“I’ m sorry, Mr. Cole, this has nothing to do with you. Please excuse me.” Ellen Lang stood up out of the director’s chair across from my desk. I’d had it and it’s mate fitted in a nice pastel burgundy a year ago. The leather was broken in and soft and did not crack when she stood. “We shouldn’t have come here, Janet,” she said. “I feel awkward.”Janet Simon said, “For Christ’s sake, Ellen, sit down.”
Ellen sat.
Janet Simon said, “Talk to him, Ellen. Eric says He’s very good at this sort of thing. He can help.”
Speak, Ellen. Arf. I rearranged two of the Jiminy Cricket figurines on my desk and wondered who the hell Eric was.
Ellen Lang adjusted her glasses, clutched her hands, and faded back into the director’s chair. She looked small, even though she wasn’t. Some people are like that. Janet Simon looked like a dancer who’d spent a lot of time at it. Lean and strong. Good bones. She wore tight beige cotton pants and a loose cotton shirt striped with shades of blue and pink and red. No panty line. I hoped she didn’t think I was d+!class+! in my white Levi’s and Hawaiian shirt. Maybe the shoulder holster made up for it.
Ellen Lang smiled at me, trying to feign comfort in an uncomfortable situation. She said, “Well, perhaps if you told me about yourself.”
Janet Simon sighed, giving it the weight of the world. “Mr. Cole is a private detective. He detects for money. You give him some money and he’ll find Mort. Then you can get Perry back and kiss off Mort and get your life together.” She said it like she was talking to someone with brain damage. Great legs, though.
“Thanks, Mom,” I said.
Janet Simon gave me a look, then turned away and stared at the Pinocchio clock. It’s on the wall beside the door that leads to my partner’s office, just above the little sign that says The Elvis Cole Detective Agency. As the second hand sweeps around, Pinocchio’s eyes move from side to side. Janet Simon had been glancing at it since they walked in. Probably thought it was peculiar.
Ellen fidgeted. “I was just curious, that’s all. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry, Mrs. Lang,” I said. “I’m thirty-five years old and I’ve been licensed as a private investigator for seven years. The state of California requires three thousand hours of experience before they’ll give you the license. I spent that time with a man named George Feider. Mr. Feider was an investigator here in Los Angeles for almost forty years. Before that I was a security guard, and before that I spent some time in the Army. I’m five feet eleven and one-half inches tall, I weigh one hundred seventy-six pounds, and I’m licensed to carry a firearm. How’s that?”
She blinked.
“Yeah, it impresses me, too,” I said. “I don’t take custody work. I might find your husband and your son but after that it’s up to you. I don’t steal children unless there’s reason to believe the child is in danger.”
Ellen Lang looked as if I’d kicked her. “Oh, no. No, no. Mort’s a good man, Mr. Cole, please don’t think he isn’t.” Janet Simon said something like shumphf. “You have to understand. He’s been under enormous strain. He left ICM last year to start his own talent agency and things just haven’t gone the way they should. He’s had to worry about the house payments and the cars and schools. It’s been terrible for him.”
Janet Simon said, “Mort’s an asshole.” She was standing by the sliding glass doors that lead out to the little balcony. On a clear day I could go out there and see all the way down Santa Monica Boulevard to the water. The view had been the selling point. Janet Simon fit nicely with the view.
“I just want Perry home, that’s all.” Ellen Lang’s eyes went from Janet Simon to me, sort of like the Pinocchio clock. “Mort will settle for McDonald’s. He’ll let Perry stay up all hours-“
I cleared my throat. “Mrs. Lang, I don’t bill by the day. I charge a flat fee exclusive of expenses and I get it in advance. You’re looking at about two grand here. Why don’t you wait? Mort might call.” McDonald’s. Christ.
“Yes,” Ellen Lang said. She looked relieved. “I’m sure you’re right.”
“Bullshit,” Janet Simon said. She turned away from the balcony to sit in the other director’s chair. “That’s not right and she knows it. Mort’s been threatening to leave for almost a year. Mort treats her like a sop. He runs around.” Ellen Lang made a little gurgling noise. “He’s even hit her twice that I know of. Now he’s taken their son and disappeared. She wants her son back. That’s all she wants. It’s very important to her.”
