“Sorry I’m late,” I said while Sammy sniffed and Frenchie nipped.
“That’s okay, Daddy. I was waiting for you but I guess I fell asleep. Whose dog is that?”
“Yours.”
She stood up to hug me, then leaned back to appraise my appearance.
“What you lookin’ at?” I asked.
“Juice always told me to look you over when you come in late. He said that that was the way to tell if you were in trouble.”
Jesus, called Juice by his friends, was Feather’s adoptive brother. He’d been taking care of me ever since I took him in back in the early fifties.
“So what’s bothering you, daughter mine?”
“Who said anything was?”
“That blanket did.”
“The blanket talks to you?”
“You only wrap up in that old rag when you’re feeling sad or upset.”
Youth is beautiful. Feather’s eyes were clear and unafraid of the monster standing next to her.
“I’m scared to meet my uncle but I really want to too.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“Most of my friends get so mad at their parents. They can hardly wait to grow up and move away. They don’t have fathers like you or brothers like Juice.”
“What does that have to do with your uncle Milo?”
“I don’t know. I’m worried that if I go see him then somebody might take me away.”
“If they tried I’d send you to Monaco,” I said with complete conviction.
Sammy had started licking Feather’s fingers under Frenchie’s scrutiny.
“To Bonnie?”
Bonnie had been my girlfriend most of Feather’s life. We broke up because I didn’t know how to let her help me. So instead she ran to Ghana with an infirm tribal prince—a man who needed her more.
“Yes,” I said, “to Bonnie.”
“I thought you hated each other.”
“No, baby. We hurt each other but the love’s still there. I talk to her once a month or so. That’s how I knew that she and Joguye ran to Europe.”
“She said she’d take me?”
“Without hesitation.”
Feather yawned. I lifted her into my arms. By the time I’d carried her to the bed she was sound asleep.
I took the dogs downstairs and fed them a ritual meal. Ten minutes later they were curled up together, asleep in Frenchie’s bed.
Feather was still asleep when I looked in on her at 5:00 a.m.
I brewed French roast coffee in the electric percolator and drank the bitter brew with butter and strawberry jam on pumpernickel rye.
After breakfast I went upstairs to the roses and my daily cigarette. I then called my answering service.
“I got any messages?” I asked Renata Forman when she answered.
“Only one, Mr. Rawlins,” she replied. “A Mr. Oldstein called and said that he needed to talk to you about a woman named D-Donata Delp, uh, Delphine. He said that he’d come to your office at around eight this morning. I told him that this was Saturday but he said that you’d want this information.”
“Did he leave a number?”
“No, sir, he did not.”
I parked in front of the WRENS-L offices a few minutes past 6:00, figuring to be there early so I could reconnoiter this Mr. Oldstein before he got to see me. I locked and bolted the first-floor private entrance and then set up a stool at the upper window so I could watch the street without being seen.
Waiting was, and is, the detective’s stock-in-trade. It felt good sitting in shadow while the sun bore down on the place my quarry would reveal himself. I spent thirty-six minutes watching for what the morning would bring.
It wasn’t yet 7:00 when a late-model emerald-green Caddy pulled up behind John’s Pontiac. There was no one on the street that early on a Saturday morning.
Three men got out of the luxury car. They were all big men, white men; not businessmen, but bruisers who meant business. Two wore pale-colored, short-sleeved, loose-fitting, button-up shirts. The last member of the squad was Eddie Brock. His suit looked to be sharkskin. Fitting attire.
The men walked as a unit to the front door. I couldn’t see them when they got that close to the building, but I heard the doorknob refusing to turn and then the muscular jostling of the lower door. I checked the .45 revolver in my hand and silently praised Whisper Natly for insisting that the access door on the bottom floor be solid, steel reinforced, and anchored in an unmovable frame.
Downstairs the men banged and pounded; then it sounded like they were trying to pick the lock. When everything failed they moved back to the curb and looked up at my spy window.
I leaned into the darkest corner, still watching. Brock peered into the shadows that cloaked me. After another failed foray at the entrance the men went back to the car and waited for an hour and forty-seven minutes.
Sitting there watching from darkness, I wondered what had changed. Why did Eddie Brock mean me harm? And how much harm? No one worked on a Saturday. He and his men could have killed me easily.
I waited a full hour after they’d gone before going back downstairs to my car.
I’d made it up to Sunset and was tooling down the Strip when, on impulse, I stopped at a phone booth and called Terry Aldrich’s hippie house.
I was leaning up against John’s Pontiac and drinking a paper cup of coffee when Milo came down to meet me.
“What’s up, Mr. Rawlins?” he asked me.
“You wanna meet your niece?”
“You guys live here?” Milo asked as we strolled down the blue-brick path of Brighthope Canyon. “I mean, this is like a rich man’s neighborhood.”
“You can’t have one rich man without a hundred poor standing right behind him,” I said, quoting the long-ago philosopher Sorry.
