The Two Minute Rule

by Robert Crais

“Stop it. Stop looking at them like that. Jesus, what’s with this hostility?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You want to fight them over the goddamned table? You’re not on the yard anymore, Holman. We need to talk to this girl.”

  Holman realized she was right. He was giving them jailhouse eyes. Holman forced himself to stop staring. He glanced at the surrounding tables. Most every guy in the diner was about Richie’s age. Holman told himself this was why he was so angry. These people were sopping up pancakes, but Richie was bagged in the morgue.

  “You’re right. Sorry.”

  “Just take it easy.”

  Marki squared things with the manager, then returned to the table with a big smile and two menus.

  “That was cool, sir. Have I waited on you before?”

  “No, it’s not that. We need to ask you about Alison Whitt. We understand you were friends.”

  Marki didn’t look moved one way or the other when Holman mentioned Alison’s name. She just shrugged and held her pad as if she was waiting for them to order.

  “Well, yeah, kinda. We were buds here at the grill. Listen, this isn’t the greatest time. I have all these tables.”

  “A hundred covers a lot of tips, honey.”

  Marki shrugged again and shifted her weight.

  “The police already talked to me. They talked to everyone here. I don’t know what else I can say.”

  Pollard said, “We don’t want to know about her murder so much as a former boyfriend. Did you know she worked as a prostitute?”

  Marki giggled nervously, then glanced at the nearest tables to make sure no one was listening before lowering her voice.

  “Well, yeah, sure. The police told everyone about it. That’s what they asked us about.”

  “Her record shows two arrests about a year ago, but none since. Was she still working?”

  “Oh, yeah. That girl was wild—she grooved on the life. She had all these great stories.”

  Holman was keeping an eye on the manager, who was pissed off and watching them. Holman was pretty sure he was going to come over because Marki was having a conversation instead of working.

  Holman said, “Tell you what, Marki. Put in a couple of orders so your boss doesn’t freak out, then come back for the stories. We’ll look at the menus.”

  When she went away, Pollard leaned toward him.

  “Did you give that girl a hundred dollars?”

  “What of it?”

  “I’m not trying to fight with you, Holman.”

  “Yes. A hundred.”

  “Jesus Christ. Maybe I should have let you pay me.”

  “Chee’s money. You wouldn’t want to get contaminated.”

  Pollard stared at him. Holman felt a flush of embarrassment and glanced away. He was in a terrible mood and had to get a grip on himself. He looked at the menu.

  “You want something to eat? As long as we’re here we might as well eat.”

  “Fuck off.”

  Holman stared at the menu until Marki returned. Marki told them she could hang for a minute, and Pollard went back to the point as if Holman hadn’t just made an ass of himself.

  “Did she ever tell you about her johns?”

  “She had funny stories about her johns. Some of them were celebrities.”

  “We’re trying to find out about a guy she was with four or five months ago. He might have been her boyfriend, but it’s more likely he was a john. He had an unusual name—Anton Marchenko. A Ukrainian dude?”

  Marki smiled, recognizing the name right away.

  “That was the pirate. Martin, Marko, Mar-something.”

  “Marchenko.”

  Holman said, “How was he a pirate?”

  Now her smile morphed into a giggle.

  “’Cause that was his thing. Allie said he couldn’t get off without pretending he was this badass pirate, you know, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum, how he lived a life of adventure and had all this buried treasure.”

  Holman glanced at Pollard and saw the corner of her mouth curl. She returned his glance and nodded. They had something.

  Holman looked back at Marki and turned on his friendliest smile.

  “No shit? He told her he had buried treasure?”

  “He said all kinds of silly stuff. He used to take her to the Hollywood Sign. That’s where he had to do it. He’d never take her back to his place or do it in the car or use a motel. They had to go up to the Hollywood Sign so he could make these speeches and look out over his kingdom.”

  Marki giggled again, but Holman saw a problem.

  He said, “Allie told you they went to the sign?”

  “Yeah. Four or five times.”

  “You can’t get to the sign. It’s fenced off and covered by security cameras.”

  Marki seemed surprised, then shrugged as if it didn’t matter to her either way.

  “That’s what she told me. She said it was a big pain because you have to hike up, but the guy was loaded. He paid her one thousand dollars just for, you know, oral. She said she’d hike up there all day for a thousand dollars.”

  A nearby table waved Marki over, leaving Holman and Pollard alone again. Holman was starting to doubt Allie’s story about going up to the sign.

  He said, “I’ve been up there. You can get close, but you can’t get to the sign. They have video cameras all over up there. They even have motion detectors.”

  “Now waitaminute, Holman—this is making sense. Marchenko and Parsons lived in Beachwood Canyon. The sign is right at the top of their hill. Maybe they hid the money up there.”

  “You couldn’t bury sixteen million dollars anywhere around that sign. Sixteen million dollars is big.”

  “We’ll see when we get there. We’ll go take a look.”

  Holman still had his doubts, but when Marki returned Pollard resumed her questions.

  “We’re almost finished, Marki. We’ll be out of your hair in a minute.”

  “Like he said, a hundred covers a lot of tips.”

