by Robert Crais
The Piedmont is a clean, two-story, U-shaped stucco building with a garden entry at the front braced by stairs that go up to the second floor. Around each stair is a stand of bamboo and a couple of banana trees for that always-popular rain forest look. There are two rows of brass-burnished mailboxes in front of the bamboo, with a big open bin beneath them for magazines and packages and Pygmies with blowguns. Kimberly Marsh’s drop was the fourth from the left on the top row. I could see eight or nine envelopes through the slot. In the bin there were three catalogs and a couple of those giveaway flyers that everyone gets. Lot of mail. Maybe four days’ worth.
I walked through the little courtyard past some more banana trees. Apartment 4 was all the way back on the left. That Janet. I knocked, but there was no answer. I walked back up to apartment 1, where a little sign on the door said MANAGER. A fat man built like a pear came around the mailboxes, started up the stairs, and saw me. Jo-Jo isn’t here,” he said. “He’s got the aerobics class on Tuesday.”
“Jo-Jo the manager?”
He nodded. “He’ll be back around five or six. But I can tell you, there aren’t any vacancies.”
“Maybe I could pitch a tent.”
He thought about that. “Oh, that was a joke.”
“You know Kimberly Marsh?” I said. “In number four.”
He said, “Number four,” and thought about it. “That the pretty blonde girl?”
“Yes.”
He shrugged. “You see her around, that’s all. I said hi once and she said hi back, that’s all.”
I took out the photograph of Mort. “You see this guy around with her?”
He squinted at me. “Mr. Suspicious I don’t know who you are,” he said.
“Johnny Staccato, Confidential Investigations.”
He nodded and stared at the picture and rubbed his arm. “Well, I dunno,” he said. “Gee.” Gee.
I thanked him and walked around until I heard a door upstairs open and close. Then I walked back to number 4. I knocked again in case she had been in the shower, then took out two little tools I keep in my wallet and popped Kimberly Marsh’s deadbolt lock. “Ms. Marsh?” Maybe she was taking a nap. Maybe she just hadn’t wanted to answer the door. Maybe she was waiting behind it with an ice pick she had dipped in rat poison.
No answer.
I pushed open the door and went in.
There was a davenport against one wall with a wicker and glass coffee table in front of it and a matching Morris chair at the far end. From the doorway, I could see across the living room to the dining area and the kitchen. To the left was a short hall. Above the couch was a slickly framed poster of James Dean walking in the rain. He looked lonely.
A dozen brown daisies sat in a glass bowl on the coffee table. Propped against the bowl was a little lavender card. For the girl who gives me life, all my love, Mort. Papery petals had rained around the card.
On the end table there was a Panasonic phone-answering machine. I passed it, walked back to the kitchen, then glanced down the little hall to the bedroom before I went into the bath. No bodies. No messages scrawled in blood. No stopped-up toilet with red-tinted water. There were two towels on the bathroom floor as if someone had stepped out of the shower, toweled off, then dropped the towels. They were dry, at least two days old. There was a little chrome toothbrush holder with the stains those things get when you park a toothbrush in them, only there was no toothbrush. The medicine cabinet held all the stuff medicine cabinets hold, though maybe there were a couple of spaces where things had been but now weren’t. I went back out into the living room and checked the message machine. The message counter said zero-no messages. I played it back anyway. The counter was right.
I went into the bedroom. The bed was made and neat. There was a little desk in the corner beneath the window, cluttered and messy with old copies of the L.A. Times, Vogue, I. Magnin shopping bags, and other junk. Halfway down a stack of trade papers and Casting Calls I found the kind of 8?10 black-and-white stills actors bring to readings. Most were head shots of a pretty blonde with clean healthy features. At the bottom of the 8?10 it said Kimberly Marsh in an elegant flowing script. On the back was stapled a Xeroxed copy of her acting credits, her training, and her physical description. She was 5? 6?, 120 pounds, had honey hair and green eyes. She was 26 years old and wore a size 8. She could play tennis, enjoyed water sports, could ski, and ride both Western and English. Her credits as an actress didn’t amount to much. Mostly regional theater from Arizona. She claimed to have studied with Nina Foch. Farther down the stack I found some full body shots, one with Kimberly in a fur bikini doing her best to look like a Pictish warrior. She looked pretty good in that fur bikini. I thought of Ellen Lang invisible in my director’s chair. Sit, Ellen. Speak. I put one of the head shots in my pocket.
