When Nora tired herself out, she came and plopped down beside Keegan’s feet, panting, satisfied with her efforts to rid the world of pigeons. Keegan stroked her head and hooked the leash back on her collar.
The two of them headed over to Kipper Lusk’s newsstand on the square’s easternmost corner. Lusk was an old friend of sorts. He’d once been a small-time operator—nothing serious, just some bookie work and some fencing and some black-market rum brought up from Mexico. He’d been a good source of information all those years when Keegan was covering crime for The Times. For a guy who spent his day on a folding chair inside a plywood hut, he’d always had a good handle on what was going on around town.
These days—older, wiser—Lusk was still always looking for an angle, but he limited himself to misdemeanors, nothing likely to put him behind bars. He had a wife and a Pomeranian and a house out in Echo Park, and he probably paid most of his taxes. But if you needed a box of illegal Cuban cigars, he’d have them waiting for you the next morning. If you needed a fake ID, he’d tell you to buy one of the postcards from his rack, then he’d jot a phone number on the back as a kind of bonus. If you wanted World Series tickets, and you were willing to pay—well, he’d be the first guy you’d ask.
At Lusk’s newsstand, Keegan waited behind a tall man in a charcoal suit who seemed to be buying a single copy of every local paper. He set them in a pile on Lusk’s counter and then dug in his pockets for change.
Lusk sorted through the man’s purchases. “A buck eighty,” Lusk told him, without enthusiasm.
The man counted out exact change—mostly nickels and dimes—and dumped it on the counter before he took up his stack of newspapers and left without a word. Both Keegan and Lusk watched him walk away.
“You don’t see many avid readers these days,” Keegan said.
“That’s the Chief Deputy DA,” Lusk told him. “He likes to check his press. He’s got his eye on grander things.” He swept the scattered silver coins into his palm and went about sorting them into the till beneath his counter. “You’d have known who he was,” Lusk said dourly, “if you ever coughed up a dime and actually bought a newspaper from me every now and again.”
Keegan picked a pack of Juicy Fruit gum from Lusk’s candy rack and set a nickel on the counter. “With customers like that guy, you should be in a better mood.”
Lusk looked at him and shook his head, like Keegan couldn’t be expected to understand his plight. “It’s a dark time for me, my friend,” he said cryptically. “Mirrors have been broken. A pall has descended.”
Keegan peeled open the pack of gum and unwrapped a stick. “Your metaphor escapes me,” he told Lusk. He put the gum in his mouth and the crumpled wrapper in his pocket.
“That’s because it’s no metaphor,” Lusk said. “I’m talking literal mirrors, which have literally been broken.” He jabbed a thumb in the direction of the old box truck he used to haul his goods. It was parked a quarter block down Hill Street, in the shade of a sycamore. “A guy paid me to haul a whole shipment of bathroom mirrors out to a new hotel in Pasadena,” he said. “The rope broke, and one of the crates ended up in the Arroyo Seco slow lane under a semi-truck.” He shook his head morosely. “Insurance will cover the cost,” he said, “but it’s the metaphysical fallout I’m worried about. There were twenty mirrors in that crate.” He tapped the countertop with one finger. “I’m just trying to figure out if it’s sevenyears-per-incident or seven-years-per-mirror. Either way, I’m serving serious time.”
Keegan barked a laugh and almost swallowed the gum he’d been chewing. “You’re kidding, right?” he said, coughing a little. “Tell me you’re not serious. Tell me you know that sort of superstition isn’t real.”
Lusk made a nodding-shrugging gesture that seemed to indicate the jury was still out. “The next day the wife’s car battery dies,” he said. “Then, last night, a skunk comes in the yard and sprays the dog.” He presented his palms to Keegan beseechingly. “You tell me if the bad luck is real,” he said. “Superstitions had to start somewhere, right? They weren’t made up out of thin air.” He shrugged. “So, who knows? Maybe I’m cursed.”
Keegan grinned. “Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving guy,” he said. The gum in his mouth was already beginning to lose its flavor. “Let me tell you why I came by, Kip.”
Lusk shot him a surly look. “Yes, please do,” he said wryly. “For a minute there, we were almost talking about someone else for a change.”
