by Robert Crais
Maybe I could poke around and trip over some heretofore unknown bit of evidence. I dug out the rolodex card with Garrett Rice’s phone numbers and dialed his office. A woman answered, “Mr. Rice’s office,” and told me he’d gone for the day. I asked if Mr. Tyner was about. She said he had gone with Mr. Rice. I dialed Rice’s home number and waited while it rang. Maybe Garrett Rice knew something he wasn’t telling. Maybe I could use some form of nonlethal persuasion to find out. On the fifteenth ring I hung up. Not home. Some plan, all right.
I took out my wallet and looked at the license number that Joe Pike had copied off the Nova, then called a lady at the Department of Motor Vehicles. I identified myself, gave her the number of my PI license, and asked for the Nova’s registration. She told me to wait, then came back with a name and an address. I thanked her, hung up, then finished the coffee. The beer and the aspirin had helped my back. I pulled on the shoulder rig without too much pain, got the Dan Wesson out of my desk, put on the cotton jacket, and went out. It was eight minutes after four.
I still didn’t have a plan. Maybe the guys in the Nova, maybe they had a plan. Maybe I could borrow it.
20
Forty minutes later I turned down a small residential street in an older part of Los Angeles between Echo Park and Dodger Stadium. The houses were flat-topped stucco bungalows, mostly off-white or sand or yellow in color. Most had porches and most of the porches had tricycles and big potted geraniums and old Chicano women sitting in lawn chairs. You could smell chili sauce and machaca simmering and the doughy scent of fresh, hand-thrown flour tortillas. It was a good, clean smell.
The DMV had said that the dark blue Nova belonged to a man named Arturo Sanchez who lived in the fourth house from the corner on the north side of the street. It was a light brown bungalow with a two-strip drive, a porch, and four ratty rose bushes. The Nova wasn’t in the drive, nor was it parked on the street. I cruised past the house to the end of the block and turned into a little street-corner shopping center. There was a laundromat and a 7-Eleven and a taco stand and a billboard advertising Virginia Slims, ¡Hiciste mucho progreso, chiquita!
I parked under the Virginia Slims sign, bought a taco and an iced tea, and sat with them at one of the little picnic benches in a place where I could watch Arturo Sanchez’s house. It was a real taco, with chunk beef and chilis, fried in oil and doused with the sort of sauce that would bring a Taco Bell taco to its knees. Heaven. I had finished the first and started on a second when the blue Nova turned down the street and into Sanchez’s drive. The poor man’s Charles Bronson got out, looking sullen, kicked at something on the ground, kicked at it again, then entered the front door. Still tough, all right.
I waited.
The sun settled and the cars that passed began to burn their headlamps. It grew chill. Two teenage girls in tight pants and too much makeup walked past the taco stand and into the 7-Eleven. Cars pulled into the lot. Guys who looked like they worked hard for a living got out, went into the 7-Eleven and came out with six-packs or cartons of milk. It got dark. A beat-up station wagon discharged a short, thick-boned woman with two large baskets of clothes. The two baskets were almost as big as the woman. She edged sideways through the laundromat doors, set the baskets onto the floor near the closest machine, and sorted through her wash. She saw me watching her. I smiled. She smiled. She went on with her wash. Another close brush with dangerous inner-city life.
The guy in the taco stand was beginning to look at me, too, only he wasn’t smiling. I threw the rest of my iced tea into a steel trash bin and went over to the 7-Eleven and pretended to make a call from the pay phone. The guy in the taco stand watched me. Four make-believe calls later I gave up, went back to the taco stand, and smiled in the little window. “Ever thought about licensing a franchise?” I said.
The guy never took his eyes off me. He had his right hand where I couldn’t see it behind the Orange Crush machine. Probably embarrassed by a hangnail.
At ten minutes before eight Arturo Sanchez kicked open the screen door to his house and stormed out to his Nova. The porch light came on and a heavy woman appeared in the door, screaming something in Spanish. Arturo gunned the Nova, screeched backward out of the drive, and roared down the street away from me.
