“I’m having second thoughts about this place, Doctor.”
After escorting the woman and her son out of his office, Spearman said, “I won’t have you behaving like that and endangering the business end of—”
“Shut up and listen, Isaac,” cut in the OCO agent. “You promised me that you’d have Jake Cardigan taken care of. Since you claim to have such enormous influence in these parts, I assumed you were capable of handling the keeping of him quiet and out of my way for at least a—”
“I got him out of the way, Trinity. He was tossed into our local—”
“But he’s out now, Isaac. That jig got him sprung within a few hours. Didn’t you anticipate something like that?”
“Joe Chatman turned out to have more connections than I expected,” admitted the plump doctor. “But let me remind you that you were always free to handle this yourself. I don’t quite understand why you didn’t just kill Cardigan as soon as he hit the area.”
“That wouldn’t be a smart move, not yet,” said Trinity. “I just want the bastard sidelined for a few days. Killing him might cause too much trouble.”
“Don’t tell me the Office of Clandestine Operations is afraid of a smalltime private eye?”
“The Cosmos Detective Agency isn’t smalltime,” he pointed out. “And just at the moment I’d prefer not to annoy them by killing one of their better ops. Further along, maybe we’ll have to risk it.” He sank down into the chair that Norby had occupied. “How much more time do you need on Alicia?”
“I’ve already told you, at least three more days. Four would be even better.”
Trinity scratched at his red hair with his golden fingers. “Okay,” he said. “Meantime, I’ll have to come up with another way to distract Cardigan.”
The lean, bald man kept on pacing.
Jake took the chair again. “How much did she tell you, Hershberg?” he asked.
Randy Hershberg turned away from him, concentrating on Chatman. “Why did you ever let Sharon get involved with a Tek dealer like Cardigan? She isn’t the sort of person who ought—”
“Whoa now.” Jake rose. “I’m not a Tek dealer, never have been.”
“Oh, spare me the bullshit, Cardigan.” He scowled at him. “I’ve heard all about you—hell, you did time up in the Freezer.”
“Jake was framed,” Chatman reminded him. “And he got a complete pardon—eventually.”
Jake took hold of the man’s shoulder. “Let’s,” he suggested, “concentrate on Sharon.”
“Where do you get off calling her by her first name? You don’t even—”
“Listen to me,” said Jake evenly. “We all want to find her, but accusing Joe and me of—”
“Chatman convinced her she was some kind of god damn crusader. She’d helped him out before, raising funds, getting petitions signed. Then this mess at Mentor came up and instead of minding her own damn business, she let him convince—”
“Do you work at Mentor?”
“No, at the Prairie. That’s how we met and, after her divorce, we—”
“How much did she tell you about what was happening at Mentor?” Jake asked him.
Hershberg shook free of Jake’s grip. He circled the wheelchair, stopping behind Chatman. “You know, there’s somebody else who should’ve minded his own business, too.”
The newsman frowned up at him. “Who you talking about?”
“Her other great friend—Mel Winter. Doctor Mel Winter.”
Left eyebrow rising, Chatman told Jake, “Winter works at the Centre.”
“And how does he figure in this?”
Hershberg gave an impatient grunt. “He’s the one who got Sharon interested in this mess, told her about what was worrying him,” he said. “I think—I think Winter even must’ve showed her some things while she was there. That’s what got her so upset, made her come running to Chatman here. A really dumb thing for her to do.”
Jake said, “You and the lady don’t seem to share an outlook on life.”
“I’ve stuck with her through a lot of rough times,” the lean man assured him. “And while I’m not a troublemaker like your pal Chatman, I do hold decent, liberal opinions. The thing is, the thing I kept trying to explain to Sharon—you can believe in something but not get yourself killed over it.”
“Yeah, that’s safer,” said Chatman.
“Shit, c’mon. You know just about this whole state is controlled by Farmboy,” said the angry Hershberg. “Sharon was dependent on them, same as I am. So it just wasn’t smart to—”
“Do you think your bosses are the ones who caused her and her son to disappear?” Jake asked him.
