The knob on the front door turned, and I snatched the cigarette away from her so that I was holding both the Marlboro and the bottle when Mrs. Sorrell came into the room.
“Rory,” she said in a voice that was already furred by drink, “what in the world are you doing?”
Rory settled back onto the couch and crossed her arms. “I'm watching Mr. What's-his-name here drink and smoke,” she said. “Just honing the skills I picked up at home.”
Her mother swatted away some invisible gnats in front of her. “Well,” she said, “go into the other room.”
“Hey, don't worry,” Rory said, glancing at me. “I've got potatoes in my ears.”
“Is that supposed to be funny, miss?” Mrs. Sorrell said. “Don't you think I've got enough troubles without my own daughter turning into Henny Youngman?”
“Henny
“Never you mind. Just make yourself scarce.”
“Oink,” Rory said, looking back at me as she stood up. Her elegant legs, brown below the white shorts, twinkled at me as though they had been dusted with Tinker Bell's goofus sparkles as she walked away. “Oink, oink,” she said. “Everything but the squeal.”
“What have you been
“Oh, Mother,” Rory said. “The truth will out.” She gave me another glance, walked very slowly to the door to what I supposed was the bedroom, and pulled it shut softly behind her. Mrs. Sorrell watched the door for a moment as though she expected it to open again, and then shook her head.
“We shouldn't have brought her,” she said, “but we were afraid to leave her alone, after, well, after Aimee. And it's Easter vacation and she wanted to see L.A. And, I don't know, I thought if we found Aimee she might be more willing to come home if Rory were with us. If we found Aimee,” she added bitterly. She rubbed at the bridge of her nose, stretching the skin tight over the fine bones of her face, and I could see Rory's face peeking out at me through her mother's. “So I'm drinking,” she said. “The one thing I shouldn't be doing.”
She was wearing a white blouse with little red cherries embroidered on the collar and a pair of navy-blue slacks with big safari-style pockets. There were three long scratches on her forehead from where she'd raked it with her nails, red, angry parallel lines. Hers wasn't the kind of face that should have had scratches on it. They made her look younger and softer than her daughter.
“Well,” I said, hoisting the bottle, “at least you're not drinking alone.”
“Put it down,” she said in a tone that brooked no discussion. “One of us has to be clear-headed. I have something to show you, but first I have to know if you've learned anything.”
“Not much,” I said. I wasn't going to tell her about the girl on the slab and the burn in her navel. Not until I had to, at any rate. “I've been on the street for four days but I haven't found anyone who can put her there with certainty. That's where she was, though. There's a whole community of them out there.”
“She's not there anymore,” she said. “Come out on the terrace. I don't want Rory listening through the door.”
I put down the bottle as she crossed the room to a big sliding glass door and pushed it open. I couldn't figure out what to do with the cigarette, so I carried it out onto the terrace and crushed it underfoot.
The terrace was enclosed by ten-foot pink walls and overgrown vegetation. A hummingbird that had been feeding on a big leathery
“I hate those things,” she said vaguely. “They're neither birds nor insects. They're like leftovers from some time when lizards flew and snakes swam. I always think they'll have dandruff.”
I like hummingbirds, but I kept quiet. Mrs. Sorrell fished in the pocket of her slacks and pulled out a piece of paper. “We have to go home,” she said wearily. “I guess I knew this was going to happen. I just hoped we'd find her before it did.” I put out a hand and she put the paper into it. Then she sank onto a chaise and crossed her ankles, looking down at her hands resting in her lap. I opened the paper.
Same kind of paper, same dot-matrix printer as before. GET $20,000, it said, all in caps. BE HOME TUESDAY AFTERNOON. I'LL CALL.
I felt a sinking sensation in my stomach. “When did this arrive?”
“Here? Today. It got to Kansas City yesterday. The maid sends my mail out every day, Federal Express.”
“Has he seen it?”
“He went home yesterday. I made him. I was worried about his heart.”
“You're going to have to tell him now.”
She looked up at me. “The hell I am,” she said.
“But the money.”
She lifted one hand from her lap and waved it away. “I've got money of my own,” she said. “I'm richer than Daddy will ever be.”
“You'll get the money, of course.”
“Certainly I will. She's my little girl.” She blinked twice, very quickly, and then drew both hands into fists. “The question,” she said, after a moment, “is what you'll be doing.”
“I've got two places to go today,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “One of them, I'm not so sure about. I'll get something at the other one.”
She looked back down at her lap, at the two sharp little fists and the expanse of navy-blue cloth drawn tight over her childbearing hips. “Please,” she said in a very small voice, “see that you do.”
6
The place I wasn't sure about was Jack's Triple-Burgers, but I had to go there anyway. Even if the note hadn't arrived to speed things up, I'd realized when I was looking at the little girl on the slab that I was finally too old to pass as anything but an undercover cop. It was time to come out from whatever meager cover I'd managed to establish, and the place to do it was the place where I was less likely to find anyone who knew Aimee. That way, if the approach failed, at least I wouldn't have locked myself out of the Oki-Burger.
It was pretty early for Jack's. Even after I'd killed a couple of hours in the B. Dalton bookshop on Hollywood Boulevard, ignoring the pointed stares of the clerks while I read Philippe Aries'
Figuring it couldn't get any worse, I headed for the sidewalk.
As I emerged, blinking in the late sunlight, onto the Walk of Fame, the first thing I saw was a woman walking two little girls, aged ten or eleven. They might have been twins.
Although it was cold, the girls wore white T-shirts, knotted above their navels, identical green-and-white running shorts that ended several inches above the bottoms of their buttocks, and identical black patent-leather collars around their necks. Hooked into each of the collars was a short black leash, the end of which the woman held in her hand. She scanned the faces of the passersby, looking for takers. Well, I thought, at least now Jack's can't get to me.
I was wrong, as I had been so often since my first conversation with the Sorrells. The ice-cream pimp and his girl were there, and so was a Korean or Japanese teenager whom I'd seen several times before. The Oriental girl was tiny, impossibly fragile-looking, capable of ingesting vast amounts of drugs if her behavior on previous occasions was any indication, and heartbreakingly beautiful except for a ravaged coarseness in her skin that advertised bad acne in the past. She had her keeper with her, a skinny hardcase in his middle twenties whose mouth curved raggedly upward, courtesy of an old knife scar. He was sitting now, but on the move he walked like he was trying to slice his way through solid ice, elbows held away from his body, feet taking big stiff strides. His