  “Did Allie know why it always had to be the sign?”

  “I don’t know. That’s just where he liked to go.”

  “Okay, you mentioned something about speeches. What kind of speeches did he make?”

  Marki scrunched her face, thinking.

  “Not really speeches, maybe—more like pretend. Like if he was a pirate and kidnapped her, he would screw her on all his stolen treasure. She had to act like that made her really hot, you know, like it would be this big turn-on to get screwed on all these hard gold coins.”

  Pollard nodded, encouraging.

  “Like that was his turn-on, to do it on the money?”

  “I guess.”

  Pollard glanced at Holman again, and this time Holman shrugged. Banging on bucks might have been Marchenko’s fantasy, but Holman still couldn’t see planting sixteen million in cash in such a public place. Then he remembered that Richie and Fowler had come home covered in grass and dirt.

  Holman said, “When the cops were here before, did you tell them about Marchenko?”

  Marki looked surprised.

  “Should I have? It was so long ago.”

  “No. I was just wondering if they asked.”

  Holman was ready to leave, but Pollard wasn’t looking at him.

  Pollard said, “Okay, just one more. Do you know how Allie hooked up with this guy?”

  “No, uh-uh.”

  “Did she have a madam or work for an outcall service?”

  Marki screwed up her face again.

  “She had someone looking out for her, but he wasn’t a pimp or anything.”

  Holman said, “What does that mean, someone looking out for her?”

  “It sounds kinda silly. She told me I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone.”

  “Allie’s gone. The statute of limitations ran out on that one.”

  Marki glanced at the nearby tables, then lowered her voice again.

  “Okay, well. Allie worked
for the police. She said she didn’t have to worry about getting in trouble ’cause she had this friend who could make it go away. She even got paid for telling about her clients.”

  This time when Holman glanced at Pollard, Pollard had turned white.

  “Alison was a paid informant?”

  Marki made an uneasy grin and shrugged.

  “She wasn’t getting rich or anything. She told me they had some kinda cap or something on the amount. Every time she wanted some money this guy hadda get it approved.”

  Holman said, “Did she tell you who she worked for?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  Holman looked back at Pollard, but Pollard was still pale. Holman touched her arm.

  “Anything else?”

  Pollard shook her head.

  Holman peeled off another hundred and slipped it into Marki’s hand.

  37

  A DEPRESSED ACTRESS named Peg Entwistle killed herself in 1932 by jumping from the top of the letter H. The letters were fifty feet tall, then and now, and these days the sign stretched some four hundred fifty feet across the top of Mount Lee in the Hollywood Hills. After years of neglect, the Hollywood Sign was rebuilt in the late seventies, but vandals and dickweeds took their toll, so not long thereafter the city closed the area to the public. They surrounded the sign with fences, closed-circuit video cameras, infrared lights, and motion detectors. It was like they were guarding Fort Knox, which wasn’t lost on Holman as he directed Pollard up to the top of Beachwood Canyon. Holman had been going up to the sign since he was a kid.

  Pollard looked worried.

  “You know how to get there?”

  “Yeah. We’re almost there.”

  “I thought we had to go through Griffith Park.”

  “This way is better. We’re looking for a little street I know.”

  Holman still didn’t think they would find anything, but he knew they had to look. Every new discovery they made brought them back to the police, and now they knew a policeman had also been connected to Alison Whitt. If Whitt told her contact officer about Anton Marchenko, then the cops might have known about the Hollywood Sign. Putting the sign together with Marchenko’s fantasy would have inspired them to search the area. Richie might have been part of the search. Holman wondered if Alison Whitt had seen Marchenko in the news. It was likely. She had probably realized her pirate was the bank robber and offered up what she knew to her cop. This had probably inspired her death.

  Pollard said, “These canyons are shit. I can’t get a cell signal.”

  “Do you want to turn around?”

  “No, I don’t want to turn around. I want to check out whether or not this girl was really an informant.”

  “They have some kind of informant hotline you can call?”

  “Don’t try to be funny, Holman. Please.”

  They wound their way up narrow residential streets higher into Beachwood Canyon. The Hollywood Sign grew above them, sometimes visible between houses and trees and sometimes hidden by the mountain. When they reached the top of the ridge, Holman told her to turn.

  “Slow down. We’re coming up on it. You can pull over in front of these houses.”

  Pollard pulled over and they got out of the car. The street ended abruptly at a large gate. The gate was locked and was hung with a large sign readingCLOSED TO THE PUBLIC.

  Pollard looked dubious as she studied the sign.

  “This is your shortcut? It’s closed.”

  “It’s a fire road. We can follow it up around the peak to the back of the sign. This way cuts a couple of miles off going up through Griffith Park. I’ve been coming up here since I was a kid.”

  Pollard tapped the sign,CLOSED.

  “Have you ever obeyed the law?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  Pollard squeezed around the side of the gate. Holman followed, and they started up the road. It was steeper than Holman remembered, but he was older and in lousy shape. He was breathing hard before long, but Pollard seemed to be doing fine. The fire road joined with a paved road, and the paved road grew steeper as it curved around to the back side of the peak. The Hollywood Sign disappeared from view, but the radio tower perched above it steadily grew.

