Crashed

I picked it up and said “Hello.”

No one answered. I heard a motorcycle or something go by in the background. The person on the other end of the phone was on the street somewhere.

“I’m not saying it again,” I said. “Talk or let me go to sleep.”

No reply, and suddenly I was blindly, hotly, pulse-poundingly furious. “I’m at the Hillsider motel on Highland, in room 210. I don’t have a gun. I’m getting up right now and opening the door. I’ll leave it wide open. Come over here, you asshole, and let me get a look at you.” I slammed the phone closed, got up, opened the door, and got dressed, in the same coveralls I’d been wearing for two days. Then I turned off the phone, since I didn’t plan to go to sleep and I didn’t need the alarm, and I didn’t want whoever had shot Jimmy to call me again. I was giving him or her only one way to talk to me.

I sat in the armchair, facing out through the open door, and waited. I waited for two or three of the slowest, darkest hours of my life.

And then I found myself talking to Jimmy with steep blue-green mountains in the background, definitely a Chinese landscape with lots of mist, and he had that cigarette in the middle of his mouth, and the cigarette was putting out an enormous amount of smoke. It got harder to see Jimmy through the smoke, and then everything just seemed to go white. And I was someplace cold, sitting in the white on something hard.

Out of the white, something prodded my shoulder.

I bolted up, coming out of the chair so fast that I almost knocked Doc over.

“Do you know your door is wide open?”

“Yeah,” I said. I rubbed at my face, which seemed to be all there. “It was too hot in here.”

“Seven-thirty,” Doc said. “We should get over there.”

“Sure, sure. Did you bring coffee?”

“No, but I’ve got this.” He held out a little flask. “Cognac,” he said. “Pretty good, too.”

“No, thanks. Maybe they’ve got coffee in the office. Let me get my stuff.”

“I’ll check the office for you,” Doc said. He got halfway through the door, and then said, “Did you drop this?”

I went over and looked. On the cement walkway to the immediate right of my door was Jimmy’s cell phone.

“No,” I said, picking it up. “It belongs to a friend of mine.”

We had to slow when we made the turn onto Romaine. A uniformed cop was there, detouring people to the first right turn. Doc rolled down the window and explained that we had to pick someone up at the Camelot Arms, and rattled off the address.

The cop eyed him for a moment. Then he said, “Are you on television?”

“You spotted me,” Doc said modestly.

“Tell you what,” the cop said. “Give me an autograph for my daughter, and I’ll let you through. Just tell the officer at the corner that Willett said it was okay.”

“That’s right nice of you,” Doc said, in Milburn Stone mode. He grabbed a pad that was fastened to the center console with a suction cup, took a pen out of his pocket, and said, “What’s your daughter’s name?”

“Um, Dennis,” Officer Willett said. He was very young.

“Fine, fine.” Doc wrote, “For Dennis, a big howdy,” and signed it “Milburn Stone.” When he handed it to Willett, he said, “That’s a rare one. I haven’t been signing much lately.”

“Thanks.” Willett pocketed the signature. “Straight ahead. Remember, the name’s Willett.”

“Got it,” Doc said, raising the window.

“Rare,” I said, sipping the coffee he’d grabbed in the Hillsider lobby.

“Well, the new ones are. Milburn Stone died in 1980.”

A block ahead, another cop tried to wave us off, but Doc lowered the window and said the magic words, and we were allowed to make the turn onto Thistle’s street. A knot of cops, including three black-and-whites, a bunch of uniforms, and some detectives in suits almost as awful as Hacker’s, snarled the street around Jimmy’s car. Both doors were wide open and the car was empty; Jimmy had been hauled away with the night’s other dead.

Doc had no problem finding a place to park. The people who went to work early had vacated their spaces, and no one had been allowed into the street to replace them. “I’ll go get her,” he said. “I want to give her a little wake-up injection, and I don’t want to surprise her with you, standing there all tall and threatening.”

“Fine,” I said. I really didn’t want to get out of the car anyway. You never know when you might run into a cop who’d recognize you. After Doc climbed out and closed the door, I leaned over and angled the rear-view mirror so I could see what was going on around the Porsche. But I overshot it and had to turn it back-and then froze. I thought I’d seen something.

“Nah,” I said out loud.

But I readjusted the mirror anyway, and about thirty yards away, some five or six spaces behind Jimmy’s Porsche, there it was. A dented white Chevy with some halfhearted primer applied at random. And the last time I’d seen it, I’d watched it dig up a bunch of lawns on Windward Circle.

19

All I remember is the waiting

Get out and check the Chevy, or sit here?

I angled the mirror back toward the Porsche and studied the activity. With a sinking feeling I recognized Detective Al Tallerico, a hard case from Hollywood Division, who’d almost arrested me twice for jobs I hadn’t done. He must have been promoted to Homicide. I would have to walk past him to get to the Chevy. Tallerico looked busy, but not so busy he wouldn’t look at anyone who approached the crime scene on foot. And if he looked at me, he’d recognize me. And if he recognized me, he’d detain me on general principles, a crook in the vicinity of a homicide. And if he detained me, Rabbits Stennet would see the wrong videotape. And, and, and.

So stay in the car.

Except.

Except that Doc was standing in the door of the Camelot Arms, gesturing with a certain amount of urgency for me to get out of the car and get my ass across the street. He was flapping a hand at me, and it was only a matter of moments before one of the cops noticed. I held up my hand in a stop gesture and got out of the car into a morning that was entirely too bright, too bright for the aftermath of what had happened in the Porsche last night, and far too bright for my own personal comfort with Al Tallerico less than twenty yards away.

The key to being inconspicuous is to look like you know where you’re going and why. So I made a show of glancing at my watch and then turned my head away from the cops, like someone making sure he isn’t about to step in front of a speeding bus, and crossed the street, just another citizen on a perfectly upright errand. Every step, I expected to hear Tallerico’s voice yelling for me to stop, and every step I didn’t, and after a certain number of steps, I was inside the doorway of the Camelot Arms and Doc was grabbing my sleeve.

“She got her hands on something,” he said. Beads of sweat dotted his forehead. “I need help.” He tugged me inside, toward a stairway.

“You need help?” I said. “What skill set do you think I possess?”

“You can walk,” he said, pulling me along. “She needs to be walked.”

“Walking I can do. How could she have gotten anything? I thought you knocked her out last night.”

We were most of the way up the stairs now, and the second story yawned in front of us. “I did,” Doc said. “All I can figure is that somebody delivered. Come on, pick it up. I’m afraid she’ll heave and then aspirate it. It’s remarkable she hasn’t already done that, the way she’s been living.”

The second-floor hallway was dim, barren, and windowless: just filthy linoleum, finger-marked walls, and doors on either side, most of them absolute arsenals of locks. It smelled of damp wood, with a sharp note of urine.