The Four Last Things (Simeon Grist Mystery)

by Timothy Hallinan

  “I'd love to sit down,” I said. “Thanks for asking. Muchas gracias, Roberto.”

  “De nada, señor.” He went back toward the door.

  “Greasers,” Ambrose Harker said, pulling a complicated Swiss Army knife out of his jacket pocket and paring his nails with it. “You want to know what's wrong with this city? Greasers.”

  “It's been a terrific lunch,” I said, getting up again. “I'll send you a bill for the mileage.”

  “Sit down,” Harker said, still working on his nails.

  I stood above him. “I didn't like you on the phone,” I said. “I don't like you in person. Why on God's green earth would I want to eat lunch with you?”

  “Money,” Harker said, dangling the Swiss Army knife back and forth like a hypnotist. “Money, money, money.”

  I didn't sit down, but I didn't leave either. One of the reasons I was pretending to look for Mrs. Yount's cat was that I was uncomfortably short on the rent. “How much money?”

  “Enough to overcome your scruples.”

  “Scruple you,” I said. “It's going to be a nice sunset if the clouds clear.”

  “They won't. You've driven all the way from Topadoa or wherever the hell it is. It's going to rain on you going back. You've got a hangover. Wouldn't you like a beer?”

  I took a breath. “Well,” I said, sliding back into the booth, “since you put it that way.”

  Harker rubbed a hand across his chin and I heard whiskers bristle. He gestured for a waiter and I ordered a Beck's; they didn't have Singha. While we waited for my medication, I looked at him.

  He looked like a cop: in fact, more than anything else in my fractured frame of reference he conjured up William Burroughs' Thought Police. Thirty-five to thirty-eight, spare and snaky thin, a taut, high-boned face, skin drawn tighter than a snare drum, clear blue eyes, and a jutting chin. He had a bony, possibly broken nose, an angular Adam's apple, a flat-top, and thin, muscular wrists that stuck out from cuffs that were half an inch too short. He seemed big somehow, although I had the feeling that he was shorter than I was. For a man who looked as though his nails might usually be dirty, he sure put a lot of effort into them. He'd started on his left hand.

  A burst of disc-jockey laughter, hearty, abandoned, and insincere, greeted a disc-jockey joke at the bar as Roberto put a cold bottle of Beck's in front of me. I waved away the glass, asked for another beer in three minutes, and upended the green bottle into my mouth. Harker watched with something that would have passed for envy in a less abstemious man, put the red knife down, and sipped at his half-empty club soda. It had a crushed wedge of lime floating on top of it.

  “I wonder what they used to do with all those limes,” I said after I'd knocked back half the beer. “It's like mesquite.”

  “I don't understand,” he said. “What's like mesquite?”

  “Before people stopped drinking. Now everybody has a lime in his bubble water. Look around. Half the poor souls in this room are kicking the DT's with lime and carbonation.” He took a gulp from his. “What did they do with all those limes before?”

  “What's that got to do with mesquite? Mesquite's a wood, isn't it?”

  “It's the wood,” I said. “Try to get a piece of fish that hasn't been cooked over mesquite. Thank you, Roberto,” I said, as Roberto plunked another Beck's in front of me. “Momentito.” I drained the first and handed it to him. “If half the mesquite-grilled food we eat in L. A. is really cooked on mesquite, there must be acres of mesquite, forests of mesquite, hundreds of thousands of square miles of mesquite somewhere. Have you ever been in a mesquite forest?”

  “No,” he said shortly.

  “Neither have I. Neither, I'd be willing to bet, has anyone else in this appalling room. So where's it all come from?”

  He took a disapproving sip of his club soda. “Do you really think this is interesting?” he said.

  “It'll do until you say something that is.”

  He smiled wolfishly and I could hear spit bubbles popping in his mouth. He reached into a pocket and his clothes rustled. That was why he seemed big: all his sounds were amplified. He tossed a photo on the tabletop and it made a plopping sound. His blue eyes bored into mine.

  “Sally Oldfield,” he said. “I want you to follow her.”

