He frowned. “You hit me with something.”
“Mort got hit with four 9mm Parabellums, stupid.” I was at my limit. “A cop named Poitras is going to come around. Talk to him. He won’t hassle you about things that don’t matter. Just don’t try to act tough. He’s not as nice as me.”
I walked out through the living room past the fishbowl. It smelled like a toilet. Algae were thick and furry around the sides and on top and over the big rocks at the bottom, and there was a dense mat of seaweed that looked like colonic polyps. A white fish of indeterminate genus lay bloated and belly-up at the surface. I stopped at the front door and looked back at them. Larry took a toke on his joint and the tip glowed.
“Kimberly?”
She turned toward me, putting her hands in her back pockets and letting me see her body. It was nice. A long time ago she could’ve been a cheerleader or even the homecoming queen in Elverton, Kansas. Every boy’s desire. “Hunh?” she said.
“Mort was an asshole because he loved you.”
She put her right hand up under her Poltergeist tee shirt and scratched her right breast.
I went out and slammed the door.
15
The next morning I woke with brilliant white sunlight in my face, smelling coffee. The sliding glass doors were open and Joe Pike was out on the deck. He was wearing faded jeans and a gray sweat shirt with the sleeves cut off and blue Nikes and government issue pilots sunglasses. He rarely takes the glasses off. He never smiles. He never laughs. I’d known Joe Pike since 1973 and he has never violated those statements. He’s six feet one with short brown hair and muscled the way a fast cornerback is muscled, weighing in somewhere between one eighty-five and one-ninety. He had a red arrow tattooed on the outside of each shoulder when he was in The Nam. They pointed forward.
Pike had the rail section out and was sitting on the edge of the deck. The cat was in his lap. I pulled on a pair of sweat pants and went out. I said, “Goddamnit. If you broke the alarm again, you pay for it.”
“Slipped the latch on the sliding doors with a hacksaw blade. You didn’t arm the system. You don’t arm the system, it won’t keep out the bad guys.” Pike stroked the cat along the top of the shoulders, using slow, careful passes the way the cat likes.
I said, “I don’t like to keep out the bad guys. I like to let’m in and work out on them.”
“You should get a dog. A good dog, properly trained, you don’t need to arm him. He’s always armed.”
“What? You don’t think I’m tough enough?”
Pike sat silently.
“I got the cat.”
Pike nodded. “That is a problem.” He put the cat down. The cat flattened his ears, hissed, grabbed Pike’s hand and bit him, then darted away to the other side of the deck to crouch under my grill. He growled deep in his throat. Helluva cat. Pike stood up. “Come on,” he said, “I’ve got breakfast, then we can take a ride.”
Pike had put out plates and napkins and flatware. There was a bowl of pancake batter beside the stove and four eggs and a small pot of water simmering on a back burner. The big skillet was greased and waiting for the batter. I said, “How long you been here?”
“About an hour. You want eggs?”
“Yeah.” About an hour, doing all this. I might just as well have been on the moon.
Pike poured the coffee, then spooned the eggs into the simmering water and looked at his watch. It was a big steel Rolex. He said, “Tell me about it.”
By the time we sat down, each with two soft-boiled eggs smushed atop six pancakes and syrup and butter, I had told him. Pike nodded, forked in some pancake and egg, swallowed. “We’re not overburdened with useful intelligence.”
“One might say that, yes.”
“She say this guy Dom’s a matador?”
“Yes.” The pancakes were good. I wondered if he’d put cottage cheese in them.
“I put cottage cheese in these,” he said, reading my mind. “What do you think?”
I shrugged. “Okay.”
He ate. “You know what matador means?”
“Bullfighter.”
He shook his head. I could see little images of me in his glasses. “Bullfight is an American concept. It has no relevance to the actual event. Not only is the term irrelevant, it’s insulting. If a matador fights a bull, then they’re adversaries. That’s not what it’s about. The matador has to dominate the bull, not be equal to it. The bull’s death is preordained. The matador’s job is to bring him to it.”
What a thing to wake up to. I said, “So what does it mean?”
The corner of Pike’s mouth twitched. That’s the closest he comes to a smile. “Means ‘bringer of death.’ Nifty, huh?”
I sipped the coffee. Bush coffee, bitter and black, made by putting grounds in a pot, adding water, and boiling it down. Amazing, what you can grow to like. “How do you know so much about it?”
The twitch again. “I’m into ritualized death. You know that.”
I ate more pancake. “Is this your contribution to the case?”
“What’d you have in mind?”
“A small clue, perhaps. A small note, a small eyewitness. Anything, really. I’m easy to please.”
“We’ll see.”
I got up, found two bananas in the living room, and brought them back to the table. I put one by Pike and sliced the other over my pancakes. Pike didn’t touch his. He said, “I don’t see how you stand dealing with these screwups.”
“People didn’t screw up, we’d be out of a job. Screwups are our business.” I liked the sound of that. Maybe I should call Wu, have him put it on the cards.
Joe said, “Guy like Mort, laughing when they laugh, nodding when they nod, sucking up the slimeballs.” The cat came in off the deck, hopped up onto the table, and stared at Pike. He held out a bit of egg. The cat ate it with delicate bites. “I know this Mort. I’ve known men like him. I don’t like people with no will and no commitment and no pride.”
“Your problem is your lack of a clear-cut opinion.”
Joe stopped feeding the cat, so the cat walked across the table and sat beside me. I ignored him.
“It’s never that simple,” I said. I told him about Carrie, about the photo album, about the pictures of Mort and Ellen and the kids around the pool.
Joe said, “Everybody’s got pictures. People pose for pictures. I’ve got pictures of me and my old man with our arms around each other, smiling, and I haven’t spoken to the sonofabitch in twelve years.”
I didn’t say anything. I had pictures, too. I finished off the pancakes and the eggs and speared the last slice of banana. “Mort gave himself up,” I said.
Joe Pike sat erect at the table, chewing, mirrored lenses immobile, lean jaws flexing, one veined, muscled arm in his lap, the other against the table, elbow not touching. He swallowed, finished his coffee, wiped his mouth. Impeccable. He said, “No. He gave nothing. He lost himself. The distinction is important.”
After a while I gathered the dishes, brought them into the kitchen and rinsed them. When I finished, Pike was back out on the deck, holding the cat, staring off toward Hollywood. I went out to the rail. He didn’t turn around. “Somebody screws up, I clean up after them. That’s why people come to the agency. That’s what I’m good at. You’re good at it, too.”
“Hell of a way to make a living,” he said.
“Yeah,” I turned and went back inside. “Come on, Yukio. Let’s take that ride.”
