“What is this?” said Reeve. “Dial-a-Foulmouth?”
Eddie Cantona wheezed, trying to speak and laugh and light a cigarette all at the same time. “So what’s our schedule?” he finally said.
“Just get over here and pick me up. I’ll think of something.”
“Thirty minutes, okay?”
“Make it half an hour.” James Reeve hung up the phone. He liked Eddie, liked him a lot. They’d met in a bar in the Gaslamp Quarter. The bar had a western theme and sold ribs and steaks. You ate at a long, hewn wooden bench, or at hewn wooden tables, and at the bar they served the tap beer in Mason jars. It was an affectation, yes, and it meant you didn’t get a lot of beer for your money-but it was good beer, almost good enough and dark enough to be English.
Reeve had come into the dark, cool bar after a hot, unprofitable walk in the sunshine; and he’d drunk too many beers too quickly. And he’d got talking to the man on the stool beside him, who introduced himself as Eddie Cantona. Reeve started off by saying there was a football player called Cantona, then had to explain that he meant soccer, and that the player himself was French.
“It’s a Spanish name,” Eddie persisted. And it was, too, the way he said it, turning the middle syllable into
The conversation could only improve from there, and it did, especially when Eddie announced that he was “between appointments” and owned a car. Reeve had been spending a fortune on cabs and other modes of transport. Here was a driver looking for short-term employment. And a big man at that-someone who just might double as bodyguard should the need arise. By that point, Reeve had figured on the need arising.
Since then he’d been offered money to quit the story. And when he’d turned the offer down, there had been a silent beating in a back alley. They’d caught him while Eddie was off somewhere. They hadn’t said a word, which was the clearest message they could have given.
And still James Reeve wanted the story. He wanted it more than ever.
They drove out to La Jolla first to visit the retired pharmacist unannounced.
It was a white-painted clapboard house (Eddie pronounced the word “clabbard”), a bungalow with not much land around it. It had a green picket fence, which was being freshly redecorated by a whistling workman in overalls. His van was parked with two wheels on the curb, its back doors open to show a range of paint cans, ladders, and brushes. He smiled and said, “Good morning to you” as James Reeve pushed open the stubborn gate. There were bells hanging from the latch, and they chimed as he closed it behind him.
He’d been here before, and the old man hadn’t answered any of his questions. But persistence was a journalist’s main line of attack. He rang the doorbell and took one pace back onto the path. The street wasn’t close to La Jolla ’s seafront, but he guessed the houses would still be worth at least a hundred and fifty thou apiece. It was that kind of town. Eddie’d told him that Raymond Chandler used to live in La Jolla. To James’s eye, there didn’t seem much worth writing about in La Jolla.
He stepped up to the door again, tried the bell, then squatted to peer through the mail slot. But there was no mail slot. Instead, Dr. Killin had one of those mailboxes on a post near the gate, with a red flag beside it for when there was mail. The flag was down. James went to the only window fronting the bungalow and looked in at a comfortable living room, lots of old photographs on the walls, a three-seat sofa with floral covers taking up way too much room. He remembered Dr. Killin from their first, only, and very brief meeting. Killin had reminded him physically of Giles Gulliver, a knotted strength beneath an apparently frail exterior. He had a shiny domed bald head, the skull out of proportion to the frame supporting it, and thick-lensed glasses behind which the eyes were magnified, the eyelashes thick and curling.
The old fart wasn’t home.
He walked back down the path and wrestled with the gate again. The painter stopped whistling and smiled up at him from his half-kneeling position.
“Ain’t in,” he informed James Reeve, like this was news.
“You might have said before I went three rounds with that damned gate.”
The painter chuckled, wiping his green fingers on a rag. “Might’ve,” he agreed.
“Do you know where he is?”
The man shook his head, then scratched his ear. “I was told something about a vacation. But how do you take a vacation when you live in paradise?” And he laughed, turning back to his task.
James Reeve took a step towards him. “When did he leave?”
“That I don’t know, sir.”
“Any idea when he’ll be back?”
The painter shrugged.
The journalist cursed under his breath and leaned over the fence to open the mailbox, looking for something, anything.
“Shouldn’t do that,” the painter said.
“I know,” said Reeve, “tampering with the U.S. Mail.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t know about that. But see, you got green paint on your shirt.”
And so he had.
Dismissing the offer of mineral spirits, in need of another kind of spirit altogether, he stomped back to the car where Eddie was waiting for him. He got into the passenger seat.
“I heard,” said Eddie.
“He’s been scared off,” Reeve declared. “I know he has.”
“You could leave a business card or something, ask him to get back to you.” Eddie started the engine.
“I did that last time. He didn’t get back to me. He never let me past the front door.”
“Well-old folks, they do get suspicious. Lot of muggings around.”
James Reeve turned as best he could in the seat, so he was facing Eddie Cantona. “Eddie, do I look like a mugger?”
Eddie smiled and shook his head, pressing the accelerator. “But then you don’t look like the Good Humor man either.”
The painter watched them go, waved even, though they’d already forgotten about him. Then, still grinning, he wiped his hands as he walked to his van. He reached into the passenger side and took out a cell phone, holding it to his face. He stopped smiling only when the connection was made.
“They were just here,” he said.
That afternoon, Eddie dropped his employer off downtown, on the corner of Eighth and E. James Reeve had some work to do at the public library. He sometimes typed his notes into the laptop there, too-it was better than his motel room, a hundred times better. Surrounded by busy people, people with projects and ideas, people with
Plus, the library was only four blocks from Gaslamp, which meant he could get a beer afterwards. Eddie had a couple of things to do, but said he might be in their regular haunt by six. If he still hadn’t arrived by the time James felt like going home, the bar would call him a cab. It was an eight-dollar ride, including tip.
The story was slowing down, he decided. Here he was in San Diego, which should have been the heart of it, and he wasn’t getting anywhere. He had Preece and the pesticide research, but that was years back. He had a rape, also ancient history. He had stories from two retired investigators. He had Korngold… but Korngold was dead.
He had Agrippa and the bank accounts. Maybe if he went back to England, concentrated on that particular corner of the puzzle, talked to Josh Vincent again; the union man’s story was almost enough in itself. But he’d already pitched that at Giles Gulliver, who’d pooh-poohed it, saying the
So there was little enough for him to add to his files. He had other names, and had tried telephone calls, but no one wanted to meet him, or even talk on the phone. This was a shame, as he’d had his little recorder beside him, the microphone attached to the telephone earpiece. All his recordings showed so far was evasiveness on a grand scale, which didn’t mean anything. Americans were wary of callers at the best of times. Blame all the cold- callers out there, interrupting lunch or dinner or a postprandial snooze to drum up money for everything from the
