'Does this Dawn have a middle initial K'?'
She looked down. 'Yes, she does.'
'Then, there you go,' I said. 'The name I was given was D.
Kent. What's her job description?'
'Um, five thirty-three A-let me see... Thumbing through another book. 'That looks like a research assistant, Level One.'
'Did she transfer to another department in the hospital, by any chance?'
Consulting yet another volume, she said, 'Nope. Looks like a termination.'
'Hmm... Do you have an address for her?'
'Nope, nothing. We throw out personal stuff thirty days after they're gone-got a real space problem.
'When exactly did she terminate?'
'That I can tell you.' She flipped a few pages and pointed to a code that I couldn't comprehend. 'Here we go. You're right-about her being here in February. But that was her last month-she gave notice on the fifteenth, went officially off payroll on the twentyeighth.'
'The fifteenth,' I said. The day after pulling Chad Jones's chart.
'That's right. See right here? Two slash fifteen?'
I stuck around for a few more minutes, listening to a story about her dogs. But I was thinking about two- legged creatures.
It was 3:45 when I drove out of the parking lot. A few feet from the exit a motorcycle cop was giving a jaywalking ticket to a nurse. The nurse looked furious; the cop's face was a blank tablet.
Traffic on Sunset was obstructed by a four-car fender-bender, and the accompanying turmoil wrought by rubberneckers and somnolent traffic officers. It took almost an hour to reach the inanimate green stretch that was Beverly Hills' piece of the boulevard. Tile-roofed ego monuments perched atop hillocks of Bermuda grass and dichondra, embellished by hostile gates, tennis court sheeting, and the requisite battalions of German cars.
I passed the stadium-sized weed-choked lot that had once housed the Arden mansion. The weeds had turned to hay, and all the trees on the property were dead. The Mediterranean palace had served briefly as a twenty- year-old Arab sheik's plaything before being torched by persons unknown-aesthetic sensibilities offended by puke- green paint and moronic statuary with blacked-in pubic hair, or just plain xenophobia.
Whatever the reason for the arson, rumors had been circulating for years about subdivision and rebuilding. But the real estate slump had taken the luster off that kind of optimism.
A few blocks later the Beverly Hills Hotel came into view, ringed by a motorcade of white stretch limos. Someone getting married or promoting a new film.
As I approached Whittier Drive, I decided to keep going. But when the letters on the street sign achieved focus, I found myself making a sudden right turn and driving slowly up the jacarandalined street.
Laurence Ashmore's house was at the end of the block, a threestory, limestone Georgian affair on a double lot at least two hundred feet wide. The building was blocky, and impeccably maintained. A brick circular drive scythed through a perfect flat lawn. The landscaping was spare but good, with a preference for azaleas, camellias, and Hawaiian tree ferns-Georgian goes tropical. A weeping olive tree shaded half the lawn. The other half was sun-kissed.
To the left of the house was a porte-cochere long enough to shelter one of the stretches I'd just seen at the hotel. Beyond the wooden gates were treetops and the flaming red clouds of bougainvillea.
Prime of the prime. Even with the slump, at least four million.
A single car was parked in the circular drive. White Olds Cutlass, five or six years old. A hundred yards in either direction the curb was vacant. No black-garbed callers or bouquets on the doorstop.
Shuttered windows; no sign of occupancy. The placard of a security company was staked in the perfect, clipped grass.
I drove on, made a U-turn, passed the house again and continued home.
