by Ross Thomas
The gunshot came then and Partain automatically classified the weapon as a .30-caliber sporting rifle, possibly an old Schultz & Larsen M 65. He tried to press himself to the concrete as he waited for the second bullet's impact—or for someone's groan or cry. He fully expected the second shot but hoped desperately for the sound of the limo's revving engine and the getaway screech of its rear tires clawing at the pavement.
But he heard nothing and, after a moment, sat up and looked across the street. The limousine was gone. He looked then for Jessica Carver and found her crouched six feet away in almost a caricature of a sprinter's starting stance. Her mouth was open, her eyes were wideand her head was turned toward Partain. But she was staring at something beyond him.
Partain turned to find Jack the doorman lying faceup near the outside phone in death's familiar position of a rag doll, carelessly dropped. Jack's eyes and mouth were open. Partain decided it had been either a head shot, expertly aimed, or a shot gone wild. The relief came then, flooding through him and drowning the brief guilt he had always felt whenever it had been he who lived and someone else who died.
The black limousine turned right off Wilshire and eventually chose Santa Monica Boulevard as its path to the southbound 405 freeway. It was not until the limousine was in the freeway's number three lane and rolling south at a sedate 59 miles per hour that the Latino driver spoke to his passenger in the rear.
“You missed,” he said, his accent making it sound something like, “Chew meesed.”
“Did I?” said Emory Kite from the backseat.
CHAPTER 20
They stood in front of Jack Thomson, the dead doorman, until the first black-and-white arrived. They stood side by side, Partain in a mildly threatening “at ease” military stance, Jessica Carver with arms folded across her chest.
A small crowd had gathered and wanted to know if the guy was dead and if they had killed him and if anybody had called the cops. Partain answered only the last question.
After the black-and-white arrived, Partain and Carver abandoned their guard duty, answered a uniformed sergeant's questions and agreed to wait upstairs until homicide talked to them which, the Sergeant warned, it sure as shit would.
They took the elevator to the fifteenth floor without speaking and entered the apartment. Carver went silently to her room and locked the door. Partain retired to the kitchen and began cutting up two plump fryers that were in a bag of groceries General Winfield had insisted on buying during the drive from the airport.
An hour later Partain knocked on Carver's door and said, “Dinner's ready.”
“I don’t want any,” she said, her voice muffled by the door. “Fried chicken. Mashed potatoes. Cream gravy. A three-lettuce salad. Corn bread.”
After a moment she asked, “Real corn bread?” “From scratch.”
Five seconds later the bedroom door opened and Jessica Carver, her eyes swollen and bloodshot, gave him a sad tired smile and said, “Well, I reckon we have to eat.”
“It's on the table,” Partain said as the corridor door chimes rang.
“I’ll get it,” he told her. “You go ahead and start.”
Partain opened the door and wasn’t surprised to find that the caller was the fashion-plate homicide Detective Sergeant, Ovid Knox. Before Knox could say anything, Partain said, “You eat yet?”
Knox didn’t try to hide his surprise. “Why?”
“Because dinner's on the table. Fried chicken. Salad. Mashed potatoes. Cream gravy. Corn bread. You’re invited. We eat in the kitchen.”
“Who's we?”
“Jessica Carver, me and now you. But if you don’t want to eat, you can watch.”
“I’m not much of a voyeur,” Knox said.
They ate everything but the bones and the beak. And because Jessica Carver and Ovid Knox still seemed hungry, Partain found some Sara Lee brownies in the freezer and served them with the coffee. Carver had two brownies, Knox, three, and Partain, none.
After his third brownie and final cup of coffee, Knox pushed the cup and saucer aside, rested his elbows on the table, leaned forward slightly and said, “Who shot him?”
“At least two guys in a black stretch Lincoln limo,” Partain said. “One drove. The other was the backseat shooter.” “Any description?”
“It was night. The windows were tinted. They were at least fifty yards away.”
