We were rolling down the hill. Despite the heat, I felt chilled where my shirt had been soaked. “I figured surgery had something to do with it.”
Henry snickered. “Nobody cut ol’ Ferris. He too scared about the blood supply.”
“What about you?”
“I don’t plan on bleeding.”
“Hold that thought.” I gave Henry a short version of my chat with Ed Pfester as I cut left on Sunset and right on La Cienega, one long downhill coast, both in terms of topography and real estate values. Below Sunset the world was running on something like normal time, and traffic was lighter. A thin layer of cloud had slid in, and the city’s lights pressed up against it, turning the sky into a flat, reflective sheet of hammered metal.
Henry cleared his throat, making a noise like someone emptying a pool, rolled down the window, and spat. “You think he’s going to be there?”
“If he wants to kill me, he is. But, no, I don’t. I think he left the moment he hung up the phone. If I’d really thought there was any chance he’d hang around, I’d have called the cops.”
“Well,” Henry said, “at least you know you got something he wants.”
“Even though I don’t,” I said. “Tell me about Ferris.”
He gave me a sidelong glance. “You seen him.”
“I’ve seen an old man in a big house. He’s more than that.”
“Ferris is something,” Henry said approvingly. “Still at it, you know?”
“Still at what?” I asked cautiously.
A chuckle rumbled through the car. Henry was a lot calmer than I was. “Everything,” he said, “but I was talking about business.”
“Agenting?”
“Got all the guys he could ever want. Some of them working, too. He’s not as big as he says he used to be, but they still take his phone calls.” He opened the dash compartment idly and closed it again. “Sometimes. But he does okay, for a man who never made nothing in his life.”
“What does that mean?”
“Agents,” he said. “Agents don’t do nothing. They’re not actors, they’re ten percent of actors. They’re ten percent of writers, ten percent of directors. Add it all up, you got thirty percent. Other seventy percent is bullshit. Ferris is a man, you want someone to do something, he sends you someone and takes ten percent, fifteen if he can get it. They like to talk about packaging, elements, putting deals together. What’s to put together? It’s somebody else’s idea, somebody else’s script, somebody else’s money. Except for that ten percent. Ol’ Ferris, he takes it pretty easy.”
“And you?”
“I take it pretty easy myself. It’s a nice slow gig. I read a lot, walk the wolf pack, practice tai chi, help Ferris keep his schedule straight. Point a gun once in a while, when someone needs a look at a gun. People come over that wall a lot.”
“It’s not much of a wall.” I was talking, I realized, to keep my breathing regular. My hands were slick on the wheel. Stay out of dark rooms.
“Ferris don’t want much of a wall. He likes his trouble delivered regular. We get burglars, rough trade, sightseers-Ferris is famous in some circles, you know-people looking for something out of Sunset Boulevard. Expectin’ some old H. Rider Haggard queen with four-inch fingernails in one of Nancy Reagan’s castoffs. And we get the wishfuls who still think Ferris can dump Stardust all over them. And sometimes he does.”
“How’d he find you?”
“I found him,” Henry said in a voice that suggested that the answer was complete. “Turn here.”
Hayworth runs north and south at a slight grade, the kind of faintly dingy street that sings a siren’s tune for the developers. Two bungalows had been razed on the east side of the street, leaving dark spaces like gaps in a memory. The vacant lots were overgrown behind chain link, crammed with a tangle of chaparral that looked wild enough to house coyotes. Two big scraggly tomcats bolted into the brush in exaggerated alarm as Alice’s headlights swept over them. Cats take everything personally.
Thirteen twenty-eight bumped up against the lower of the weedy lots, a featureless two-story oblong with glitter shot into the stucco for that indispensable touch of glamour. Big faux-Oriental letters cut from plywood and sprayed gold told one and all that the building had a name: THE MIKADO.
The plywood eight at the end of the address had fallen sideways to make a slightly ominous infinity sign. Infinity spent at the Mikado seemed like it would last longer, somehow, than infinity anywhere else. An iron gate, wide enough to admit the Rockettes in formation, hung ajar in the building’s center. Halloween decorations, violently colored plastic pumpkins and cats, dangled out of reach above the gate, and hibiscus blossoms littered the big bushes on either side, gawking open-throated at the night.
“Hustlers and screenwriters,” Henry said appraisingly as we approached. “Screenwriters will live anywhere.”
The gate’s squeal had been given oil-free decades to develop a full, almost orchestral tone. When it stopped echoing in our ears, we found ourselves facing a parched courtyard, open to the sheet-metal sky. Green gravel simulated grass, and concrete paths cut straight lines through it, and the building rose dark and solid on all four sides. There was no opening at the far end. Dead center, a skeletal wooden structure that might once have suggested a pagoda to someone with a vivid imagination was collapsing in on itself in silhouette. Four sagging cacti, one at each corner of the structure, cried silently for water. The West Hollywood charm patrol, so ubiquitous elsewhere, evidently hadn’t paid The Mikado a visit. It would be a dismal place to die.
There were twelve apartments downstairs and twelve up, and the entire enclosed area was visible from every single one of them. Their doors opened directly onto the parched geometry of the courtyard, each bordered by a single window about five feet wide. No cheerful lights called to the lonely traveler. Apartment seven was the door in the far corner of the lower level.
“Me first,” Henry whispered. He had his leather jacket open and his hand inside it, brushing the dark skin of his abdomen. His stomach muscles announced themselves like an alluvial ripple pattern washed into stone.
“That’s not polite,” I said, stepping in front of him. “ I invited you.”
Henry wrapped long fingers around my arm. “He’s not looking for me. I figure I’ll go straight across, make a little noise, scuff a little gravel. You stay close to the walls, and when I go past the door you wait a minute and then kick it in.“
My confidence, already low, waned further. “Kick it in?”
He raised a booted foot. “You know. Like on TV.” His eyes went down to my feet, to my battered Reeboks. “Second thought,” he said, “we both go around the side and I kick it in.”
“Henry,” I said, “the window’s open.”
Henry squinted across the courtyard. “In Los Angeles?”
Great. He was nearsighted, too. “Follow me.”
He grabbed me again, harder this time, and hauled me around to face him. “I got Special Forces training,” he said. “Do you?”
I pulled my arm free. “I’m what you might call self-trained.”
“You gonna be what you might call dead, that guy still in there,” he said.
“Goddamn it, Henry, I need a backup, not a replacement.”
He brought his left hand up, fingers splayed wide, and rested it against the center of my chest, forcing me back three steps. It hadn’t taken any visible effort. His right hand had his gun in it. “Ten feet,” he said. “You stay behind me ten feet. I go through the window, you count to ten, and if you don’t hear anything, come in. If I yell for help, come in right away. Otherwise, you’re going in alone.”
I was not going in alone. “After you,” I said.
He nodded once, wheeled, and struck off straight across the courtyard, a man-shaped hole in the night. When he was ten feet in front of me I followed, feeling like one of Ferris’s Yorkies. A very paranoid Yorkie. I took out my own gun and jacked a shell into the chamber.
“Shhhhh,” Henry said.
The pagoda, or whatever it might once have been, loomed dolefully on our left and then receded behind us. I heard music, the muted thump of bass and drum, barely audible over the scuff of Henry’s motorcycle boots. It grew louder as we approached number seven, floating onto the hot still night air through the open window.
