“Did you know,” I asked, “that Debbie was who Stinky sent after me?”
He didn’t even pause for breath. “I know most stuff,” he said.
“And you didn’t feel that was anything worth discussing?”
“She missed, right?”
Another long curve and the Pacific opened up below me, doing its cute little frilly act on the sand to hide the fact that it was the biggest, most implacable thing on the planet. The air, which had given me such a good look at the moon’s craters the previous night, was still miraculously transparent, and the horizon looked sharp enough to slice a ship in two. “Just, you know, might have been something to mention.”
“Phooey.”
“Did you hire her for Stinky?”
“I might have made a recommendation.”
“But it didn’t occur to you—”
“If he’d hired someone else, I mighta told you. But he hired Debbie like I said he should, and I figured if I told you, you might have ducked the wrong way. Look, someone wanted me to find someone to take you out. I hired someone who wouldn’t do it, I checked with her to make sure she wouldn’t do it, and I didn’t blow it by telling you because you would have stormed up there and Stinky would have figured it out and found someone else to hire a hitter for him. Right?”
It was a little tortuous, but it made sense. I said, “Well.”
“I know you’re driving,” Louie said, “but later I want you to call me back and gimme a round of applause.”
“What about Bones?”
“Hollywood. Near the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.”
I’d heard of it but never seen it. “Where’s that?”
“Right behind Paramount. Or you could say Paramount’s in front of it since the studio bought the land from the cemetery, and I’ve been asking myself ever since I learned that whether there are bodies buried there.”
“There are bodies under every studio in town.”
“Mister Metaphor. Craziest cemetery in the world. They show movies there at night, they stream funerals on the Internet, imagine that. Live funerals for strangers, right in your living room. Whole fucking world is buried there. Douglas Fairbanks, Peter Lorre, Tyrone Power, Rudolf Valentino, Cecil B. DeMille, Jayne Mansfield, that chick Phil Spector shot—uh, Lana Clarkson—Mel Blanc, you know, the guy who was the voice for Bugs Bunny; the kid who was Alfalfa in the old ‘Our Gang’ movies—”
“How do you know all this?”
“There’s some gangsters want to get in, but the place is drawing the line. I mean, come on, they let in that sonofabitch Harry Cohn? A guy people hated so much that when the place was jammed for his funeral somebody said, ‘Just goes to prove it. Give the people what they want and they’ll always show up.’ ”
I said, “How about that,” but there was no stopping Louie in mid-vent.
“They let in Bugsy Siegel, back in ’47, but they won’t take a crook now? What, we didn’t have laws then? Discrimination, plain as the nose on your face.”
“Have you got an address?”
“I told you, right behind—oh, sorry. You mean Bones. Working on it. Right now I got someone says he’s in one of those apartment houses, you know, from the fifties.”
“That narrows it way down.”
“Hollywood’s not really my territory,” Louie said. “I’m doing pretty good. More later.” He hung up.
Malibu Canyon spilled me out onto the Pacific Coast Highway, and I disengaged the gears in my mind and let it wobble loosely from one thing to another. I discovered something interesting. Whichever hill I tried to let it roll down, it kept ending up in front of Bones.
What was he doing at Monty’s storage place last night? When I looked back over the past few days, it seemed like everyone I knew was being followed wherever they went, and no one was spotting the tail, not even me. And I was pretty good at it, after all these years, even if I had missed Monty and the girls. Bones had not followed me, I knew it. Or, if he had, it was time for me to go back to my first and only boss and try to get that job back. Maybe the shoes weren’t so silly-looking now.
I set the phone on speaker and put it back in my lap. PCH has more cops on it, mile for mile, than any other stretch of road I know. Ronnie answered on the first ring, skipping the hello like everyone else. “I knew you’d have to call. How could you not, after all that?”
“It was memorable,” I said. “Like when I was seventeen.”
“You coming home for lunch? We could skip eating.”