“You wouldn’t know where I could get a ticket for a World Series game, do you?”
Lusk’s mood seemed to brighten. He sat up straighter on his folding chair. “Games Three, Four, and Six,” he said. “They go on sale Wednesday. There’s already a line a mile long out at Chavez Ravine.”
“And if I don’t want to wait in line?”
“Then you’d need to talk to a particular local businessman who will soon have a number of choice seats for sale,” Lusk said.
“And where might I find this scalper of yours?”
“You might be talking to him presently,” Lusk said. “I got half a dozen kids from up at the high school camping out outside the stadium in shifts. Even bought them a pup tent to keep them happy. If you want a ticket, I’m your man.”
Keegan nodded. Kipper Lusk was now a scalper. How had he not seen this coming? “So how much would you be charging for one of those choice seats?”
Lusk looked both ways before he spoke. This, after all, was a crime, and the Chief Deputy DA might still have been in earshot. “Fifty bucks for Saturday’s game,” Lusk said, “if you’re not picky about where you sit. The better seats? Those’ll run a little higher.”
Keegan recoiled. He’d been guessing twenty bucks—twenty-five at the most. “Now, come on, Kip,” he said. “The tickets can’t cost you more than ten bucks a piece.”
“Twelve bucks, I’ll have you know,” Lusk said. “And you’re forgetting my overhead. High school kids don’t come cheap. And did I mention the camping equipment?”
Keegan shook his head. “You know scalping is illegal,” he said. “You’re not supposed to sell a ticket for more than face value.”
“And you’re not supposed to let your mutt off her leash in the park,” Lusk countered. “Yet here we are, two outlaws in broad daylight.” Lusk leaned forward a little, and his face was suddenly lit up in the afternoon sun. “Look, Jimmy, there are fifty-six thousand seats in Dodger Stadium,” he said. “And every seat’s going to be full. Nobody much cares if one of those butts is yours.”
He was right, and Keegan knew it. If he didn’t pay Lusk’s prices, someone else would be happy to. This was the World Series, after all. “Okay, fine,” Keegan told Lusk. “Put a ticket aside for me. And make it a good one.”
Lusk nodded and sat back in his chair, his face muted in shadow again. “That’ll require a ten-dollar deposit,” he said.
“What? Seriously?”
Lusk shrugged and made a show of straightening out his till. Keegan could take the offer or leave it.
Nora tugged at her leash. An old woman was walking a toy poodle over by the drinking fountain.
“Just a sec,” Keegan told the dog. He dug out his wallet and flattened two fives on Lusk’s counter.
Lusk folded them and put them in his shirt pocket, keeping them separate from the money in his till. “Always a pleasure doing business,” he said. “Swing by Thursday afternoon with the rest of the cash, and there’ll be a ticket here with your name on it.”
AGAIN, A LITTLE after midnight, the dog started up her barking. She was out in the living room, her claws skittering on the oak flooring. Keegan tried to ignore the noise. He pulled the pillow around his head and tried to will himself back to sleep. But her barking was so strident, so insistent, there was no way he could tune it out. He got up and trudged out to the living room.
Nora stood just where she had all the times before, next to the coffee table, ears pricked, hackles raised. She growled at the big easy chair, inche
d toward it tentatively, then stopped and growled some more.
Tonight, the big chair was empty. There wasn’t even a blanket there to make an ambiguous shadow. Keegan reached over and turned on the corner lamp again. In the sudden light, the dog sat down and whimpered. She eyed the empty chair keenly, cowering a little.
“Nothing there,” Keegan told her softly. “Nothing to be afraid of.”
The dog stood and edged toward the chair. When she got to it, she jumped up into it, quivering with excitement. She sniffed at the arms and at the seatback, wagging her stubby tail. Whatever scent she found there seemed to please her.
“So, are we done now?” Keegan said. “Think we can call it a night and go back to sleep?”
The dog kept up her excited sniffing, ignoring Keegan completely. She seemed transported by whatever scents the old chair was confiding to her. At least she wasn’t barking.
“Well, okay then,” Keegan said. “You stay out here if you want. I, for one, am going back to bed.”
