brought back a childhood memory, triggered more by the smell than by the familiar line-up of guitars, portable radios, watches, rings, necklaces, harmonicas, trumpets, and weapons. The smell made a special tug at my memory.
I grunted in with the dog in my arms.
“Rudolfo Castillo at your service and open for business,” said the little old man as he moved slowly behind his counter, pulled open the little window marked CLOSED, and adjusted his glasses.
“You got any hair clippers?”
I put the panting dog down on the floor.
Castillo looked at me blankly.
“Clips, for the hair.”
He grunted and then disappeared into the dark depths of the shop.
And then I placed the smell. My father had bought me a saxophone in a North Hollywood pawn shop when I was a kid. It didn’t have all the parts and couldn’t make all the notes, but I spent a summer and a good part of a winter loving the thing. The case it had come in smelled like Castillo’s pawn shop.
Castillo returned, puffing from the burden of the box in his arms. He dropped the box on the counter and continued to pant heavily while I fished through the box of hair clippers till I found an old black one that looked as if it might still have teeth and wasn’t too rusty.
“I’ll take this one,” I said.
“Two dollars,” the old man said.
“What? It’s not worth a quarter.”
“Yesterday it was a quarter,” Castillo said. “Today two bucks.”
“What happened between yesterday and today?” I asked, watching Miguelito nose around behind a guitar- shaped box.
“Yesterday the police weren’t looking for someone who looks like you,” he said.
“I don’t have any money …” I began, but Castillo spoke over me.
“Bicycle and the hat,” he said.
“You can have them,” I said.
“And the dog,” Castillo added.
“You want that dog?”
“
“Okay. Give me the clipper to shave the dog. After I shave him, you can have him, but you have to throw in a shirt for me.”
He handed me the clipper and came up with a small can of oil.
“I get the bike, the dog, and the clipper back,” Castillo said readjusting his glasses as I oiled the clipper. “You get a shirt.”
What the hell. I picked up the clipper and pulled Miguelito out from between the feet of a slightly chipped, full-size ceramic pig on which someone had written MONROE in nail polish. I shaved Miguelito, who simply watched with curiosity as I put the razor to his back.
The clipper wasn’t bad. After a few false starts, I found a patch of fur that looked shorter than the rest and worked on in for a few seconds. Pay dirt. I could clearly see the lettering on the dog. I got down to bristle, read the names, and kept going. When I’d finished, Miguelito’s back was exposed right down to his white skin.
“You got paper and a pencil?” I asked.
Castillo came up with them, and I copied what Lorna had written on her dog. It didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. Three names I didn’t recognize-two men and a woman-a date, and a place: Cherokee, Texas.
“Without the hair he looks like a fat chihuahua,” said Castillo. “I don’t know if my wife wants a fat chihuahua. And who knows if we can get that ink washed off?”
“Then take him on trial,” I said.
“Fifteen days,” he said, making out a receipt. “You don’t come back for him, my wife don’t like him, I sell him. Fifteen days.”
“Okay,” I said, handing him the clipper, the hat, and the dog. In turn, he handed me a white shirt that looked a little large, but that was better than too small.
Miguelito lay there like a hairy cactus.
I took off my shirt, threw it to Castillo, and put on the white shirt. It wasn’t too bad a fit.
“I can cover the dog so no one’ll come around here and get curious about what’s written on him till I get him home and wash him up,” Castillo said, surveying the animal. “Got one of those blankets people put on greyhounds to race them. I’ll show you.”
He moved around the counter, went to a corner of the shop, and came up with a dusty box.
A few seconds later Miguelito’s official number in gold was 9, and I was broke and on my way to look for a killer.
13
I tucked my shirt in and asked a pair of ladies carrying paper shopping bags how to get to the Opera-not the old Opera, but the one that was reopening.
“You mean the old barn where that guy got killed last week?”
“That’s the place,” I said.
“Dumb place to build a opera, you ask me,” she said, shifting her bag from her right to left hand.
“Or anything else,” said her friend. “Nobody goes there. Nothing around there. It’s a dump.”
After their critique and recommendations for urban renewal, they told me how to get to the Opera. It was about ten blocks away. I started out staying with the growing crowds, following a pride of young sailors for a few blocks, a gaggle of shoppers for another block.
It was somewhere near one in the afternoon when I hit the corner a block away from the Opera. I hid in a doorway and looked for the police. They weren’t visible, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. Reverend Souvaine’s troops were out in force, about twenty of them. This was a big day. Dress rehearsal. Special guests, the press would be there.
The placards were bigger than ever. One announced: FIRST SACRILEGE. NOW MURDER. Another claimed: BUY A TICKET, HELP THE JAPS. Souvaine himself was not in sight. He’d show up for the crowds.
Across the street from where I was hiding, a rusting abandoned delivery van sat in a little weed-covered empty lot. The flecked dead paint on the side of the van indicated that it had once distributed Fleecy White Laundry Bleach, Little Boy Blue Bluing, and Little Bo-Peep Ammonia. Now it sat without tires, without front doors, and probably without engine, but with a better view of the San Francisco Metropolitan Opera Building than I had from the doorway. I moved out of the doorway, back down the block away from the street the Opera was on, crossed the street, and approached the van from behind. The back of the van had two doors; one was rusted shut, the other hung on one hinge. I climbed up and in and tried not to cut my hands on the bits of glass and pieces of metal left by kids or bums.
“Use Fleecy White, you’ll find delight,” I mumbled. “It’s a peach of a bleach they say.”
There were enough holes in the side of the van so I could see the front of the Opera. I was tired. I was hungry. My back let me know that it wasn’t going to take much more of this without major complaints.
I watched for a while. Carpenters, painters, laborers, and guys with rolled-up blueprints under their arms came and went. It seemed as if the number of people working on the building had tripled and they were all moving fast to get the final touches done for the opening. The action inspired Souvaine’s people, who marched with the step of the truly righteous. Sloane, Cynthia, and the widow Bertha were there shouting and urging the elderly to remain vigilant in case some Jap tried to sneak past them without reading their placards.
I could see Gunther’s Daimler parked down the street in front of Stokowski’s limo. Stokowski’s driver leaned against the hood in full uniform, reading a newspaper and occasionally glancing over at the ancient army.
No cops, but they had to be there.
I sat for a few minutes, being careful not to get a splinter of something up my rear. Then, in one of the