I finished with the desk and moved to the closet. There were twelve shoe boxes stacked against the wall. I found a snapshot of a sleeping dog in one of them. There was a large empty space about the size of a suitcase on the right side of the closet shelf. Maybe Morton Lang had called and said, I’ve finally had my fill of this invisible sexless drudge I’m married to so how’s about you and me and Perry hit the beach in Hawaii? And maybe Kimberly Marsh had said, You bet, but I havta get back for this role I got on “One Life to Live,” so she’d pulled down the suitcase and packed her toothbrush and enough clothes for a week and they had split. Sounded good to me. Ellen Lang wouldn’t like it, but there you are.
I shut the closet and went through the dresser, starting with the top drawer and working down. In the third drawer from the top I found a small wooden box containing a plastic bag of marijuana, three joints, two well-used pipes, a small bong, a broken mirror, four empty glass vials, and a short candle. Well, well, well. There was a 9?12 envelope under the stash box, folded in half and held tight by a rubber band. There was a pack of photographs in it. The first picture featured a nude Kimberly seated on her davenport, stark white triangles offsetting a rich tan. Not all of the shots were raw. A couple showed her posing on the back of a Triumph motorcycle, a couple more had her at the beach with a big, well-muscled, sandy-haired kid who had probably played end for the University of Mars. Near the bottom of the pack I found Morton Lang. He was naked on the bed, grinning, propped up on one elbow. A well-tanned female leg reached in from the bottom of the picture to play toesies with his privates. Mort. You jerk. I tore the picture of Morton in two and put it in my pocket. I put the rest of the stuff back, closed the drawers, and made sure the apartment was the way I’d found it. Then I let myself out.
The pear-shaped man was standing by the mailboxes on a little plot of grass they have there, waiting for a rat-sized dog on a silver leash. The dog was straining so hard its back was bent double. It edged sideways as it strained. Awful, the things you see in my line of work. The pear-shaped man said, “You’re not Johnny Staccato. That was an old TV series with John Cassavetes.”
“Caught me,” I said. “That’s the trouble with trying to be smart, there’s always someone smarter.” The pear-shaped man nodded and looked superior. I gave him a card. “You see Ms. Marsh around, I’d appreciate a call.”
The Mexicans in the Nova were still there, only now they were arguing. Charlie Bronson gestured angrily, then fired up their car and swung off down the street. Hot-blooded. The pear-shaped man put the card in his pants. “You aren’t the only one looking for that woman,” he said.
I looked at him. “No?”
“There was another man. I didn’t speak to him, but I saw him knocking on number 4. A big man.”
I gave him my All-Knowing Operative look. “Good-looking kid. Six-three. Sandy-haired. Could be a football player.”
He looked at the dog. “No, this man was dark. Black hair. Bigger than that.”
So much for the All-Knowing Operative. “When was this?”
“Last week. Thursday or Friday.” He belched softly, said “That’s a sweetie” to the dog, then eyed me again. “I think she had quite a few
men friends.”
I nodded.
The pear-shaped man tsked at the little dog and gently jerked the leash, as if that would be coaxing. The dog looked up with sad, protruding eyes. The pear-shaped man said, “I’d feed him dog meal, but he whines so much for chicken necks. That’s all he’ll eat. He loves the skin so.”
I nodded again. “Same with people,” I said. “You never like what’s good for you.”