I caught up to him a block and a half down Elysian Park heading toward Dodger Stadium. With the baseball season still a couple of months off, traffic was light; two months from now with the Dodgers in a home game I might have had problems. We went up Stadium Way through Chavez Ravine and north on Riverside paralleling the Golden State Freeway. About a mile and a half up he swung right onto a crowded side street without signaling. Some guys are assholes all the way through.
The Nova pulled into a small apartment building. A man passed through his headlights and climbed in. It wasn’t the same guy who’d been with Sanchez in front of Kimberly Marsh’s place. This guy was shorter and built like an in-shape welterweight, compact and hard and mean. The kind of guy who just naturally wanted to make something of it. The Nova came back onto Riverside and continued north.
When we got to Los Feliz Boulevard they surprised me, turning west toward Hollywood instead of east toward Domingo Duran’s. On Franklin they parked in front of a liquor store and the welterweight got out. He went into the store, came out with a bagged pint, and made a call on the pay phone. Probably to his broker. They continued down Franklin to Beachwood, then hung a right up into the Hollywood hills. Halfway up they turned off Beachwood and climbed into a little nest of cramped, winding streets beneath the Hollywood sign. I killed my lights and backed off, guessing turns by watching their lights bounce off the houses and trees above me. We went higher, Hollywood and Los Angeles spreading out below in a hypnotic panorama so wide and deep that you could lose yourself in the lights.
When I saw their car again it was parked at the curb of a little white clapboard bungalow. I eased to a stop, then let the Corvette roll backward and swing into an empty drive. I took my gun out from under the seat and held it at my side as I walked up to the house. My heart was pounding. That really happens when you’re scared.
There were three men standing in the living room, Sanchez and the welterweight and a third guy. The third guy was holding a can of Budweiser beer in his teeth and pulling on a white shirt. He had spiderwebs tattooed on each shoulder along with assorted daggers and skulls and female breasts. He also had a shoulder holster. Behind them was a short hall running back to what looked like the kitchen. The welterweight peeled the bag off his pint, set it on the coffee table, and laughed at something. Probably not the other guys tattoos.
I went around the side of the house and peeked in a window. It was a little bedroom off the hall, decorated in early poverty. Ellen Lang sat in a chair. Her hands were tied behind her back and there was a Mayfair Market grocery bag over her head. I went back to the front and around the other side, looking in each window for the boy. I didn’t see him. At the back of the house, there was a wooden door off the kitchen, opened to catch the breeze. I stood just outside the wedge of light, trying to hear into the front room. The men were still laughing. Maybe if I yelled Fire! they’d run. I eased back the hammer on my gun and stepped into the house.
Alarms didn’t go off. The Eskimo didn’t swoop out of the sky. The kitchen was dingy and yellow and hadn’t been cleaned in a long time. There was a roach trap on the floor under the dinette, Taco Bell and Burrito King wrappers on the counter, and the stink of old hot sauce. Someone had built a pyramid of Coors cans on the dinette. From where I was standing I could look down the hall and see the back of Sanchez’s head. I took one step out into the hall, then turned right into the bedroom with Ellen Lang. I could hear her breath hissing softly against the paper bag. She shifted once, then sat motionless. Out in the living room, the men talked and laughed and I heard a bottle clunk the table. I went to Ellen Lang and said quietly, “Don’t speak and don’t move. It’s me.”
I thought it would end then. I thought she would gasp or moan or stumble ou
t of the chair but she didn’t. Her body tensed and she drew up very, very straight. I slipped the bag off her head and untied her wrists. Her eyes were puffy and she had one small red mark in the left corner of her mouth but that was all. She stared at me without blinking.
“Can you walk?”
She nodded once.
“Is Perry here?”
She shook her head.
“I’m going to slip your shoes off. We’re going to go out that door, turn left, and go out through the kitchen. On the deck, we’ll turn right and out to the street. You’ll go first so I can cover our backs.”