“Tell me about the dead guy—Jack Thomson with no ‘p.’“
“He was the night doorman and a sometime actor.”
Knox turned to Jessica Carver. “How long’ve you known him?”
“Three years. Maybe three and a half. He came with the building.”
“Then he was here when your mother moved in.”
She nodded.
“Nice guy?”
“Yeah, he was nice. He’d get you a taxi, carry your groceries up, get your car washed, tell creeps you weren’t in when you were. He was just a nice accommodating guy. Ma always tipped him for doing stuff and gave him two hundred dollars at Christmas.”
“He ever offer to sell you any dope?”
“No. But then I never asked him, did I?”
“He ever ask you to go out with him?”
“No. But if he had, I might’ve.”
Knox turned back to Partain. “How’d he strike you?”
“He could do voices, or maybe I should say accents. He was very good at it. He also told me he was too second-leadish for films but got work in commercials—radio and TV, I suppose. I never saw him on TV but that might be because he said he did mostly voice-overs and also because I seldom watch television.”
Turning to Carver again, Knox said, “He was the night doorman?”
She nodded.
“Then he wasn’t on duty when Dave Laney paid you that early morning call.”
“Tom was on duty. The day doorman.”
“Did poor dead Jack know poor dead Dave?”
“Sure,” she said. “I stayed here a while before I went to Mexico with Dave, who was one of the creeps I sometimes told Jack to get rid of. They knew each other all right, but not socially.”
Knox rose, went to the sink, found a glass, ran the cold water, filled the glass and sipped it. All this gave Partain the opportunity to assess Knox's outfit. That night he was wearing a double-breasted brown jacket with worsted slacks so dark green they might have been black. His shirt was the palest of yellows with a long-pointed collar. There was no tie and the collar was buttoned. Partain remembered when only hicks and rubes wore their shirts buttoned to the top like that. But if there was no tie, there was a dark green handkerchief that peeped out of the jacket's breast pocket. Partain leaned back so he could see the shoes and was almost disappointed to discover they were the same gleaming black walnut loafers Knox had worn before.
Knox turned from the sink, had another sip of tap water, peered into the glass instead of at Partain and Carver and asked, “What happened tonight—from the beginning?”
Jessica Carver made the reply. “We were going to dinner. We were going to walk to Westwood.”
“Walk?”
She indicated Partain with a nod. “His idea. Walk there, cab back. We came out of the lobby. He asked Jack how long the limo had been parked across the street. Jack said about an hour or forty—”
Knox interrupted. “Let him take it from there, Ms. Carver.”
Jessica shrugged and Partain said, “He said forty-five minutes or an hour. I asked him why the cops hadn’t tagged it. Jack said the cops were too busy—and what if the limo was waiting for the girlfriend of some indy prod at Paramount who’d halfway promised to read the cop's treatment for a TV show. What's an indy prod?”
“Independent producer,” Knox said. “What happened next?”
“I asked Jack to call us a cab, took Jessica by the arm and suggested we wait inside.”
“Why’d you change your mind about walking to Westwood?”
“Because I don’t like it when cars park out in front of where I live f
or an hour or forty-five minutes with their engines running.”
“It was parked across the street—not out front.”
“That bothered me even more.”
Knox sighed. “Okay. Then what?”
“We were heading for the building's front door. I glanced back, saw the limo's rear window’d been lowered and thought I saw something metallic inside the limo. Something that, well, glinted.”
“Glinted?”
“Glinted. I shoved Jessica to the right and I dropped and rolled left. Then I heard the shot.” “And then?”
“I waited for the second shot.”
“Thought they were shooting at you, did you?”
“I knew they were shooting at somebody. So I lay there, hoping that what I heard next would be the limo's getaway. But I didn’t hear anything. Then I looked at Jessica. She was on her hands and knees like a sprinter at the starting blocks. But she was also staring at something. I looked where she was looking and saw Jack, the dead doorman.”