  I picked up the photograph. “Nice face. A fine, inviting overbite. What's she done? And have you got any identification?”

  Crisp rustling this time, as he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a card. He dropped it, with predictably ear-splitting results, next to my bottle. Ambrose Harker, it read, chief of security, Monument records. Then some phone numbers.

  “She's stealing money,” he said. “And she's leaking our release schedule to the competition. We also believe she's helping other labels get in touch with our talent.”

  “Why would they want to do that?”

  “To steal them. To sign them, to take them away from us. Do you know what I mean?”

  The phrase had sharpened my headache and refreshed my memory. It had run through our phone conversation like an operatic recitative.

  “You ask that more often than anyone I've ever met. I'll bet you make the waitress show you her order pad before she goes to the kitchen.”

  “Understanding is important,” he said, as though he were reciting dogma. Dogma silences me: what can you say to someone who's just told you that, in essence, he's signed away his free will? Fortunately, I was spared the necessity of thinking of anything to say by the sight of Roberto, standing above us with pad in hand. Harker ordered first with the air of someone who usually orders first. He said, very slowly and clearly, and more loudly than was strictly necessary, that he wanted a chef's salad, making absolutely sure that Roberto understood he didn't want any ham, and I ordered a burger.

  “Onions, si or no?” Roberto said.

  “Si, and then si again,” I said.

  “You mean two onions?” Harker said.

  “Let it rest,” I said. “And another beer.”

  “On the way,” Roberto said cheerfully, already heading for the kitchen.

  “You're going to get two slices of onion,” Harker predicted gloomily. “You just watch.”

  “I've faced more compelling crises. If I do get two, I'll give you one.”

  “You certainly take a careless approach to life.”

  “Mr. Harker,” I said, “it's my life. I'll be careful with yours, okay?”

  “Just don't be careless with Sally Oldfield.”

  My beer looked very good all of a sudden and I drained it. Harker passed a hand over the back of his neck. His hair crackled. “You have to stay with her,” he said. “I don't tolerate slip-ups.”

  “Yipes,” I said. There was a long pause. “Why don't you fill me in?”

  “She's in A&R,” he said.

  “Here's your big chance. I don't understand.”

  “Artists and repertoire. The people at a label whose job it is to look for talent. She was hired because she had a good background in underground music,” he said distastefully. “The kind of bands that play in the little clubs.”

  “Head-banging,” I said. “Heavy metal, mohawks, chain saws, and G-strings.”

  He didn't ask me what I meant this time. “Exactly,” he said. “It's important in music to be, um, current. If bands that play heads of cabbage are what sells, you look for bands that play heads of cabbage.” Roberto or somebody put another beer on the table and I picked it up.

  “You drink too much,” he said.

  “But my heart is pure. So what's she doing wrong?”

  He eyed the beer and hefted his own glass. It was empty. No one scurried to refresh it. He put it down again and sipped a bit dolefully from a glass of water. ”A lot of money, cash money, flows through A&R,” he said. “These kids in these shit bands, they've never seen a buck. Let's say someone from Monument shows up at one of these places and hands them a thousand bucks not to sign with anyone else. They don't. Or maybe they do.”


  “And if they do, the money sets up housekeeping in the debit column.”

  “There's virtually no way to recover it. These musicians, they're using drugs and, um, drinking. If you confront them they say they've never seen anyone from Monument, and who can prove the contrary?”

  “Who indeed? How much money do you think?”

  “More than thirty-one thousand dollars of Monument's operating capital.” He lifted his arm, and a moment later Roberto slapped another beer on the table.

  “For me,” Harker said, turning a shade of red that would have interested a cardiologist. He picked up the Swiss Army knife and slammed it onto the table. ‘Perrier for me, okay? Do you understand?”

  “Comin’ up,” Roberto said, and disappeared forever.

  “What about the rest of it? Release schedules and all that?” I shoved my water across the table at him as a pacifier.

