“And weren’t they surprised,” I said.
We turned off Doheny just below Sunset and onto Wetherly Drive.
“She wants to see you, so she’ll see you,” Rafferty said. “But anytime after that, you want to try me out, wise guy, why, start right in.”
I didn’t seem to have him intimidated.
We stopped in front of a small neat house among many small neat houses on Wetherly Drive. They built close together in L.A. A lot of good-looking vine that I couldn’t identify grew over the blank front of the house. We went down the narrow passage between this house and its neighbor. Rafferty unlocked the door and we went in. The floors were polished hardwood, to the right was a large living room. The back wall of the living room was glass and looked out onto a pool and a small cabana that occupied all there was of the backyard. The pool sparkled with blue water-clarified, filtered, and pH-balanced-and the effect in the living room was of space and nature in a remarkably small area. Candy Sloan half sat on the couch in front of the glass wall, her feet up, wearing a blue silk bedjacket with a mandarin collar. One eye was closed; her lip was badly swollen and showed the loose end of a stitch at one corner. There was a darkening lump on her forehead, above the good eye. When I came in, she moved her face slightly. I assumed she was smiling. The movement obviously hurt, and she stopped.
“I guess they were serious,” she said. She barely moved her mouth. Her voice was normal and seemed out of place, issuing from the battered face.
“Anything broken,” I said.
“No.”
“How about the body? Ribs? Anything?”
“They just hit me in the face,” she said. “Messed it up.”
I nodded. Rafferty had gone to the alcove off the living room and poured coffee from an electric percolator on the sideboard. To his right I could see a stand-up kitchen.
“I should’ve been here,” he said.
“It didn’t even happen here, Mickey,” she said. “We’ve been through this. Let’s not do it again.”
“How about the bozo you hired.” Rafferty tossed his chin at me. “Him. Where the hell was he?”
“Mickeyl” she said. The force of her saying it made her wince.
He drank some coffee and was quiet, but the cords in his neck were still taut.
I said, “Tell me about it.”
She said, “After I dropped you off, I went back to the station. I had to tape a three-minute insert for the six o’clock news. Right after I got through taping, I got a call from someone named Danny. He said he had something hot on the series I’d been doing and wanted to meet me. He wouldn’t talk on the phone and said he was being followed. He said he’d meet me in Griffith Park in the zoo parking lot. He said he’d be driving a black van with orange flames painted on it and Nevada plates.”
Talking was a bit of an effort for her. She stopped.
“And you went, goddammit, by yourself,” Rafferty said. “Why in hell didn’t you call me?” He had set his coffee down on the dining table and was grinding his right fist into his left palm as he talked.
“I’m a reporter, Mick,” she said. “I am not just a goddamn talking head that reads somebody else’s stuff off the crawl.”
“You’re also my woman,” he said.
“No, Mickey. I’m my woman.”
With his teeth clenched Rafferty said, “Shit,” walked into the small kitchen, leaned his hands on the counter, and stared into the sink. The position made his shoulders hunch up.
I walked over to the percolator and poured some coffee into a mug. “Then what?” I said. I sipped some coffee. It was weak.
“I went to Griffith Park. The van was there. I got out of my car and walked over to it. A man got out of the back of the van. I walked over to him and he shoved me into the back, came in after me, and the van started up. While it drove around, the man in the back beat me.”
“Did he say anything?”
“Yes. He said, `I’m not going to kill you this time, I’m going to mess up your face.‘ And he hit me. And he said, `If you keep snooping around, I’ll kill you.’ And then he hit me some more. I covered up as much as I could, but he was much stronger.”
“And?”
“And after about ten minutes they dumped me out on the Ventura Freeway and drove off. I never lost consciousness.”
“Who found you?”
“Highway patrol. They took me to the hospital and then I got in touch with Mickey, and he came and brought me home.”
“Cops get a statement from you?”
“Yes.”
“Description of the guy?”
“Yes.”
“License number?”