  Holman said, “There’s no way those guys brought all that money up here. It’s too far.”

  “Marchenko brought his girlfriend up here.”

  “She could walk. Would you leave sixteen million laying around in a place like this?”

  “I wouldn’t rob thirteen banks and shoot it out with the cops, either.”

  The road wrapped around the back side of the mountain as they neared the peak, but curved to the front face again, and suddenlly all of Los Angeles spread out before them as far as Holman could see. Catalina Island floated in the mist almost fifty miles to the southwest. The pudgy cylinder of the Capitol Records Building marked Hollywood, and tight clusters of skyscrapers pushed up like islands dotting the cityscape sea from downtown to Century City.

  Pollard said, “Wow.”

  Holman didn’t give a damn about the view. The Hollywood Sign was about thirty feet below them, walled off by a green six-foot chain-link fence that ran along the edge of the road. The radio tower waited at the end of the road, bristling with antennas and microwave dishes and surrounded by yet more fences. Holman waved his hand at the sign.

  “There it is. You still think they buried the money up here?”

  Pollard hooked her fingers into the fence and gazed down at the sign. The downslope was steep. The bases of the letters were too far below them to see.

  Pollard said, “Goddamn. Can you get down there?”

  “Only if we climb the fence, but it isn’t the fence you’d have to worry about. See the cameras?”

  Closed-circuit video cameras were mounted on metal poles dotting the fence by the communications station. The cameras were trained on the sign.

  Holman said, “These cameras watch the sign twenty-four hours a day. They have cameras all along the length of the sign and more cameras down below at the base so they can see it from all angles. They’re also set up with infrared so they can watch it at night, and they have motion sensors.”

  Pollard stood on her toes, trying to see as far down the slope as possible, then squinted up the road at the communications station. A bristle of cameras sprouted at the station, too. Uphill from the road was a steep slope climbing another twenty or thirty feet to the summit. Pollard glanced uphill, then back to the cameras.

  “Who’s on the other end of the cameras?”

  “The Park Service. Rangers are watching this thing twenty-four seven.”

  Pollard looked uphill again.

  “What’s up there?”

  “Weeds. It’s just the top of the hill. There’s some old geologic survey gear, but that’s all.”

  Pollard set off toward the communications station and Holman followed. She stopped from time to time to peer down at the sign.

  She said, “Can we come up from below the sign?”

  “That’s why they have the motion detectors. The cameras at the bottom cover the approaching hillsides.”

  “Damn, it’s steep. Does it flatten out at the base of the letters?”

  “A little, but not much. It’s more like a wide spot in a trail. The sign is pretty much set into the side of the mountain.”

  The communications station was surrounded by an even taller fence. The eight-foot fence was topped by barbed wire and concertina wire. The road they were on dead-ended directly into a gate that cut across the road like a wall. They were boxed in by the steep upslope on one side, the fence on the other, and the gate in front of them. Holman thought it felt like being in a chain-link tunnel.

  Holman said, “There’s supposed to be a helipad on the other side of the antenna, but I’ve never seen it. That’s how they come up if someone triggers the alarms. They send a chopper.”

  Pollard stared up at the surrounding cameras, then gazed back along the road
at the way they had come. She looked disappointed.

  “You were right, Holman. This place is a fucking compound.”

  Holman tried to picture Richie and Fowler and the other two cops coming up here in the middle of the night, but just couldn’t see it. If they suspected Marchenko had hidden the money at or near the sign, where and how would they search? The Hollywood Sign covered a lot of ground and even policemen couldn’t approach the sign without being seen by the Rangers. Holman thought they might have tried telling the Rangers they were conducting an official police investigation, but the chances of that were slim. It would have been a bad move, made even worse by conducting their search at night. The Rangers would have had questions, and stories of the late-night search would have spread beyond the park. If they had tried to bluff their way past the Rangers they would have made their search during the day. Coming out at night meant their search had been a secret.

  Pollard said, “You know what I’m thinking about?”

  “What?”

  “Blow jobs.”

  Holman felt himself flush. He glanced away and cleared his throat.

  “Yeah?”

  Pollard turned in a little circle, spreading her arms at their surroundings.

  “So Marchenko brings her up here to have sex, what did he do, just drop trou for his blow job right here in the road? Cameras are everywhere. Other people might come walking up the road. There isn’t any privacy. This is a lousy place for a blow job.”

  Holman was uncomfortable with Pollard talking about sex. He glanced at her, but couldn’t bring himself to make eye contact. She suddenly turned and stared up the steep slope rising above them.

  “Is there a way up to the top?”

  “Yeah, but nothing’s up there.”

  “That’s why I want to see it.”

  Holman realized her instincts were right. The summit was the only private place on the hill.

  They squeezed between the hillside and the corner of the fence by the communication station, then scrambled up a narrow, steep path. It wasn’t easy going like the fire road. Pollard twice fell to her knees, but pretty soon they crested the summit and reached a small clearing at the top of the hill. The only things up here were the survey equipment Holman remembered and brush. Pollard looked around at the 360-degree view that surrounded them and smiled.