by Robert Crais
There was one call on the answering machine. The auto parts clerk, telling me that if I didn’t want the shifter skirt he knew plenty of guys who did. I turned off the machine, opened the balcony doors, and sat at my desk to wait. Sooner or later Duran would call or send the Eskimo. He’d have to. He lost two men last night and the woman and he wouldn’t like it. Maybe Poitras was right and he’d like it so little he’d just say aw fuck it and send somebody to blow me away. Or maybe he’d just say, Give me the dope now or I’ll kill the kid. Then what would I do?
The air was warm and moist and a small breeze was blowing in from the south. Down the coastline, toward San Pedro and Newport Beach, there were a couple of dark cumulus out over the water. Looking at them, I smiled. Where I grew up, there was much rain of the beating, pounding, falling-in-sheets variety that Southern California almost never enjoys. I missed it. Rain was a Good Thing. If there were more rain, there would be less smog.
I took out the Dan Wesson, checked the load, then laid it on the desk. If the Eskimo came in, maybe he’d think it was one of those fancy office lighters and ignore it.
I settled in and I waited.
Three hours later the phone rang. “Elvis Cole Detective Agency, we find more for less. Check our prices.”
The Eskimo said, “You made a very bad mistake, Mr. Cole.”
“Would it help to say I’m sorry?”
He said, “We know the woman is at your home and we know a man wearing a sidearm is staying with her. Mr. Duran trusted that you would do as you were told, but you didn’t.”
“That couldn’t be helped.”
“We still have what we have.”
“I know that.”
“Mr. Duran still wants his property. Go home now.”
He hung up. No mention of a trade, no demand for an explanation. I called the house. Pike answered on the second ring.
I said, “I just heard from the Eskimo. They know Ellen’s at the house and they know you’re with her.”
There was a pause. “Spotter. They could have found out your address, then put someone up the hill or in an empty house across the canyon.”
“Better keep her away from the windows and the deck.”
“No reason. Guy with the right weapon could have taken us any time he wanted. I get into that with her, we’ll have to pull all the drapes and lock her in the bathroom. Be worse for her.”
“The Eskimo told me to go home. He’s got to have a reason for wanting me there.”
Pike grunted. “Maybe pulling the drapes isn’t so bad an idea after all.”
“Do it without alarming her.”
“Unh-huh.”
“We need anything?”
“Unh-unh.”
“I’m coming in.”
When I got to the house, the drapes were pulled across the sliding glass doors and Pike was making dinner. Ellen was wearing her cleaned Ralph’s clothes and was standing by the counter, watching him cook. She looked uncomfortable, probably because he was in the kitchen and she wasn’t. I put the bag of her fresh clothes and makeup on the stairs.
“What’s for dinner, girls?” Mr. Nonchalance.
Pike said, “Red beans and rice, ham hocks, cornbread.” He was still wearing the sunglasses and the gun.
“He wouldn’t let me help.” Ellen took a sip of iced scotch from a short glass. The glass was sitting in a puddle of condensation. She’d probably been taking little sips all day. Just enough to keep things manageable.
I nodded. “He’s very territorial about his kitchen.”
I pushed under the drapes, opened the glass doors, then reclosed the drapes. I opened the little jalousie window off the powder room, then the kitchen window.
“Good idea,” Pike said. “It was getting stuffy.” It would be easier to hear with the glass open.
Ellen said, “Janet called.”
“Delightful.”
“She was worried.”
I leaned against the powder room doorjamb. The powder room window opened on the front of the house. If anyone came, they’d have to come from the front. The downslope off the back of the house is too steep for any sort of assault.
Ellen sipped the scotch. “She wanted to put the girls on. I said no. I didn’t know what to say. I don’t think I could talk to them without crying.”
I nodded, listening but not listening, straining to hear outside. Ellen didn’t notice.
“Janet said they need me to be strong now, and I don’t know if I can. I’m thirty-nine years old. I don’t want to be weak. I don’t want to be scared.”
“Then don’t be,” Pike said.
Ellen and I both looked at him. He used the flat of a heavy knife to push diced onion into a small bowl. He covered the bowl with Saran Wrap.
“Don’t be,” she repeated.
“This Janet your friend?” Pike said.
“Of course.”
Pike shook his head and put the bowl in the ice box.
The phone rang. I picked it up.
A thick voice with a heavy Mexican accent said,
“The boy wants to speak with his mother.”
“Who is this?”
“Put on the mother.”
I motioned Ellen over, raising a finger to make her pause as I ran to pick up the living-room extension. She looked confused. When I had the phone I mouthed, “Perry.”
She blurted, “Perry?” into the phone as Pike moved to stand by her, watching me.
The harsh voice said, “Listen.”
There was a thump on the line, then a scuffling, whimpering sound, then a long, piercing little-boy shriek that made a clammy sweat leak out over my face and chest and back. Ellen Lang screamed. Pike jerked the phone away from her. She screamed “No!” and slapped at him, clawing to get the receiver back. He pulled her close, holding her tight against him. She hit and clawed and made a deep-in-the-throat gargling sound and got the edge of his hand in her mouth and bit until blood spouted down along her chin and wrist and onto Pike’s shirt. He didn’t pull away.