She nodded. I slipped her shoes off and handed them to her. Just as she stood up, a toilet flushed and a door across the hall opened and a fourth man came out of the bathroom. He was shorter than me and fat, carrying a Times sports section. He said something in Spanish to the living room and then he saw me. I shot him twice in the chest and he fell sideways. There were shouts and a thump like a chair hitting the floor. I yanked Ellen Lang toward the hall.
The welterweight came around the corner, firing as fast as he could pull the trigger. One of his slugs caught the doorjamb and kicked some splinters into my cheek. I shot him in the face, then shoved Ellen through the kitchen and half carried her around the house and out onto the street. The Tattooed Man popped out of the front door and fired five shots—bapbapbapbapbap—then dove back into the house.
Porch lights were coming on and someone was yelling and Wang Chung was coming out over somebody’s radio. I shoved Ellen into the Corvette, fired up, and ran over two garbage cans pulling away. I was shaking and my shirt was wet with sweat and I wasn’t having a great deal of luck seeing past the little silver flashes that bobbed around in front of my eyes. I drove. Slow. Steady. Just trying to get away from there. I think I ran over a dog.
At the bottom of Beachwood, I pulled into an Exxon station and waited for the shakes to pass. When they did I looked at Ellen Lang. She was drawn and pale in the fluorescent Exxon light, and sitting absolutely still. She didn’t whimper and she didn’t tremble but I’m not quite sure she felt anything, either. I touched her hand. It was cold. “Do you need a doctor?”
She shook her head once like back at the house, and looked at me with dulled eyes. I peeled off my jacket, put it around her shoulders, then leaned my head back on the seat. My heart was hammering. Outside on Franklin, night-time Hollywood traffic edged past. A tall skinny kid wearing an old Stetson and a threadbare Levi jacket thumbed for a ride. The Exxon attendant leaned against the gas pump, staring at us, probably wondering what the hell we were doing over in the shadows, probably thinking maybe he should walk over and see, probably deciding nope, this is Hollywood. The attendant went into a service bay.
I closed my eyes. I’d killed one man for sure and probably another. The cops would have to come in, and they wouldn’t like it. I didn’t much like it myself.
I heard her say, “Mort’s dead, isn’t he?”
I turned my head to see her. “Yes.”
“Did he steal those drugs like they said?”
“I don’t know.”
She nodded once more, and that was it. We stayed in the shadows on the side of the Exxon station for a long time. Then I restarted the Corvette, pulled into traffic, and drove slowly toward Laurel Canyon.
21
The Corvette moved easily up the mountain. When cars came up behind us, I steered into turnouts to let them pass. At the far edge of the passenger seat, Ellen Lang sat huddled in the jacket, eyes forward, as I told her what I knew. She only spoke twice. Once to ask me about the girls, and once to answer “no” when I told her the girls were with Janet and asked if she wanted me to bring her there.
We pulled into the carport, killed the engine, and went into the kitchen through the carport door. When we were inside she asked me to please be sure to lock the door, so I had her watch me throw the bolt. I went out to the living room for a bottle of Glenlivet and a couple of glasses that looked like they were made for something besides jam. When I got back she was holding one of my R.H. Forschner steak knives. I put ice into each glass, filled them with the scotch, then pried the steak knife out of her hand and replaced it with a glass. “Drink this, then I’ll show you what we have.”
I dumped mine back, threw out the ice, then refilled the glass and downed that, too. You can’t beat Glenlivet for the smooth mellow glow it gives you, especially after you kill some people. I felt my nose and eyes fill and something large in my throat and I thought I was going to burst. But I bit down on it and managed some more of the scotch and it passed. When she had taken half of hers I led her through the house, first the dining area and living room and powder room on the main floor, then the loft bed above and the master bath. The bottle of scotch went with us. I turned on every light in each room and left it on. We looked in closets and in the storage space under the platform bed. I showed her that the windows and the front door and the sliding glass doors were all locked and I showed her the red light that meant the burglar alarm was armed. When we finished the tour upstairs by the master bath I refilled her drink and said, “You can bathe in here. I’ve got an oversized hot-water heater, so use all you want. There’s buttermilk soap and shampoo in the cabinet and extra towels under the sink.” I went out to the closet and brought back the big white terry robe. “You can wear this. If you’d rather have some clothes, I’ve got a sweat shirt and some jogging shorts that a friend left over. They should fit.”
