Shooting Star/Spiderweb

But nine times out of ten, they look in the current issue. And nine times out of ten, that’s all they ever look in.

That’s why I tried the run-down drugstores, the ones with the dusty displays in the windows and the rubber goods counter up front. Sometimes they have an older edition of the Directory. This one did.

I turned to J in a hurry. Juarez. Plenty of names here; a lot of them right in this neighborhood, around Olvera Street. But no Estrellita. Of course, I could start calling or start hiking around. Maybe I’d strike a family sooner or later...if she lived with her family.

No, come to think of it, she wouldn’t have. She’d been Trent’s girl, and before that probably anybody’s. Including guys like Joe Dean.

Joe Dean. I went after the Ds now. Dean was living with Kolmar on the ranch, and he’d worked for Ryan. But where was he two years ago?

I found out. Dean, Joseph. And the address, on Broadway, not more than five blocks away.

Hunch, long-shot, call it whatever you like. I only knew that I had to start someplace. And it might as well be over on Broadway. That seemed to be the right neighborhood for what I was interested in.

I walked over, slowly. The afternoon sun was hidden by smog, and the streets were gray, gray as stone. And crawling along them were what you find when you turn over a stone.

This was Broadway. Not Broadway, New York. Broadway in L.A.; just a knife’s throw from Main and a blind stagger from Olive. Bumway. Skidway. Wrongway. The kind of a street you find in every big city. Even in that nice eastern city where the newspaper doesn’t want to contaminate its readers with sordid stories of unpleasant people.

I saw plenty of unpleasant people during my walk, and their sordid stories were usually quite apparent. There was a girl with platinum blonde hair who somewhat resembled Polly Foster in appearance. But her dress was sleazy, her eyes were puffy, and she was walking with a big Mexican who’d never put her in the movies; at least, not in the kind of movies that would lead to stardom in anything except a public health clinic. I noted a man of the same general physical build as Harry Bannock, up to a point. Down to a point, rather; he rolled along on a coaster platform because he lacked legs. I saw a baldheaded little fellow who might have passed for Abe Kolmar, except that Kolmar wouldn’t have been snoring in an areaway with an empty pint of rotgut cradled in his lap. A fellow resembling Al Thompson stood picking his teeth in front of a cigar store; he stepped out and offered to sell me some pictures Thompson would never have approved of, and said he could introduce me to the subjects if I so desired. I saw a man almost as handsome as the late Dick Ryan, in a Latin sort of way. He was cursing and being cursed by a fat Indian woman whose four offspring clung to her skirts and pummelled her pregnant belly. There was a girl about the same age and complexion as Billie Trent; at least I thought so until she turned her head and I saw the purple blotch covering the left side of her face. And there was a man with a mustache and an eye-patch, just like me. Only his patch covered both eyes, and he held out a battered tin cup. There but for the grace of God...

Yes, there but for the grace of God went all of us, and there seemed to be plenty the grace of God had somehow overlooked. Everybody overlooked them, including the nice, clean family newspapers and the smug little moralists who devoted their oracular pronouncements to solving the vital problems of people who couldn’t make up their minds between buying a new station wagon or taking a vacation in Hawaii this season.

I walked on, thinking there wasn’t anything particularly original about my philosophy. On the other hand, there wasn’t anything particularly original about a run-down neighborhood or its run-down inhabitants, either. Maybe they were happy. Maybe they pitied me. Most of them would, if they knew the police were looking for me. That they could understand.

And remembering, I kept a lookout for squads or patrolmen. My luck held. My luck held all the way to the Harcourt Apts.

That’s what the grimy stone lettering read: Harcourt Apts., in abbreviated grandeur. There hadn’t been much grandeur to begin with when they built this old three-story block of flats, and none of it remained now. The lobby was about the size of a pay toilet and looked no more inviting. To the right on the ground floor was a liquor store; the left had been retained as living quarters by someone who’d placed a sign in the front window reading Gypsy Horoscopes.

I walked up the steps, into the lobby. There were twelve buzzers to ring, but only seven names to choose from in the adjoining panels. Three of them I could read; the other four were either illegibly written or had been rendered illegible by the action of time and grime.

There was nothing resembling the name of Dean or Juarez that I could read. Maybe I was the wrong guy for the job. Fellow name of Jean-Francois Champollion might have had better luck. This stuff couldn’t be much harder to decipher than the Rosetta Stone. Say 50 percent harder at the most.

I was still squinting, wondering whether or not I ought to start ringing doorbells at random and going into a one-eyed version of a Fuller Brush Man routine, when somebody shuffled out into the hall and leaned against the side of the wall.

“Lookin’ for me?”

She was a fat woman with almost invisible eyebrows and pale yellow hair done up in pin curlers; she was wearing a pink housecoat decorated at the throat with braid and egg yolk. I smiled at her.

“Could be,” I said.

“You after a readin’? C’mon in.”

I remembered Gypsy Horoscopes. Victor Herbert should see this little Gypsy Sweetheart. But I followed the un-corseted amplitude of her behind into the musty flat off the first landing.

The front room was dark, rankly odorous. She waddled over to a gas burner.

“Sit right down,” she said. “First I gotta make the tea.” But she didn’t move away immediately. I noticed she had her paw out. “Two bucks,” she said. “Advance.”

I gave her two dollars. She turned away and busied herself at the stove. The tea came from a cabinet. I noticed that the better Gypsies were doing their tea leaf readings with Salada nowadays.

She put the pot on, then came over and planted herself in a chair across the table from me. A lamp switched on.

“Let me have your palm,” she said. “Give you a readin’ while you wait.”

“Look,” I said. “I’m in a hurry. I don’t need a regular reading. It’s something else.”

Her eyes narrowed. She watched me as I put my hand in my pocket.

“What?”

“Do you have any experience locating missing articles?”

“Lost somethin’, eh? What was it?”

“It wasn’t a something. It was a someone. A man named Joe Dean lived here a few years ago. I’m looking for a friend of his, a girl named Estrellita Juarez.”

She stood up. “Who sent you?”

“Nobody. I just thought you might be able to help.”

“Don’t know the name, mister. I just moved in here last year.”

“But I thought you might be able to use your divination—”

“Crap!” She stood up. “You a copper?”

“No. I’m an agent. I used to work for the same studio as Miss Juarez. She’s got some money coming to her for a bit she did some while ago. They asked me to find her. All we had on file was Dean’s old address.”

“I wouldn’t know nothin’ about it.” She started to get up.

I took my hand out of my pocket. “Maybe if you concentrate on this it might help,” I told her.

She stared at the twenty I held in my palm, then sat down again.

“You on the level about having money for her?”

I nodded. “I’m no cop, you ought to know that. If I was, I’d have put the cuffs on you the minute I came in and took a sniff. That tea on the stove isn’t the only kind you serve here.”

“You’re crazy.” Her upper lip was wet.

I held out the bill. “Knock it off,” I said. “I’m just interested in saving time. All I really have to do is start rapping on doors. But like I said, I’m in a hurry.”