I shouted something into the phone.
The shrieking didn’t stop, but the voice came back on. It said, “You won’t fuck up again.”
I said, “No.”
“The boy is alive. You can hear him.”
“Yes.” I felt like I was going to choke.
“We call you again.”
I looked at Pike over the dead connection.
29
Ellen thrashed and cried and finally grew still, but even then her pain was a physical presence in the room.
Pike went into the little bathroom, stayed a few minutes, then came out with gauze taped to his hand and his skin orange from Merthiolate. Ellen squeezed her eyes shut when she saw his hand.
Pike said, “Do you have any Valium or Darvon for her?”
I told him no. He slipped out the kitchen door. I poured more scotch and brought it to her. She shook her head. “I’ve been drinking all day.”
“Sure?”
She nodded.
“Want a hug?”
She nodded again, and sighed deeply as I held her. After a while she said, “I want to wash.”
She took the bag of clothes upstairs, and in a few minutes the water began to run. I turned on the evening news with Jess Marlowe and Sandy Hill, Sandy talked about Navy spies in San Diego. Not particularly relevant to Perry Lang unless Duran was smuggling state secrets to the Russkies. But in L.A., anything is possible. The water ran for a long time.
When Ellen came back downstairs she was wearing some of the clothes I’d brought and the white New Balance. Her face looked clean and blank, less vulnerable than at any time since I’d met her. She said something that surprised me. She said, “God, I could use a cigarette.”
I couldn’t see her having ever smoked. “When Joe gets back, I’ll get you some.”
She nodded slightly then shook her head. “No.” She stood next to the TV and crossed her arms. I couldn’t tell if she was looking at me or past me. “I quit alm
ost six years ago. I just stopped. Janet says she goes crazy after about a day, but when I wanted to stop, I just stopped.”
“Tough to do.”
She said, “What did the police say?”
I thought about lying, but couldn’t think of anything good enough to explain why the cops weren’t here or we weren’t there, so I said, “It’s a Special Operations case now.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means the case was taken away from Poitras to be handled by some hotshots downtown.”
“What are they doing?”
“I don’t know. They shut Poitras and me out. They said they might come out to talk to you.”
“When?”
“Later.”
She looked at me calmly. She said, “But what are they doing about … all of this?” She gestured around her.
“I spoke with Joe this morning. Did he tell you anything that happened when I went to the cops?”
She shook her head, so I told her. When I was done she asked if she could have a glass of water. When I came back with it she looked just as she’d looked when I left. As if the idea that somebody on the police force could cave in to political pressure was an everyday and undisturbing event.
She said, “Sergeant Poitras goes along with this?”
“He has to. But he doesn’t like it, and he’s fighting it. He and his lieutenant were downtown this afternoon, trying to find out who’s damming the works.”
She said, “Unh-huh,” and drank the water. When the glass was empty she said, “My older daughter, Cindy, she hates me. She screams that if I were a better wife, her father would be happier.” She said it as if she were telling me she preferred tan shoes to cordovan.
“She’s wrong.”
“I tried being the best wife I could.”
“I know.”
“I tried.”
“There’s some insurance,” I said. “Not a lot. But some.”
She didn’t ask how much.
I sipped some of the scotch I’d poured for her. I said, “Look, I’ll find the dope or where the dope went and who has it and we’ll work something out with Duran. Then we’ll bring Poitras in and put it in his lap, and this will end.”
“But that man, O’Bannon, he said you were supposed to stay away.”
I shrugged.
She nodded and turned away and looked at the books and the figurines and the photos and the dark steel knight’s heraldry that line my shelves. A girlfriend who was a pretty good carpenter built the shelves for me from unfinished redwood. A place for me to keep my junk, she said. The TV sat at about eye level, the stereo beneath it, my books and mementos and treasures on either side. The latex Frankenstein mask was on a Styrofoam head. My junk. Out from the canyon, we could hear the first faint yelps of the coyotes, gearing up for a sing.
I drank more of the scotch but found it sour. I took the glass into the kitchen, threw out the booze, and went back into the living room with a can of pineapple juice.
“Mr. Pike says you read these same books over and over,” Ellen said.
“That’s true.”
She touched different volumes. “I know some of these. I read the histories of King Arthur when I was in college. I worked as a teacher’s aide. I read them to the children when the teachers went on break.”
“I’ll bet you enjoyed that.”
“Yes.” Ellen turned to me from the books. “Was Mr. Pike really a policeman?”
I was impressed. “He must like you. I’ve never known him to tell that to anyone.”
“Then he was.”
“For a while. Pike will never lie to you. You don’t have to doubt anything he says.”
“He says he’s a professional soldier.”
“He has gun shop in Culver City. He owns the agency with me. But sometimes he goes to places like El Salvador or Botswana or the Sudan. So I guess that makes him a part-time professional soldier.”
“Was he in Vietnam with you?”