Hershberg made an angry, spitting sound. “Hell, no,” he said. “I’m not a hypocrite, Cardigan. If I thought that they had anything to do with what’s happened to her, I’d go right straight to—”
“But you think it has something to do with Mentor?”
“Yes, even though she never gave me any details.”
Chatman inquired, “What do the police have to say?”
“I didn’t go to the police, I can’t risk that,” he answered. “But when I heard the report that she was missing, I decided to come here. Since you—”
“The best thing for you to do is go home and wait.”
“That’s very tough, just sitting around and—”
“Do it all the same,” seconded Jake. “And don’t mention to anyone that you told us a damn thing.”
23
“BUENOS DÍAS, POP.” GOMEZ WENT breezing by the robot doorman, giving him a lazy salute, and headed for the backstage area of Ferman’s Cinema Palace.
“Just a darn minute, sonny,” the chromeplated robot called after him.
“Si?” He halted, shrugged his shoulders slightly and turned to face the movie palace doorman.
“Where the dickens you think you’re heading in such an all-fired hurry, young fella?”
“Oh, sorry, I should’ve introduced myself.” The curlyhaired detective knuckled his moustache and smiled. “I’m part of Jacko Fuller’s entourage.”
“Well, then, why didn’t you up and say so?” The robot produced a tsking noise as he shook his silvery head. “You people in the show business think you can come waltzing into any old place you please and—”
“My apologies, Pop.” Gomez continued on his way. He located Dressing Room 3A, knocked and entered.
Bosco the agent was kneeling on the floor, both tanned hands massaging the knee of the blond, wavyhaired android. “C’mon, kid, give it another try.”
“You’re making too much of this, Wolfe,” the handsome simulacrum told him. “Here’s Gomez—let him be the judge.”
“Gomez doesn’t know his fanny from a barn door.”
“Sure, I do. Try me.”
The agent urged the android, “Bend your damn leg again, Jacko.”
Jacko obliged. “Now ask Gomez for his honest opinion.”
“Gomez, meaning no slight, isn’t savvy to this sort of nuance.” Wheezing slightly, Bosco made it to an upright position. “You did hear it, didn’t you, Gomez?”
“Give me some sort of clue.”
“The creak,” said the agent.
“Beg pardon?”
“The damn creaking his mechanical knee makes.”
“Didn’t notice it.” Gomez shook his head. “Now—about the material you said you’d collected for me.”
“See?” Jacko chuckled, pleased. “You’re making too much out of this, Wolfe.”
Rotating to his right, the agent placed his hands on Gomez’s shoulders. “You just wandered in from the outside, right?”
“That I did, si.”
“And what did you notice out there?”
“Several hundred tourists waiting behind a rope.”
“Exactly. All of them fans of Jacko’s,” explained the unhappy Bosco. “Did you also perhaps happen to notice a small rectangle of wet cement?”
“Nope, missed that. Let’s get on to what you’ve gath
ered for me, Wolfe?”
“In a minute.” Letting go of the detective, he eased closer to his android client. “Just a few moments from now Jacko will be obliged to go out there and face that clamorous crowd. He must not only put his famous footprints but his handprints as well into that selfsame wet cement.”
“This is a real honor for me,” put in Jacko, “since the courtyard of Ferman’s Cinema Palace is justly famous for its collection of entertainment-world footprints, handprints and—”
“Save the speech,” his agent warned him. “The point, Gomez, is that my boy creaks—his damn knee joint makes a loud and distinct metallic creaking sound. When his fans hear that, some of them, as nitwitted as they are, will likely exclaim—‘Holy Hannah, this guy’s not a human actor, he’s nothing more than an old brokedown andy.’ Soon as that news gets around, we’re finished, washed up.”
Gomez told him, “You’re making a big fuss over a small noise.”
“Ah, then you did hear it?”
“No,” lied Gomez. “Shall we get to the information that I came here to pick up from you?”