  “Schedules are everything,” he said, taking a dour sip. “You can sell two million copies of an album by putting it on the market at the right time, or half a million by doing it wrong. Let's say you've got an album by a middle-selling band, someone like, oh, who knows, the Dranos. Put it out in a week when nobody else is releasing, and you'll do okay, maybe a few million units. Put the Dranos out against Michael Jackson, you're looking at returns. And the label behind Michael Jackson picks up most of the few million units you were counting on.”

  “Big bucks,” I said.

  “Five or six million dollars. As you would say, big bucks.”

  A waiter we'd never seen before put some food down in front of us. Harker waved his glass ineffectually at the waiter's retreating back and then glanced down at my plate. “See?” he said, by way of revenge, “no onion at all. You have to be more precise.”

  “Who gave you my name?” I asked.

  The blue eyes came up to meet mine. “What's the difference?” he said.

  “I like to know who my friends are. Or my acquaintances, at any rate. Why? Is that a hard question?”

  “Sally Oldfield, that's your only business.” His eyes wrestled mine to the mat, won, and came up for more.

  “Not until I say it is,” I said without looking away. “And while we're at it, why don't you go to low beams?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It's considered polite to dim your headlights when approaching an oncoming vehicle. Anyway, if you want me to remember anything you're saying, you've got to stop trying to outstare me. It makes me feel like I'm arm-wrestling.”

  The waiter reappeared with a plate covered by a silver dome. He put it down on my right and whisked the dome off to reveal about seventy-five slices of onion.

  “Hah,” Harker said in a vindicated voice.

  The waiter winked at me and ignored Harker's waving hand.

  “You,” Harker said. “You. Waiter. Goddammit, I'm trying to get another Perrier. Perrier, don't you understand English? Perrier, Perrier, Perrier,” he said three times in French. He hit the table with the knife every time he said it, three amplified whacks. It even cut through the disc jockeys' egos; some of them actually looked at us.

  The waiter looked down at my beer and then at me. I nodded and he headed for the bar.

  “You sure know how to handle help,” I said.

  “Nobody speaks English anymore. This goddamned city is full of immigrants.”

  “America is full of immigrants,” I said. “I'm an immigrant. You're an immigrant. Now, why don't you tell me who recommended me?”

  “Skippy Miller,” he said sulkily, taking a browser's bite of his salad.

  “Why is that such a big deal?”

  “You're for hire, right? That's what you do. Hire yourself out. Why should you care who gave me your name?”

  “Listen. You may have two last names to my one, but that doesn't mean I'm going to go all buttery just because you offer me a job. I like to know what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, and who I'm doing it for. What did Skippy tell you about me?”

  “He said that you'd helped him out when his series was in its first year and one of the scandal papers had gotten something on him that could have ruined everything. He didn't tell me what it was.”

  “He wouldn't,” I said. Skippy was a big, fat, middle-aged actor with an extremely sloppy private life. Not a bad guy, but a messy one. “What else did he say?”

  “That you were bright.”

  “How dangerous is this going to be?”

  “Dangerous? She's a girl.”

  “So are black widows.”

  He was looking around the room, trying to catch the waiter's eye. He snapped his fingers and gestured impatiently at the table. “She's not a spider,” he said.

  I sighed and palmed his card. “Enjoy your salad, but try not to get too festive,” I said, sliding across the seat of the booth. “People might think you're a disc jockey.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I'd say I want to wash my hands, but you might misunderstand. I have to go to the john, okay? You can catch up on your nails while I'm gone.”

  The telephone was in the men's room. I wanted to make sure that Harker was really Harker. First I called Skippy and got a woman on his service who knew me. Skippy, she said, was on a one-week retreat someplace near Big Sur and wouldn't be back for six days. Then I called the private number Harker had given me. No one else ever answered it, he said. It rang eleven times before I hung up and called the main number of Monument Records, which he'd said I was never to call.

  I asked for Ambrose Harker's office and was put through. Mr. Harker, I was told, was at lunch.

  “This is Clyde Barrows,” I said, trying for a drawl. “I'm Mrs. Harker's brother. Do you know where he's eating?”