“Not with me. He was in the Marines. We didn’t meet until after we’d mustered out and were back here in L.A. Pike was riding in a black-and-white. I was working with George Feider. We met on the job. When Pike and the cops parted company, I made the offer.”
“He told me he wasn’t a successful policeman.”
“He wasn’t successful, but he was outstanding. Pike and some of the cops he worked with had what we might call a grave philosophical difference. Guy like Pike, philosophy is all. He rode a black-and-white for three years and for three years he was outstanding. Even splendid. He just wasn’t successful.”
“He likes you quite a bit.”
“That’s the Marine. Marines are all fairies at heart.”
“Did he get those tattoos in Vietnam?”
“Yeah.”
“What for?”
“Ask him.”
“I did. He said I wouldn’t understand.”
“Joe’s got a little credo he lives by. Never back up. That’s what the arrows on his shoulders are for. They point forward. They keep him from backing up.”
She stared at the end of the sofa. “I understand that.”
I finished the pineapple juice and crushed the can. “Don’t let Joe get to you. Life is very simple to him, but it isn’t always the way he’d like it to be. Part of his problem with the cops.”
She nodded but didn’t look any less empty.
“Think of a samurai,” I said. “A warrior who requires order. That’s Pike.”
“The arrows.”
“Yeah. The arrows allow him to impose order on chaos. A professional soldier needs that.”
She thought about it. “And that’s what you are?”
“Not me. I’m just a private cop. I am also the antithesis of order.”
“He said you were a better soldier than he. He said you won a lot of decorations in the war.”
“Ha ha, that Pike. You see what a card that guy is? A million laughs.”
“He said you’d deny it.”
“A scream, that guy.”
“He said that everything of any real value that he’s learned, he’s learned from you.”
“Flip it to channel 11, wouldja?” I said. “I think Wheel of Fortunes on.”
She stared at me for a very long time. She didn’t change the channel. “I can’t be the person I was anymore, can I?”
I gave her gentle eyes. “No.”
She nodded, but probably not to me. “All right,” she said. “I can understand that, too.”
30
When Joe got back he had a bottle of Dalmane and six Valiums. We put out the red beans and rice and cornbread, and ate. Ellen stared at her plate and said, “I’ve never eaten a ham hock before,” so I slit the skin and showed her how to get out the meat.
She ate quietly and completely, finishing what Pike put on her plate. Joe and I drank beer, Ellen had milk. I pointed out a few of the more uproarious ironies of life, but neither Ellen nor Joe showed much in the way of appreciation. I was used to it from Pike.
We finished the meal, did the dishes, then went into the living room. No one said more than five words at a time. I put on a Credence Clearwater album, then went into the entry closet and came back wearing my Groucho Marx nose.
“Appropriate, as always,” Pike said, then went out onto the deck. Ellen smiled once, then looked away. After a while I took off the nose and picked up Valdez Is Coming
I was almost through it when Ellen made a hoarse sighing sound from her end of the couch. When I looked up, her eyes were red and tears dripped down her cheeks. I reached across and touched her leg. She took my fingers and said, “What did they do to make him scream like that?”
Pike stepped in off the deck. I slid across the couch and held Ellen for a while, until she asked for two of the Dalmane and said she would go up to bed. I went up with her and stood at the foot until the Dalmane had done its work, then I shut the light and went down.
Pike said, “I like her.”
“
You told her you were on the cops.”
“I like her a lot.”
I got two Falstaff from the box. We offed all the lights in the house, turned the stereo low, then went out onto the deck. A couple of cars moved through the canyon roads to the south and east, appearing then disappearing behind the houses that dotted the hillside. The coyotes were quiet.
Pike hung his feet off the deck. I joined him. Just like Tom and Huck.
I said, “Duran’s spotter had a good deer rifle, we’d be history.”
“Maybe.”
We sat. Heavy clouds blocked out the moon and most of the stars. You could smell the coming rain in the air. Springsteen sang about tough kids and broken hearts on KLSX.
I said, “Remember the other day, when I said Mort had given himself up?”
“Yes.”
“He didn’t. She did.”
“I know.”
“She’s over the edge right now. Mort, the kid, who she is. She doesn’t have as much self-esteem as a piece of bread.” Pike’s beer can raised, tilted, lowered. “I want her to make it back,” I said.
“Unh-huh.”
I took a pull on my Falstaff. “Does it strike you odd that Duran’s giving me so much time to turn over his dope?”
“It does.”
“Like maybe he knows I don’t have it, but he’s using me to find it for him.”
“Unh-huh.”
“Joe, how the hell can you see at night with the sunglasses?”
“I am one with the night.” Raise, tilt, lower. You never know whether he’s serious. “Duran wants you to find the dope because he doesn’t know how. If he tells his people to find something, all they know how to do is rack ass. That doesn’t get you very far, and maybe eliminates someone with some important information.”
“It would’ve been easier to hire me.”
“Maybe.”
“Only maybe I won’t hire, and I turn it over to the cops.”
“He probably shit himself, thinking about that one.”