Knox nodded thoughtfully and turned to Jessica Carver. “You were on your hands and knees?”
She said yes.
“Facing the street?” he said. “Facing the street.” “What’d you see?”
“I saw that the limo's back window was about three-quarters of the way down. Something was poking out of the window—something dark. The light caught it once. Bounced off it. Then I saw a red flash and heard the bang. I looked at Partain, who was trying to imitate a pancake. When I looked back at the limo, it was already pulling away—not fast, not slow, just normally.”
Knox sat back down at the old kitchen table. “It's one-hundred-forty-nine feet from the driver's side of the limo to Jack the doorman. It's night but there's still lots of artificial light. The single round hit Jack in the center of the back of his head and blew away a lot of his brains. You were Army, Mr. Partain. What kind of shooting would you call that?”
“Expert—providing the shooter hit what he was supposed to hit.”
“From what we could figure out,” Knox said, “poor Jack was moving toward the outside phone when he got it. You shoved Ms. Carver, then dropped and rolled to a point about eight feet away from Jack. Ms. Carver was sort of kneeling five or six feet away from you, looking at a limo, a driver, a shooter in the backseat and a nice slow getaway. What does all that tell you?”
“That it was a professional job.”
“Back up,” Jessica Carver said. “That limo’d been parked there with its engine running for forty-five minutes or an hour. They could’ve shot Jack anytime. But they waited till they had an audience.” She looked at Partain. “You and me.”
Knox leaned an inch or two toward Partain. “That makes a weird kind of sense to me, Partain. It make any sense to you?”
“None at all,” Partain said.
CHAPTER 21
After her trout and his lamb at Morton's, Millicent Altford and Vernon Winfield declined dessert but ordered espresso and cognac. During dinner, a producer, a director, an agent and three actresses had stopped by separately to gloat over the imminent change at the White House; tell a really nasty Bush joke; find out how well Altford knew the Presidentelect, and ask whether she would be joining his administration.
AltfordintroducedtheGeneraltoeachofthem;grinnedatthe Bush joke; claimed to have known the President-elect for seven or eight years, and said she wasn’t at all keen about going to Washington. During the drop-bys, the General had half risen six times for the introductions, smiled agreeably but otherwise kept his mouth shut.
Altford had a sip of her after-dinner cognac and said, “Two of those guys who stopped by voted for Bush, the agent for Perot and the women all went with the winner.”
“How do you know how they voted?”
She smiled. “I know.”
The General finished his cognac, examined the tablecloth for atime, then looked up and asked, “I ever tell you how big-city machine politics enabled me to dodge the draft during World War Two?”
She smiled and shook her head slightly. “No, I think I’d’ve remembered that one.”
Seconds went by as the General seemed to gaze across her left shoulder at a past that went back almost fifty years. “From age ffour-teen,” he said, “I was a hell-raiser. Something to do with hormones and puberty, I imagine. I got into one jam after another and my father always got me out of them with a single phone call. He was a lawyer who got rich off Chicago politics. But you knew that.”
“You don’t talk about him much.”
“No, I suppose not. This time, the time I’m talking about, was a particularly bad jam. It was the spring of ‘forty-four and I was about to graduate from the university high school.”
“What kind of jam?”
“Drunken driving and a wreck in which no one was hurt. Inexcusable, of course, but my father fixed it and a week later announced he’d arranged for me to go to West Point. A senatorial appointment. To me it sounded like a jail sentence and I told him that if I had to go to college, I’d rather go to Slippery Rock than West Point. At the time, I believed Slippery Rock to be in either Arkansas or Missouri.”
“It's in Pennsylvania,” she said.
“I know. But then I didn’t. My father said okay, I could hang around until I was drafted and then go to any goddamned college I wanted to after the war on the GI Bill—providing I survived.”
“This was nineteen-forty-four?”
