Another pause, this one the kind when the background static becomes real noise. Then he said, “You’re an asshole, Elvis. I’m on my way.”
He hung up. I hung up. I sipped the scotch. Asshole. That Lou. What a kidder.
I called Joe Pike. He answered on the first ring, a little breathless, as if he were finishing a long run or a couple hundred push-ups. “Pike.”
I could hear his stereo system in the background. Oldies but goodies. The Doors. “It’s gotten hot,” I said. I gave him the short version.
Pike asked no questions, made no comment. “Button up,” he said. “I’m coming in.”
Pike thinks Clint Eastwood talks too much.
I took eight eggs, cream, butter, and mushrooms out of the refrigerator. I got out the big pan, put it on the stove, and was opening three raisin muffins when Ellen Lang came down and stood in the little passageway between the counter and the wall.
She was wearing the terry robe and a pair of my socks. Her hair was damp and combed out and looked clean. So did her face. She looked good. She looked younger and maybe willing to laugh if you gave her something worth laughing at. “How are you doing?” I asked.
“You must be terribly tired,” she said. “Let me do that.” She moved to the stove.
“It’s okay.” I put the muffins face up in the toaster oven.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “You’ve had a hard day. If you want to do something, you can make the coffee.” Her eyes had turned to poached eggs. Her smile was weak but somehow pleasant, the sort of smile you get when you practice smiling because you think you have to. Like with Mort. Only now the poached-egg eyes were rimmed with something that could have been desperation.
I smiled as if everything was fine, and stepped back out of her way. “Okay.”
She opened each cabinet, saw what was inside, then closed it and moved on. She looked over the food I had out, then put the cream back into the fridge and took peanut oil out of the cupboard. The oil and a little bit of the butter she put into the big pan. While they heated she beat the eggs with a little water, then placed the spoon neatly beside the bowl when the eggs were frothy. I could see Carrie in her. I said, “I always put in cream.”
She chopped the mushrooms. “You men. Cream makes the eggs stick. Never put cream. Would you like to shower before we eat?”
“Later, thank you.”
She moved around the kitchen as if I weren’t there, or if I was, I was somebody else. We talked, but I didn’t think she was talking to me. She was Barbara Billingsley and I was Hugh Beaumont. But not. I drank more of the scotch.
She got out two plates, forks, knives, and spoons, and brought them to the counter. She had to move the Dan Wesson to set out the plates, and stared at it before she did.
I went into the dining area to get placemats out of the buffet. When I looked at Ellen again she had picked up the gun. She held it like that, then brought it close and smelled it. I stood up. “There’re placemats and napkins,” I said.
She set the places even though I offered.
She put the eggs in the pan and turned on the toaster oven and put out butter and strawberry jam and salt and pepper, and then she told me to sit. She nursed the omelette, then eased it onto a serving plate, added a sprig of mint leaf as garnish, and brought it to the counter. A lovely presentation. She brought out cups and poured the coffee and asked me if I took cream and sugar. I said no. She said she hoped I would like it. I said it smelled wonderful. She asked if there was anything else I might want. I said no, this would be fine. She said it would be no trouble if there were. I said if I thought of something, I’d ask for it. I wanted to cry.
We didn’t speak as we ate. She took one spoon of eggs and one side of a muffin. She ate that, then took some more. She ended up eating more eggs than me and half of the muffins. That was okay. I was happy with the scotch.
When she was finished she took a breath and let out a sigh like her body was trying to rid itself of ten years’ accumulated poison.
I said, “A couple of friends of mine are on their way over. Joe Pike, who owns the agency with me, and a guy named Lou Poitras. Poitras is a sergeant with the LAPD. He’s also a friend. We’re going to have to talk to him and tell him what we know. Do you have any objection to that?”
She sipped some of the coffee and put down the cup. Her voice came out softly. “If I had let the police search the house when you wanted, would Mort still be alive?” Steam from the coffee crept around her hand like delicate vines. I watched the way the overhead light worked the planes of her face. She had a nice face when she didn’t slump.
“No,” I said. “Mort was already dead. There wasn’t anything in the house that could’ve told us where he was.”
She nodded. I drank more of the scotch. She drank more of the coffee. That’s what we did until Poitras arrived.
22
Poitras said, “Okay, let’s have it.”
I told him everything from following the beach boy to Kimberly Marsh all the way up to what had just happened in Beachwood. He didn’t laugh when I told him about Duran and the bull. He just chewed his lower lip and listened. Ellen Lang listened closely, too, as if she were taking notes on her own life. I kept my version of what Kimberly had said about Mort and the party at Duran’s as brief as possible without leaving anything out. When I finished, Poitras went into the kitchen and used the phone.
I patted Ellen’s arm. “You okay?”
She gave a little shrug. I drained the rest of the scotch, went to the cabinet for some more. Out of Glenlivet. Damn. I cracked a bottle of Chivas that a cheap client had given me as a present and brought it back to the couch. I drank some. Hell, it wasn’t much different from the Glenlivet after all.
Ellen went into the dining area and came back with a coaster and a napkin. She put the coaster on the coffee table in front of me and the napkin on the arm of the couch by my hand. “There,” she said.
Poitras came back and asked for her side of it. When he saw the Chivas bottle he gave me a look. I gave him a look back.
Ellen spoke slowly, in short, declarative sentences, describing how two men had approached her in the Ralph’s parking lot, forced her into the backseat of their car, and taped a sack over her head. One of them was the tattooed man. They drove around for a while, Mexican music playing and one of them occasionally patting her rump, until they arrived at the Beachwood house. They told her that Mort had stolen cocaine from them and that they had killed him and would kill her, too, if she didn’t tell them where Mort had hidden the dope. They wouldn’t believe her when she told them she didn’t know what they were talking about. They put a gun to her head and snapped the trigger and touched her breasts and between her legs and threatened to rape her, though they hadn’t. One of them, the fat one, brought in Perry and slapped the boy repeatedly while the other asked her about the drugs. She screamed for them to leave Perry alone, but they wouldn’t, and that was when she told them that Mort had hidden the cocaine but that now I had it. After that, another man came and they took the boy away and hadn’t brought him back.
I watched her tell it and sipped at the Chivas and felt bad. Once when she mentioned Perry her voice broke. Other than that, she was fine. I decided she’d started out a pretty tough lady, back there in Kansas. So tough she took life-with-Mort on the chin for so long that it finally changed her into what Janet Simon had dragged into my office three days ago. I wondered if she could heal back to the person she had been. Could anyone, ever?
When she finished, Poitras ticked his fingers on his belt buckle and frowned at me. “Can you talk or are you incoherent?”
I sampled more of the scotch. Chivas ain’t so bad no matter what they say. Probably just elitists, anyway.
Poitras excused himself to Ellen, then got up, and we went over to the kitchen. I brought my drink. He poured