“I’m in Malibu, and I’ve got a few more things to do after I finish here. Sorry to be so prosaic, but I need to know something. How positive are you that you were being followed the night you wound up at Cantor’s?”
The turnoff was coming up and I hit the turn signal. It had blinked a couple of times before she replied.
“Pretty sure. But you know, I’d be kind of embarrassed by now if I’d been wrong, with you sending the cavalry to pick me up and everything. I mean, I thought there was somebody back there.”
“But you’re not a hundred percent.”
“I suppose not. We were both pretty jumpy at that point.”
“No problem. It was better for you to call when you were wrong than to not call when you weren’t.”
“Sorry?”
“Well, I know what I meant. Here’s my turn, I’ve got to hang up.”
“Listen,” she said, “come home for dinner and we’ll skip that instead of lunch.”
The road to Herbie’s place wound up the hill above the highway, probably following—like the streets in the hills of Tarzana—the track of an old arroyo. There were always cars parked on the first few blocks because it was close enough to walk to the beach if you were crazy enough to cross PCH on foot. I drove past the address, checking each car for I didn’t actually know what—for some indication that might mark them as anything but random. When I was two blocks above the condominium complex I eased into a parking spot and sat there for a few minutes, waiting to see whether anyone had been behind me.
I smelled the sage on the hillside, watched the sea crinkle and smooth itself and throw off the gold sparks that calculus can apparently explain, and listened to the hum of traffic below. No one came up the hill, so I got out of the car and hiked down the grade until I reached the walkway that would take me to the rear of Herbie’s place.
I didn’t feel any eyes on me, although I was starting to question my ability. I took what I hoped was a casual look around and followed the walkway around the building.
Stretched across the broken door and vibrating in the ocean breeze was the usual yellow crime scene tape. I’d half expected the place to be boarded up, but it wasn’t, which was a good thing because my picks were stuck in the bush I’d left them in, about halfway back up to the car. If you’re going to be caught where you don’t belong, it’s much better not to be holding a deck of picks or to be armed, which is why the Glock was in its hidey-hole in the trunk. I’d be in trouble if the cops found the Glock, but at least I wouldn’t be up on a charge of armed burglary. Having a gun on you, even when the place you’re hitting is empty, is enough to knock the charge up to first-degree, and that’s the charge we’re all most eager, we nonviolent crooks, to avoid.
Crime scene tape is obviously supposed to keep people out, but it’s never exerted much of a repellent force on me. It marks a crime scene, right? Who’s more comfortable in a crime scene than a criminal? Putting up crime scene tape to keep us out is sort of like a supermarket trying to turn away shoppers by putting a sign that says FREE FOOD.
So I put on my food service gloves and eased the big double-thick baggies over my shoes, parted the ribbons of tape, listened for two or three long minutes, and went in.
The place had been picked over but not ransacked. Objects of obvious value, including the John Sloane painting that was at least putatively mine, had been removed neatly. My guess was that the orderly ransacker was A. Vincent Twistleton in his role as protector of Herbie’s legacy. Th
ere was certainly no sign of any sort of hurry. Drawers and cabinet doors were closed tightly, sofas were intact with their cushions unslit, and a few “shinies,” which was what Herbie called objects that looked valuable but weren’t, sat in their usual places, where he’d put them as burglar bait. Burglars, generally speaking, aren’t any more sympathetic to the needs of other burglars than straight people are.
I had a few hiding places in mind.
Up until now I’d been relying on my assumption that Herbie’s natural death—before his tormentors could kill him themselves—meant that he hadn’t told them where the piece of paper with Wattles’s chain on it was. If I was right, then I was pretty sure I knew who was behind most of what was going on. If I was wrong, I had no idea. Well, actually, I did have an idea, but it was too new and too raw for me to be comfortable with it yet.
