“Take it easy.”
“I’m taking it easy,” I said. Simms had stopped smiling.
The redhead came back in with the color copies and the little picture. She put the copies on Lou’s desk and the little picture on top of the copies. She looked at me. “What, no cracks?”
“They broke my spirit.”
She smiled nicely. “Penny Brotman. Studio City.” And swayed away. Simms said, “Sonofabitch.”
I took the little picture and put it in my pocket. I sneered at Simms, then gave Lou a flat look. “If we’re finished, I want to get out of here.”
He looked at his hands. “I didn’t know he was gonna pull that, Hound Dog. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.”
I went back along the short hall, down the flight of stairs and out through the reinforced door. Nothing had changed. The Chicano guys still stood by the front desk, the white kid still murmured into the phone. People came in and went out. A fat woman bought a Coke; it wasn’t a diet drink. A black cop with heavy arms led a man past the desk and through swinging doors. The man’s fragile wrists were cuffed. There were knots in my trapezius muscles and in my latissimus dorsi and my head throbbed. I went up behind the kid on the phone and stood very close. He looked at me. Then he murmured something into the phone, hung up, and sat on one of the wooden benches with his head in his hands. I dialed Janet Simon and let it ring. On the thirty-second buzz she answered, breathless. I said, “Does Ellen Lang have any close relatives nearby? Sister or mother or something like that?”
“No. No, Ellen doesn’t have any relatives that I know of. She’s an only child. I think there could be an aunt back in Kansas, but her parents are dead. Why?”
“Can you meet me at her house in twenty minutes?”
There was a long pause. “What is it?”
I told her. I had to stop once because she was crying. When I was through I said, “I’m on my way,” then I hung up. I stood with my hand on the phone for several seconds, breathing deeply, in through the nose, out through the mouth, making my body relax. After a while, I went over to the kid on the bench, said I was sorry, and put a quarter on the bench beside him. It was shaping up as a helluva day.
10
At twenty minutes before three I pulled into Ellen Lang’s drive and parked behind Janet Simon’s Mustang. Ellen’s Subaru wasn’t there. I went to the front door and knocked. Out on the street, cars driven by moms went past, each carrying kids home from school or off to soccer practice. It was that time of the day. Pretty soon Ellen Lang would turn in with her two girls. She’d see the Corvette and the Mustang and her eyes would get nervous.
I knocked again, and Janet Simon opened the door. Her hair was pulled back and large purple sunglasses sat on top of her head. Every woman in Encino wears large purple sunglasses. It’s de rigueur. She held a tall glass filled with amber liquid and ice. More ice than liquid. She said, “Well, well. The private dick.” It wasn’t her first drink.
Ellen Lang had made the house spotless for Mort’s return. Everything was back in its place, everything was clean. The effort had been enormous. Janet Simon brought her drink to the couch and sat. The ashtray beside her had four butts in it. I said, “You know when she’ll get home?”
Janet Simon fished in her pack for a fresh cigarette, lit it, and blew out a heavy volume of smoke. Maybe she hadn’t heard me. Maybe I’d spoken Russian without realizing it and had confused her.
“In a while. Does it matter?” She took some of the drink.
“How many of those have you had?”
“Don’t get snippy. This is only my second. Do you want one?”
“I’ll stay straight. Ellen might appreciate coherence from the person telling her that her husband is dead.”
She looked at me over the top of the glass, then took some of the cigarette. She said, “I’m upset. This is very hard for me.”
“Yeah. Because you loved Mort so much.”
“You bastard.”
The leaders on either side of my neck were as tight as bowstrings. My head throbbed. I went out to the kitchen, cracked ice into a glass, and filled it with water. I drank it, then went back into the living room. Her eyes were red. “I’m sorry I said that,” I said. “I’ve done this before, and I know what it’s going to be like, so my guts are in knots. Part of me wants to be up in Lancaster trying to get something on the boy, but I’ve got to do this first. The rest of me is pissed because the cops had me in so an asshole named Baishe could give me a hard time and feel tough. He did, it wasn’t fun, and I feel lousy. I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”
She listened to all that, then quietly said, “She always runs a couple of errands after she picks up the girls. They might go to Baskin-Robbins.”
“Okay.” I sat down in the big chair opposite the couch. She kept looking at me. She brought the cigarette to her mouth, inhaled, paused, exhaled. I got up and opened the front door to air the place out.
She said, “You don’t like me, do you?”
“I think you’re swell.”
“You think I ride Ellen too hard.”
I didn’t say anything. From where I was sitting I could see the street and the drive through the big front window. And Janet Simon.
She said, “What the hell do you know,” then finished off her drink and went into the dining room. I heard glass against glass, then she came back in and stood at the hearth, staring out the window.
I said, “She’s your friend, but you don’t show her any respect. You treat her like she’s backward and you’re ashamed of it, like you’ve got some sort of paradigm for modern womanhood and it burns your ass that she doesn’t fit it. So you put her down. Maybe if you put her down enough, what she wants will change and shell begin to fit the paradigm.”
“My. Don’t we have me figured out.”
“I read Cosmo when I’m on stakeout.”
She took a long sip of the drink, set it down on the mantel, crossed her arms, and leaned against the wall to stare at me. “What shit.”
I shrugged.
“Ellen and I have been friends since our kids were in nursery. I’m the one she cries to. I’m the one who holds her when she breaks down in the middle of the morning. I’m the only goddamned friend she has.” More cigarette, more drink. “You haven’t seen the bags under her eyes from the sleepless nights or heard the horror stories.”
“And you have. I respect that.”
“All right.”
“The problem is that you’re shoving too hard. Ellen has to move at her own rate, not yours. I’m not talking about where you want to go. I agree with that. I’m talking about how you get there. Your method. I think it weakens the one you’re hoping to strengthen.”
She raised an eyebrow. “My. Aren’t we sensitive. Aren’t we caring.”
“Don’t forget brave and handsome.”
She cupped her hands around her upper arms the way you do when you’re standing in a draft, the way Ellen Lang often did.
“Maybe you’re too close,” I said. “Maybe you’re so close and hurting so much you can only know how you’d react and that isn’t necessarily the way Ellen should react. You’re not Ellen.”
“Perhaps I used to be.”
I shook my head. “You were never Ellen Lang.”
She stared at me a little longer, then shrugged. “I was alone, and it was rough. I was taken advantage of. Even my women friends deserted me. Their husbands were business friends of Stan’s. They went with the money.”
“But you’ll stick with Ellen.”
