Spencer took two suitcases from the closet, considered them, put the smaller of the two aside, and opened the larger bag on his bed. He selected enough clothes for a week. He didn’t own a suit, a white shirt, or even one necktie. In his closet hung half a dozen pairs of blue jeans, half a dozen pairs of tan chinos, khaki shirts, and denim shirts. In the top drawer of the highboy, he kept four warm sweaters — two blue, two green — and he packed one of each.
While Spencer filled the suitcase, Rocky paced from room to room, standing worried sentry duty at every window he could reach. The poor mutt was having a hard time shaking off the nightmare.
Leaving his men to watch over the Zelinsky family, Roy stepped out of the house and crossed the street toward his car.
The twilight had darkened from red to deep purple. The streetlamps had come on. The air was still, and for a moment the silence was almost as deep as if he had been in a country field.
They were lucky that the Zelinskys’ neighbors had not heard anything to arouse suspicion.
On the other hand, no lights showed in the houses flanking the Zelinsky place. Many families in that pleasant middle-class neighborhood were probably able to maintain their standard of living only if both husband and wife held full-time jobs. In fact, in this precarious economy, with take-home pay declining, many were holding on by their fingernails even with two breadwinners. Now, at the height of the rush hour, two-thirds of the homes on both sides of the street were dark, untenanted; their owners were battling freeway traffic, picking up their kids at sitters and day schools that they could not easily afford, and struggling to get home to enjoy a few hours of peace before climbing back on the treadmill in the morning.
Sometimes Roy was so sensitive to the plight of the average person that he was brought to tears.
Right now, however, he could not allow himself to surrender to the empathy that came so easily to him. He had to find Spencer Grant.
In the car, after starting the engine and slipping into the passenger seat, he plugged in the attache case computer. He married the cellular telephone to it.
He called Mama and asked her to find a phone number for Spencer Grant, in the greater L.A. area, and from the center of her web in Virginia, she began the search. He hoped to get an address for Grant from the phone company, as he had gotten one for the Bettonfields.
David Davis and Nella Shire would have left the downtown office for the day, so he couldn’t call there to rail at them. In any case, the problem wasn’t their fault, though he would have liked to place the blame on Davis — and on Wertz, whose first name was probably Igor.
In a few minutes, Mama reported that no one named Spencer Grant possessed a telephone, listed or unlisted, in the Los Angeles area.
Roy didn’t believe it. He fully trusted Mama. The problem wasn’t with her. She was as faultless as his own dear, departed mother had been. But Grant was clever. Too damned clever.
Roy asked Mama to search telephone-company
As Mama worked, Roy watched a car cruise past and pull into a driveway a few houses farther along the street.
Night ruled the city. To the far edge of the western horizon, twilight had abdicated; no trace of its royal- purple light remained.
The display screen flashed dimly, and Roy looked down at the computer on his lap. According to Mama, Spencer Grant’s name did not appear in telephone billing records, either.
First, the guy had gone back into his employment files in the LAPD computer and inserted the Zelinsky address, evidently chosen at random, in place of his own. And now, although he still lived in the L.A. area and almost certainly had a telephone, he had expunged his name from the records of whichever company — Pacific Bell or GTE — provided his local service.
Grant seemed to be trying to make himself invisible.
“Who the hell is this guy?” Roy wondered aloud.
Because of what Nella Shire had found, Roy had been convinced that he knew the man he was seeking. Now he suddenly felt that he didn’t know Spencer Grant at all, not in any fundamental sense. He knew only generalities, superficialities — but it was in the details where his damnation might lie.
What had Grant been doing at the bungalow in Santa Monica? How was he involved with the woman? What did he know?
Getting answers to those questions was of increasing urgency.
Two more cars disappeared into garages at different houses.
Roy sensed that his chances of finding Grant were diminishing with the passage of time.
Feverishly, he considered his options, and then went through Mama to penetrate the computer at the California Department of Motor Vehicles in Sacramento. In moments, a picture of Grant was on his display screen, one taken by the DMV specifically for a new driver’s license. All vital statistics were provided. And a street address.
“All right,” Roy said softly, as if to speak loudly would be to undo this bit of good luck.
He ordered and received three printouts of the data on the screen, exited the DMV, said good-bye to Mama, switched off the computer, and went back across the street to the Zelinsky house.
Mary, Peter, and the daughter sat on the living room sofa. They were pale, silent, holding hands. They looked like three ghosts in a celestial waiting room, anticipating the imminent arrival of their judgment documents, more than half expecting to be served with one-way tickets to Hell.
Dormon, Johnson, and Vecchio stood guard, heavily armed and expressionless. Without comment, Roy gave them printouts of the new address for Grant that he had gotten from the DMV.
With a few questions, he established that both Mary and Peter Zelinsky were out of work and on unemployment compensation. That was why they were at home, about to have dinner, when most neighbors were still in schools of steel fish on the concrete seas of the freeway system. They had been searching the want ads in the Los Angeles
Roy was prepared to flash his Drug Enforcement Administration ID and to use every technique of intimidation in his repertoire to reduce the Zelinsky family to total submission and to ensure that they never filed a complaint, either with the local police or with the federal government. However, they were obviously already so cowed by the economic turmoil that had taken their jobs — and by city life in general — that Roy did not need to provide even phony identification.
They would be grateful to escape from this encounter with their lives. They would meekly repair their front door, clean up the mess, and probably conclude that they had been terrorized by drug dealers who had burst into the wrong house in search of a hated competitor.
No one filed complaints against drug dealers. Drug dealers in modern America were akin to a force of nature. It made as much sense — and was far safer — to file an angry complaint about a hurricane, a tornado, a lightning storm.
Adopting the imperious manner of a cocaine king, Roy warned them: “Unless you want to see what it’s like having your brains blown out, better sit still for ten minutes after we leave. Zelinsky, you have a watch. You think you can count off ten minutes?”
“Yes, sir,” Peter Zelinsky said.
Mary would not look at Roy. She kept her head down. He could not see much of her splendid nose.
“You know I’m serious?” Roy asked the husband, and was answered with a nod. “Are you going to be a good boy?”
“We don’t want any trouble.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
The reflexive meekness of these people was a sorry comment on the brutalization of American society. It depressed Roy.
