“Spectator,” Jeremy said pensively.
“You’ve got an idea,” I said hopefully.
He took the magazine from under his arm and showed it to me. It was the latest issue of
“Houses have crumbled in my memory as soundlessly as they did in the silent films of yore.”
He closed the magazine and looked at me.
“That’s nice, Jeremy.” I felt a chill creeping through my soaked windbreaker.
“It’s in a short story by a young man named Vladimir Nabokov,” he explained. “You have forgotten a house, Toby Peters.”
“Can you help me remember, Jeremy?”
“It is never so meaningful as when one remembers oneself,” he admonished.
“Then I’ll regret my loss,” I said. “While you’re trying to improve my mind …”
“Your soul,” he corrected.
“My soul,” I accepted. “Another person could be murdered.”
“Why does the note say ‘Senor’?” asked Jeremy.
“The note’s to Dali. He’s Spanish,” I said.
Jeremy shook his head sadly, patiently.
“The first note had ‘Place’ in capital letters,” he said. “And this one has ‘Street.’”
“So,” I said, watching a woman dash across the street with a sheet of cardboard over her head. “Street is someone’s name. Where? There aren’t thirteen people named Street in the L.A. phone book.”
“Senor,” said Jeremy, “it is in the Town of the Spectator.”
“Hollywood,” I said.
“In Spanish,
“Holy shit. Jeremy, remember when we were in Mirador about a year ago on the Hughes case, the sheriff was …”
“Mark Nelson,” said Jeremy.
A shot of thunder.
“I don’t like things like this,” I said. “I like it straight and simple. I don’t like puzzles, and I sure as hell don’t want to risk running into Nelson. What am I going to do?”
Jeremy looked down at me and said nothing.
“Right,” I said. “I’m going to Mirador.”
When the rain slowed enough to make it less than insane to do so, I headed back to the Farraday Building. When I got there, I put on a dry if not clean shirt I kept in my office and removed the.38 Smith amp; Wesson five- shot revolver I kept locked in the lower drawer. I almost never carried the gun. In the last five years, I had lost it three times, been shot by it once, and never used it to stop or even confront anyone threatening me. But now I was on the trail of a killer who was leaving clues like at a Crime Doctor movie, a killer who had made a third eye in the forehead of a taxidermist named Place and was ready to do something equally nasty to a citizen named Street.
I made it to the Crosley with a newspaper over my head, got in and headed for the Pacific Coast Highway. The skies grumbled, stayed gray but stopped raining as I did my best to keep from thinking. It didn’t work. Try it some time.
Was someone killing people just because their names left interesting clues? Did Place have anything to do with the Dali theft? If there was a Street in Mirador, was he or she a part of this or just a poor sap who happened to have the right name?
An hour later I turned off the highway at the Mirador exit and two minutes later was on Main Street. I didn’t know if Mark Nelson was still sheriff. I hoped I didn’t have to find out. We hadn’t gotten along like arms-around- the-neck buddies.
Downtown looked almost the same as it did the last time I had hit town. There were six store-front buildings on the main street. One of them was the sheriff’s office, another was a restaurant named Hijo’s. A place that used to sell “Live Bait” was now a hardware store, and three shops that used to be boarded up were now in business, though closed for the day. One of the shops, Old California, a few doors down from the sheriff’s office, sold antiques. The second specialized in “New and Used Clothes” and the third was Banyon’s Real Estate. The war boom had hit Mirador. There was no one on the street but a big guy in overalls looking into the window of the antique shop. Whatever was in there had his full attention. His face was flat against the window.
I kept driving till I came to a gas station I remembered. It was open. I got the kid on duty to fill the Crosley and went in to look at his phone book. The kid, tall and pimply with straight corn-colored hair and overalls, came in and said, “Eighty-three cents.”
“How many people live in Mirador?” I asked.
He shrugged as I handed him a dollar.
“Keep the change,” I said.
“Maybe a few thousand if you count the rich ones who only come in the winter,” the kid said, pocketing the whole buck and putting nothing in the till.
“There are thirty listings in the phone book for people named Street,” I said.
“Lot of Streets,” he replied seriously.
The inside of the station was small, crowded with stacks of oil cans and old Dime Detectives. It smelled of gasoline and musty pulp magazines.
“Why?”
“Streets founded the place,” he said. “My grandma on my ma’s side is a Street.”
“The thirteenth Street listed in the phone book is a Claude Street,” I said. “On Fuller Drive. How do I get there?”
“Claude’s probably in his shop,” said the kid, picking up a comic book and sitting in a wooden armchair behind a battered desk covered with old issues of
“And where’s his shop?” I tried.
“Passed it on the way in. Old California Antiques on Main Street.”
I was going to say thanks and leave, but the kid put his comic book down and came up with a rifle from nowhere.
“Hands on your head,” he said, standing.
I put my hands on my head.
“Why are you asking all these questions about Mirador?”
“I’m looking for Claude Str-”
“You a Jap spy? No, maybe you’re a Nazi. Japs landed you in a submarine. I’ve been watching the beach a year. So have Andy and Dad.”
“I drove up in a car, remember?” I reminded him as he reached for the phone.
“Smart. I know you guys’re smart. I know you got big subs,” he said.
“Not big enough to hold a car,” I tried.
“Big enough to hold that little Jap car,” he said, nodding toward my Crosley.
“It’s an American car. And how would they get it out of the submarine? Through the little trapdoor?”
This gave him pause.
“Smart,” he said.
“I’m a private detective, undercover,” I said. “Call the sheriff. Call Mark Nelson. He knows me.”
Yeah, I thought, Nelson knows me. He told me never to come back to Mirador unless I wanted to go through life walking like a sloth on my knuckles.
“You know Sheriff Nelson?”
“Like a brother.”
He lowered the rifle and took his hand away from the phone. I slowly took my hands away from my head, without asking permission.
“Sorry,” the kid said. “Just that we’ve been expecting the Japs for two years. We’re ready for them, too. I practice every Friday.”
