the sound of a telephone in an empty room.
Well, no one could say I hadn't tried. I'd thought that the death of the subject might be of interest to the man who'd hired me to trail her, and I'd spent many of Monument Records' nickels to report it. It wasn't my fault that the creep who was paying me was a nine-to-five bureaucrat addicted to an eight-hour workday. Although God only knew what a joyless slug like Harker did with the time he didn't spend at work. Probably combed through back issues of Popular Mechanics in search of new insights into human psychology.
I tried the number again anyway. Zero. Harker was off practicing his eyelock in a bathroom mirror or working up expressions that would persuade the fired help to quit without severance. With a third cup of Roxanne's coffee in hand, I climbed out onto the deck to look at the world.
All was right with it. The clouds were lifting to reveal a hard line of silver above the mountains that God put there to keep me from wasting my days staring at the Pacific, and things smelled wet and clean, with that sharp, new odor that rain always leaves as a consolation prize for slick roads and leaky roofs. A mockingbird, drunk on clean air, let rip with a confused jigsaw puzzle of other birds' songs. Mozart would have envied it. It was a morning Sally Oldfield would have enjoyed. She would have looked at it and laughed. She was the only woman I'd ever seen who laughed at a dropped bag of groceries.
And that made me mad enough to try the sacrosanct corporate number, the one he'd told me never to use. I stood there chewing on the grounds in the bottom of the cup while the Monument Records switchboard did its clumsy imitation of the human nervous system, ultimately directing my call to the waiting ear of Harker's secretary.
'Mr. Harker's office,' she said in the voice of a woman who'd said it too often. She was the same one I'd talked to in my prior incarnation as Clyde Barrows.
No, he wasn't in. He usually got in about ten or ten-thirty, but if it was urgent she promised to have him call me the moment he lifted his oversize shoes across the threshold. I left my name, number, and the assurance that the call was urgent, and looked at a couple of empty hours.
There was the computer to kill time with. I'd recently bought a spreadsheet program that snickered at my finances every time I booted it. I didn't feel up to it. There was always Flight Simulator, but recently I'd felt less assured that my career path would ever lead me to the point where I'd be trying to land my private plane at Burbank Airport. That left the phone, so I used it.
'Henry, city desk,' said my ex-student. He'd overcome a lot of obstacles, including the course in Precursors of Shakespeare that I'd taught at UCLA and the fact that his given name was Patrick, to land a job as a reporter at the L.A. Times.
'Pat,' I said. 'Simeon. What's yellow journalism paying these days?'
'Green,' he said. 'How much of it do you need?'
'It runs into seven figures. As in a license plate. Have the cops run a make yet on the car in that motel murder last night?'
'Motel murder where?'
'Jesus, Pat, how many were there?'
'Three.'
I wondered whether Norman Bates was in town. 'This was on Sunset, in Hollywood.'
'Jane Doe,' he said.
I digested that.
'White woman,' Pat said. 'Early thirties, right?'
'No identification?' I said.
'Clean as a whistle. Just like it said in the paper.' He paused for a second. 'Do you know anything I don't know?'
'I probably know lots of things you don't know.'
'Anyway,' he said, 'what makes you think there was a car involved?'
'It was a motel. Motels take license numbers. Checks bounce but license plates don't.'
'This one did,' he said. 'As you'd know if you read the Times or anything more current than Homer. The car was stolen.'
'From whom?' I said.
'Why?' he said.
'I'm a concerned citizen. You know how concerned I am. Remember how concerned I was when you bought your term paper from that Iranian?'
'There was nothing wrong with that paper,' he said defensively. It was an old argument.
'No. It would have been perfect if it hadn't implicated Allah as the deity responsible for the deus ex machina in the last act of an Elizabethan play. That's one of the things I know that you don't know, that Elizabethans didn't know Allah from Colonel Sanders.'
'You didn't flunk me,' he said.
'No, I didn't. So who was the car stolen from?'
There was a pause. 'I don't know. I should, but I don't.'
'If you find out, call me, okay?'
'Tell me why.'
'Tell me about that term paper.'
'Oh, shit. I'll call you. But when there's something we can print, you tell me first, right?'
'Make a deal?'
'Let's hear it.'
'Here's another license plate. Check it for me and I promise that I'll call you first if there's ever anything.'
'Cross your heart and swear to God?'
'Come on, Pat. You know I can't do two things at the same time.' I gave him the license number of Sally Oldfield's chubby girlfriend.
'I'm going to have to talk to the cops, you know.'
'Tell them it has to do with the Girl Scout Cookie scam.'
'The what scam?'
'Read the Herald Examiner,' I said. I hung up.
An hour later Harker still hadn't called, although Mrs. Yount had. Twice. I'd let her talk to the answering machine while I did two hundred sit-ups as part of the installment plan on a flat stomach I was purchasing with sweat and boredom, and I'd fed a little lettuce to my one surviving parakeet, Gretel. Someone had twisted Hansel's head off by way of saying hello a few months earlier. That time I'd been lucky; Hansel was the only one I'd cared about who'd been killed.
Thirty minutes and half a new pot of coffee after that, my patience had given out. This time Harker's secretary told me that he was in a meeting and couldn't be disturbed.
'I'm very disturbed,' I said. 'Tell him it's Simeon Grist and tell him that I'm calling the cops if he doesn't talk to me.'
'Geez, the cops?' she said. 'Will he know what it's about?'
'Tell him Sally Oldfield.'
'He knows Miss Oldfield. What about her?'
'You have a lovely voice,' I said. 'Will you put me on hold and give him the message?'
'Gee, thanks, I mean, I don't know. He's like a grizzly bear when he gets interrupted.'
'Interrupt him. Tell him I'm going to the cops if he won't talk to me.'
'Jeez,' she said again. 'Hang on a minute.'
I held on. One of Monument Records' nominal stars crooned something about love on the run. It sounded uncomfortable.
'He got all grizzly,' she said. 'But he held up twelve fingers, I mean first ten and then two-even he doesn't have twelve fingers-and I think that means he'll see you at noon. Do you know where we are?'
'Everyone in the world knows where that building is. See you at noon.'
We both hung up, the one form of climax that people frequently attain simultaneously. I pulled on some running clothes and headed for the beach.
