“Like that.”
“You didn’t answer me, Hound Dog.”
“No, it doesn’t have anything to do with Lang.”
There was a pause. “Okay,” he said, and hung up. I frowned at the phone. Galahad lying to Percival. It made me feel small.
I brought my typewriter from its little stand in the corner over to the desk and typed up a complete report from the time Ellen Lang hired me three days ago until Kato brought me back to the building. When I finished, it was four single-spaced pages long. I corrected the typos, numbered, dated, and signed each page, then brought them to the insurance office across the hall. The secretary there lets me use their copy machine whenever the boss’ door is closed. It was closed. I made two copies and tried not to breathe in the secretary’s face. I took the copies back to my office, signed and dated each sheet again and wrote in longhand that there should be no erasures or deletions from any page. The original and one copy went into my office file. The other I sealed in an envelope, stamped, and addressed it to my home. Then I went down, put the letter in the drop outside the bank, and went back into the deli. I bought a bottle of aspirin and a large black coffee to go. I chewed four of the aspirin while the blonde watched, then took the steps, two at a time, all the way up. For every sin, there must be penance.
Back in the office I ate two more aspirin, sipped the coffee, and thought about what I might do. Ellen and the boy would be safe as long as Duran thought he could trade them for the dope, only I had no dope to trade. Maybe I could break into his manse at three in the morning, ram a gun in his mouth, and demand their release. Unh-huh. Maybe I could kite some bad checks, score a hundred grand worth of dope, and pull the trade that way. Unh-huh. The problem was that once Duran had the dope, Ellen and Perry had to disappear. Wouldn’t matter how connected he was, he couldn’t buck eyewitness testimony. And that meant Elvis had to disappear, too. I watched Pinocchio’s eyes move back and forth. Portrait of the investigator: young man in search of a plan.
Maybe I could poke around and trip over some heretofore unknown bit of evidence. I dug out the rolodex card with Garrett Rice’s phone numbers and dialed his office. A woman answered, “Mr. Rice’s office,” and told me he’d gone for the day. I asked if Mr. Tyner was about. She said he had gone with Mr. Rice. I dialed Rice’s home number and waited while it rang. Maybe Garrett Rice knew something he wasn’t telling. Maybe I could use some form of nonlethal persuasion to find out. On the fifteenth ring I hung up. Not home. Some plan, all right.
I took out my wallet and looked at the license number that Joe Pike had copied off the Nova, then called a lady at the Department of Motor Vehicles. I identified myself, gave her the number of my PI license, and asked for the Nova’s registration. She told me to wait, then came back with a name and an address. I thanked her, hung up, then finished the coffee. The beer and the aspirin had helped my back. I pulled on the shoulder rig without too much pain, got the Dan Wesson out of my desk, put on the cotton jacket, and went out. It was eight minutes after four.
I still didn’t have a plan. Maybe the guys in the Nova, maybe they had a plan. Maybe I could borrow it.
20
Forty minutes later I turned down a small residential street in an older part of Los Angeles between Echo Park and Dodger Stadium. The houses were flat-topped stucco bungalows, mostly off-white or sand or yellow in color. Most had porches and most of the porches had tricycles and big potted geraniums and old Chicano women sitting in lawn chairs. You could smell chili sauce and machaca simmering and the doughy scent of fresh, hand- thrown flour tortillas. It was a good, clean smell.
The DMV had said that the dark blue Nova belonged to a man named Arturo Sanchez who lived in the fourth house from the corner on the north side of the street. It was a light brown bungalow with a two-strip drive, a porch, and four ratty rose bushes. The Nova wasn’t in the drive, nor was it parked on the street. I cruised past the house to the end of the block and turned into a little street-corner shopping center. There was a laundromat and a 7- Eleven and a taco stand and a billboard advertising Virginia Slims,?Hiciste mucho progreso, chiquita!