For some reason the quote silenced the young uncle.
The door to Roundhouse was locked. This I took as a good sign, giving me hope for no sensible reason whatever.
I used my key and we walked in.
“Feather!”
“Yeah!” she hollered from upstairs.
I realized that Milo had yet to cross the threshold.
The two dogs, yellow and black, came out barking, already a perfectly calibrated guard team.
Beyond the yelps and woofs I could hear Feather’s fast feet on the third floor.
“Come on in, Milo,” I said to the suddenly shy hippie.
He sidled left and right before putting a foot forward. As he came into the raised foyer Feather hit the top step of the first-floor stairway. He’d made it two paces into Roundhouse and Feather was halfway down when they beheld each other.
From this first encounter I knew that I’d made the right decision. They bore the same expression: eyes wide with mouths slightly agape. They’d stopped moving and started feeling.
“Milo,” I said, “meet Feather. Feather, this here’s your uncle.”
The dogs went silent and retreated toward the koi pond.
Feather descended and Milo stepped up. When they came into proximity Milo put out a hand that Feather grabbed by the wrist. She pulled him into a filial embrace, holding on tight.
When they finally let go Milo just looked at her, amazement across his face.
“What?” Feather asked.
“You,” he said. “You look just like Robin did, like your mother did when I was a kid.”
“Should I go upstairs and make breakfast?” I offered.
“Come on, let’s sit near the pond while we wait,” Feather told her uncle.
That day, after the troubled early morning, was an oasis, far away from the Kilian job. Feather taught her uncle Milo how to swim. He showed her a family photograph album with pictures that included her mother and went all the way back to her great-great-grandparents who’d migrated to the U.S. from northern England before the Great War.
Breakfast and lunch were huge meals created by me and devoured by youngsters who had been starving for each other’s com
pany for what felt like forever to them.
“Why does my grandmother hate me?” Feather asked Milo in the middle afternoon.
We were all, humans and dogs, sitting around the koi pond. I hadn’t thought about Eddie Brock or dead Craig Kilian in hours.
“She doesn’t hate you,” Milo said. There was a maturity in his voice I hadn’t noticed before. “She’s afraid of you.”
“Afraid of me? I’m just a kid. What could I do?”
“It’s not what you would do,” Milo said. “It’s who you are. You see, our parents brought me and Robin up to be good Americans, to believe in others. We learned their lessons, but when we started living lives where we knew all kinds of different people who had different ideas, they became afraid of what might happen. Robin lived with a black man and then I grew up and grew my hair long.”
“But my mom was a good person,” Feather argued against absent grandparents.
Milo heard her and managed not to cry.
At around 4:00 I suggested that Agosto Longo give Milo a ride back down to the Strip.
“I think we’ve had enough for the day, don’t you, Uncle Milo?” I said.
He and Feather hugged goodbye.
I called Agosto on Brighthope’s closed-circuit phone and sent Milo down on the funicular. He left the photo album for Feather and she hugged it tight, not letting go even in her sleep.
25
I was looking out from the veranda at the sliver of the ocean. There was a half moon just out of sight that made that little strip of the Pacific glitter. I had been graced with one of the most important moments in my daughter’s life. She was no longer alone and rudderless; she had a history.
When nighttime deepened I was still staring. The Brighthope phone rang and, reluctantly, I headed for it.
“Hello?”
“It’s the French girl,” Cosmo said.
Not a trio of killers at any rate.
“Send her up.”
I met Asiette at the dais where the funicular docked. She ran into my arms and kissed me like we had been apart for years. I didn’t complain.
“I am so sorry, Easy,” she said when the kisses subsided. She wore a pale and thin silk violet dress that fluttered slightly.
“For what?” I asked, putting my arm around her and guiding her back toward Roundhouse.
“I broke up with Stefano at dinner tonight,” she said as if that were an answer.
“Why?”
I’d like to say that it meant nothing to me that a beautiful Frenchwoman dropped her rich Italian boyfriend and then ran to my bed. I’d like to say it didn’t matter but in fact I felt it in what prim romance writers called the nether regions.
“He was angry that we are lovers,” Asiette explained.
“I thought everything was open season until somebody came up with a ring?”
“Not open for tall handsome black men who aren’t impressed by Stefano’s wealth and fancy clothes.”
I stopped on the blue-brick road and kissed her. I had to.
She smiled and, when we started moving again, she said, “He wasn’t the right man for me. And . . . and after tonight I will have to stop seeing you too.”
I think she wanted me to say something or ask something, but I stayed silent because I agreed with both of her decisions.
“Because,” she continued, “as long as I see you I will want you.”
We made love as quietly as a couple can when they know this might be the last time. Afterward we sat intertwined on the veranda beneath a quilt of silver and gold cloth.
The telephone rang.
“You ’ave replaced me already?” Asiette teased.
“I told her not to call until after you fell asleep.”
“Easy?”
“It’s kinda late, isn’t it, Lola?”