Nothing is easier to hide than a piece of paper. If Herbie had been creative about it, there wouldn’t have been a chance in the world of my finding it. But—and okay, this is another assumption—I didn’t think Herbie believed he had any reason to hide the paper. He certainly couldn’t have known that Wattles would call me—out of all the crooks in the world one of a very small number who would have thought of Herbie the moment the burglary was described. No, I was betting that Herbie thought the paper was safe in plain sight, or in relatively plain sight, right up to the moment his clients arrived at his door, probably hours earlier than the time that had been set.
Let’s say he’d had thirty or forty seconds after the doorbell rang, maybe sixty. The teapot still had water in it when I arrived, so the visitors hadn’t been gone more than, say, an hour. Herbie wasn’t an early riser; a lifetime of night work had turned him into someone who rarely got up before ten. I’d seen no half-empty coffee cup when I arrived the first time. My guess was that he was either in bed or in the bathroom when they showed up. The bathroom had doors that led both to the bedroom and the hallway, so that gave me an obtusely angular path to look at first. I felt I could skip the bedroom since the people who killed him had been in it so long they would have looked everywhere, so the most likely places were from the bathroom door to the office, where the paper was most likely to have been, and beyond the office to the front door.
I started with the master bath. My first two guesses—taped to the back of the toilet and in the hanging light fixture in the room’s center—were wrong. Nothing at all behind the toilet and nothing but a few dead moths in the light fixture, in spite of the fact that the old adage still holds true: nobody looks up. I took a quick survey of the office and saved it for later because there were too many places to look, and headed to the living room. I’m aware that under a carpet seems obvious, but I knew what Herbie’s visitors didn’t, which was that in the living room there was one corner where the wall-to-wall wasn’t tacked down. I did find twenty-two hundred-dollar bills there and I took them, planning to give them to Doc. But no chain.
My next hiding place was also a bust, because it was missing. Herbie had a nice nineteenth-century desk in the living room with a top plank that slid out and doubled the size of the desk’s surface. The feature wasn’t obvious, and it would have been a snap for Herbie to pull out the top plank, put the paper on the plank beneath, and then slide the top plank back again. And maybe he had, but there was no way for me to tell because the desk was gone, almost certainly with the other stuff that A. Vincent Twistleton, whom I really should have called by then, had spirited away, out of the reach of people like me.
I was standing there, staring at the four dimples in the living room carpet made by the legs of the vanished desk, when I heard a man’s voice.
It was coming from the direction of the dining room, probably from just outside the broken glass door, and that meant that my exit was cut off. The front door was an equally unattractive option, since, if whoever it was hadn’t come alone, it was likely that his companion was sitting out there in a car, idling at the curb. The place had only two doors.
And I could think of only one place to hide.
The centerpiece of Herbie’s office was his desk. It was a massive piece of mahogany from the 1940s, and it sat up against the wall, just to the left of the door that took you into the room. The drawers were long, and there was a row of pigeonholes at the back of the work surface, which meant that the well, or whatever the hell you call the place where your knees go, was extra-deep. I heard the man’s voice grow louder as I tiptoed up the hall, and I figured he’d ducked under the tape just as I had and was in the house.
I pulled back Herbie’s chair as quietly as I could and crawled into the well. Then I pulled the chair back into place, obscuring the well and making it darker, and crowded myself into the smallest area I could, pressed against the back of the well.
The man was on the phone. I heard him say, “That’s where I am,” and then a pause, and he said, “Nothing doing. Where? Okay, okay, hold your horses.”
It wasn’t a voice I could put a name to, but it seemed familiar somehow. It was low and sounded short-tempered, and its owner walked heavily. I got a mental picture of a guy who was wide and close to the ground, and also carrying a gun. I know the gun was an assumption that would have had my old boss raising an instructive finger, but since all I had was a choice between two assumptions—he was strapped or he wasn’t—it seemed to me safer to choose the former.
“Nope,” he said, and the voice seemed to come from the living room. “Not here, either. This is bullshit.”
I was inclined to agree with him. I concentrated as hard as I could, trying to send him the message bullshit bullshit bullshit and wondering whether Handkerchief could have given me a tip or two. I was immediately rewarded by his saying, “Bullshit, bullshit.” And just as I was congratulating myself, he said, “Okay, then, the office.”