Ellen Lang’s eyes widened but didn’t seem to be looking at anything. “Ms. Simon,” I said evenly, “as much as I’d like to lick chocolate syrup off your body, I want you to shut up.”
Ellen Lang said, “Oh, my.” Janet Simon stood up and then Ellen Lang stood up. Janet Simon put a hand on Ellen Lang’s shoulder and shoved her back down. “Who do you think you’re talking to?” she said.
“A woman who’s very concerned with her friend’s problem. But a woman who, right now, is acting like a royal pain in the ass. If the sexual nature of my comment surprised you it’s only because I needed to be shocking to get your attention.”
She chewed at the inside of her cheek, trying to decide about me, then nodded and took her seat.
“Also,” I said, “I find you devastatingly attractive and it’s been on my mind.”
She leaned forward and said, “Eric told us you had a partner. Maybe we should speak with him.”
Eric again. The Mystery Man. “Fine by me.”
Janet Simon looked at the door beneath the Pinocchio clock. If she looked close enough she’d see the little ridge in the jamb from the time someone had forced the lock. Three coats of paint, and you could still see the crack. She didn’t notice. “Is that his office?” she said.
“Unh-hunh.”
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Aren’t you going to introduce us?”
“Nope.”
Janet Simon stood up, steamed over to the door, and went through. I smiled at Ellen Lang. Ellen Lang looked nervous but smiled back. After a while Janet Simon rejoined us.
“That’s no office,” she said. “There’s no desk, no furniture, nothing. What kind of office is that?”
“Italian moderne?”
She cocked her head a little to the side. “Eric said you’d be like this.”
Eric. “How do you know Eric?” I smiled. Mr. Sly. I have quite a charming smile. Like Peter Pan. Innocent, but with a touch of the rake.
“We worked together when I was in the legal department at Universal.”
That brought it back. Eric Filer. Three years ago.
“He said you found some film negatives for him. He said it wasn’t easy. He recommends you highly.”
“M’man Eric.”
“He also said you were like this.”
“Were you ever a dancer?” I said.
If she wanted to smile, she fought it. She took out a pack of Salem Lights, lit up in the office but stood in the balcony door, blowing smoke out over West Hollywood. I liked the way her neck looked when she lifted her chin to send out a plume of smoke. Some woman. I bet her mouth tasted like an ashtray.
“Listen, Mrs. Lang,” I said, turning back to Ellen, “I don’t know if Mort is going to call or not, or what you want, or what Mort wants. A couple hundred women have sat where you’re sitting, and usually their husbands call. But not always. You’re going to have to decide which way you want to jump.”
Ellen Lang nodded. Pinocchio’s eyes shifted back and forth a few times. Janet Simon smoked. After a while Ellen Lang took two photographs out of her purse and put them carefully on the desk. “On Friday Mort always picks up Perry from school. Perry goes to Oakhurst and the girls go to Westridge. That’s Cindy and Carrie. Fridays, Perry gets out two hours earlier. Only this past Friday they never came home. I tried all weekend to find Mort. I phoned Oakhurst Monday but Perry wasn’t there, and I phoned again this morning and he still wasn’t there. They’ve been gone for four days.”
I looked at the pictures. Mort was four or five years older than me, balding on top with a round face, thin lifeless hair, and skinny arms. He was wearing a tee shirt that said U. S. S. Bluegill, Maui, Hawaii. He had the sort of eyes that had just been looking somewhere else. On the back of the picture someone had written Morton Lang, age 39, 5′ 10″, 145 lbs, brown hair and brown eyes, no visible scars or tattoos, mole on right forearm. The writing was even and firm, all of the letters identical in size.
“I wrote that,” Ellen said. God bless television.
The other picture was a wallet-size school photo of a little boy who looked like a smaller, less-worn version of Mort.
Perry Lang, age 9, 4′ 8″, 64 pounds, brown hair and brown eyes, no visible scars or tattoos or moles.