Keegan reached over and switched off the lamp. In the new darkness, he thought he might have caught a whiff of something too—a subtle hint of perfume in the air, perhaps. It was a scent so slight and delicate it was difficult to know if it was real.
He slouched into the dark bedroom and rolled back onto the waiting bed. He lay on his back looking up at the ceiling, too awake now to hope for sleep.
CHAPTER THREE
THE CHATEAU MARMONT lay off Sunset Boulevard, just west of Laurel Canyon. It was an old, high-end hotel that towered over the palms and eucalyptus trees, looking quaint and coquettish amid all the nightclubs and the liquor stores. Its architecture—at least what could be seen of it from the street—was at odds with the rest of the neighborhood. It might have been a castle from the French Renaissance, uprooted from its vineyards and dropped down here on Sunset Strip among all the billboards and neon. As a hotel, it was mostly famous for its privacy. It was the preferred destination for a well-heeled, illicit tryst or a movie star’s mental breakdown. You went to the Ambassador or the Garden of Allah if you wanted to be seen. You came to the Chateau Marmont if you wanted to be invisible.
Keegan parked his car on Sunset, just outside Schwab’s drugstore. He got out and waited beside his car, watching for a break in traffic. When he saw his opportunity, he jogged across the Boulevard. He paused on the opposite sidewalk and looked up at the hotel. Not much of it showed above the overgrown hedge, just high white walls, windows, and balconies—a splash of old Europe amid all the sun-bleached stucco.
He found a narrow entryway and ended up in a dimly lit lobby that seemed far too small to belong to a hotel. There was a front desk, a row of muted hanging lamps, and a few battered leather wingback chairs. The room’s burgundy carpeting was stained and threadbare, like something you’d see in an old movie house. Most of the light came from a pair of French doors at the room’s far end.
The concierge behind the desk wore round spectacles, an old-fashioned white dinner jacket, and a red bow tie. He was tall and stooped. Balding. Middle-aged. The way he bent over the desk as Keegan approached him gave the impression that he might be using it to stay on his feet.
“I’m here to see Ida Fletcher,” Keegan said. “She’s expecting me.”
The man regarded Keegan through his round, smudged lenses. He seemed unimpressed with what he saw. He reached up and adjusted his glasses, wincing as he did. “I’m afraid I can’t help you, sir,” he said haughtily. The mere act of addressing Keegan seemed to pain him a little. “We don’t have a guest by that name.”
After Keegan’s smoggy drive out here in traffic, the man’s smugness struck a nerve. Sure, if the old lady was as paranoid as Donovan said she was, she’d probably left strict orders at the desk not to let anyone in. But she was the one who had begged Keegan to come, and he had traipsed all the way out to the Strip in good faith. He wasn’t about to be turned away by some tinpot sycophant, dressed in his grandfather’s dinner jacket.
“Look, I talked to her on the phone this morning,” Keegan said. “She asked me to meet her here. The Chateau Marmont.”
The man straightened up a little and stood with his hands braced on the desk’s edge. This small change in posture also seemed to pain him. “I’m afraid I can’t help you,” he said. He glanced over at the door Keegan had come through. “There is a phone booth across the street,” he informed Keegan without looking in his direction. “It’s right outside the drugstore, if you need to make a call.”
There was also, Keegan could clearly see, a much closer payphone. It was in a little alcove built into the wall right behind the front desk. The concierge drifted a little to his left, as if to block that phone from Keegan’s view.
Keegan moved his jaw from side to side. He’d only agreed to this meeting because Mrs. Dodd had insisted they needed the money. He would have happily ignored the old lady’s call again and spent the afternoon behind his desk, listening to Game Two of the World Series. He put his own hand atop the desk and gathered himself up to his full six feet. “Look,” he said, glaring squarely at the concierge, “I don’t know what your problem—”
Keegan never finished the sentence. He was caught up short by a meaty hand on his shoulder. He turned to find a thick, craggy face smiling at him. The man had all the markings of a Sunset Strip bouncer. He was broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, with olive skin and close-cropped black hair. Though an inch or two shorter than Keegan, he made up for it with muscle mass. Keegan braced himself.
