floor and occasionally squatting to look under cars.
“Unless he used an automatic, there won’t be any spent shells,” I said. “And probably even then he would have picked them up.”
Samuelson ignored me.
“You’re right, though, that he wouldn’t have shot him in the car,” I said. “He’d want to avoid getting blood on the upholstery or powder burns or bullet holes. Incriminating.”
Samuelson let himself down in a push-up position to look at the cement floor under a white Pontiac Phoenix with a rented-car sticker in the lower left corner of the windshield. He took a long careful look without getting his clothes dirty and stood back up. He brushed his hands off against each other and moved along the parking level. I followed him.
On the third parking level Samuelson found a smear on the low parapet that could have been blood. Below they were getting Felton’s body out of the Dumpster. A plainclothes cop in a plaid jacket was watching them alertly. Samuelson yelled down to him.
“Bailey, come up here.”
The cop in the plaid jacket sprang into action. When he arrived, Samuelson pointed at the smear. “Find out if it’s blood,” he said.
Bailey said he’d get right on it. Samuelson kept up his tour. I followed him. Out front, Candy was doing a stand-up in front of the Holiday Inn. The ragamuffin with the camera was about five feet out into Wilshire shooting her, and a cop in uniform was directing traffic around him.
When we got to the top floor of the parking garage and Samuelson was through looking at it, he leaned his forearms on the parapet and stared out at Wilshire Boulevard. Off to the left behind some apartments and a neighborhood of small classy houses you could see UCLA sticking up here and there against the green hills.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“We told you all we knew last night,” I said.
“Maybe,” he said, “maybe not. But right now I’m interested in opinion. Boston tells me you’re a real hot shot. What do you think?”
“I think a lot of what you think. That Franco hauled Felton out of there last night and brought him here and blew him away because Franco was confident Felton would spill everything he knew and some he could make up when folks got to chewing the fat with him, so to speak.”
“Yeah?”
“And I think Franco is an employee. He’s mean enough, but he’s small-time. The thing that Candy’s trying to uncover is big-time. Franco’s the kind of guy that will shake down whores and unconnected bookies and Mexicans with forged green cards.”
Samuelson nodded. “So who employs him?”
“Directly I don’t know. Indirectly I would guess the head of Summit Studios.”
“Hammond,” Samuelson said. “Anything more than you told me last night?”
“No,” I said. “He should have known about the offer from Felton either way. He said he didn’t. He was too helpful and too innocent and too outraged. He’s in it, I’ll bet you dinner at Perino’s.”
“Make it Pink’s,” Samuelson said. “It’s what I can afford if I lose. What about Brewster?”
“I don’t know. I only met him once. He could be involved. Any guy who got to where he is can’t be too meticulous about things.”
“And who’s doing the extorting? Who’s the money going to?” Samuelson said.
I shook my head. “This is your neighborhood, not mine. Any guesses? How about the guy Franco used to collect for?”
“Leon Ponce? Naw. He’s too small-time. Shaking down an outfit like Summit, or Oceania… Leon hasn’t got that kind of connections. Or that kind of balls. This is a bib game operation.”
Across Wilshire a woman in a pink robe came out onto the balcony of her apartment and watered her plants. She had a transparent plastic bag on her head. Probably just colored her hair.
“Wait a minute,” I said. Samuelson looked at me.
“Shaking down a major movie studio is a big deal, isn’t it,” I said.
Samuelson nodded. “I just said that.”
“But it’s not being run like a big-time operation,” I said.
“For instance,” Samuelson said.
“For instance it’s a goddamn mess,” I said. “They’ve beat up a TV reporter and murdered two people including a movie producer. I never heard of Felton, but he can’t be totally anonymous.”
“Yeah?”
“And sending a lumper like Franco around to collect cash from a producer on location? And being spotted? If the Mob owned Roger Hammond, would they work that way?”
“No,” Samuelson said. “Nope, they’d have some stock in the company. They’d have credit transfers and paper transactions I don’t even know the names of, and it would take five C.P.A.‘s five years to figure out who was getting how much.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Maybe we been thinking too big,” Samuelson said.
