The look of her made Bishop snort. It made something cold and humorous go through the heart of him.
At his shoulder, the morning traffic on the hill rumbled end to end. The noise of the motors was loud. Sissy had to raise her whispery voice to be heard above it.
'Hello, Jim,' she said. It was a cold, cold tone coming from her.
'I need to find Weiss,' he told her.
'He's gone. I don't know where he is. He left me in charge. Can I help you in some way?'
Bishop ignored the cool voice, the scolding eyes. He couldn't have cared less what Sissy thought of him. If he wanted her to make noise, he'd fuck her. 'No,' he said curtly. 'I need Weiss. I can't reach his cell phone. I sent him an email; I left a message on the machine at his apartment, but he hasn't called back.'
'That's right. He's out of touch.'
'That's it? He's just gone? He just left? There's no way to reach him?'
'He must've had some private business.'
Pissed off, Bishop looked away. Private business. Bullshit. Weiss had gone to find the whore. He didn't want anyone to know where he was because he'd gone to draw the specialist into a showdown and save the whore and prove he was still some kind of hero instead of an over-the-hill Jew ex-cop picking up scraps as a private detective.
'Christ,' Bishop said under his breath, the word lost in the motor noise from the Jackson Street traffic. He should just let the old man go, he thought, let him get himself killed. Fucking Weiss.
'Is there anything else I can do for you?' said Sissy coldly.
Bishop gave her a look. Her whole priggy schoolgirl routine was beginning to give him a pain. 'If he was gonna leave someone a clue where he went, it'd be you, you or Ketchum.'
'It wasn't me,' she said.
Bishop nodded. 'Well, if you think of anything, let me know. And if he gets in touch, tell him to call me.'
'Well, he might not want to talk to you,' Sissy said primly.
Bishop ran his gaze over her, from her wool cap to the gloved hands clasped in front of her, back up to her disapproving blue eyes. He didn't say anything, but he was thinking it. That was enough. The look made her blush.
'I don't give a fuck whether he wants to talk to me or not,' he said. 'Tell him to call me. If he goes after this guy alone, he's gonna get himself killed.'
'What's that supposed to mean?'
'Just tell him, Sissy.'
He made the sputtering Harley roar. He looked up at me. It was too quick. There was no time for me to pull back. He laughed. He gave me an ironic wave. Then he nodded at Sissy, curled the bike away from her into the traffic, and headed off down the hill.
26.
Next he broke into Weiss's apartment. He flipped the lock with a credit card. Stepped inside. Shut the door behind him.
The living room was in shadow. The window shades were half-drawn, blocking out the morning light. He could hear the traffic out on Russian Hill, but it was quiet inside. The unstirred dust of days hung in the air. The place felt abandoned.
Bishop stood just within the doorway. He gave the room what pilots call a block scan, moving his eyes over ten degrees of arc at a time. He started with the corner to his left. An open kitchen door. The white tile of the room beyond. The toaster on the counter. His gaze moved on another ten degrees. A desk, a swivel chair, a computer, a phone, the answering machine with its red answer light burning: no messages.
He went around the room like that, shifting his focus from one object to another. He looked at the wing chair in an alcove across from him, facing the bay window. There was a small round table by one arm. There were pale rings in the table's brown surface, stains left by the bottom of a glass. Bishop could picture Weiss sitting in the chair, looking out the bay window, sipping his Macallan.
The corner of his mouth twitched. Fucking Weiss, he thought. His gaze moved on.
To his right, he could see the foot of the bed through the bedroom door. The bed was neatly made, the bedspread smooth. Moving on, he saw, on the wall directly at his shoulder, a mirror and another chair. That was the end of the scan.
He went to the desk. He sat down in the swivel chair. The first thing he noticed was the cell phone, Weiss's cell phone, lying right there next to the computer keyboard. Bishop turned it over. The battery was gone. Weiss wanted to make himself that much harder to trace.
Bishop turned the computer on. As he waited for the machine to boot, he pulled open the desk drawers one by one. There wasn't much there. In one drawer he found a box of bullets but no gun. Weiss must've taken his old service revolver with him, that old snub-nosed. 38 he had. There was a twinge in Bishop's gut when he thought of Weiss going after the specialist with his old. 38. The specialist with his SIG and his 1911 and his armor-piercing Saracen. He made a face. He slid the drawer shut hard.
He diddled with the computer for a while, but he was no hacker. Weiss had a code on his case files and his mail. Everything else was business letters, home accounting, that kind of thing. No clues to where he'd gone. The phone answering machine wasn't any help either. Bishop pressed the replay button, but all the messages had been erased.
He pushed back from the desk. Crossed the thin hemp rug. Went into the bedroom. Not much there either. A stack of magazines on the bedside table. Baseball Digest, Sports Illustrated, Baseball America, Newsweek, Law and Order. A book on the bottom of the pile: Let Freedom Ring. He picked up the remote, turned on the television at the foot of the bed. The voice of the anchorwoman was startling in the long-standing silence. FOX News. He turned the set off again.
He went out, back across the living room, back across the thin hemp rug, into the kitchen. He took a quick glance around. Banged through the cabinets. Brought down a drinking glass. He held the glass under the faucet and ran a thin layer of water onto the bottom. He carried the glass back into the living room.
He sat in Weiss's wing chair. He put the glass on the little round table by the chair's arm. He brought his cigarette pack and his plastic lighter out of the slash pocket of his leather jacket. He lit a cigarette. Pressed his head against the chair back and smoked, looking out through the bay window-through the bottom panes, the panes that weren't covered by the half-drawn blinds.
Outside, in the bright, cold morning, the wind was moving in the plane trees. There was a steep hill falling away from a grassy square, town house by town house lining the street, bay window after bay window, descending. On the sidewalk just across from him, a thick-set workman pushed a dolly past the hilltop. A young woman in a white sweater strode into the wind with great determination. On the street a blue station wagon rolled past, then a red coupe, then a green one. There were long moments between the cars when the corner was empty and still.
Bishop raised the Marlboro and pressed it between his lips. Weiss must've sat in this chair in the evenings, he thought. Drinking his scotch, looking out at the hill. Watching the dusk fall over the city. Alone. Watching the dark.
He drew smoke. He let it trail out of his mouth slowly. What did Weiss think about, sitting here? Did he think about the whore? Alone here, night after night, drinking, watching the dark. Or was it the killer he thought about- the killer out there somewhere, watching him, hunting for her?
Bishop tried to think the way Weiss would. If he was going to catch up to the old man, if he was going to stop the specialist, he had to get into their heads-just like Weiss would. He had to get a sense of what they were planning, what they wanted.
He thought about the killer. He thought about him buying three guns from the Frenchman. It was a lot of hardware, powerful stuff. Just to kill off one middle-aged private eye. What was that about?
Bishop lowered the cigarette. He tipped an ash into the water glass on the table. The ash hissed softly, spread and sank, lay black and cold at the glass's bottom. He considered it. Something came to him. A scenario. A
