by Teri White
Finally Perry stopped in front of a three-story gingerbread monster that was badly in need of a paint job, as well as a dozen or so new windows. “She lives here, I’m pretty sure.”
Gar handed him a five-spot. “Thanks.”
“Hey, thank you.” He grinned once more and held up one hand as if swearing an oath. “No drugs.” Then he whipped around and took off like a bullet.
Gar watched him go, then sighed and started toward the front door.
Tammi was not especially happy to be found.
She actually seemed to like living in a filthy room on the second floor of the run-down house in Venice. She shared the room with another hard-eyed young girl, who looked as if her grip on things was slipping even faster than Tammi’s. But since Gar hadn’t been hired to find that girl, he didn’t pay much attention to her.
Tammi sat cross-legged on the bare mattress that was the only piece of furniture in the room. She had a can of beer between her knees and a joint in one hand. This particular evening, she wasn’t wearing a party dress, either in pink or yellow, but only an old T-shirt with a picture of Tom Petty on the front. Gar wasn’t altogether sure that she had anything on below the shirt, so he kept his gaze at eye level.
Her eyes were coldly amused as she studied him, head to toe, and then back again to his face. “You’re the best they could do, huh?”
“I guess so,” Gar said with a shrug. “But I found you, right?”
She conceded that with a small grimace and then took a long swallow from the can of generic beer. “So what happens next?”
“I’d like to take you home.”
“Real fucking polite, aren’t you?” Both girls snickered. “What if I prefer not to do that?”
“Well, I won’t drag you.”
“Good.”
He smiled. “But I will have to tell the cops where you are and that you’re only sixteen. No matter how much they don’t care about one more runaway brat, once they’ve been officially notified about you, the law will have to step in. After all, your father is a pretty important man.”
“Right. Well, fuck you, mister.”
Gar dismissed that with another smile. “Everybody has to earn a living.”
She took a hit from the joint and then passed it over to her silent friend. “Yeah, man, that’s just what I’m trying to do.”
“Hey, you’re a former honor student, right? A smart girl like you should be able to make her way in life without spreading her legs for the tourists.”
She did not respond to that.
He glanced at his Timex. “Getting late, honey.”
“So what you’re saying here is that I can choose you or the cops.”
“That’s pretty much it, yeah.”
She chose him. Reluctantly, and with a lot of dirty words tossed in his direction.
Gar smoked a cigarette and waited as she gathered together a few things—a pair of jeans, some shorts that she pulled on much to his relief, and another T-shirt. A small leather beaded pouch that probably held her stash. And, with a glance his way, a foil packet of condoms.
At least she practiced safe sex.
Gar just looked bored as she displayed the rubbers, which seemed to disappoint her.
Neither of them spoke again until they were in his car and headed for Brentwood. She leaned against the passenger door and stared at him. “So this is how you earn your daily bread, huh?”
“This is pretty much it.”
“Why?”
He just shrugged.
“Doesn’t it make you feel bad that everybody thinks you’re a real prick?”
“I spent years working as a cop,” he replied. “I’m used to that.”
“I’ll bet,” she muttered. “Don’t you even care about why a person might have done what she did?”
“Run away, you mean?”
He sped through a yellow light. “I care. Sort of. But, see, I don’t allow myself to get all tangled up in heavy philosophical issues like that.”
“Sure. You used to be a cop, right?”
He couldn’t help smiling a little at that. Sometimes these kids surprised him with how smart they could be. Except, of course, when it came to their own lives. Then they got real dumb.
The conversation seemed to die off at that point, probably from a lack of motivation on either side.
The house in Brentwood was dark, of course. Apparently nobody was sitting up nights worrying about the girl. Gar parked in the circular driveway and they both got out. “This really sucks,” Tammi said as they walked to the door.
“I’m sorry,” Gar said. “But maybe it’ll all work out better this time.” He pressed the doorbell.
She snorted in disbelief.
It took several minutes, but finally a light went on inside, and then the door opened. McClure himself stood there, tying a sash around his midnight-blue silk robe. “Oh, it’s you,” he said to Gar. Then he spotted Tammi, who was hanging back. “You found her a lot quicker than anybody did before.”
“That so?” Gar gave the girl a slight push forward.
“Hello, Tammi,” her father said. “Your mother has been worried sick about you.”
“I’ll bet.”
McClure sighed. “Go to your room now. We’ll talk about this in the morning.”
“Sure. The way we always talk, right?” She turned and looked at Gar one last time. “Prick.” Then she ran up the stairs and out of sight.
Gar waited and then, when McClure remained silent, he said, “You’ll get a bill.”
McClure nodded. “Itemized, of course.”
“Of course.”
Gar dragged himself back to his car. Another happy family reunited. This work was so goddamned rewarding.
Item: one daughter, returned.
He couldn’t wait to get home to his girlfriend and his dog.
7
His dog was waiting for him.
His girlfriend wasn’t.
It was just after dawn by the time Gar walked into the house, and the first thing he saw was that the red light was on over the darkroom door. That meant Mickey was still at work developing and printing her pictures from the night before.
