Stalking The Angel

She frowned.

'I'm going to take a look outside. I'll be back in five.' I told Ellis to stay with Bradley and told both Mimi and Sheila to stay put. Mimi made the crooked mouth again. Sheila told me she was horny, and asked wouldn't I like to do something about it. Nothing like cooperation.

I went along the Blue Corridor and out into what a little sign said was the Angeles Room and thought, nope, maybe the sign was wrong. Maybe this was really the UN. Maybe a king was about to be crowned. Maybe aliens had landed and this was where they were going to make their address. Then I saw Joe Pike. It was the Angeles Room, all right.

Eighty tables, eight people per table. Video cams set up on a little platform at the rear of a place that might be called a grand ballroom if you thought small. Press people. A dais with seating for twenty-four. Pacific Men's Club Man of the Month. Who would've thought it. About sixty percent of the faces were Asian. The rest were black and white and brown and nobody looked too concerned about making the next Mercedes payment. I recognized five city council members and a red-haired television newswoman I'd had a crush on for about three years and the Tashiros. Maybe the Pacific Men's Club was the hot ticket in town. Maybe Steven Spielberg had tried to get in and been turned away. Maybe I could get the newswoman's phone number.

Pike drifted up to me. 'This sucks.'

That Joe.

'I could off anybody in this place five times over.'

'Could you off someone and get away with you here?'

Head shake. 'I'm too good even for me.'

I said, 'It starts in ten minutes. Door I came from is off the Blue Corridor. They're in a room down the corridor. We come out that room, along the corridor, through the door, and up to the dais.' I told him where Ellis had put his men. 'You take the right side of the dais. I'll come out with them and take the left.'

Pike nodded and drifted away, head slowly swiveling as he scanned the crowd from behind the sunglasses.

I went back to the Blue Room. Bradley Warren was seated on a nice leather couch, smiling with four or five new arrivals, probably people who would sit on the dais. The little room was getting crowded and smoky and I didn't like it. Jack Ellis looked nervous. Bradley laughed at something somebody said, then got up and went to a little table where someone had put out white wine and San Pellegrino water. I edged up to him and said, 'Do you know all these people?'

'Of course.'

'Any way to clear them out?'

'Don't be absurd, Cole. Does everything look all right?'

'You're asking my opinion, I say blow this off and go home.'

'Don't be absurd.' I guess he liked the sound of it.

'All right.'

'You're being paid to protect us. Do that.'

If he kept it up, he was going to have to pay someone to protect him from me.

More people squeezed into the little room. Jack Ellis went out and then came back. There were maybe twenty-five people in the room now, more coming in and some going out, and then Jillian Becker went over to Bradley and said, 'It's time,' loud enough for me to hear. I looked around, figuring to get Sheila and Mimi and Bradley into a group. Sheila was nodding at a very heavy white guy who smiled a great deal. I said, 'Where's Mimi?'

Sheila looked confused. 'Mimi?'

I went out into the hall. There were more people coming along the corridor and others going into the Angeles Room but there was no Mimi. Jack Ellis came out and then Jillian Becker. Ellis said, 'She asked one of the busboys for the bathroom.'

'Where is it?'

'Just around the corner to the left. I got a man down there.' We were trotting as he said it, picking up speed, Ellis breathing hard after twenty feet. We went around one corner then around another and into a dirty white hall with an exit sign at the far end. There was a men's room door and a women's room door halfway down its length. Jack Ellis's man was lying facedown in front of the women's room door with one leg crossed over the other and his right hand behind his back. Ellis said, 'Christ, Davis,' and puffed forward. Davis groaned and rolled over as he said it.

I pulled my gun and pushed first into the women's room and then into the men's. Empty. I ran down to the exit door and kicked through it and ran down two flights of stairs and through another door into the hotel's laundry. There were huge commercial washers and steam-circulating systems and dryers that could handle a hundred sheets at a crack. But there was no Mimi.

In Vietnam I had learned that the worst parts of life and death are not where you look for them. Like the sniper's bullet that takes off a buddy's head as you stand side by side at a latrine griping about foot sores, the worst parts hover softly in the shadows and happen when you are not looking. The worst of life stays hidden until death.

On a heavy gray security door that led onto a service drive beneath the hotel, someone had written WE WARNED YOU in red spray paint. Beneath it they had drawn a rising sun.

Chapter 13

When the first wave of cops and FBI got there, they sealed off the Blue Corridor and herded all the principals into the Blue Room and sealed that off, too. An FBI agent named Reese put the arm on me and Ellis and brought us outside and walked us past the restrooms and down the stairs. Reese was about fifty, with very long arms and pool player's hands. He was about the color of fine French roast coffee, and he looked like he hadn't had a good night's sleep in twenty years.

He said, 'How long this guy Davis been working for you, Ellis?'

'Two years. He's an ex-cop. All my guys are ex-cops. So am I.' He said it nervous.

Reese nodded. 'Davis says he's standing down the hall back up by the bathrooms grabbing a smoke when the girl comes by, goes into the women's room. Says the next thing he knows this gook dude is coming out the women's room and gives him one on the head and that's it.' Reese squinted at us. Maybe doing his impression of a gook dude. 'That sound good to you?'

Jack Ellis chewed the inside of his mouth and said, 'Uh-huh.'

In the laundry there were cops and feds taking pictures of the paint job and talking to Chicano guys in green coveralls with NEW NIPPON HOTEL on the back. Reese ignored them. 'Didn't anybody tell the girl not to go off alone?' He squatted down to look at something on the floor as he said it. Maybe a clue.

Ellis looked at me. I said, 'She was told.'

Reese got up, maybe saw another clue, squatted again in a different place. 'But she went anyway. And when she went, nobody went with her.'

I said, 'That's it.'

He stood up again and looked at us. 'Little girl gotta go potty. That's no big deal. Happens every day. Nothing to worry about, right?' A little smile hit at the corner of his mouth and went away. 'Only when you got serious criminals out there, and they're saying things, maybe going potty, maybe that's something to think about. Maybe calling the police when the threats are made, maybe that's something to think about, too.' He looked from Ellis to me and back to Ellis. 'Maybe the cops are here, maybe the little girl does her diddle and comes back and this never happens.'

Ellis didn't say anything.

Reese looked at me. 'I talked to a dick named Poitras about you. He said you know the moves. What happened, this one get outta hand?'

Ellis said, 'Look, Mr. Warren signs the checks, right? He says jump, I say which side of my ass you want me to land on?'