'I just ran a guy named Farrell Champion through the regular mainframe downtown and he came back empty.' 'No criminal beefs… okay.'
'No. Not just no criminal beefs, no nothing. No parking tickets, no fender benders, nothing. A blank screen.'
'Kinda unusual,' Lee said. 'Most people at least have a loud party once in a while.'
'Would you do me a favor and run a deep background on this guy? Start five years ago. He sort of appeared out of nowhere in the late nineties, and there are all of these romantic stories about where he came from and what he did before Hollywood. Gunrunner in Libya is one I remember reading, and a diamond hunter in South Africa, bullshit stuff, probably planted by studio flacks, but it keeps showing up in magazines.'
'We're talking about the movie guy, right?'
'Right. And maybe you could run him through NCIC in Washington…'
'Sounds juicy.'
'Just a precaution. I'm sure it's nothing.'
'Okay, I'll call when I get something. Your Venice number still good?'
'Yep. Same cell, too.'
'Got it all on my PalmPilot so I gotcha covered.' Shane got into his car and drove down to Rampart looking for the Ho-Tell Motel on Adams.
He found it on the corner of Adams and Gilbert. It was one of those uninteresting boxlike structures that had gone up all over L. A. in the fifties, under the name of 'clean-line' architecture. It had a sloping roof, stucco walls, and a big faded sign out front that read: HO-TELL MOTEL, and under that FREE CHEWING GUM. The chewing gum was for hookers after oral sex. 'Free chewing gum' was street code for a hot-cot motel. The sign also meant you could rent rooms by the hour.
Shane pulled into the motel parking lot and got out. The lot was half-empty, but it was only eleven A. M. He walked toward the office's large plate-glass window, which was protected by steel bars and had burglar alarm tape across the bottom. Shane looked inside. The office was deserted, so he opened the door and entered. The room had one vinyl couch and an end table with a pottery lamp that was pushed against the wall. The lampshade was broken and sat at a jaunty angle, like a drunk sleeping it off in the corner.
Shane rang the little bell. A man with an Arabic-looking face and skeletal demeanor came out of the back room to stare at him. He was smoking a Turkish cigarette.
'You want room? Come by hour, day, or week,' the man said in broken English.
'I'm looking for Carol White. She sometimes uses the name Crystal Glass. I understand she frequents this motel for business.'
'Carol White… No… no… not got a Carol White.' He didn't check the register book, so he knew her.
Now Shane had the big cop decision. What wallet do I go for? The badge or the billfold? The badge could clam this guy up because he was renting rooms to whores. The billfold would probably produce a better result but cost Shane money; money he wasn't sure he could get back from Nicky. Finally, he reached for his billfold, pulled out a twenty, and laid it on the counter.
The Arab looked down at the Jackson as if it were a dead cockroach the maids had missed.
Shane added another twenty and then a third. Sixty bucks was his limit. There was a market for information in L. A.
'Hey, Abdul,' Shane said, leaning in and making his voice hard, 'are you trying to piss me off and destroy my cooperative spirit?'
'No sir. Crystal, she a friend?'.
'Right. She performs services on me.' The man stared at Shane deadpan. 'Do I have to spell it out?'
'Maybe across street on corner. She got corner there, she not there, you try Snake Charmers Bar next door. Sometimes she go rest it there.'
'Thank you.'
Then the Arab did a David Copperfield on the three twenties; they disappeared before Shane's very eyes.
She wasn't on her corner, but Shane found Crystal Glass in the Snake Charmers Bar next door.
Chapter 5
The Snake Charmers had wood floors, a small stage painted black, and a bar on the far side of the room. When Shane came through the door, an African-American dancer with a pockmarked complexion was standing in the center of the stage doing a slow coffee grind, while Tina Turner sang 'Tiny Dancer' from the old-fashioned Wurlitzer. An overweight blond stripper sat in a metal chair with a towel tucked under her armpits, watching her colleague with listless, dead-eyed indifference. Morning dancers in nude clubs were on the bottom rung in show business, just one step from unemployment. There was a glass full of quarters on top of the jukebox; each dancer would put several in and pick her songs, then do her set and sit down. Shane looked around, and as his eyes adjusted to the light, he could see a few people sitting in the imitation leather booths that lined the walls. The windows had been boarded up and painted over to keep it dark inside. Shane walked up to the bartender, who had burly shoulders, a shaved head, and was watching a baseball game with the volume turned off on a small black- and-white TV set that was just below the bar top.
'Is Carol White around?' he asked the man, who looked up, immediately making Shane as a cop. The bartender was in his mid-forties and bald. He had green tattoos on his arms the kind you get in prison because the only color available in the joint was the green institutional ink supplied by the government to the penal system. The man didn't answer Shane, but looked back down at the TV.
'How about Crystal Glass?' Shane persisted. 'Sometimes she uses that name.'
The bartender kept ignoring him, so Shane reached out and slapped the ex-con hard across the side of the head. That brought him up fast.
'What the fuck?!' the man snarled.
'Sorry,' Shane said. 'You had a big yellow wasp about to land on your bald head there.'
'Hey, this ain't the fuckin' police department, and I ain't four-one-one.'
'This bar ain't gonna be open much longer either, unless you give me a little respect.'
The ex-con glowered at him, flexing his right hand, which had the word fuck tattooed across the first four knuckles. Classy guy.
'Eat me, cop.'
Shane reached out and again slapped him hard across the side of his head. It was an open-handed slap that made more noise than damage. Suddenly everybody in the bar stopped talking and was watching. The stripper had stopped in the middle of her grind and stood in the center of the stage, her breasts sagging, hands on chunky hips. Everybody, including Shane, wondered what would happen next.
'Lemme ask you one more time before I go through this place and confiscate everybody's bag of sparkle,' Shane said. 'Is Crystal Glass in here?'
It was a hard moment for the bartender. He didn't like getting punk-slapped in front of his dancers, but he knew that if Shane wanted, he could make a mess of the morning business. Finally he nodded at the far booth on the right, and Shane smiled and put down a twenty.
'For your trouble.'
He turned and walked up to the booth the bartender had indicated. The girl sitting there was hard to evaluate at first. From a distance, in the low light, she seemed quite beautiful. Long blond hair and a luscious body. She was dressed in a low-cut minidress, no jewelry, and some eye glitter. But the closer he got to her, the more this changed. It was as if someone was turning a time-distance dial on his first-impression meter, until as he was sliding into the booth, she looked old and used up. He could see the tangles in her hair, the droopy eyes, and the extra weight that was hanging from under her arms. Grime caked her wrists, while unhealthy skin and this morning's oozing track mark completed the depressing picture. Up close, Carol White was tarnished, dirty, and aging fast. She