Shrugging, gazing sadly down at his client’s knee, Bosco sighed. From an inner pocket of his flamboyant plaid sportscoat he withdrew a packet. “Sheldon Gates is indeed residing at his dear mother’s spa.” He handed over the materials. “I got you, among other things, a floorplan of the whole dump, with an X marking the exact suite where Shel is lying low. I’ll have to charge you an extra $100 for the map.”
“$50.” Gomez unfurled the floorplan and slowly eyed it. “And, by the way, what do all these cute little green Xs you’ve drawn on this represent?”
“Oh, yeah, that’s something else I better mention.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
“By the merest chance, there’s a famous actor staying there, too. Incog, doesn’t want a soul to tumble to the fact that, at the early age of twenty two, he’s already in need of some serious rejuvenation,” the agent explained. “You—”
“Some of them live at such a fast pace.” Jacko pursed his lips in sympathy. “Shut up and limber your knee.”
“A little more narration, por favor, about these squiggles, Wolfe?”
“Well, those circles, Gomez, represent the extra guards who are stationed at Madame Sonja’s Longevity Lodge. They’re to keep out the press, fans and similar scum.”
Rolling up the plan, Gomez stroked his moustache with it. “Who’s the youthful star in question?”
“Carlos Taffy.”
“Who’s he?”
Jacko chuckled. “Only the hottest teensoap star going,” he supplied. “Haven’t you ever viewed ‘Hotspur Hi’?”
“I keep meaning to, Jacko, but it’s always on during the hour I do my homework.” Gomez put the papers away, then scanned the ceiling for a few seconds. “A means of access occurs to me—but it’s going to call for something drastic.”
The agent squatted to tap his client’s knee. “You mean violence, Gomez?”
“Only violence to my sensibilities,” he answered and took his leave.
Dan cardigan twisted again in his booth chair. He glanced once more in the direction of the wide doorway to the student lounge. For the fifth time there was no sign of Molly Fine.
She was ten, make that eleven, minutes late so far.
Dan picked up his cup of citriblend, took an absentminded sip, set the cup down again. The lounge, which was called the Squad Room, was located atop the central building of the SoCal State Police Academy. The plastiglass ceiling was tinted a pale blue, and a hard afternoon rain was hitting down on it.
“I’m sorry. Forgive me and so on. Don’t take time now to bitch and moan and otherwise complain, because we have something important to discuss.” Molly, a slim, darkhaired girl of sixteen, slid into the booth across from him. “I’m here—you can brighten up now, Dan.”
“Occupying myself for eleven, make that twelve, minutes with nothing but my thoughts and a cup of fruit punch isn’t my idea of—”
“I know how you hate to be separated from me for even a few minutes, but quit sulking,” she advised. “Sit up and pay attention.”
“How come you were—”
“I’m late because I was talking on the vidphone.”
“That doesn’t cheer me up much.”
“This was Norm Porter I was talking with.”
“The large, handsome suntanned guy you used to date?”
“We’ve stayed friends,” Molly answered, nodding. “What’s important for you to grasp is that Norm is presently in the Social Corps. He’s stationed down in the Venice Sector.”
“That’s where Gomez got roughed up.”
“You’re commencing to comprehend.” Molly smiled, reached across the table to pat his hand.
“If you’d come to the point right off, instead of dwelling on the details of your old beau, I’d—”
“My old beau happens to know a girl named Jimalla Keefer,” continued Molly. “May I have part of your soy danish?”
“Sure, take what’s left.”
“Thanks. I don’t recall having lunch.”
“Damn it, Molly, I keep telling you that you have to eat at regular intervals or—”
“I’m always getting distracted is the problem.” She took a bite of the pastry. “Jimalla is a member of the therapy group down there that included Alicia Bower.”
“The woman my dad and Gomez are hunting for.”
“You told me about the case this morning, so when Norm—who isn’t all that handsome, as a matter of fact, though he’s certainly tanned—when he mentioned he knew somebody who knew something about a missing woman named Alicia Bower and was wondering if he ought to tell anyone, I told him to tell me.
