Everything but the Squeal

“Mrs. Sorrell. What's happening?”

“She's not back,” Jane Sorrell said in a rigid monotone. “She's not back and no one has phoned. She was supposed to … she was supposed to be back last. .” A ring clacked against the mouthpiece, and she made a sound like a retch. “No one has … has. .”

“Please, Mrs. Sorrell. Hang on to yourself. It isn't over yet.”

“Oh, yes,” she said, “yes, it is. They've got her, they've killed her, I'll never see-”

“I don't think they've killed her,” I said. She made crumpled, wispy little sounds into the other end of the line. “She's too valuable to them. They're not going to kill her unless they have to.”

Jessica and Morris exchanged wide-eyed stares. Even Woofers was watching me, her brown eyes alert and sympathetic.

“Valuable?” said a new voice, a tougher voice. “What do you mean, valuable?”

“Aurora, is that you?”

“Who else would it be, Donder and Blitzen?”

“Aurora, take care of your mother. I think I know where Aimee is.” I didn't, but I knew how to find out.

“You do?” she said skeptically. “I'll believe it when you bring her home. So what's so valuable?”

“Listen,” I said, gesturing toward Jessica to give me the pad and pencil next to the computer, “give me the address where you sent the money.”

“Mom?” Aurora said. Jessica grabbed the pad and handed it to me, yanking a pen out of the bouquet in the pocket of Morris’ shirt. He had about eight left.

“I don't know,” Jane Sorrell said. She sounded wet.

“Of course you do,” Aurora said authoritatively. “You wrote it down.”

“Where is she?” her mother asked me.

“Here. Here in L. A. Have you got the address?” I clicked Morris’ pen a few times. Different-colored tips kept coming out.

“We know she's in L.A.,” Aurora said. “Haven't you got anything new?”

“That'll have to wait,” I said. “What's the address?”

“I don't know why we shouldn't just call the cops,” Aurora said.

My hands were perspiring, and I tucked the phone between neck and shoulder and wiped my palms on my pants. “Don't. Believe me, don't.”

“Why not?” Aurora's voice was challenging.

I tossed a mental coin. Like most mental coins, it landed on its edge. “Because some of them may be in on it,” I said.

There was a long, tense silence.

“How do we know that?” Aurora finally asked.

“You don't. You can't. Hang up,” I said. “Hang up and call them. But if you do, don't ever call me again. And whatever you do, don't give them my name.”

“You could be manufacturing business,” Aurora said. “We call the cops, we don't need you.”

“Aurora. You don't really believe that.”

She exhaled noisily into the phone. She could have been blowing her nose. I remembered that she was just a little girl. “Mom,” she said after drawing a deep sigh, “give him the address.”

“I've got it,” Jane Sorrell said shakily. “Do you have a pencil?”

“Go.” I'd decided on the red point.

“Eleven-six-eighty-six Altham Street. Los Angeles.”

“Zip?” The red point wrote blue.

”Nine-oh-three-five-two. ’ ’

“Airport,” I said.

“What?” I couldn't tell which one it was.

“That's near the airport. I'll call you.”

“When?” Aurora said.

“When I've got something worth telling you. Good-bye.” I hung up. Airport. That was a long way from Hollywood.

Morris was regarding me as though I were some newly ambitious life form that had just crawled ashore. Anything with the word “killed” in it was outside his frame of reference, as it should have been. Jessica was trying to look nonchalant. “People are dying,” I said. “What's the book?”

Jessica looked at Morris. “Remember in Mrs. Brussels' office?” she began.

“You already won the laurel wreath,” I said. “Spare me the play-by-play. Wait,” I said, suddenly recalling the agent's agitation. In my excitement I snapped Morris’ pen in half and four ball-point-pen barrels scattered to the points of the compass like a literary multiple-warhead missile. “The Actors'Directory.”

“U.r.,” said Jessica, beckoning to Morris, “means upper right.” He handed her the book and she pried it open. “Recognize him?”

She put the book on the floor and pointed to a photo in the upper right. It was her tennis player, the one she'd described as “Cute.”

“Yeah,” I said. “So?”

“Mr. Kale, right?”

“Right,” I said, suppressing an urge to strangle her.

“So he's middle left, in the center of the left-hand page. Look upper right.”

A little girl beamed up at me. Kimberly Winter, it said under the photo, Age: 11. “Oh, Jesus,” I said. “Sure. I should have thought of it.”

“She's her agent,” Jessica said. “Mrs. Brussels. I was the one who figured it out, but Morris had the book. His father is in TV.”

“And the others?”

“This is the January 1988 book,” Morris said. “All the ones that say one-eighty-eight are here, right where they should be, and she's the agent for all of them. Check it out. We've already folded down the pages.”

I went down the printout. If u.r. and c.r. meant upper right and center right, they'd figured it out. All the kids whose pictures were printed in those positions, both boys and girls, listed Brussels' Sprouts as their agency. One of them was the curly-haired little girl I'd seen the first time I went to the morgue. Her name was Lizabeth Worthy.

“Have you got the earlier books?”

“Only one,” Morris said. “It's from 1987. It's got the entry that was marked ‘unavailable.’ ”

“From June?” I asked, checking the printout.

“Yeah. I didn't bring it, but I brought a copy of the page they asked for.” He put it down in front of me and I stared at it. It had been digitized and scanned, and it was pretty high-contrast, but the bright, star-struck face in the photo was definitely Junko's. She wasn't hard to recognize, even minus a hard year and a lot of drugs and misuse. She stared up at me, wearing a lopsided baseball cap and grinning a hopeful smile that I'd never seen while she was alive.

I had to wait a moment while my blood pressure subsided. I also had to blink a couple of times to clear my eyes. Then I said, “Good.” My voice was forced and my face felt like a brass funeral mask from ancient Greece. “I'll need that other book,” I said.

“There's more,” Jessica said.

“More?” I looked down at Junko's lost, open face, trying to imagine what more there could be. Woofers, feeling neglected, lifted a leg to wash an intimate portion of her anatomy.

“The next issue,” Jessica said proudly. “It isn't out yet.”

“What about it?”

“Morris called the publishers, acting like his father, to find out which of Mrs. Brussels' clients would be listed in the June issue,” she said. Then all of it hit her, the reality of it, and her excitement faded. She looked away from me and out the window at the changeless mountains. “Page 281,” she said, “lower left. It's a girl named Dorothy Gale.”

The eleven thousand block of Altham Street was the Southern California equivalent of a ghost town. Directly