They had been living together for almost a year now, he and Mickey Duncan. Mickey was a photographer, one of that oft-cursed breed of ruthless paparazzi who stalked the celebrities of Tinseltown. Their constant hope was to catch one of the beautiful people at a particularly humiliating or salacious moment, capture the instant on film, and then sell the picture for a lot of money. Although he knew absolutely nothing about the business, it hadn’t taken Gar very long to realize that Mickey was one of the best in the field. And while he wasn’t entirely sure that what she did was a really necessary profession, he did figure that if you were going to do it at all, you might as well be very good.
He gazed glumly at the warning red light for a moment, dismissing his vague notion of grabbing a little early-morning fun in the sack. Even a man his age could, when properly inspired, surprise himself. But today he wasn’t going to get the chance. So what to do? He was tired, but hunger won out over weariness. “Come on, Spock,” he said to the small Boston terrier waiting expectantly at his feet. “I guess it’s just you and me for breakfast.”
The dog thought that was just fine, which was one of the main reasons for having him around.
The telephone-message light on his business line was flashing as he walked into the kitchen. After a mere moment of consideration, he decided to ignore the urgent blinking until after he’d eaten.
Instead of breakfast, he opted to have dinner, which he seemed to have missed the night before. A quick search of the refrigerator revealed only a bowl of leftover spaghetti and some tuna fish salad. He tossed a mental coin once and then a couple more times until it finally came up heads for spaghetti. The glass bowl went directly into the microwave. During the three minutes and thirty seconds that it took to heat through, Gar buttered a couple of slices of wheat bread, sprinkled on some garlic salt,
and slid them into the toaster oven. All the while, he worked at studiously ignoring the relentlessly blinking message light. A Diet Coke—in a glass bottle, because he hated the taste of plastic or aluminum—completed the meal. Everything went onto a tray, which he carried, one-handed, out to the deck. He liked having a view of the Pacific as he ate.
The house belonged to Mickey, of course. No cop could afford a place like this—if he was honest, anyway. The place was a souvenir of her very early, very brief marriage to a soap-opera star. Once, just after he’d moved in here with Mickey, Gar had tuned in to the afternoon drama, hoping to catch a glimpse of the ex. He looked quite ordinary. Ordinary, at least, for a soap-opera doctor/sex symbol who was suspected of trying to kill his rich wife by poisoning her with a strange South American drug.
As he ate, Gar watched a pair of gulls play tag against the blue sky. Spock sat at his feet, hopefully watching each forkful of spaghetti.
Gareth Sinclair thought of himself as a happy man, at least at moments like this. He could watch the ocean, his leg wasn’t hurting too much, and Mickey was working nearby. He pretty much had it all. Or at least as much as a pensioned-off old cop could expect to have.
The main thing was not to question any of this. Don’t ask why they had found one another or why Mickey loved him. Don’t ask. Just accept it and keep on being happy. After all, what was so hard about being happy?
But even as he finished the spaghetti and garlic toast, feeding an occasional bit to the dog, the flashing light of the answering machine still occupied a corner of his mind. The message that was waiting might have been perfectly innocent, of course. An old buddy from the department who wanted to meet for a beer. Some asshole peddling insurance or aluminum siding. Hell, maybe he’d won the lottery.
None of the idle speculation fooled him at all. He knew damned well what kind of message was waiting on the machine. Somebody had lost a child and they wanted him to find it.
Gar sighed and set the plate down onto the flagstone. There was nothing left on it but a little sauce and some crumbs, but the dog began to lick eagerly anyway.
“No wonder that animal is fat.”
He turned and saw Mickey standing in the doorway. It was, as always, a minor revelation. After his wife’s death from breast cancer, Gar hadn’t really planned on getting into a new relationship. Face it—he wasn’t exactly a handsome young stud. No soap-opera star. And although he knew that it was a pretty sexist attitude, Gar was not willing to settle for what he thought he might be able to get: either a plump and kindly widow of his own age, or a too-thin, too-tan, too-desperate tennis-playing divorcee. What else could he expect? It simply never occurred to him that a twenty-five-year-old might come into the picture. Especially a beautiful, talented twenty-five-year-old.
“I hate eating alone,” he said, justifying sharing his meal with a dog.
“Poor thing. A good woman would be waiting for you when you came home, right?”
“Sure,” Gar said. “With a cold drink and a hot meal. And an eager libido.”
“Libido?” she said. “Have you been reading the dictionary again?”
“Ha-ha.”
She smiled quickly and then nodded back toward the kitchen. “Did you see that your message light is flashing?”
“I saw.” He picked up the plate and started for the house. As he passed Mickey, she stretched up to plant a quick kiss on his cheek. “I was thinking that maybe I won the lottery, and they’re calling to tell me the good news.”
“They don’t call you, dummy, you have to call them. But I suppose anything is possible,” she added doubtfully.
They both went into the kitchen. Gar stuck the plate, bowl, and fork into the dishwasher. He loved all the gadgets in this house.
Except for the answering machine.
He took the cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one.
