Simeon. I mean, how many Caleb Ellspeths can there be in L.A.?'
'Give me the list of directors.' She pulled it from her purse and handed it to me. I put it in my pocket. 'Now tell me why you think he'll be home.'
'The phone listed was his work phone. His supervisor or somebody told me he had special dispensation to spend afternoons at home and to work mornings and evenings. A sick kid, he said.'
'What company?'
'Miska Aerospace.'
'What's he do?'
'Some kind of engineer.'
'Fine. Better than fine. Listen, I don't know how he's going to react. My guess is that he's been told not to talk to anybody. It could get a little rough, so keep a brake on the humanitarian impulses, okay?'
'Oh, lighten up. You make me sound like Dear Abby. Golly, Simeon, what have we just been talking about?'
'Golly,' I said mockingly. 'I'm sorry about that. Just getting the ground rules straight.' I leaned over and kissed her hair.
'Will wonders never cease,' she said, blushing slightly. 'A sporting metaphor.'
I started the car. As I pulled out into traffic, she said, 'Those men would have killed you.'
'Yes,' I said. 'I think they would have.'
Thirteen-twelve Ashland was a peeling one-story house with a glassed-in porch built in the thirties by a refugee from the East who didn't believe, and rightly so, that the California winters would be as mild as advertised. When he'd built the house it had had a view of the Pacific. Now three-story stucco apartment houses, the architectural litter of the fifties, made the block seem landlocked. The ocean could have been twenty miles away.
Naturally, the porch leaked. I tried to remember the last time I'd been dry. I was giving up when Caleb Ellspeth opened the door.
He didn't open it very far. A four-inch chain held it in place. His eyes were just about level with the chain. 'Yeah?' he said, looking at the grease on my clothes. Then he saw Eleanor. 'Can I help you?'
'We're from the Times,' she said.
He started to close the door. I got a hand against it and shoved back. He wasn't very strong.
'Give me a break,' he said. 'No one else has in years.' He had a wrinkled, oddly transparent face: pale skin like crumpled cellophane over prominent cheekbones, a hawk nose, muddy brown eyes, a skinny neck that vanished down into a white shirt that seemed several sizes too large. His hair looked like a hat. He wore it in a style that had last seen the light of day on a member of Richie Valens' backup band, a black Reddi-Wip wave at the top and heavy graying sideburns that disappeared into the collar of his shirt and, for all I knew, ended at his knees.
'We only want to ask a few questions,' Eleanor said.
'I'm out of answers,' he said. 'I was just going to run down to the store, pick up a few. You want to tell your mechanic here to let go of the door?'
Eleanor laughed. 'He does look like a mechanic, doesn't he?'
'He doesn't look like a reporter.'
'And I'm not,' I said. 'I'm a detective.' Eleanor looked startled.
'Better and better,' he said. 'You two ought to talk it over. Ring the bell again when you decide who you are. If I'm anywhere near the door, I'll answer.' He tried to push the door closed again, but I shouldered it back. The chain snapped tight and held.
'What we are,' I said, 'is a double-whammy. A reporter and a detective. We're everything you don't want camped on your doorstep.'
'Leave me alone,' he said desperately.
'How would you like to be in People magazine? 'Church Prophet's Father Living in Poverty.' Then, of course, there'd be the National Enquirer. How would you like to be called as a witness in a murder trial?'
'This isn't poverty,' he said. 'And I don't know anything about any murder. And also, don't talk to me about the fucking Church. Beg your pardon,' he said to Eleanor.
'I'm used to it,' she said.
'You have a security clearance out there at Miska, don't you?' I said. 'What are you cleared to? Secret? Top Secret? Eyes Only? How wide is your need-to-know scoop?'
'Hey,' he said. 'What do you got in your head, bugs? You can't stand out there and shout that kind of stuff.'
'Then let us in.'
'What do you got to talk about my security clearance for?'
'How long do you think you'd keep it after you got famous?'
'You wouldn't do that.'
'I wouldn't even have a hard time sleeping.'
'You must be some guy.'
'A very nice lady has been killed. The Church is in the middle of it-not Angel and probably not Mary Claire, but the Church. I'll do anything I have to do to figure out why. Now, are you going to let us in, or do you want to practice your signature so you can sign autographs in supermarkets?'
He tilted his head back, toward the rear of the house, like a man listening for something. Then he said, 'And if I let you in?'
'We ask some questions about the Church and then we go away and leave you alone.'
'You'll never see us again,' Eleanor said.
His mouth twisted. 'You come in,' he said, 'you gotta be quiet.'
'We'll be quiet,' Eleanor said.
'Okay. You want to move your big fat hand so's I can get the chain off?'
'If you lock it,' I said, 'I'll kick it in.'
'Breathe a little more fire,' he said. 'It's a cold day.' He pushed the door closed and the latch rattled. Then the door opened again and he stood there, a small wiry man whose clothes were too big for him. 'Come in and wait here,' he said. 'I got to check on something.' He turned and shuffled off down the hall. He wore battered leather slippers.
We went in. The house was dark and smelled of food and an elusive chemical taint. Sickness. On a little table next to the door was a pile of unopened junk mail, computer-generated trash addressed to three or four misspellings of his name.
'This is awful,' Eleanor whispered. 'Half his mail is from Ed McMahon. It doesn't even feel like a house. It's just, I don't know, indoors.'
'It's not going to get any better,' I said. 'Don't turn into the Problem Lady.'
Caleb Ellspeth appeared at the end of the hallway and beckoned to us. 'In here,' he said, 'in the living room.'
The living room was a cramped little cubicle with so much furniture that it looked like a couch convention. The furniture had seen too much wear. Magazines written by, and for, engineers and machinists were scattered across the two coffee tables. Reader's Digest book condensations marched in uniform across a small bookshelf. War and Peace democratically shared a volume with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
'So what do you want?' he said. 'Wait a minute. If we're going to do this, we might as well do it. Coffee? All I got is instant, but I could use a cup.'
'Sure,' I said. 'Black.'
'How about you, miss?' he said with an unexpected sweetness that made Eleanor's eyes widen. 'Some tea? A Coke, maybe?'
'Coffee,' she said. 'That'd be fine. Black, like his.'
'Okey-doke,' he said, shuffling off in his slippers.
'Gee,' Eleanor said, blinking.
'You softy.'
'You're really not as nice as you used to be,' she said. 'I don't know, with everybody else, I have the feeling that the plumbing fixtures are going to stay put. How come with you I feel like they're always pulling away from the
