'You start with the school,' Joyce said. 'He or she had to take an M.D. But of course, you have to know what school it was.' She raised her glass to her lips and then sputtered, spraying wine onto the table. 'Wait,' she said, wiping her chin. 'I tell a lie. There is a central data bank for everyone who graduates with an M.D. It's run by the AMA, and it's in Chicago. It doesn't tell you whether people ever practiced or not, just whether they graduated. I mean, they may not ever be certified or hang out shingles, such a quaint term, but they've got the right letters after their names.'
'Could you check that for me?'
'I guess so. What name?'
'Richard Merryman. An internist, or supposed to be. Living in California but not licensed here.'
'What's he do, then?'
'He's the private physician to a little girl.'
Bernie raised an eyebrow and looked interested. 'That little girl?'
'That's not legal, not if he's not licensed,' Joyce said in a tone of righteous outrage.
'I don't think this guy cares very much what's legal.'
'Does he dispense drugs?'
'I don't know.'
'If he does, he's got to be registered with the DEA in Washington. Oops, there's another list. Harder to check, though.'
'Could you do it through the hospital?' Bernie asked.
'This is a bad guy?' Joyce demanded.
'If I'm right, he's about as bad a guy as I've ever met,' I said.
Joyce toyed with her lasagna. 'I'll give it a shot,' she said. 'All they can say is no.'
An hour later, at the door, I kissed Joyce good-bye and gave Bernie a hug. It had turned into that kind of an evening. We'd gone through both the bottles I had brought and one with a screw-top that held some kind of white plonk from Argentina or someplace. Bernie had finally gotten to talk about the Green Revolution.
I talked my way past the cop at the entrance to Topanga Canyon by showing him my driver's license with the Topanga Skyline address on it. Bad mudslides, he said. No one but residents allowed in. He implied that the roads could be closed completely in the morning if the rain kept up. The rain was supposed to keep up.
The wine and the good fellowship had dissolved the knot of unease in my stomach, and the Russell Arms didn't exert much appeal. I needed to pack some stuff, and when I got out of the car I was toying with the idea of sleeping at home and finding my way out over the fire roads in the morning, if necessary.
No odor at the bottom of the driveway; I silently thanked Dexter, wherever he might be. Halfway up the drive I saw that the lights were on again and did my best to accelerate, anticipating Roxanne. I tried to remember whether there was any beer in the refrigerator.
The door was open. Roxanne didn't like the cold. She wouldn't have left the door open.
I went back down to Alice and got a gun out of the dash compartment, then climbed quietly back up and went into the house. It had been thoroughly and ambitiously tossed.
Chapter 20
The first thing I did was call Eleanor. I was swearing by the time she answered on the fifth ring, sounding serene and unconcerned.
'Get out of there,' I said. 'Go to the place we were talking about earlier. Don't take anything, just go. I'll come back with you tomorrow to help you pack.'
She didn't get rattled, just said she'd be out of the house in five minutes. I hung up and looked at the answering machine. It was on Play, so they'd listened to it, but they'd left the cassette this time.
I rewound it and picked around in the rubble trying to figure out what to take while I listened to the messages.
Mrs. Yount sobbed into the phone that she knew Fluffy was alive, she could feel it in her heart, and I wasn't off the case. I should phone her at once. Al Hammond had called, sounding gruff and upset. There didn't seem to be any Ambrose Harker in the whole world except the one who was alive and well and working at Monument Records, and certainly no Ellis Fauntleroy. To the best of Hammond's knowledge, no one had been killed in the Santa Monica TraveLodge, although someone had stolen a bedspread and a couple of pillows from room 311, and when could he expect to hear from me, anyway?
I wasn't really crazy about the fact that they'd heard that last message. Well, at least Hammond hadn't identified himself as being with the police.
Then I learned why they'd left the cassette.
It was a man's voice, very hushed. 'Get out of it,' he said. 'No one will tell you again. Get out of it and stay out. If we have to come again, we'll do it when you're home.' He hung up. It was a thin, chilly little voice. It sounded sincere.
I didn't know who it was, but I knew that it meant Needle-nose was alive. He was the only one who'd seen me at the Borzoi who could link me to Sally Oldfield's death. I didn't think it was Needle-nose's voice, although it sounded vaguely familiar. There was no mistaking the next voice.
'Wo,' it said, 'this be Dexter Smif in your ear. I took the liberty of writin' down your number off the top of your phone. Good, huh? Think I got a future? Call me if you be needin' a man of talent.'
I could use one, I thought as I pulled some stuff together. They couldn't have been any more thorough if they'd passed everything through a sieve. Twice now they'd walked right into my house and right back out again. They'd killed two people under my nose. A lesser man might have had an identity crisis.
Everything fit into one small bag. I made a desultory effort at straightening up, but the sound of the drip from the leak in the living-room roof sapped me of any excess energy I might have devoted to cosmetic efforts. There was too much to do without worrying about little things like whether the couch was right-side-up.
I unplugged the phone and the answering machine and removed the cassette, replacing it with a new one. Tugging a few tacks loose, I pulled back a corner of the carpet. With a hand drill that I'd bought during a short-lived attempt to learn carpentry, I made a neat little hole in the floorboards and fed three or four feet of phone cord through it. The floor of my living room hangs right out over the hillside where the hill slopes down to meet the retaining wall onto which a bunch of hazy freaks who occupied the house before me had built the leaky little room under the sun deck.
Then, clutching the answering machine in one hand and a flashlight in the other, I went outside and around to the side of the house. The rain had let up, but the creek churned loudly through its course at the bottom of the canyon.
After using the flashlight to locate the phone cord and to check for any scorpions, snakes, or tarantulas that might be thoughtful enough to be hanging around in plain sight, I screwed my courage to its rather low sticking point and crawled in. I seemed to be doing a lot of crawling lately. The farther I crawled, the better Dexter's offer sounded.
I hooked up the answering machine to the phone jack and then swore at myself briefly and vigorously. I slithered back out, tracked mud into the kitchen, and poked through the debris that had been dumped on the floor until I found a long extension cord and a black plastic trashbag. I plugged the extension cord into a living-room socket, lowered the female end through the hole in the floor, and recovered it with the carpet. Then I went outside and back under the house.
When I was finished, the answering machine was on and functional, wrapped in the trashbag against mud and water, and, I sincerely hoped, hard to find. It could be activated to give me my messages from any touch-tone phone. You never knew when Hollywood might call, and I didn't think I was going to be home for a while.
In a final bid for confidence, I took the knife I'd borrowed from the pimp and put it into my pocket, along with the cassette from the answering machine. Then I hefted my suitcase and slid back down the hill.
The San Fernando Valley glittered hard and bright as Alice creaked her way down toward the fragment of Mulholland that intersects Old Canyon Boulevard and deposits you at a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant on Ventura. The cops hadn't blocked Old Canyon, so I had an uninterrupted ride.
