'Have we got a deal?'
'How am I supposed to treat this information?'
'That's your problem. Pretend I'm an informant, someone on the street.'
Hammond drank. Eleanor and I followed suit. 'Is the information good?' he said.
'Better than anything you've got now.'
He waved a hand for Peppi. 'Deal,' he said. 'Shoot.'
I told him about how I'd been hired, about the line of bull that had been fed to me about Sally. I described Needle-nose, and he nodded. As I'd figured, he already had a description from the people who ran the motel. I shut up as Peppi served a new round, and then told him about the Church. He sat up and took notice. Hammond's pen was scratching away, but Eleanor hadn't yet taken a note. I told him about Rhoda Gerwitz and about Skippy Miller.
'They got your name from Skippy,' Eleanor said.
'He said not.'
'Simeon. He told his Listener.'
I sat back and felt stupid. 'You're good at this,' Hammond said to her.
'I've been working at it all day,' she said, looking pleased. 'He's a good teacher. Simeon, what about the other murder?'
Hammond leaned forward. All the good feeling fled from his face. 'What other murder?'
'I need to know we have a deal.'
'My ass,' he said.
'Good night.' I got up to go.
'What do you want?' he said.
'I told you. I want in, and I want information on four people. Dr. Richard Merryman of the Church of the Eternal Moment, two folks from something that calls itself the Congregation of the Present, and one other.'
'Names?'
'From the Congregation, Dr. Hubert Wilburforce and Sister Zachary.' He wrote. 'Number four is a man named Ellis Fauntleroy, or possibly not, deceased. I want everything you've got on any of them. Nothing held back, Al.'
'Do I look like a man who'd hold something back?' Neither of us said anything, so he crossed himself. 'You've got it,' he said. 'On my mother's grave.'
'Your mother's alive,' Eleanor said.
'How do you know?' Hammond said, looking surprised.
'You're not married,' Eleanor said, 'and you see your mother often. It's written all over your face.'
'Well, I'll be damned,' Hammond said.
'Where, specifically?' I asked, looking at Hammond's face.
'His forehead,' Eleanor said.
'My mother notwithstanding,' Hammond said, 'you've got a deal. What's the other murder?'
'Friday night in Santa Monica,' I said.
'Huh?'
'The guy I mentioned, Harker or Fauntleroy.' Hammond still looked blank. 'In Santa Monica,' I said again.
Hammond said nothing.
'In the TraveLodge, for Christ's sake. How many murders were there in the Santa Monica TraveLodge on Friday night?'
Hammond laid down his notebook and spread two empty hands. 'None,' he said.
Chapter 14
That was what I got for not reading the papers. I'd been assuming all along that Harker's death had been reported, when obviously a clean-up squad had been waiting in the wings. For whatever reason, they'd waited until I'd cleared out and then sent in the housekeepers. And for whatever reason, I told myself again, they'd left me alive.
So, we were dealing with a number of people. At least three, I figured: one to kill Harker, probably one more to help him, as Hamlet said, to lug the guts into the neighbor room-bodies are heavy-and one to go to my house and slip the cassette out of my answering machine. One or more of them had obviously been listening in when Harker called me, and Harker had probably known it but it hadn't worried him. He'd thought he was part of the gang.
On the whole, that made me happy. The more people you have involved in a murder, the more likely it is that one of them will do something stupid.
Hollering over the music in the Red Dog, Hammond had made it clear that, as far as he was concerned, I was the stupid one. If I'd done what I was supposed to do, which is to say call the cops, they'd have a body. He'd used language that had turned Eleanor scarlet, and I'd had no choice but to listen. As we staggered out of the Red Dog and into the rain on Hollywood Boulevard, I'd asked whether our deal still stood.
Hammond didn't seem to notice the rain. He stood there, solid and bulky, with water streaming down his face, and thought for a long wet moment.
'With a difference,' he finally said. 'The information is two-way. I get everything you get.' He really wanted out of Records.
'Al,' I said, 'of course. I'd assumed that all along.'
'Honey,' Hammond said to Eleanor, who was shivering at my side, 'go home with Peppi. She's a straighter guy than your buddy here.'
'He's always been a liar,' she said. So much for loyalty.
'All of it, Simeon,' Hammond said to me. 'And I mean it. Investigators' licenses are precarious things.'
I got my legs to wobbling. 'Look,' I said, 'you're making me weak in the knees.'
Hammond took Eleanor's hand in both of his. 'You're a beautiful little thing,' he said, 'and it's been a pleasure to meet you. Good-bye, jerk,' he said to me. He turned abruptly and walked away into the rain. He hardly weaved at all.
'What a sweet man,' Eleanor said. 'His mother is a very lucky woman.'
'Well, you beautiful little thing,' I said, 'where to now?'
'Home. We've got a lot to do tomorrow.'
We hadn't even hit the Santa Monica freeway when the man on the radio said that there'd been a mudslide in Topanga, closing the boulevard from the Pacific Coast Highway to Old Canyon.
'Well, shit,' I said. 'That's an extra fifty miles.'
'Stay at my place,' she said absently.
'You're kidding,' I said. Hope springs eternal.
'Why not? The couch is comfortable.'
Hope, as Emily Dickinson once wrote, is a thing with feathers, and Eleanor had just twisted its neck. For lack of anything more interesting to do, I turned the windshield wipers onto high, and they responded by swinging back and forth at exactly the same rate as before. The silence in the car lengthened in an ominous fashion. I turned right from La Brea onto the long freeway on-ramp, heading west.
'Anyway,' she finally said, 'if you sleep on my couch you won't be sleeping with that Roxy or whatever her name is.' She rapped her fingernails sharply against the window.
I swallowed a couple of times and wondered how she knew about Roxanne Then I stopped wondering. The Women's Network, the world's most successful subversive society, had done its stuff. 'Who am I supposed to sleep with?' I said, more defensively than I would have liked. 'My teddy bear wore out years ago.'
'Simeon,' she said with elaborate unconcern, 'I don't care who you sleep with, as long as you don't catch anything. I mean, I certainly hope you don't think I'm being possessive.'
Childishly I sped up; Eleanor hated it when I drove fast. This time, though, she seemed determined to ignore it. She chewed distractedly on the ends of her hair and gazed out the window on her side.
'I want to interview the Speaker and her mother,' she finally said, 'and that Dr. Merryman you keep talking
