house ten or twelve small apartments, with the one on the left end of the U wearing a small sign that said MANAGER. Attached to that, a cardboard placard proclaimed VACANCY.
Chee walked up the narrow pathway to the porch in front of the manager's apartment. Beside the door, opposite the vacancy sign, another sign listed apartment occupants. Chee found no Albert Gorman, but the name slot beside number 6 was empty. He cut across the weedy bermuda grass to the entrance porch of number 6, rang the bell, and waited. Nothing. A mailbox was mounted beside the door, its lid closed. Chee rang the bell again, listened to the buzz it produced inside the apartment, and, while he listened, pushed open the lid of the mailbox.
Two envelopes were in it. Chee moved his body to shield what he was doing from the direction of the manager's office and extracted the envelopes. One was addressed to OCCUPANT and the other to Albert Gorman. It seemed to be a telephone bill, postmarked two days earlier. Chee dropped both envelopes back into the box, rang the bell again, then tried the door. Locked. Again he shielded the action with his body because he was aware that someone was watching him. A woman, he thought, but he'd only had a momentary glimpse of the form standing behind the partly pulled curtain of the office window.
Chee turned from the door and recrossed the weedy lawn. He rang the office manager's doorbell, waited, rang it again, waited again. He glanced at his watch. What could the woman be doing? He rang the bell again, watched the second hand of his watch sweep around a full minute, and then another. The woman did not intend to come to the door. Why not? She had an apartment to rent. He rang the bell again, waited another minute, then turned and started toward his truck.
He heard the door open behind him.
'Yes?'
Chee turned. She held the door halfway open. She was as tall as Chee, gaunt, and gray—a bony, exotic face which showed Negro blood and perhaps Chinese.
'My name's Jim Chee,' Chee said. 'I'm looking for a man named Albert Gorman. In apartment six, I think.'
'That's right,' the woman said. 'Apartment six is Gorman.'
'He's not in,' Chee said. 'Do you have any idea where I could find him?'
'I think he'll be back in a little while,' the woman said. 'You wait. There's a chair there on his porch.' She gestured across the lawn, 'Just make yourself comfortable.'
The accent was marked. Spanish? Probably, but not the sort of Mexican Spanish Chee heard around the reservation. Filipino, perhaps. Chee had heard there were lots of Filipinos in Los Angeles.
'Do you know when he'll be back? Actually, I'm trying to find some of his relatives. Do you—'
'I don't know anything,' the woman said. 'But he'll be right back. He said if anyone came looking for him to just have them wait. It wouldn't be long.'
'I'm a policeman,' Chee said, extracting his credentials and showing her. 'I'm trying to locate a girl. About seventeen. Small. Thin. Dark. An Indian girl. Wearing a navy pea coat. Has she been here?'
The woman shook her head, expression skeptical and disapproving.
'It would have been early this morning,' Chee said. 'Or maybe late last night.'
'I haven't seen her.'
'Does Albert Gorman have any other address you know about? Where he works? Any relatives I could check with?'
'I don't know,' the woman said. 'You wait. You ask him all that.'
'I have a friend looking for an apartment,' Chee said. 'Could I look at the one you have vacant?'
'Not ready yet. Not cleaned up. Tenant still has his stuff in it. You wait.' And with that she closed the door.
'All right,' Chee said. 'I will wait.'
He sat in the chair on the porch of number 6 and waited for whatever his visit here had triggered to start happening. He made no effort to calculate what that might be. The woman, obviously, had called someone when she saw him on Gorman's porch. Apparently she had been told to keep him there, and so she had stalled.
He would stay partly because he was curious and partly because there was no other choice. If he drew a blank here, he knew of no promising alternatives. This address was his only link to the Turkey Clan and Margaret Sosi. Unfortunately, the chair was metal and uncomfortable.
He got up, stretched, sauntered across the grass, fingers stuck in the back pockets of his jeans, sending the woman who was surely watching from behind the curtain the signal of a man killing time. He walked down to the street and looked up and down it. Across from him, a neon sign over the entrance of a decaying brick building read korean gospel church. Its windows were sealed with warped plywood. Next door was a once-white bungalow with a wheelless flatbed truck squatting on blocks before its open garage door. Once-identical frame houses stretched down the block, given variety now by age, remodeling projects, and assorted efforts to make them more livable. The line terminated in a low concrete block building on the corner which, judging from the sign painted on its wall, was a place where used clothing was bought and sold. In general, it was a little worse than the street Chee had lived on as a student in Albuquerque and a little better than the average housing in Shiprock.
Gorman's side of La Monica Street was of a similar affluence but mostly two-story instead of one. Below his U- shaped apartment house were two more, both larger and both badly needing painting. Up the street, the remainder of the block was filled by a tan stucco building surrounded by lawn and a chain-link fence. Chee ambled along the fence, examining the establishment.
On the side porch, five people sat in a row, watching him. They sat in wheelchairs, strapped in. Old people, three women and two men. Chee raised a hand, signaling greetings. No reaction. Each wore a blue bathrobe: four white heads and one bald one. Another woman sat in a wheelchair on a concrete walk that ran just inside the fence. She, too, was old, with thin white hair, a happy smile, and pale blue vacant eyes.
'Hello,' Chee said.