“What does he know exactly?”
“Only that Jimalla knows something and is scared,” she replied. “Now what we have to do is go talk to—”
“Wait. The last time, Molly, that we teamed up, we came damn close to getting killed.”
“You simply aren’t taking statistics into consideration, Dan. If you did, you’d realize that the odds are very much against our nearly getting killed every time we investigate something together.”
“On top of which, I don’t know if my dad would want us to—”
“Didn’t he say we made a great team? I heard him myself.”
“Maybe I’d better explain irony to you. What he was really—”
“We have a date tonight, don’t we?”
“Sure, yeah.”
“Okay, since we don’t have anything special planned—well, we can go to Venice.”
“And see Jimalla Keefer?”
“Norm says he can probably arrange a meeting. Jimalla is scared, but apparently she’s also eager to confide in somebody official—and we come close to being official.”
“Not that close,” he said. “Do we have to see Norm, too?”
Smiling, she held her thumb and forefinger about an inch apart. “Only for a very short span of time,” she promised.
“Okay,” Dan decided, “we’ll go.”
24
PAUSING TO CATCH HIS BREATH, Gomez scanned the broad lobby of the LaBrea Arms Hotel. Then he muttered, “Esta bien,” and went trotting across the flowered carpeting toward the robot-staffed desk.
Natalie Dent, a flush commencing to touch her face, was just turning away from one of the white-suited clerkbots. “Suppose, you weasel,” said the redhaired reporter on sighting Gomez, “you explain why you’re not registered at this hotel?”
Before he responded, the detective struggled a bit more with the contrite expression he was trying to affect. “Ah, I thought perhaps you were confused.” He took hold of her arm.
“When people lie to me, even lowlifes as habitually unreliable as you, Gomez, it has a tendency to confuse me, yes,” she told him as she retrieved her arm.
“I admit, chica, that this misunderstanding was maybe my fault. Afterall, running into you again by chance was such a stimulating surprise that
I haven’t been thinking as clearly as—”
“Malarkey. You wanted to ditch me, as is often your habit, so you handed me a fake—”
“Were I so eager to ditch you, cara, why then am I here dancing attendance on you?”
Natalie halted, placed her hands on her hips and studied him. “It’s probable that, after lying to me and sending me on a wild- goose chase, you must’ve decided that there was some further way you could still exploit my pathetic, naive and illplaced fondness for you.”
He denied her accusation with a shake of his head and an injured smile. “Let me be honest with you.”
“Ha! That’d be a first.”
“I truly, es verdad, intended to have dinner with you,” he insisted. “But, rattled as I was, I gave you not the name of the hotel I was residing at but rather the name of the hotel where I wanted to take you dining.”
“The LaBrea doesn’t happen to have a dining room.”
“Well, then I was even more rattled than I thought.” He caught her arm again, guided her in the direction of a doorway. “The important thing is that I realized my error and rushed over here in time to catch you, Nat. We’re together and we’ll be able to spend a few precious moments with each other.”
“A few moments? Dinner, at least the way I dine, usually takes more than a—”
“I myself was looking ahead to a tête-à-tête of several long, pleasant hours,” he assured her as they left the lobby and hit the sunbright street. “I’m assuming, however, that you’ll want to go rushing off.”
“Why, in heaven’s name, would I rush off? Unless, which is, I’m afraid, highly unlikely, I suddenly came to my senses and realized that I was wasting my time and damaging my reputation by being in your disreputable company?”
“Oh, I figured because of the scoop.”
“What scoop?”
“The one growing out of the major news tip I’m about to pass on to you,” he explained.
The late-afternoon rain was pelting the plazdome that sheltered the wide oval landing area next to Bernard Zangerly’s mansion in the Redondo Sector of Greater LA. Roger sat for a moment in his just-landed skycar, gazing absently downhill toward the choppy grey ocean.
Sighing, the husky man eased out of his car. Left eye narrowing, he stood watching his father’s house. The low, sprawling home looked especially dark and gloomy this afternoon.
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