by Robert Crais
“A P B,” I said. “All Points Bulletin. That went out with Al Capone.”
“I don’t want that, either.”
My head throbbed. The muscles along my neck were tight. Pretty soon I’d have knots in the trapezius muscles and sour stomach. “Listen,” I said. “It wasn’t Mort.”
Ellen Lang started to cry. No whimpering, no trembling chin. Just water spilling out her eyes. “Please do something,” she said. She made no move to hide her face.
The cops came back and glanced into the kitchen. Eddie mumbled some more to Simms and headed out to the radio car. Simms stayed with us. “We’re gonna get the detectives in on this,” he said.
Ellen Lang folded up and sat down like she’d just been told the biopsy was positive. “Oh, God, I can’t do anything right.”
I watched her a moment, then took a long breath in through the nose, let it out, and said, “Simms?”
Simms’ eyes flicked my way. Flat, bored eyes. Street-cop eyes.
I brought him aside. “She thinks it was her husband,” I said. “It’s a domestic beef. They’re separated.”
Simms said “Shit” under his breath and called out the front door for Eddie to wait. He stood in the living room, one thick hand on his gun butt and one on his nightstick, looking around the place like he was standing hip deep in dog shit. The older girl came back in, saw her mother crying, and looked disgusted. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Mother.” She went back down the hall. Maybe she wanted to grow up to be Janet Simon.
Ellen Lang cried harder. I went over to her, put my hand on her shoulder, and said, “Stop that” into her ear. She nodded and tried to stop. She did a pretty good job.
Simms said, “All right. Do you want to report anything missing?”
She shook her head without looking at him, either.
“A lot of this stuff is ruined,” he said. “You could maybe file a vandalism claim with the insurance, but only if we file a report, and only if we can’t prove it’s your husband. Okay, even if we forget your husband, the detectives still gotta come out here and file a vandalism report. That’s the insurance company, see?”
“You’re okay, Simms,” I said.
He ignored me. Ellen blew her nose on a little bit of Kleenex and shook her head again. “I’m very sorry for the bother,” she said.
Simms frowned around the room. “Husband, huh?”
Janet Simon said, “Ellen, you should have this for court.” I felt Ellen Lang tighten like a flexed muscle.
“Forget that,” I said.
Simms stood there a second longer, breathing heavily, then nodded and walked out.
Nobody moved for a long time. Then Janet Simon pulled out another cigarette. “You’re a dope.”
Ellen Lang began to tremble. I felt it deep in my chest and up through my arm, a high-strung from-the-lonely-place resonance that left the tips of her collar shaking like leaves in a chill breeze. “You want me to stay?” I asked. “I can bunk on the couch.”
Ellen lifted off her glasses, wiped at the wet around her eyes, and sniffled. “Thank you, no. We’re going to stay the night with Janet.”
I gave Janet a look. “Gosh, I was hoping I could. I’m into pain.” Janet ignored me, but Ellen Lang smiled. It wasn’t much of a smile, but it was real.
I told her I’d be back tomorrow to look over the bills and bank statements and that she should gather them. I let myself out. The chill had a bite to it now and I could smell a eucalyptus from a neighbor’s yard along with the jasmine. There were times when I thought it might be nice to have a jasmine and a eucalyptus to smell. But not always.
6
I woke up just before nine the next morning and caught the tail end of Sesame Street. Today’s episode was brought to us by the letter D. For Depressed Detective. I pulled on a pair of tennis shoes and went out onto the deck for the traditional twelve sun salutes of the hatha-yoga, then segued smoothly to the tai chi, third and eighth cycles, Tiger and Crane work. I started slow the way you’re supposed to, then increased the pace the way you’re not until the tai chi became a wing chun kata and sweat trickled down the sides of my face and my muscles burned and I was feeling pretty good again. I finished in vrischikasan, the second-stage scorpion pose, and held it for almost six minutes.
The cat was waiting in the kitchen. I gave him the big smile and a cheery hello. “Held the scorpion for six minutes,” I said. Proudly.