  “Does Mr. Harker know you're in town, Mr. Barrows?”

  “Ackshully, me and Bonnie, that's the little woman, just got in from Oklahoma. We're going to Singapore on a four-o'clock plane. So we'll either say hi at lunch or not at all. Be a shame to miss old Ambrose.”

  “I've never heard anyone call him old Ambrose,” she said in a pleased voice.

  “Hell, honey, we all call him that. Man was thirty-nine when he was born.”

  “If he was born,” she said. “Don't tell him I said that.”

  “Your lips to God's ears.”

  “Thanks. The reservation was for twelve-thirty at Nickodell's on Melrose. Do you know where that is?”

  “Honey, even the French, may they all go to heaven and never throughout all eternity meet anyone who isn't French, know where Melrose is. Think there'd be room for us at the table?”

  “I don't know,” she said thoughtfully. “The reservation was for two.”

  “Well, we'll just pull up some chairs and squat for a while. If you can't eat squattin’, the food ain't no good, as Bonnie always says.” I had a feeling I'd gone too far.

  I was wrong. “Order the chicken salad,” she said. “And have a nice squat.”

  I hung up and went back into the restaurant. Even from fifteen feet away, Ambrose Harker looked mad. On the table in front of him were three full glasses of Perrier. With lime.

  Chapter 3

  On the second day of my surveillance, I burglarized her car.

  It couldn't have been much easier. The security guard watching over Monument Records' underground parking lot was a dozing fat man. Sleepy eyelids flicked in my direction as I walked by, and for a moment I thought he was going to establish a personal best by getting up three times in a single day. I jingled my keys over my head and grinned at him, and he settled back into a torpor that would have made a giant sloth look like Ralph Nader.

  I already knew what the car looked like, an Oldsmobile Cutlass in an institutional shade of gray, not at all what I would have expected after her rainbow wardrobe. It opened as gratefully as a Catholic at her final confession.

  The car was as spotless as a martyr's conscience: the Immaculate Conception by General Motors. For the first time, I got suspicious of Sarah Marie Theresa Oldfield. In L.A., most people's
cars are full of junk: wads of used Kleenex, bills they haven't paid yet, McDonald's coupons, the detritus of a life spent largely on wheels. If this Oldsmobile had been a time capsule, archaeologists would have concluded that no one lived there. It was a cipher.

  The rain was threatening a return engagement, so I went back to Alice and endured the radio. People told me I could consolidate my bills with a quick and easy loan and I laughed. Other people invited me to stash my parents in various rest homes; elderly parents are an awkward intrusion into the Southern California life-style. I thought about dragging my profane and politically radical parents, kicking, screaming, and cursing me inventively, into a rest home, and laughed again. About the only thing that wasn't funny, if you didn't count the disc jockeys, was the music. It had all the verve and variety of a sheet of stamps.

  Sally came out at precisely one-twenty. The rain had given up on L.A. and gone east to give the desert a hard time. Traffic was flowing. I managed to muscle my way into it in time to watch the light at Gower and Fountain turn red just as she jumped once again into the white Corvette.

  I looked left. I looked right. Then I stopped looking at anything but the stoplight. An LAPD black-and-white cruised in a stately manner through the intersection, heading east on Fountain. The hell with it. I knew where Oldfield and friend were going anyway.

  The Sleepy Bear Motel was doing its usual landmark business in midday quickies. Mr. Needle-nose's Corvette was in its usual parking space. It wasn't raining, so the usual bum wasn't in his usual phone booth. I grabbed my usual space and settled into my usual wait. My eyelids sagged into their usual half-mast position. God, surveillance was exciting.

  Someone rapped on the window. I looked up to see a tired-looking Chicana peering in at me. She was wearing a red dress that somehow managed to be both low-cut and high-cut.

  “Hi, handson,” she said. “You wan’ a date?”

  I lifted my arm and checked my watch, a complicated electronic affair given me for my birthday by my ex-girlfriend, Eleanor. It told me the time, the date, the day of the week—everything but the humidity. “I've already got one,” I said. “November eleven.”