I put the pictures on the desk, then opened my right top desk drawer and took out a Bic pen and a blank yellow legal pad. I had to move my gun to get the pad. The gun was a Dan Wesson .38 Special with the 4-inch barrel, a gift from George Feider the day I got my license. It was a good gun. I closed the drawer, put the pad beside the pictures and the Bic on the pad.
“Okay,” I said. “Did Mort leave a note?”
“No.”
“Why would Mort take your son but not your two girls?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was Perry Mort’s favorite?”
“That would be Carrie, our youngest daughter. I asked her if Mort said anything about this to her, thinking he might have, but she said no.”
I nodded and wrote Carrie on the pad.
“Your husband make any large withdrawals recently?”
Ellen Lang said, “I’m not very good with figures. Mort handles all our business affairs.” She said it apologetically.
“How about work? Someone there who might know what was on your husband’s mind?”
Ellen Lang looked at the floor. “Well, he’s not part of an office anymore, like I said. He worked out of the house, and he didn’t really talk’a” She trailed off and turned red, her lips a tight purple knot.
I tapped the Bic against the pad, which wasn’t exactly brimming with information.
I looked at Janet Simon. She had a tight, sexy grin on her face. Or maybe it was a sneer. “I wouldn’t think of interfering,” she said.
“Maybe if I said please.”
Janet Simon took a final pull on her cigarette, tossed it out over the railing, and came back inside. “Tell him about the girlfriend, Ellen.”
Ellen Lang’s voice was so soft I could barely hear her. “He has a girlfriend. She lives at the Piedmont Arms off Barrington in Brentwood.”
“Her name is Kimberly Marsh,” Janet Simon said. “She’s one of his clients. 412 Gorham, just above San Vicente. Apartment 4, on the ground, in the back. An actress.” She took two rolodex cards from her purse and flipped them down on the desk next to the photographs. The top one had KIMBERLY MARSH typed on it along with the address and a phone number.
“We followed him.” Ellen Lang said it the way you say something that embarrasses you.
I looked at Janet Simon. “And I’ll bet you drove.”
She looked back. “And I got out of the car and I checked the apartment number and I matched it to a name on the mailbox.” Some woman, all right.
“Okay,” I said. “What about friends?”
Neither of us bothered to look at Ellen Lang. “Mort was trying to get a film project off the ground with a producer named Garrett Rice. That’s his name and number on the second card. It was one of those deals where you do a lot of talking about firming up Redford with a commitment from Coppola so you can get the money from Arab investors. That kind of thing. They call it ‘blue-sky’.”
I nodded. “How come you know more about her life than she does?”
Ellen Lang leaned forward out of the director’s chair. It was the first time she’d shown any animation since they’d walked into my office twenty minutes ago. “Garrett is an old friend. We used to play bridge with Garrett and his wife Lila until they were divorced, oh, I guess it was five years ago. We used to play every week for almost a year. Mort was so happy to be back in contact with him. Garrett was Mort’s best friend. I guess that’s why he told me.”
Janet Simon sighed the way you sigh when you’ve been holding your breath at a horror movie, and said, “Mort didn’t believe in sharing his life. At least, not with his wife.”
“Well, that was his way,” Ellen Lang said. Her eyes were still wide. “Mort would just die if he knew about this, Mr. Cole. That’s why I wouldn’t go to the police, even though Janet said that’s what I should do. I couldn’t get my own husband in trouble with the police. He’d never forgive me. You can see that, can’t you?”
Maybe it was my expression. Ellen Lang’s face got dark, her chin trembled, and she said, “What’s wrong with a woman caring how her husband feels?” I got the feeling she’d been saying it a lot lately.
“You’ll take the job?” Janet Simon said.
“There’s the matter of the fee.”
Ellen looked away from me again. “I’m afraid I forgot my checkbook.”
Janet said, “She’s not used to this. Mort always paid for everything, so she didn’t think to bring it.”
I tapped the Bic against the pad.
“You can understand that, can’t you?” Janet said.
I stood up. “Yep, I can understand that. Why don’t I come by your house this afternoon, Mrs. Lang? You can give me the check and we can go through your husbands things.”