The cat thought about that, then licked his scrotum. Some people you can never please.
I made us eggs. His with tuna, mine with a couple of shots of Tabasco. We ate in silence. After the meal I phoned General Entertainment Studios.
A young woman’s voice said, “Casting.”
“Patricia Kyle, please.”
“Who’s calling?”
“Elvis Cole.”
“Pardon me?”
“Don’t be cruel,” I said.
“I’m not. I-oh.” A giggle. “ That Elvis. Hold on.”
Patricia Kyle came on the phone, voice loud enough to be heard in Swaziland. “You got me pregnant, you bastard!” That Patricia. What a kidder.
I said, “I need to pump you.”
“Oh, ho!”
“For information.”
“That’s what they all say.” She told me that she would be there until lunch, that there would be a drive-on pass at the main gate, and that I should come by anytime.
“That’s what they all say,” I said. And hung up.
Forty minutes later, showered, dusted, deodorized, and dressed, I was on the GE lot walking toward the casting offices.
GE has one of the few remaining old-time studio lots. Huge gray sound stages packed belly-to-butt with bunkerlike offices, navigable only by a grid of narrow streets usually fouled with the big semis production companies employ to carry cameras and lights and costumes to location. On any given day you could see almost anyone walking those slim tarmac streets. As a tour bus passed I waved and the people waved back. Ah, the land of make-believe.
I went in a door that said Emergency Exit Only and took the first flight of stairs I came to, turned down a short hall and passed seven of the most beautiful women on Earth, strolled past the casting office receptionist like I owned the place, went through a glass door and down another short hall past a man and a woman who were arguing softly, and stopped outside Patricia Kyle’s door. She was on the phone.
I said loudly, “Have the abortion. It’s the only way.” I looked at the man and the woman. “Herpes.” Then a hand yanked me into Patricia Kyle’s office and the door slammed amid a gale of red-faced laughter.
“You nut, that’s my boss!”
“Not for long.”
She picked up the phone and cupped the receiver. “Business. I’ll just be a second.”
I took a seat in a chair beneath a wall-sized poster of Raquel Welch from the movie 1,000,000 Years B.C. Someone had taken a Magic Marker and drawn a voice balloon over her head so that Raquel was saying, “Mess with me, buster, I’ll gut you like a fish!!!”
Patricia Kyle is forty-four years old, five-four and slim the way a female gymnast is slim, all long, lithe muscle and defined curves, with a pretty Irish face framed by curly auburn hair. When we met four years ago she weighed in at one seventy-three and had just gotten out of the worlds worst marriage. Only her ex didn’t see it that way. He’d show up all hours, drunk and stumbling around, knocking over the garbage cans, doing Stanley Kowalski. To prove how much he loved her, he put a brick through the rear window of her BMW and used an ice pick on the tires and that’s when she called me. I took care of it. She dumped the weight and quit smoking and took up Nautilus and started running. She got the job at General Entertainment. Things were looking up.
She apologized into the phone, told whoever it was that GE and the producers really wanted their actor but couldn’t pay more than Top of the Show, that she knew the actor’s wife had just had a baby and so he’d probably want the work and the money, and that he’d be just so right for
the part she really wished he’d do it. She listened, then smiled, said fine, and hung up.
“He’s going to take the role?”
She nodded. “It’s twenty-five hundred dollars for two days work.”
“Yeah, but those guys earn it.”
She laughed. I’ve never heard Patricia giggle. It’s either a smile or a full blown laugh, but nothing in between. I gave her the once-over. “Nice,” I said.
She put a thousand watts out through her teeth. “One-twelve,” she said. “I ran in my first Ten-K last week, AND I’ve got a new boyfriend.”
“He’s just after your mind.”
“God, I hope not.”
“Tell me everything you know about an agent named Morton Lang.”
She pushed back in her chair. “He used to work for ICM, I think, then he left about a year ago to start his own agency. He calls maybe once a month, sometimes more, to push a client or ask about upcoming roles.”