Mickey made a face and ostentatiously switched on a small fan. The whirling blades blew smoke right back at him. He didn’t mind.
Gar leaned against the counter, smoking and looking at Mickey, admiring her ash-blond hair, which was cut short for practicality, making her look even younger than she was. Especially when, like now, she was wearing an Indiana Jones T-shirt and a pair of baggy shorts.
Mickey started to make a glass of instant iced tea. As she stirred the brown granules into tap water, she frowned at him. “That message has been there all night. You going to check it or not?”
“Anybody ever tell you that you’re a slave-driving bitch?” he muttered.
“Dozens of men have said that,” she replied, dropping ice cubes into the glass. “They might be right.”
Gar gave up. He reached out to punch the “play” button on the answering machine. The kitchen was quiet as they both listened to the voice on the tape. Gar scribbled a phone number on the memo pad, then looked up, frowning. “I should know that name, right?” he said. “It sounds familiar.”
She swallowed tea. “Saul Epstein? I should hope it sounds familiar. Vanguard Studios?”
The name clicked into place in his memory. “Oh, right. Movies.”
She frowned. “I wonder what he wants.”
Gar sucked up cigarette smoke. “What does anybody want with me?” he asked after exhaling. “He must have misplaced a kid.”
“Saul Epstein?” she said skeptically. “He must be eighty.”
Gar shrugged. “Well, I don’t know why the hell else he’d be calling me.” There was only one kind of case that he worked on, and everybody knew it. He glanced at the clock. It was too early to call Epstein now. He crushed out the cigarette. “We were talking before about the libido,” he said. “Remember?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “I remember.”
He followed her to the bedroom.
The security guard on duty at the front gate of Vanguard Studios took his time looking at Gar’s identification. Contrary to the popular image, the sentry was not a kindly white-haired gent named Pop. No way. He was probably all of twenty-two and looked like a walking ad for the Aryan Youth Corps. Blond hair cut too short, piercing blue eyes, square jaw. A squeaky-clean lad, not about to put up with any nonsense.
Gar waited patiently as the guard eyed him. He realized that it was probably some serious flaw in his own character that made him decide he would rather spend time with Perry, even given the chartreuse hair, than with this humorless Dudley Do-Right.
Finally, he was waved through the gate and onto the lot. Not, however, before Dudley had issued explicit instructions as to where he could and could not go, including a specific order not to invade any of the sound stages. Gar could not understand why the guard thought he gave a damn about what was happening in the wonderful world of movies.
Saul Epstein’s office was on the third floor of a brick building in the middle of the lot. It wasn’t that easy to get to the old man himself, however. The first barrier came in the form of a plump, middle-aged woman in a plain gray suit. She had the air of a person who could have run the whole damned place single-handedly without ruffling a hair. Once he had convinced her that he was indeed who he said, she permitted him to pass on to the third floor.
There, he was greeted by Epstein’s private secretary, a slender blonde who, while definitely easier on the eyes, looked not one iota less efficient than the first line of defense down in the lobby. Epstein was obviously no fool when it came to business, which no doubt explained why he’d been around for so long.
Gar was promptly guided to a very comfortable chair, served up some perfectly brewed coffee in a real china cup, and handed the most recent copy of M. He browsed through the glossy pages of the good life and surreptitiously watched the secretary as she worked.
Not that he was really interested, of course.
The memory of his recent bedroom gymnastics with Mickey was fresh in his mind. Amazing how his weariness fled the moment they were between the sheets and she was beneath his body. It was a miracle every time. Just as it had been on the first night.
They met at a murder scene, not the most romantic site for a beginning. He had tracked a runaway girl to the house, where she was shacked up with the drummer in a hot new heavy-metal band. The cops were already there when he arrived and the drummer was dead, stabbed in the chest with a dirty steak knife. Kathy, the missing girl, was huddled in the corner of the living room, rocking back and forth and talking to herself.
Gar realized immediately that this was beyond his meager skills. He called the father, who called a shrink, and they took over.
It was when he walked back out of the house that he first saw Mickey. She was there because the opportunity to snap a picture of the drummer’s body being carried out of his Hollywood Hills home was just too good to miss. Pretty tasteless, Gar thought, but when she walked over and started talking to him, he found himself smiling. One thing led to another, and before he knew what was happening, they were at Denny’s having coffee.
An hour after that, they were necking in his car like a couple of damned kids.
Gar grinned at the memory.
The blond secretary seemed to think that the grin was meant for her. She frowned and swiveled around toward her typewriter.
Epstein didn’t keep him waiting much longer, luckily.
The inner office was paneled in oak and furnished like an English men’s club. Lots of leather, wood, and polished brass. Epstein sat behind a desk that probably wasn’t quite big enough to qualify for statehood. Maybe he really was eighty, as Mickey had said, but he could have passed for a decade or more younger. He was a small man, dressed in a well-cut dark-blue suit, red tie, and French-cuffed white shirt. An unlit cigar was propped in a crystal ashtray next to his hand.
“Thank you for coming so promptly,” Epstein said.
Gar nodded. “You have a problem?”
“Yes. My grandson is missing.”