“Why do you have to do that?”
“Clues, Mrs. Lang.”
Janet Simon said, “You look like John Cassavetes twenty years ago.”
“Who do I look like now?”
Janet Simon smiled grimly and stood up. Ellen Lang stood up, too, and this time Janet Simon didn’t push her back down. They left.
I wrote old friends on the pad, drew a box around it, then tore off the sheet and threw it away.
Some notes.
Chapter 2
I went out on the balcony and watched the street. After a few minutes they pulled out from beneath the building in a sky-blue Mustang convertible. Janet Simon was driving. It was the GT handling package. Great maneuverability. Tight in the curves. Without sacrificing a smooth ride. I went back into my office, called the deli on the ground floor to order a pastrami on rye with Chinese hot mustard, and then I called Joe Pike.
A man’s voice said, “Gun shop.”
“Give me Joe.”
The phone got put down on something hard. There were noises and words I couldn’t understand, and then the phone got picked up again. “Pike.”
“We just had another complaint about your office. Woman goes in there, comes out, says what kind of office is that, empty, no phone, no desk? What could I tell her?”
“Tell her she likes the office so much she can live there.”
“It’s a good thing we don’t depend on you to sweet-talk the customers.”
“I don’t do this for the customers.” Pike’s voice was flat. No smile. No humor. Normal , for Pike. “That’s why I like to call,” I said. “Always the pleasant word. Always the cheery hello.”
Nothing came back over the line. After a while I said, “We added a new client today. Thought you’d like to know.”
“Any heat?” Pike’s only interest.
“We got through the interview with a minimum of gunshots.”
“You need me, you know where to find me.”
He hung up. I shook my head. Some partner.
An entire afternoon ahead of me and nary a thing to do except drive out to Ellen Lang’s and dig through six or seven months of phone bills, bank statements, and credit card receipts. Yuck. I decided to go see Kimberly Marsh. The Other Woman.
I slipped the Dan Wesson into my holster, put on the white cotton jacket, and picked up the sandwich on my way to the parking garage. I ate in the car driving up Fairfax, turning left at Sunset toward Brentwood. I’ve got a Jamaica-yellow 1966 Corvette convertible. It would have been easier to take Santa Monica, but with the top down Sunset was a nicer drive.
It was shaping up as another brutal Los Angeles winter, low seventies, scattered clouds, clearing. The sky was that deep blue we get just before or just after a rain. The white stucco houses along the ridges were sharp and brilliant in the sun. I passed the coed-specked running paths of UCLA, then wound my way past a house that may have been the one William Holden used to slip the repossessors in Sunset Boulevard. Old Spanish. Same cornices and pilasters. The ghosts of old Hollywood haunting the eaves. I’ve wondered about that house since I discovered it, just two days after I mustered out of the Army in 1972. I’ve wondered, but I’ve never wanted to know for sure. After the Army, magic was in short supply and when you found some, you held on tight. It wouldn’t be the same if I knew the house belonged to some guy who made his millions inventing Fruit Loops.
A half mile past the San Diego Freeway I turned left on Harrington and dropped south toward San Vicente, then hung another left on Gorham. The Piedmont Arms is on the south side of the street in a stretch of apartment houses and condominiums. I drove past, turned around at a cross street, and parked. It looked like a nice place to live. An older woman with wispy white hair eased a Hughes Market cart off a curb and across a street. She smiled at a man and a woman in their twenties, the man with his shirt off, the woman in an airy Navajo top. L. A. winter. They smiled back. Two women in jogging suits were walking back toward Barrington, probably off to lunch at one of the little nouveaux restaurants on San Vicente. Hot duck salad with raspberry sauce. A sturdily built Chicano woman with a purse the size of a mobile home waited at a bus stop, squinting into the sun. Somewhere a screw gun started up, then cut short. There were gulls and a scent of the sea. Nice. Four cars in front of me, north side of the street, two guys sat in a dark blue ’69 Nova with a bad rust spot on the left rear fender. Chicanos. The driver tried to scowl like Charles Bronson as I cruised past. Maybe they were from the government The Piedmont is a clean, two-story, U-shaped stucco building with a garden entry at the front braced by stairs that go up to the second floor. Around each stair is a stand of bamboo and a couple of banana trees for that always-popular rain forest look. There are two rows of brass-burnished mailboxes in front of the bamboo, with a big open bin beneath them for magazines and packages and Pygmies with blowguns. Kimberly Marsh’s drop was the fourth from the left on the top row. I could see eight or nine envelopes through the slot. In the bin there were three catalogs and a couple of those giveaway flyers that everyone gets. Lot of mail. Maybe four days’ worth.