3
I walked back along Gorham and down to San Vicente where I phoned Ellen Lang from a Shell station, and got no answer. I took out the rolodex cards Janet Simon had given me. There were two phone numbers typed on Garrett Rice’s card, one with a Beverly Hills prefix, one from The Burbank Studios in beautiful downtown Burbank. It was almost four and traffic was starting to build, the sky already a pallid exhaust orange. Ugly. Bumper to bumper. Fifty-five delightful minutes later I was on another pay phone across from the Warner Brothers gate asking a secretary I knew for a walk-on pass. I would have phoned Garrett Rice directly; but people tend not to be in for private cops. Even when they brave the rush hour.
I jaywalked across Olive Street and gave the guard my name. He flipped through a little file where they keep the passes after the teletype prints them out and said, “Yes, sir.”
I said, “I’m going to see Garrett Rice. Can you tell me where that is?”
“What’s that name again?”
Usually, you tell these guys a name, they’re spitting out directions before you finish saying it. This guy had to look in a little book. Maybe nobody ever asked for Garrett Rice. Maybe I was the first ever and would win some kind of prize. “Here we go,” he said, and told me.
A lot of production companies share space at The Burbank Studios. Warner Brothers and Columbia are the big two. Aaron Spelling Productions rents space there. So do a couple zillion lesser companies. All tucked away in warm sand-colored buildings with red tile roofs and pseudo-adobe walls. Mature oaks fill the spaces between the buildings, making a nice shade. The quality of the space reflects your position within the industry.
Garrett Rice was beneath the water tower at the back of the lot. I missed the building twice until a cross-eyed kid on a bicycle pointed it out. It was a squat two-story brick box, six single offices on the bottom and six more on top, with a metal stair at either end. There were palm trees at either end, too, and more palms in a little plot right out front. The palms didn’t look like they were doing too well. A backhoe and a bulldozer were parked beside the building, taking up most of a tiny parking lot. This probably wasn’t where they put Paul Newman or David Lean. I looked at the names stenciled on the parking curbs. Second from the right was Garrett Rice. Room 217. The backhoe was in his spot.
I went up the stairs and found his office without having anybody point it out. The door was open. There was a little secretary’s cubicle, but no secretary. A spine-rolled copy of Black Belt magazine was on the secretary’s desk, open to an article about hand-to-hand combat in low-visibility situations. Some secretary.
Behind the secretary’s space was another door. I opened it and there was Garrett Rice. He stood behind his desk with the phone pressed to his ear, bouncing from foot to foot like he had to go to the bathroom. There was a dying plant on the desk and another on the end table by a worn green couch. There was a can of Lysol air freshener on a file cabinet. The cap was off.
When he saw me, he pressed his hip against the desk, closing a drawer that had been open. He did this in what some might call an understated fashion, then murmured into the phone and hung up.
Rice was about six-one with thin bones and the crepey skin you get from too much sun lamp. There was a mouse under his left eye and another on the left side of his forehead. He had tried to cover them with Indian earth. He had beer wings and shouldn’t have been wearing a form-fit shirt.
I handed him one of my cards. “Nice office,” I said. “I’m trying to find Morton Lang. I’m told you and he were close and that maybe you can help me out.”
He glanced at the card, then looked at me with wet, shining eyes. Nervous. “How’d you get in here?”
“My uncle owns the studio.”
“Bullshit.”
I gave him a shrug. “Mort’s been missing since Friday. He took his boy with him and didn’t leave word. His wife’s worried. Since you and he were associates, it makes sense that he might’ve said something to you.”
He licked his lips and I thought of Bambi’s mother, the way her head jerked up at the first sound of the hunters. Only she was pleasant to look at. The longer I looked at Garrett Rice, the more I wanted to cover my face with a handkerchief and fog the air with the Lysol.
He read the card again and flexed it back and forth, thinking. Then he said. “Fuckin’ asshole, Mort.”
I nodded. “That’s the one. When did you see him last?”
He glanced at the doorway behind me and spread his hands. “You shoulda called. I’m busy. I got calls.”
“Consider it a favor to the Forces of Good.”
“I got calls.”
“So make’m. I’ve got time.” I sat down on the couch between his briefcase and a large brown stain. The stain looked like Mickey Mouse run over by a Kenworth. It went well with the decor.
