“I’m not sure if I’m supposed to feel better about this or worse.”
Stillman raised his eyebrows, took a long draft of his mai tai, and stared contemplatively at the hull of the outrigger canoe hanging above the table. “I’d say that our humanity requires us to feel . . . bad. Which we will tomorrow while these drinks claw their way out of our systems.” He looked at Walker again. “You’re in the clear, ego-wise. You could have been the aforementioned paragon of virtues, and she would have skipped the concert.”
“Then what are we sad about, precisely?”
“Her. No matter how misguided the goal, we can’t help rooting for the determined little human animal who wants it. That’s why we watch people doing things like climbing Mount Everest—which, on the well-known one-to- ten Stanford-Binet stupidity scale weighs in at about a thirty—and actually, with shame and horror, admit to ourselves that we hope the little boogers make it.”
“We don’t know that she won’t.”
“The broken window tells us somebody broke into her apartment. The two guys show us that somebody was watching her apartment—somebody from out of town, or they would have known enough to impersonate Pasadena cops instead of L.A. cops. They may have been interested in getting their hands on her, or keeping our hands off her. But I’d say the idea that she’s irrelevant to the little problem at McClaren’s is about shot.”
“So what can we do?”
“We find her.” Stillman’s eyes met the waiter’s across the room, and he pointed at his empty mai tai glass. The waiter scurried off.
Walker stared at his glass while the waiter snatched it up and replaced it with a full one. It was beginning to take on a strange brightness, but then he realized that it was all right. It just looked bright because the breadth of his vision was now so narrow that the periphery was gone, and the glass was about all that was left. He felt a sudden regret so deep that he gave in to the need to draw in a quick breath. Maybe he was being stupid. What was he defending—her reputation? Her life could be in danger. He should tell Stillman the part he had not said. But as he contemplated it, he could not think of a single disparity between the truth and the lie that made any difference to anyone but John Walker.
6
Walker sensed that he was in a large, empty space. His ears told him that the sounds were coming from a distance, but it was some debased offshoot of human reason that told him he could not be alone. Spaces this size were public. Bits of memory rose into his consciousness. Had he passed out in the restaurant? He sat up quickly. It was a hotel room. He was still dressed, lying on top of a bed. He remembered walking in here and lying down, but he also remembered telling himself he was just going to test the bed for a moment to see if it was comfortable. He had planned to get up.
Stillman was sitting in a wing chair across the room, and the rustling noises had been the newspaper he was reading. He looked over the top of his paper at Walker, then turned a page.
“What time is it?” asked Walker. His voice didn’t sound as though it belonged to him. He cleared his throat.
“About nine. Don’t hurt yourself trying to roll the stone away from the tomb, though. We’ve got plenty of time.”
Walker crawled off the bed and walked into the bathroom. He found a paper bag on the sink. Inside were a toothbrush, toothpaste, razor, shaving cream, mouthwash, comb, and a receipt that said Hilton Gift Shop. There were bars of soap in packages in the soap trays, so he decided he was adequately equipped for the moment.
Walker brushed his teeth and stood under the hot shower for a few minutes before he was ready to face considerations that had to do with the future. He began with the immediate future, because that didn’t challenge his mind too much. He had come to Los Angeles with only the clothes on his back, so he didn’t have to decide what to wear. As his mind began to forage beyond the moment, it collided with Stillman, and he felt the urge to stay right where he was, letting the water pound his scalp and run warm down his body to his toes until Stillman went away. He had heard him say, “We’ve got plenty of time.” It was innocuous and undemanding, but it implied that there was something coming. He reminded himself that last night Stillman had said they were going to search for Ellen.
Moments later, Walker came out of the bathroom and put on his clothes. Stillman stood, refolded his newspaper, dropped it into the wastebasket, then stepped to the door. “Come on.” It was only then that Walker noticed Stillman was wearing a freshly pressed gray suit that made him look like a senator.
Walker quickly surveyed the room, then realized he had been checking to make sure he had not left anything behind. He had nothing except his wallet and keys, and he could feel them in his pants pockets. He followed Stillman along the hall without having the slightest memory of the velvet-flocked blue-and-white wallpaper, then rode down with him in an elevator. The elevator stopped every second or third floor to pick up groups of middle- aged women who seemed to know one another, some of them pulling suitcases on wheels, so that by the time it had descended ten floors, Walker was occupying himself by estimating the weight of each passenger and her burdens, adding them up and comparing the total to the elevator’s capacity printed on the little card beside the door.
When they got out in the lobby, Stillman turned to him. “How close did we come?”
“One more stop might have done it. We had about four hundred more pounds.”
“It’s kind of nice, isn’t it?” asked Stillman. “Not dying by yourself, but with all those women hugging you and screaming all the way down, so our bodies would be all smeared together like a big, runny omelette.” He stopped. “Hungry?”
Walker was defiant. “Sure. Do we have time?”
“Let me worry about that.”
They ate breakfast in the hotel restaurant, and Walker felt pleased with his decision. The food seemed to give his body energy, and the coffee cleared his mind. He watched Stillman paying the bill, then followed him out the front door.
Stillman turned his head to stare at Walker critically, then waved off the valet parking attendant. “We’ll have to stop and get you some clothes and stuff.” He turned and walked west on Wilshire Boulevard.
Stillman stopped to look into the Neiman Marcus window, and Walker pointedly kept moving. Stillman called, “Hold it,” and Walker came back. “I know you can’t afford this, but don’t worry about it. We’re on an expense account.”
“You may be,” said Walker. “But I doubt that it includes me, and I’m sure it doesn’t include clothes.”
Stillman glanced at his watch and said affably, “It includes anything I say it includes. I don’t itemize.”
Walker cocked his head and raised an eyebrow.
“My clients know I’m not wasting their time on that sort of thing. If they want my services, they pay what I cost and don’t get on my nerves. I don’t bid, I don’t give estimates, and I don’t account for things.”
“They go for that?” asked Walker. “McClaren’s goes for that?”
“If they didn’t want to, they wouldn’t have to. They have a telephone book. Now, we’re about to go meet some people. I want them to look at you once and make some unfounded assumptions. What that’s going to require is that you go in there and buy yourself a good shirt, a suit off the rack that fits you, and a tie in a tasteful color and subdued pattern that does not include any stripes.”
“So it’s a disguise for a meeting?”
“Jesus, I hope it’s not a disguise. I’ve been giving you the benefit of the doubt. We’re going to see some people who need to assume that you’re very high up on the food chain. We may see them more than once in the next few days. So while you’re at it, start at the skin and work outward. Buy three or four suits, some jackets and pairs of pants, shirts, shoes and so on. I’ll go buy you a suitcase to hold them in, then be back in time to sign the slip.”
Walker frowned.
“What are you waiting for?”
“I’m wondering . . . . why no stripes?”
“Because that’s what British regimental ties have, and if you ended up with the colors of the Queen’s Own Thirty-sixth Welsh Bushwhackers or the Eton All-Castrato Choir you wouldn’t know it.”