I walked through the little courtyard past some more banana trees. Apartment 4 was all the way back on the left. That Janet. I knocked, but there was no answer. I walked back up to apartment 1, where a little sign on the door said MANAGER. A fat man built like a pear came around the mailboxes, started up the stairs, and saw me. Jo-Jo isn’t here,” he said. “He’s got the aerobics class on Tuesday.”
“Jo-Jo the manager?”
He nodded. “He’ll be back around five or six. But I can tell you, there aren’t any vacancies.”
“Maybe I could pitch a tent.”
He thought about that. “Oh, that was a joke.”
“You know Kimberly Marsh?” I said. “In number four.”
He said, “Number four,” and thought about it. “That the pretty blonde girl?”
“Yes.”
He shrugged. “You see her around, that’s all. I said hi once and she said hi back, that’s all.”
I took out the photograph of Mort. “You see this guy around with her?”
He squinted at me. “Mr. Suspicious I don’t know who you are,” he said.
“Johnny Staccato, Confidential Investigations.”
He nodded and stared at the picture and rubbed his arm. “Well, I dunno,” he said. “Gee.” Gee.
I thanked him and walked around until I heard a door upstairs open and close. Then I walked back to number 4. I knocked again in case she had been in the shower, then took out two little tools I keep in my wallet and popped Kimberly Marsh’s deadbolt lock. “Ms. Marsh?” Maybe she was taking a nap. Maybe she just hadn’t wanted to answer the door. Maybe she was waiting behind it with an ice pick she had dipped in rat poison.
No answer.
I pushed open the door and went in.
There was a davenport against one wall with a wicker and glass coffee table in front of it and a matching Morris chair at the far end. From the doorway, I could see across the living room to the dining area and the kitchen. To the left was a short hall. Above the couch was a slickly framed poster of James Dean walking in the rain. He looked lonely.
A dozen brown daisies sat in a glass bowl on the coffee table. Propped against the bowl was a little lavender card. For the girl who gives me life, all my love, Mort. Papery petals had rained around the card.
On the end table there was a Panasonic phone-answering machine. I passed it, walked back to the kitchen, then glanced down the little hall to the bedroom before I went into the bath. No bodies. No messages scrawled in blood. No stopped-up toilet with red-tinted water. There were two towels on the bathroom floor as if someone had stepped out of the shower, toweled off, then dropped the towels. They were dry, at least two days old. There was a little chrome toothbrush holder with the stains those things get when you park a toothbrush in them, only there was no toothbrush. The medicine cabinet held all the stuff medicine cabinets hold, though maybe there were a couple of spaces where things had been but now weren’t. I went back out into the living room and checked the message machine. The message counter said zero – no messages. I played it back anyway. The counter was right.
I went into the bedroom. The bed was made and neat. There was a little desk in the corner beneath the window, cluttered and messy with old copies of the LA. Times, Vogue, I. Magnin shopping bags, and other junk. Halfway down a stack of trade papers and Casting Calls I found the kind of 8×10 black-and-white stills actors bring to readings. Most were head shots of a pretty blonde with clean healthy features. At the bottom of the 8×10 it said Kimberly Marsh in an elegant flowing script. On the back was stapled a Xeroxed copy of her acting credits, her training, and her physical description. She was 5′ 6″, 120 pounds, had honey hair and green eyes. She was 26 years old and wore a size 8. She could play tennis, enjoyed water sports, could ski, and ride both Western and English.