I am not a brave person. I stay alive by not being any braver than I have to be. If I were an insurance salesperson I would disqualify all applicants for policies who described themselves as brave or relatively brave or even intermittently brave. I believe that most people are cowards because they inherited it, and the reason they inherited it is that natural selection favors the timid. A few feet beneath the surface, the earth is interlaced with the bones of the brave. The valiant’s more prudent comrades march home, their uniforms unbloodied, to fix watches, drive nails, and raise children. The brave molder where they lie.
I know that I don’t talk much about courage. In my description of how Ting Ting tore me to shreds and picked his teeth with the splinters, I left out the fact that I was terrified. I am frequently terrified, and more power to it. And, of course, at that moment in Herbie’s house, I wasn’t armed. What all that meant, as Mr. Short Wide Deep Voice tromped down the hallway toward the room I was cowering in, was that I found a way to make myself even smaller. And a very sound strategy it seemed, too.
“Yeah, I’m doing it,” he said, and I realized belatedly that he and his partner, who was almost certainly outside at the wheel of a car, were doing the same thing I was. They were looking for Wattles’s chain. And since these were virtually guaranteed to be the two who had hurried Herbie toward his heart attack, my primary assumption had been correct: they hadn’t found the piece of paper.
Which meant, in turn, that I probably knew at least part of what was going on and who was behind it. Now all I had to do was live through the next ten or fifteen minutes so I could act on it. It was, I realized, a moral imperative: to avenge Herbie and untie a remarkably complicated knot, I had a responsibility right at this moment to be as cowardly as possible.
I could handle that.
Handkerchief Harrison used to claim that he had a kind of perfect pitch for voices. Once he heard one, he could pick it out of a room full of chattering people and mimic it, too; the voices of his various identities, a braid of three or four borrowed voices. I’d been paying more attention to voices since Handkerchief told me that, and I usually knew when I’d heard one before. And cowering under Herbie’s desk, I stretched my bu
dding talent to its extreme and realized that I’d heard this man’s voice at some point in the recent past.
And here he was. Mr. Short Wide Deep Voice came into the room, muttering mutinously, and the first thing he did was yank Herbie’s chair out of the well, which had an interesting impact on my heart rate. He stood in front of me, moving things around on the desk as I stared at the bottoms of a pair of plaid Bermuda Shorts and muscular calves so hairy I could have climbed up them hanging onto the fur. Below the shorts were a pair of yellow socks sticking out of black, scuffed loafers. This was a style of dress I was pretty certain I’d recognize, but I didn’t, although there was something familiar about his stance. And then two things happened: he pulled the drawer of Herbie’s desk all the way out, and he dropped his phone, which landed in the center of the well, not three feet from me.
He said, “Balls,” and ignored the phone to focus on the pulled-out drawer. I had been looking up at the underside of the drawer, and now that it had been yanked free, I could see the bottom four or five inches of a knit shirt in a green so vile that people would have thrown rocks at it even in Ireland. A shower of stuff landed on the floor as he flipped the drawer over to see whether anything was taped underneath it—paper clips, pens, reading glasses, packets of Kleenex, a couple of those pink rubber erasers I didn’t think people used any more. He yelled toward the phone, now at the bottom of a pile of office trash, “Told you. You watch too many movies. Anybody with a TV is gonna be too smart to tape something under a drawer, for Chrissakes.” He slammed the drawer home and then spread his feet, preparatory to bending down to pick up the phone.
And grunted. And said, “Damn back,” and lifted a foot and kicked the phone about six feet away, toward the window. Then he called to it, “That’s it. I’m taking a leak.” The feet went to my right, toward a door I had thought was a closet, and as I listened to it open I expected him to swear again and turn around, but instead there was a pause followed by a stream of water and a sigh. I hadn’t even heard him lift the seat.
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