“Talk to him anytime in the past week or so?”
“Unh-unh.” She leaned forward, gave me dimples and an eager look. “What’s the dirt?”
I tried to give her the sort of look I’d always imagined Mike Hammer giving to dames and broads who got out of line. “It’s the game, doll. You know that.”
Her left eyebrow arched. “Doll?”
I spread my hands. “Let’s pretend you didn’t commit this major gaff by asking about a client, and continue. Mort had business with a producer named Garrett Rice.”
“Garrett Rice. Yuck.”
“Crepey skin, lecherous demeanor, sour body odor. What’s not to like?”
She looked at me as if she were trying to think of a concise way to say it. “When you’re in high school, and you first start thinking you’d like to work in this business and you tell your parents and they freak out, they’re freaking out because they’re thinking of men like Garrett Rice.”
“Can you think of any reason why he might need a bodyguard?”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Nope. Guy named Cleon Tyner. He’s pretty good. Not world class, but okay in a bar. Somebody put a couple of marks on Mr. Rice and scared him. Ergo, Cleon.”
Patricia thought about it, then laid a finger alongside her nose. “I’ve heard there’s some of this.”
“Cocaine.”
“Just talk. I don’t know for sure. Garrett has this reputation. He came on to one of the girls here by offering her a toot, that kind of thing.”
I saw him closing the drawer, closing the briefcase. “Mort, too?”
She looked surprised. “I wouldn’t think so.”
“Okay, that’s Garrett’s problem. Mort ever mention any friends, anyone he might’ve been close to?”
“Not that I remember. I can ask the other people here. I’ll call a friend at Universal Casting and he can ask around over there.”
I unfolded the 8?10 of Kimberly Marsh. Patricia looked at it, turned it over and read the resume, then shook her head. “Sorry.”
“If Mort Calls, will you try to get a number and let me know?”
“You going to tell me what this is about?”
“Mort’s peddling government secrets to the Arabs.”
She stuck her tongue at me.
“Tell me the truth,” I said. “Do I look like John Cassavetes twenty years ago?”
“I didn’t know you twenty years ago.”
Everyone’s a comedian. I stood up and went to the door.
“It’s too bad about Mort,” she said. “I remember when he was with ICM. He was well-placed. He had a fair clients list.” She leaned back, putting her feet on her desk. She was wearing dark blue Espadrilles and tight Jag jeans. “You only start dealing with a Garrett Rice when you’re scared. It’s the kiss of death. A guy like Garrett Rice, he rents space over at TBS but he couldn’t get a deal with Warners or Columbia. Nobody wants him around.” She frowned. “I met Mort twice maybe a year and a half ago when he was with ICM. He seemed like a nice man.”
“Yeah, they’re all nice men. This business is rife with nice men.”
“You’re a cynic, Elvis.”
“No, I’ve just never met anyone in this business who believed in anything worthwhile and was willing to go the distance for it.”
“Oh, foo,” she said. That’s one of the reasons I like her, she said things like “oh, foo.” She slapped her desk, then got up and came around and punched my arm. “Hey, when are you going to come to the house for dinner?”
“Then I’ll have to meet your boyfriend.”
“That’s the idea.”
“What if I don’t approve?”
“You’ll lie and tell me he’s the greatest thing in the world.”
I squeezed her butt and walked out. “It works like that, doesn’t it.”
7
I pulled up at Ellen Lang’s house at ten minutes before noon. She came to the door in cutoffs, bare feet, and a man’s white-with-blue-stripes shirt tied at the waist. Her hair was done up in a knot. “Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, God.”
I smiled serenely. “To some, yes.”
“I wasn’t expecting you. I’m not dressed.”
I went past her into the living room. The books and records were back on their shelves and most of the furniture was righted and in some semblance of order. There was a staple gun and packaging tape by the big couch, which was still upside down. Too heavy for her. I whistled. “You do all this by yourself?”
“Of course.”
“Without Janet?”
