'So you tried to run over him,' Dolly said. She was well past the stage of hero worship.
'He didn't,' I said. 'If he had, I'd be dead.'
'Champ,' Toby said earnestly, 'the last thing I want is for anything to happen to you.'
'No,' I said. 'The last thing you want is for anything to happen to Saffron.'
'Well, sure,' he said listlessly. 'That goes without saying.'
'What kind of an envelope did it come in?'
'An envelope, you know? Kind of brown, I think.'
'What postmark?'
'Hollywood. I checked that.'
'What does that tell us?' Dolly said. 'Zilch.'
'Right. But I want to see the envelope. Do you have it?'
Toby shook his head. 'I threw it away.'
'Well,' I said, 'that's really brilliant. Here's a piece of nice, tidy physical evidence that any half-wit cop would jug you for, and you throw away the envelope it came in. Amateurs,' I said in disgust. 'Just wait here. Dolly, you make sure he waits.'
I hiked back up the driveway and went into the club. Rock music blared, and the heavyset Tiny clone stopped me as I lifted the curtain. 'Seven dollars,' he said.
'Don't be an idiot. I just left.'
'No reentry without paying.'
'I was here for Amber's funeral.'
He shrugged. 'I don't care if you were here for Washington's birthday. Seven bucks.'
His jaw hung slack. I picked up a corner of the red curtain and jammed it in his mouth. 'Eat this while I'm gone,' I said. 'I'll be back for dessert.' He pushed it away with both hands and came up off his stool at me. A white arm billowed past me and shoved him back down, and I turned to look at Tiny.
'I don't need trouble,' he said. 'Not tonight.'
'I want a minute with Nana.'
'That'll be seven dollars for a minute, then.'
I paid him. It didn't feel like a good idea to feed the curtain to Tiny.
Nana was at the bar, with her back to me. As I came up behind her, she said, 'Go away.'
'I am going away. Can I come back later?'
'If you can afford it.'
'I'm sorry I hit you.'
She shrugged. I was provoking a lot of shrugs. 'I been hit before.'
'He didn't take the picture. He got it in the mail.'
'Yeah, and they find babies under cabbage leaves.'
'Have it your way. I'll be back in a couple of hours.'
'How will I stand the wait?' she said.
Tiny's hand landed on my shoulder. It was like standing under a falling redwood. 'Minute's up,' he said. The bartender glowered at me. Nana wouldn't give me a glance.
'Fine,' I said. 'Gee, everybody, have a good night.'
It was getting dark when I reached Toby's car. The driver's door was still open, and Dolly was leaning against the front fender, looking like a hundred kilos of scorned woman. Toby hadn't moved.
'What time do they empty the wastebaskets in the dressing room?' I said.
'How do I know?'
I went around and got in on the passenger side. 'Well,' I said, 'you're about to find out.'
Twenty-five minutes later I was looking at a square, buff-colored envelope with a Hollywood postmark. The stamp had Susan B. Anthony on it. 'Nice sense of irony,' I said.
Toby was doing a line of cocaine. 'Fingerprints,' he said without much hope. 'What about fingerprints?'
'It's rough paper. If I were the cops and I had a couple of billion dollars' worth of image-intensifying laser equipment, I might be able to lift a partial off the gummed strip. And you know what? It'd be yours.'
'But the picture's smooth,' Dolly said.
'Photographs are a great surface for prints, one of the best. But I'd bet my fee that Toby's are the only prints on it. And mine, of course, and yours. Nobody's a big enough schmuck to handle a photograph bare-handed after he's committed a murder.'
'Swell,' Toby said. 'I'm so glad we've got a specialist.'
'Toby,' I said, 'why would anyone send you that picture?'
For a second I thought I was going to get my third shrug of the evening. But then he shook his head. 'To freak me out, maybe. To threaten me.' He glanced up at Dolly and then back at me. 'Maybe to tell me I'm next.'
'No,' Dolly and I said simultaneously.
'This probably won't come as a complete surprise to you, Toby,' I said, 'but somebody hates your guts. I want a list. Everybody you've hurt, everybody who's related to somebody you've hurt.' I glanced up at Dolly. 'You might as well sit down,' I said. 'This could take a while.'
15
The Spirit, according to the people who believe in it, never sleeps. That was probably the reason the dreary little storefront with 'Things of the Spirit' scrawled across the window had a large open sign in its door at nine- fifteen on a Monday evening.
I'd checked my notes twice. This was the address that Hammond had grudgingly given me for Rebecca Hartsfield, the teenager whom Toby had matriculated in the school of hard knocks at the Ontario Motor Speedway. Things change fast in Hollywood, but things of the Spirit are eternal, and the shop certainly looked as though it had been sitting right where it was, on one of the scuzziest blocks of Hollywood Boulevard, for all eternity.
The window was crammed full of things of the Spirit. Crystals glittered from transparent nylon fishing lines that suspended them in space. Garish mandalas challenged my equilibrium with confusing permutations of concentric circles, looking like targets for spiritual archery. Reassuringly thick books offered answers to all the eternal questions between fake vellum covers embossed with confused combinations of crosses, pentacles, and symbols for infinity. Tiny glass vials filled with colored liquids glowed prismatically. In the whole window there wasn't anything I knew how to use.
I backed away to the curb and looked up. Like so many Hollywood storefronts, this one had once been the bottom floor of an apartment house. Two stories of apartments still squatted above it, lighted windows set in a plain brick wall. Maybe Rebecca Hartsfield lived in one of them.
A decidedly earthly buzzer announced my intrusion. Once it quit, I heard what I'd learned against my will to identify as new age music. Aimless and spacey, it meandered from unresolved keyboard chord to unresolved keyboard chord with some somnolent noodling in place of melody. Drooling pianos, music to sleepwalk by.
The music was almost immediately drowned out by the smell. Things of the Spirit stank like an old-fashioned whorehouse. The smell suggested that every bouquet ever picked had been reduced to its essence and crammed somehow into a single aerosol can, and that can had then been emptied into the store. It was enough to make a bee sneeze.
And I sneezed.
She was something to look at. Her age was impossible to guess. The skin on her face was as smooth and unlined as a girl of twenty, but her hair was snow white. At first glance it seemed as though there were yards of it, cascading over her shoulders and down her back. Framed by all that white, her face looked like an apple in the