Her credits as an actress didn’t amount to much. Mostly regional theater from Arizona. She claimed to have studied with Nina Foch. Farther down the stack I found some full body shots, one with Kimberly in a fur bikini doing her best to look like a Pictish warrior. She looked pretty good in that fur bikini. I thought of Ellen Lang invisible in my director’s chair. Sit, Ellen. Speak. I put one of the head shots in my pocket.
I finished with the desk and moved to the closet. There were twelve shoe boxes stacked against the wall. I found a snapshot of a sleeping dog in one of them. There was a large empty space about the size of a suitcase on the right side of the closet shelf. Maybe Morton Lang had called and said, I’ve finally had my Fill of this invisible sexless drudge I’m married to so how’s about you and me and Perry hit the beach in Hawaii? And maybe Kimberly Marsh had said, You bet, but I havta get back for this role I got on “One Life to Live,” so she’d pulled down the suitcase and packed her toothbrush and enough clothes for a week and they had split. Sounded good to me. Ellen Lang wouldn’t like it, but there you are.
I shut the closet and went through the dresser, starting with the top drawer and working down. In the third drawer from the top I found a small wooden box containing a plastic bag of marijuana, three joints, two well-used pipes, a small bong, a broken mirror, four empty glass vials, and a short candle. Well, well, well. There was a 9 X 12 envelope under the stash box, folded in half and held tight by a rubber band. There was a pack of photographs in it. The first picture featured a nude Kimberly seated on her davenport, stark white triangles offsetting a rich tan. Not all of the shots were raw. A couple showed her posing on the back of a Triumph motorcycle, a couple more had her at the beach with a big, well-muscled, sandy-haired kid who had probably played end for the University of Mars. Near the bottom of the pack I found Morton Lang. He was naked on the bed, grinning, propped up on one elbow. A well-tanned female leg reached in from the bottom of the picture to play toesies with his privates. Mort. You jerk. I tore the picture of Morton in two and put it in my pocket. I put the rest of the stuff back, closed the drawers, and made sure the apartment was the way I’d found it. Then I let myself out.
The pear-shaped man was standing by the mailboxes on a little plot of grass they have there, waiting for a rat-sized dog on a silver leash. The dog was straining so hard its back was bent double. It edged sideways as it strained. Awful, the things you see in my line of work. The pear-shaped man said, “You’re not Johnny Staccato. That was an old TV series with John Cassavetes.”
“Caught me,” I said. “That’s the trouble with trying to be smart, there’s always someone smarter.” The pear-shaped man nodded and looked superior. I gave him a card. “You see Ms. Marsh around, I’d appreciate a call.”
The Mexicans in the Nova were still there, only now they were arguing. Charlie Bronson gestured angrily, then fired up their car and swung off down the street. Hot-blooded. The pear-shaped man put the card in his pants. “You aren’t the only one looking for that woman,” he said.
I looked at him. “No?”
“There was another man. I didn’t speak to him, but I saw him knocking on number 4, A big man.”
I gave him my All-Knowing Operative look. “Good-looking kid. Six-three. Sandy-haired. Could be a football player.”
He looked at the dog. “No, this man was dark. Black hair. Bigger than that.”
So much for the All-Knowing Operative. “When was this?”
“Last week. Thursday or Friday.” He belched softly, said “That’s a sweetie” to the dog, then eyed me again. “I think she had quite a few men friends.”
I nodded.
The pear-shaped man tsked at the little dog and gently jerked the leash, as if that would be coaxing. The dog looked up with sad, protruding eyes. The pear-shaped man said, “I’d feed him dog meal, but he whines so much for chicken necks. That’s all he’ll eat. He loves the skin so.”
I nodded again. “Same with people,” I said. “You never like what’s good for you.”
Chapter 3
I walked back along Gorham and down to San Vicente where I phoned Ellen Lang from a Shell station, and got no answer. I took out the rolodex cards Janet Simon had given me. There were two phone numbers typed on Garrett Rice’s card, one with a Beverly Hills prefix, one from The Burbank Studios in beautiful downtown Burbank. It was almost four and traffic was starting to build, the sky already a pallid exhaust orange. Ugly. Bumper to bumper. Fifty-five delightful minutes later I was on another pay phone across from the Warner Brothers gate asking a secretary I knew for a walk-on pass. I would have phoned Garrett Rice directly, but people tend not to be in for private cops. Even when they brave the rush hour. I jaywalked across Olive Street and gave the guard my name. He flipped through a little file where they keep the passes after the teletype prints them out and said, “Yes, sir.”