“Where will you be?”
“In the kitchen. I have to make a call, and then I’ll make us something to eat.”
She thanked me and shut the door. I waited until I heard the water running, then the scotch and I went back to the kitchen. I took off my pistol, put it on the counter, then went into the bathroom and plucked my face. It was like playing buried treasure with a needle and a bright light. I dug out six little pieces of wood, washed, dabbed on alcohol, then looked at myself in the mirror. No permanent damage. At least nothing that you could see.
Back out in the kitchen, I refilled my glass, then dialed Lou Poitras at home. He said, “Do you know what time it is? I got kids in bed.”
“Ellen Lang’s over here. To get her I had to kill a couple of guys up in Beachwood Canyon, in a house just under the Hollywood sign.”
Lou said, “Hold on.” There was a knocking sound, like the receiver had been put down on a table, then nothing, then some scuffing sounds as the phone was picked up, then a little girls voice, giggling. “Judy bit my heiny.”
An extension was lifted and Poitras yelled he had it. A hang-up, and it was just me and Lou again. He said, “You get the boy, too?”
“No.”
“You home?”
“Yeah.”
“Does this have anything to do with you asking about Domingo Duran?”
“Yes.”
Another pause, this one the kind when the background static becomes real noise. Then he said, “You’re an asshole, Elvis. I’m on my way.”
He hung up. I hung up. I sipped the scotch. Asshole. That Lou. What a kidder.
I called Joe Pike. He answered on the first ring, a little breathless, as if he were finishing a long run or a couple hundred push-ups. “Pike.”
I could hear his stereo system in the background. Oldies but goodies. The Doors. “It’s gotten hot,” I said. I gave him the short version.
Pike asked no questions, made no comment. “Button up,” he said. “I’m coming in.”
Pike thinks Clint Eastwood talks too much.
I took eight eggs, cream, butter, and mushrooms out of the refrigerator. I got out the big pan, put it on the stove, and was opening three raisin muffins when Ellen Lang came down and stood in the little passageway between the counter and the wall.
She was wearing the terry robe and a pair of my socks. Her hair was damp and combed out and looked clean. So did her face. She looked good. She looked younger and maybe willing to laugh if you gave her something worth laughing at. “How are you doing?�
� I asked.
“You must be terribly tired,” she said. “Let me do that.” She moved to the stove.
“It’s okay.” I put the muffins face up in the toaster oven.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “You’ve had a hard day. If you want to do something, you can make the coffee.” Her eyes had turned to poached eggs. Her smile was weak but somehow pleasant, the sort of smile you get when you practice smiling because you think you have to. Like with Mort. Only now the poached-egg eyes were rimmed with something that could have been desperation.
I smiled as if everything was fine, and stepped back out of her way. “Okay.”
She opened each cabinet, saw what was inside, then closed it and moved on. She looked over the food I had out, then put the cream back into the fridge and took peanut oil out of the cupboard. The oil and a little bit of the butter she put into the big pan. While they heated she beat the eggs with a little water, then placed the spoon neatly beside the bowl when the eggs were frothy. I could see Carrie in her. I said, “I always put in cream.”
She chopped the mushrooms. “You men. Cream makes the eggs stick. Never put cream. Would you like to shower before we eat?”
“Later, thank you.”
She moved around the kitchen as if I weren’t there, or if I was, I was somebody else. We talked, but I didn’t think she was talking to me. She was Barbara Billingsley and I was Hugh Beaumont. But not. I drank more of the scotch.
She got out two plates, forks, knives, and spoons, and brought them to the counter. She had to move the Dan Wesson to set out the plates, and stared at it before she did.