“You must be the new detective,” the man said. His grin broadened when he saw Keegan’s confusion. The man wore a tight blue polo shirt that seemed to be designed for a much smaller man. “I’m with Mrs. Fletcher,” he said. “I’m supposed to bring you on back.” He held out a thick hand for Keegan to shake. His grip was leathery and oversized, like someone’s well-worn baseball glove. Keegan noted the faded blue tattoos on the extended forearm: an anchor, a hula girl, the stars and stripes. This was a Navy man.
“I’m Jim Keegan.”
“Frank Romano,” the other man said.
The name fit, Keegan thought. It was no nonsense, plain and blunt and hard enough to break a bone or two.
“I’m supposed to look you over first,” Frank said amiably. “Mrs. Fletcher’s orders.” He made a show of stepping back to give Keegan the once over. “You seem okay to me,” he said. He turned, strode to the lobby’s far end, and opened the French door.
Keegan glanced back at the concierge, who was now bent over the ledger, pretending to be immersed in something. Keegan shook his head and went through the door Frank Romano was holding open for him.
Outside was a shady arcade walkway that skirted a courtyard garden. The other man led Keegan between two ivy-laced pillars into the sunlight.
Now that Keegan had a better look at him, Frank struck him as more of a boxer than a mere bouncer. He had the agile build; the blunt, slanted nose; the cauliflower ears. Above one of his heavy-lidded eyes, the brow had a notch in it, a bare slit where it had no doubt been quickly stitched between rounds so he could get back in the ring. Brigade Boxing Champ in the Navy, Keegan guessed. The man’s bulging triceps suggested he would have packed a good wallop, but—judging by the ears and crooked nose—he was a bit slow with his ducking and weaving.
The courtyard they crossed felt secluded and removed. The cool air was filled with birdsong and the sound of running water. It was as if they were in some high-mountain getaway far removed from the city. The distant hush of traffic passing out on Sunset Boulevard might have been the rush of wind among the pines. Keegan followed Frank the Boxer past a small oval swimming pool to a row of bungalows.
They approached the nearest bungalow. A wrought-iron gate was set into a redbrick wall. The ex-boxer stepped in front of Keegan and blocked his way. “I’m going to need to see some ID before I take you inside,” he said. He shrugged and smiled apologetically; these were not his rules. “And your PI license, if you have it with you.”
He stood—feet planted wide, blue-inked arms folded across his chest—while Keegan fished out his wallet. These might not be his rules, but he was clearly going to make sure Keegan followed them. “She’s picky about this kind of thing,” he said amiably. “But who can blame her?”
Keegan handed over the two cards, and Frank the Boxer looked down at them, one in each hand. He held Keegan’s driver’s license up so he could match the photo to Keegan’s face. He did all this good-naturedly, like the two of them were playing along in some kind of pantomime. “She’s a sweetheart once you get to know her,” he said. He held the two IDs in the air between them, as if assuring Keegan that he’d take good care of them. “She’ll want to see these first,” he said.
Keegan nodded.
“This’ll only take a minute,” the boxer said. He turned and disappeared through the big iron gate, making sure to latch it behind him.
While Keegan waited, he took in his surroundings. The day out on Sunset had been mild, cool for so early in October. Inside the hotel’s walls, the atmosphere was a shadowy, damp November—a good five degrees cooler than it had been outside Schwab’s. He looked up at the walls of the main hotel, a warren of mismatched windows and odd balconies set into the walls, elegant and shabby in equal measures.
Two men lay on adjoining deck chairs by the pool in shorts and undershirts, making use of a small scrap of sunlight that filtered down through the palms. They wore nearly identical tortoiseshell sunglasses—that Italian brand that was always showing up in Mrs. Dodd’s movie-gossip magazines. The men’s chairs were pushed closely together. It wasn’t something you’d see at any other hotel. Privacy was hard to come by in Hollywood.
The iron gate behind Keegan swung open again, and Frank Romano stood there, taking up most of the gateway with his shoulders. “Right this way, Mr. Keegan,” the boxer said. “Sorry for the wait.” He gave Keegan back his ID cards. “Or should I call you James?”
Valley of Shadows Page 3