The Man With No Time

He thought about it. “Around two or three, call my girl.”

He hung up. I went back inside and kissed Eleanor awake.

For the next four hours Eleanor and I scoured Chinatown looking for Horace while Tran sat home and baby- sat Everett. We checked all of Horace's favorite restaurants, Eleanor using her Cantonese on the owners, and both of us dropping in on his friends. No Horace. One of the friends, a shopkeeper, thought Horace might have narrowly missed running him over on Hill Street the previous night, but when he'd jumped out of the car's way and shouted Horace's name, the driver had accelerated away.

“He was looking for Lo,” I said to Eleanor when we left the shop.

“Horace always drives that way,” Eleanor said. “All Chinese do. They've usually got a grandmother in the backseat, and all they care about is finding a parking space so the ancestor shouldn't have to walk. Chinese people hit fire hydrants all the time. Anyway, even if it was Horace, what good does that do us now?”

We picked up a sandwich for Dexter, who'd been watching Tiffle's cottage from his big Lincoln.

“People in and out,” he said, chewing. “Mostly Orientals, mostly girls. How you doin, Eleanor?”

“Why is a better question,” Eleanor said. “Sense of family, I suppose.”

“They's family,” Dexter said comfortably, picking a tomato slice out of the sandwich and dropping it out the window, “and then they's everybody else.”

“Keeping score, Dexter?” I asked.

“All in the little black book,” he said, waving something at me. It actually was a little black book.

“I thought those went out with Hugh Hefner,” I said.

Dexter gave me the big eyes. “Somethin happen to Hugh Hefner?”

Back home at three I called Norman's “girl,” whose name was Deirdre and who was older than Norman, and was told that the boat and skipper were in place.

“Two little things,” I said. I'd always liked Deirdre. Like thousands of low-paid women in Hollywood, she did the work that the men put their names on.

“Only two?”

“I want to be picked up in Santa Monica, not in San Pedro. And the skipper has to know how to find a specific boat in the harbor.”

“Where in Santa Monica?” That was one of the things I liked about Deirdre; she didn't say, “Can't do.” She said, “Where?”

“Someplace we can wade.”

“Skip it,” she said. “Too much attention. Get the boat in Marina Del Rey; that's where it docks anyway.”

“Where? I mean, do boats have an address?”

Papers got rifled through. “Pier, um, three, slip twenty-nine.”

I'd been to Marina Del Rey before, and it was security-happy. “Is someone going to ask me what I'm doing there?”

“You're looking for Pat Snow's boat.”

“Pat Snow.”

“Captain Pat Snow, if you want to sound nautical. What ship are you after?”

I paused. “I don't want you to tell Norman,” I said.

“Welllll,” Deirdre offered.

“This is dangerous.”

“Norman doesn't want to know,” she said promptly, “until you bring the boat back. And Captain Snow used to run dope. That's how Norman knows about the boat. Did you see the show? High Seas it was called.”

“Loved it,” I lied. “Investigative journalism at its best. The boat-pardon me, the ship, I mean-is called Caroline B.”

“I'll get on the horn with Captain Snow,” she said. “Nine o'clock okay?”

“Nine is fine,” I said. The line went dead.

The rest of the day was just waiting. Tran and I re-blindfolded Everett while Eleanor looked at the fork hole in his thigh and pronounced it nothing to worry about.

“Didn't happen to you,” Everett said sulkily.

“Do you get seasick?” I asked him.

“No,” he said. Then he said, “Why? I mean, why?”

“High seas,” I said. “The Caroline B.”

We closed the bedroom door on his wails of panic and drank more coffee while the sun fought its way through the afternoon fog. When it got strong enough to warm the skin, we went out onto the roof of the room downstairs and drank more coffee and watched hawks cut slices out of the sky. A few fat and dirty seagulls, disoriented and driven inland by the fog, landed on the deck and cast nervous glances at the hawks.

“Squab with lettuce,” Tran said, eyeing them. He began to make little cooing noises, and the birds checked the deck for an attractive bird of the opposite sex,

'I’ll fix you a burger,' I said.

“Wait,” Eleanor said, fascinated. “Can you actually catch one?”

“Stupid, them,” Tran said. “Sure.”

“Burgers,” I said firmly.

“I want to see,” Eleanor said.

Tran lay down on the edge of the deck and summoned sounds from his throat that sounded like muffled yodels. His shoulder blades stuck up through my shirt. “No moving,” he said to us.

“Still as stones,” Eleanor commanded me.

There were four gulls clustered on the deck now, facing each other as though they were waiting for one of them to come up with an interesting conversational gambit. Tran cooed his little yodels, and the birds gradually drifted in his direction, heads bobbing forward and back with every step. I developed an itch in the middle of my back.

Just as I was about to reach back and scratch, one of the seagulls spread its wings and puffed up its breast, and took another step toward Tran. I didn't even see his arm move, just heard an astonished squawk and a beating of wings as the birds took off. Three of them, anyway. The fourth flapped its wings frantically, its legs imprisoned in Tran's fist.

“Oh, my gosh,” Eleanor said.

The bird in Tran's hand stretched its entire body skyward, wings pumping madly. It squealed and snapped its head down to sink its beak into Tran's wrist. A bead of blood appeared, and the head came up and then down again.

“Let it go,” Eleanor said over a sound I didn't recognize as I watched the beak sink into skin again, and then I did recognize it: Tran was laughing.

“Squab,” he said, grinning, impervious to the bird's repeated strikes against his wrist.

“Let it go,” Eleanor said again, and Tran looked from her to me and opened his hand, and the bird soared skyward, emitting indignant yawks. Little globes of blood dotted Tran's brown arm.

“No problem,” he said. “Catch two or three.”

I got up. “Burgers,” I said.

At seven, Dexter called. “Everybody gone. Everybody except the fat guy.”

“Tiffle's fat?”

“Make some little country a fine dinner.” Dexter said. “And one teensy Chinese snack, real pretty, arrived about two minutes ago. You want me to wait?”

They deliver them like pizza, Lau had said.

“No. Meet us at Topanga and the Pacific Coast Highway. Eight-fifteen, okay?”

“More people than I figured,” Captain Pat Snow said, looking at Tran, Dexter, Everett, and me. Captain Snow looked surprised at the fact that Everett was handcuffed, but not as surprised as I was.

Captain Pat Snow was a black woman.

She caught my stare and lifted an affronted eyebrow. She was about thirty-five, with extremely curly black hair fluffing out beneath a dark cap, mocha-colored skin, and a vulnerable-looking pug nose, but there was nothing