I parked under the Virginia Slims sign, bought a taco and an iced tea, and sat with them at one of the little picnic benches in a place where I could watch Arturo Sanchez’s house. It was a real taco, with chunk beef and chilis, fried in oil and doused with the sort of sauce that would bring a Taco Bell taco to its knees. Heaven. I had finished the first and started on a second when the blue Nova turned down the street and into Sanchez’s drive. The poor man’s Charles Bronson got out, looking sullen, kicked at something on the ground, kicked at it again, then entered the front door. Still tough, all right.
I waited.
The sun settled and the cars that passed began to burn their headlamps. It grew chill. Two teenage girls in tight pants and too much makeup walked past the taco stand and into the 7-Eleven. Cars pulled into the lot. Guys who looked like they worked hard for a living got out, went into the 7-Eleven and came out with six-packs or cartons of milk. It got dark. A beat-up station wagon discharged a short, thick-boned woman with two large baskets of clothes. The two baskets were almost as big as the woman. She edged sideways through the laundromat doors, set the baskets onto the floor near the closest machine, and sorted through her wash. She saw me watching her. I smiled. She smiled. She went on with her wash. Another close brush with dangerous inner-city life.
The guy in the taco stand was beginning to look at me, too, only he wasn’t smiling. I threw the rest of my iced tea into a steel trash bin and went over to the 7-Eleven and pretended to make a call from the pay phone. The guy in the taco stand watched me. Four make-believe calls later I gave up, went back to the taco stand, and smiled in the little window. “Ever thought about licensing a franchise?” I said.
The guy never took his eyes off me. He had his right hand where I couldn’t see it behind the Orange Crush machine. Probably embarrassed by a hangnail.
At ten minutes before eight Arturo Sanchez kicked open the screen door to his house and stormed out to his Nova. The porch light came on and a heavy woman appeared in the door, screaming something in Spanish. Arturo gunned the Nova, screeched backward out of the drive, and roared down the street away from me.
I caught up to him a block and a half down Elysian Park heading toward Dodger Stadium. With the baseball season still a couple of months off, traffic was light; two months from now with the Dodgers in a home game I might have had problems. We went up Stadium Way through Chavez Ravine and north on Riverside paralleling the Golden State Freeway. About a mile and a half up he swung right onto a crowded side street without signaling. Some guys are assholes all the way through.
The Nova pulled into a small apartment building. A man passed through his headlights and climbed in. It wasn’t the same guy who’d been with Sanchez in front of Kimberly Marsh’s place. This guy was shorter and built like an in-shape welterweight, compact and hard and mean. The kind of guy who just naturally wanted to make something of it. The Nova came back onto Riverside and continued north.
When we got to Los Feliz Boulevard they surprised me, turning west toward Hollywood instead of east toward Domingo Duran’s. On Franklin they parked in front of a liquor store and the welterweight got out. He went into the store, came out with a bagged pint, and made a call on the pay phone. Probably to his broker. They continued down Franklin to Beachwood, then hung a right up into the Hollywood hills. Halfway up they turned off Beachwood and climbed into a little nest of cramped, winding streets beneath the Hollywood sign. I killed my lights and backed off, guessing turns by watching their lights bounce off the houses and trees above me. We went higher, Hollywood and Los Angeles spreading out below in a hypnotic panorama so wide and deep that you could lose yourself in the lights.
When I saw their car again it was parked at the curb of a little white clapboard bungalow. I eased to a stop, then let the Corvette roll backward and swing into an empty drive. I took my gun out from under the seat and held it at my side as I walked up to the house. My heart was pounding. That really happens when you’re scared.
There were three men standing in the living room, Sanchez and the welterweight and a third guy. The third guy was holding a can of Budweiser beer in his teeth and pulling on a white shirt. He had spiderwebs tattooed on each shoulder along with assorted daggers and skulls and female breasts. He also had a shoulder holster. Behind them was a short hall running back to what looked like the kitchen. The welterweight peeled the bag off his pint, set it on the coffee table, and laughed at something. Probably not the other guys tattoos.
I went around the side of the house and peeked in a window. It was a little bedroom off the hall, decorated in early poverty. Ellen Lang sat in a chair. Her hands were tied behind her back and there was a Mayfair Market