The General nodded. “I was seventeen, about to turn eighteen when I’d have to register for the draft. It was also about a month before D-Day in Europe and they were drafting all the warm bodies they could find and shipping them off to infantry replacement training camps for eighteen weeks, then straight on to Europe or thePacific. A lot of the replacements were killed or wounded during their first few days on the line. I regarded all this as a most unpleasant prospect but thought that West Point, in its way, would be almost as bad. I had no desire to be a soldier of any kind.” “Not too patriotic, huh?”
“Not enough to die for my country, if I could avoid it. I still regard that as a sensible attitude. Sometimes, of course, the dying is unavoidable.”
“So what happened?”
“I went to see my godfather, a Chicago alderman, who’d been on the receiving end of all those phone calls my father’d made on my behalf. The alderman kept me waiting in his reception room for three hours.”
“I don’t blame him.”
“Neither do I because I must’ve been insufferable. When finally admitted to his presence, I told him I didn’t want to go to West Point, didn’t want to be drafted and asked if he had any suggestions. He merely nodded and said, ‘Well, kiddo’—and I’m paraphrasing here, of course—’well, kiddo, you got three choices. You can go join the Merchant Marine, go to West Point or go tell your draft board you’re queer. That's what my nephew did, but then the little shit really is queer.’ “
“So you went to West Point,” she said.
“No, I went to see the Merchant Marine recruiter at the post office downtown. He was an ancient mariner of forty-two or -three who said he’d be happy to sign me on but was obliged to warn me they were drafting guys out of the Merchant Marine straight into the infantry.”
“So on to West Point,” she said.
He nodded. “Where I sat out the war and often thought of my godfather, the alderman, who’d given me sound sensible advice devoid ofpatriotic claptrap. I felt curiously indebted to him, which is exactly how he wanted me to feel. I even thought of it as an example of how politics really worked, not only in Chicago but everywhere. And of course it was—providing you were a rich man's son.”
“Then on to Korea,” she said, “where somebody finally managed to shoot you and somebody else gave you a DSC.”
“Yes, but I was mentally prepared for it by then—the wound, not the medal.”
“I’ve often wondered why you stayed in,” she said.
“Because I’d learned a trade by then and was really quite good at it.”
&
nbsp; “You ever see the alderman again?”
“No, but I think I managed to repay my debt to him.”
“How?”
“By voting the straight Democratic ticket since nineteen-forty-eight,” General Winfield said.
Millicent Altford was driving when they left Morton's. They had gone only a few blocks when the General, staring into his side mirror, said, “I think we’re being followed.”
After glancing into her own mirror, she said, “Let's make sure.”
Altford started zigzagging her way toward Olympic Boulevard, turning left and right at random. She even circled a couple of blocks but the car behind followed at an almost measured fifty feet.
“If it's still back there when we get to the hospital, I’ll alert the security people,” she said.
“You mean wake them up?”
“Let's hope not.”
They reached the hospital and turned into its curved drive. The following car also made the turn, closed the distance, then stopped, switched off its lights and Edd Partain got out. He looked aroundcarefully before approaching the Lexus on the driver's side. Altford lowered the window.
“What's wrong?” she said.
“Jack the doorman was shot dead in front of the Eden earlier this evening. Jessica and I saw it. After we talked to the cops, I rented a car and drove to Morton's just in time to see you leave.” He inspected the hospital grounds again and said, “You’d better get inside.”
Up in Altfford's hospital room, she and the General sat on the blue couch, Partain in an armchair. She and Winfield finally had run out of questions, hers being mostly about her daughter, Winfield's about the shooting itself and the marksmanship of the gunman.
They also wondered briefly why anyone would want to kill Jack the doorman, but such talk led nowhere and, after a brief silence, Partain asked Winfield, “Who else besides Nick Patrokis knows you and I are in Los Angeles?”
“No one,” the General said. “And what a curious question. It implies that either you or Jessica was the target, and that the shooter was incompetent.”