She flushed and touched her hair where it was wispy out from the knot. “I must look horrible.”
“You look better than yesterday. You look like someone who’s been working hard and had her mind off her troubles. You look okay.”
She flushed some more and turned back toward the dining room. Half a sandwich was laid out on a paper towel on the table. It looked like a single slice of processed chicken loaf on whole wheat, cut diagonally. There was half a Fred Flintstone glass of skim milk beside it.
She said, “I want to apologize to you for last night. And to thank you for what you did.”
“Forget it.”
She looked away, picking at the knot that held the shirttails together. “Well, you came all the way out here and I was so silly.”
“No, you weren’t. You were upset. You had a right to be. It would have been smart to keep the cops but you didn’t and now it’s past, so forget it.”
She nodded, again without looking at me. Habit. As if she had never been quite strong enough to carry on a conversation in person. “Why did you let the police leave?”
“You wanted them to.”
“But you and Janet didn’t.”
“I don’t work for Janet.” Ellen Lang went very red. “When you hire me I work for you. That means I’m on your side. I act in your behalf. I respect your confidences. My job doesn’t mean cribbing off what the cops dig up. So if you don’t want the cops then I’ll try to live by that.”
She looked at me, then remembered herself and glanced away. “You’re the first private investigator I’ve ever met.”
“The others aren’t as good looking.”
A little bit of a smile came to one side of her face, then left. Progress. She turned and handed me a small stack of white and green envelopes from the table. “I found these by Mort’s desk.” There were phone bills, some charge receipts from Bullocks and the Broadway and Visa, and some gas receipts from Mobil. All neatly sorted.
“There’s only two phone bills here,” I said.
“That’s all I found.”
“I want everything for the last six months, and the checkbook and the passbooks and anything from your broker if you have one, including ILA accounts and things like that.”
“Well, like I said-” The awkward look was back.
“Mort handled all the money.”
“I’m so bad with figures. I’m sorry.”
“Unh-huh.” I pointed at the sandwich. “Why don’t you fi
x me one of those, only put some food on mine, and when I come back we can talk.”
I went back through the living room and down the hall to the master. The mattress had been pulled back onto the box spring. The clothes and personal items had been picked up and folded into neat piles on the bed, his and hers, outer garments and underwear, all waiting to go back into the drawers. The drawers were back in the chest and dresser, and the room, like the rest of the house, looked in order. She must have started at 3 A.M.
Two shoe boxes and the Bekins box were on Mort’s desk, filled with envelopes and file folders and actors’ resumes and more of those glossy 8?10’s. On the back of each 8?10 someone had stamped The Morton Lang Agency in red ink. I went through his rolodex, pulled cards for the clients I recognized, and put them in my pocket. In the second shoe box I found registration papers for a Walther. 32-caliber automatic pistol purchased in 1980. Well, well. I stood up and looked at the room but didn’t see the gun sticking out of any place conspicuous. Halfway down the Bekins box, under a three-year-old copy of Playboy, I found an unframed diploma from Kansas State University in Morton Keith Lang’s name. It was water-stained. The bills and receipts and bank stuff were near the bottom of the box. Grand total search time: eight minutes. Maybe the box had hidden from Ellen when she came into the room. I have socks that do that.
When I got back to the dining room, a full-grown sandwich sat on a black china plate atop a blue and gray pastel place mat. The sandwich was cut into two triangles, each sporting a toothpick with an electric blue tassel. Four orange slices and four raspberries and a sprig of parsley offset the tassels. A water goblet sat to the right of the plate. To the left was a matching saucer with sweet pickles and pitted olives and Tuscan peppers, and a little gold fork to spear them with. A blue and gray linen napkin was rolled and peaked and sitting above the plate.
Ellen Lang sat at her place, staring out through the glass doors into her backyard. When she heard me she turned. “I put out water because I didn’t know what else you might want. We have Diet Coke or milk or Pabst beer. I could make coffee if you’d like.”
The table was perfect. “No, this is fine,” I said. “Thank you.”