“I can’t sleep and I don’t know what to do. As long as I knew I’d be talking to Craig in a day or so I felt calm, peaceful. But now he’s dead and . . .”
“I understand,” I said. “I have a son about Craig’s age.”
“You do?”
“He’s adopted but I love him so much that I couldn’t imagine the world without him in it.”
We were both silent for a time there.
“Did you just want to talk to with somebody?” I asked after a while.
“Donata Delphine used to work for the Stephanopoulos Talent Agency.”
“Oh.” I scribbled down the name on a little pad I kept next to the first-floor extension.
“I had forgotten it before. She just mentioned it that time Craig brought her over. It’s up on Sunset, the talent agency is. She told me that she got fired because of dating one of the clients.”
“I thought she was a burlesque dancer.”
“She does a lot of things, but through all of it that girl has ambition. She won’t stop until she’s on top of the mountain or underneath it.”
“Anything else about her?”
“Like what?”
“Who else she worked for, if maybe there was somebody angry when she got dismissed. Maybe the name of the client she was dating.”
“I don’t, I don’t remember. She turned up her nose at the little bit of money the modeling agency paid. Like all young, beautiful women she thought she was worth her weight in gold.”
I felt a hand on my bare back and actually gasped.
“What’s wrong?” Lola asked.
“Nothing,” I said, turning my eyes to Asiette. “I just thought I saw a mouse.”
The French girl had donned her violet dress and also an old orange, button-up sweater that I let her wear sometimes when she got cold.
“Oh my God,” Lola moaned. “You got to fumigate. If you see one there’s a thousand.”
Asiette kissed me and then moved on along the inside stream. The touch, kiss, and the fact she did all this while I was on a call meant that she was emphasizing the break between us. We might never see each other as lovers again.
“One time me and Craig had to move out of my house for a week because of rodents,” Lola was saying.
I let her talk because it seemed to make her feel better.
As Lola jabbered Asiette made her way to the door and let herself out.
“It was just a shadow,” I said. “Nothing real.”
I didn’t sleep that night. Asiette’s overly dramatic breakup made me feel alone. And because I had serious problems before me, I found that I was able to concentrate on how to pursue a case where the client was dead. I still hadn’t accomplished the tasks Craig and his mother had set before me. The man Craig had stabbed and the woman that man had savaged were yet to be accurately identified. And there was a third man, that’s what Christmas Black said.
“How old is Uncle Milo?” Feather asked at the breakfast table later that morning.
“Twenty-five or six,” I said. “Why did you want him to swim with you?”
“He needed a bath,” she said, crinkling her nose. “Can I call him sometime?”
I wanted to say no. I wanted to protect her from anything that might bring her pain.
“There’s a number in my phone book for a guy named Terry Aldrich. Call there and ask for Milo.”
She grinned and nodded.
“But, Feather,” I said in a stern tone.
She looked up at me, sans smile.
“I don’t want him up here unless I’m with you.”
“Okay.”
After that we ate our shirred eggs and bacon, strawberry jam on pumpernickel, and figs cooked in their own juices.
When the house phone rang I was wondering about the Stephanopoulos Talent Agency.
“Hello?”
“I need to see you,” Melvin Suggs rumbled.
“It’s Sunday,” I complained.
“And you think murder’s gonna take the day off and go to church to confess?”
“Talk about what?”
“Face-to-face,” he said. “The usual place.”
When Melvin was gr
uff like that he most often hung up without another word. But the phone made some airy noises and a woman’s voice came over the line.
“Hey, Easy,” Mary Donovan said. “How are you?”
“Okay. How about you, Mary?”
“Still in the same skin and liking it just fine, thank you very much.”
Our chatter seemed to be about nothing on the surface of things, but Mary and I communicated on subterranean levels. Just the fact she got on the line told me that this meeting with Mel was going to be something serious.
Mary liked me because she loved Mel and believed that I was his best friend in the business of being a cop.
She might have been right.
26
Roger’s twenty-four-hour diner was on Exeter in the heart of downtown—as much as LA had a downtown back in those days. The restaurant had a plate-glass window-wall that looked out on the street. In the old days Melvin would order three eggs over easy with sides of pork sausage and maplewood bacon along with a slab of baked ham.
But that morning he supped on a cup of oatmeal with no raisins, brown sugar, or cream.
He was sitting in a booth next to the window frowning at his repast when I slid into the seat across from him.
He looked up, a beast with beautiful eyes, and squinted.
“It’s a couple of things,” he said.
I was wearing a blue sports coat, cotton brown trousers, and a yellow shirt open at the throat. If Mary’s implied warning was as bad as it sounded I might get arrested and forced to take a mug shot; if that was the case I wanted to look good.
“Yesterday evening,” Suggs recited, “a report came in from a San Bernardino heist that went down two and a half months ago.”
“I remember that one,” I said. “They stole the whole armored car.”
“Along with three guards—presumed dead. They got away with something like eighty-six thousand dollars.”
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