Garrett Rice hustled over and closed the case. Maybe he had the new Hot Property in there. Maybe Steven Spielberg had been calling him, begging to get a peek. Maybe I could sap Garrett Rice, make my getaway with the Hot Property, and sell it to George Lucas for a million bucks. I put my arm up on the back of the couch so the jacket would open and he could see the Dan Wesson. I waited.
He was breathing harder now, the way a fat man does after a flight of stairs. He looked at the door again. Maybe he was waiting for a pizza delivery. “I got calls,” he said. “I dunno where Mort is. I haven’t seen him for a week, maybe longer. What do I look like, his keeper?” He went back to his desk with the case.
I stared at him.
He fidgeted. “What?”
“Who beat you up, Garrett?”
He held the briefcase to his chest like a shield. “You’d better not fuck with me. I’m warning you.”
“I don’t want to fuck with you, Mr. Rice. I just want to ask you about Morton Lang.”
He looked past me at the door again, only this time he said, “Well, thank Christ! Where the hell you been?”
The man in the doorway was a little taller than me and a lot wider, with the sort of squared-off shoulders boxers get. He wore a heavy Fu moustache, a little business under his lower lip, and a two-inch Afro that was thicker on top than on the sides. Not quite the Carl Lewis look. He was very, very black. He looked at me. He looked at Garrett Rice. “Nature call. You didn’t want me to mess the floor, right?”
Rice said, “Throw this asshole outta here. C’mon.”
The black guy looked back at me and sucked a tooth. “How ’bout that, Elvis? Think I oughta throw your ass outta here?”
I sucked a tooth back at him. “She-it,” I said. “How’s it goin,’ Cleon?”
Garrett Rice looked from Cleon Tyner to me and back to Cleon. “What the hell is this? ‘Cleon. Elvis. Howzitgoin?’ Throw the sonofabitch out, goddamnit!”
Cleon said, “Unh-unh,” and let himself down in the chair opposite Rice’s desk. He wrapped one arm over the back of the chair so I could see his Smith. It was in a pretty, gray brushed-leather rig. Cleon was wearing dark blue designer jeans, a ruffled white tuxedo shirt, and a gray sharkskin jacket. The jacket was tight across his shoulders and biceps. “You’re looking good,” I said.
He tried to give me modest. “Cut down on the grits. Dropped a few pounds. Workin’ out again. How’s Joe?”
Garrett Rice said, “Hey, hey, this guy walks in here, he’s got a gun. Look right there, under his goddamned arm. He starts pumpin’ me, he won’t leave when I ask, he could be anybody, goddamnit, and you’re shootin’ the shit with him. What in hell I hire you for?” His forehead was damp.
Cleon let out a long, dee
p breath and shifted forward in the chair. Rice jerked back an inch. Probably didn’t even know he’d done it. Cleon’s voice was polite. “I know this man, Mr. Rice. He won’t take muscle work. If he does decide to move on you now, why, then I’ll step in. That’s what I take the money for. But if all he wants to do is ask you about something or other, then you talk to him. That’s the smart thing.” Cleon gave me the sleepy eyes. “That’s all you wanna do, blood, is talk, am I right?”
“Sure.”
Cleon looked back at Rice. “There. You see. Why make somethin’ out of nothing?”
Garrett Rice chewed his lip. He said, “I don’t know where Mort is, all right. I told you.”
“You told me you saw him about a week ago. He say anything about leaving his wife?”
“Look, it was a party, see? A social situation. We were meeting with a potential backer about this project of mine. Mort had some bimbo with him. An actress. It was good times, that’s all. Mort wouldn’t’ve brought up any shit about his wife.”
“Kimberly Marsh?”
“Yeah, I guess that was her name. The bitch was all over me. That’s the way it is, see? These bimbos find out you’re a producer, they’re all over you.” Talking about that brought him to life.
“Sounds rewarding.”
He leered and made a pistol with his fingers and shot me. I considered returning the gesture with my. 38. Cleon picked his thumb, ignoring us. I said, “Can you think of anyone else Mort might’ve talked to?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“You were friends.”
“We had business.”