I said, “I’m going to see Garrett Rice. Can you tell me where that is?”
“What’s that name again?”
Usually, you tell these guys a name, they’re spitting out directions before you finish saying it. This guy had to look in a little book. Maybe nobody ever asked for Garrett Rice. Maybe I was the first ever and would win some kind of prize. “Here we go,” he said, and told me.
A lot of production companies share space at The Burbank Studios. Warner Brothers and Columbia are the big two. Aaron Spelling Productions rents space there. So do a couple zillion lesser companies. All tucked away in warm sand-colored buildings with red tile roofs and pseudo-adobe walls. Mature oaks fill the spaces between the buildings, making a nice shade. The quality of the space reflects your position within the industry.
Garrett Rice was beneath the water tower at the back of the lot. I missed the building twice until a cross-eyed kid on a bicycle pointed it out. It was a squat two-story brick box, six single offices on the bottom and six more on top, with a metal stair at either end. There were palm trees at either end, too, and more palms in a little plot right out front. The palms didn’t look like they were doing too well. A backhoe and a bulldozer were parked beside the building, taking up most of a tiny parking lot. This probably wasn’t where they put Paul Newman or David Lean. I looked at the names stenciled on the parking curbs. Second from the right was Garrett Rice. Room 217. The backhoe was in his spot.
I went up the stairs and found his office without having anybody point it out. The door was open. There was a little secretary’s cubicle, but no secretary. A spine-rolled copy of Black Belt magazine was on the secretary’s desk, open to an article about hand-to-hand combat in low-visibility situations. Some secretary.
Behind the secretary’s space was another door. I opened it and there was Garrett Rice. He stood behind his desk with the phone pressed to his ear, bouncing from foot to foot like he had to go to the bathroom. There was a dying plant on the desk and another on the end table by a worn green couch. There was a can of Lysol air freshener on a file cabinet. The cap was off.
When he saw me, he pressed his hip against the desk, closing a drawer that had been open. He did this in what some might call an understated fashion, then murmured into the phone and hung up.
Rice was about six-one with thin bones and the crepey skin you get from too much sun lamp. There was a mouse under his left eye and another on the left side of his forehead. He had tried to cover them with Indian earth. He had beer wings and shouldn’t have been wearing a form-fit shirt.
I handed him one of my cards. “Nice office,” I said. “I’m trying to find Morton Lang. I’m told you and he were close and that maybe you can help me out.”
He glanced at the card, then looked at me with wet, shining eyes. Nervous. “How’d you get in here?”
“My uncle owns the studio.”
“Bullshit.”
I gave him a shrug. “Mort’s been missing since Friday. He took his boy with him and didn’t leave word. His wife’s worried. Since you and he were associates, it makes sense that he might’ve said something to you.”
He licked his lips and I thought of Bambi’s mother, the way her head jerked up at the first sound of the hunters. Only she was pleasant to look at. The longer I looked at Garrett Rice, the more I wanted to cover my face with a handkerchief and fog the air with the Lysol.
He read the card again and flexed it back and forth, thinking. Then he said. “Fuckin’ asshole, Mort.”
I nodded. “That’s the one. When did you see him last?”
He glanced at the doorway behind me and spread his hands. “You shoulda called. I’m busy. I got calls.”
“Consider it a favor to the Forces of Good.”
“I got calls.”
“So make’m. I’ve got time.” I sat down on the couch between his briefcase and a large brown stain. The stain looked like Mickey Mouse run over by a Kenworth. It went well with the decor.
Garrett Rice hustled over and closed the case. Maybe he had the new Hot Property in there. Maybe Steven Spielberg had been calling him, begging to get a peek. Maybe I could sap Garrett Rice, make my getaway with the Hot Property, and sell it to George Lucas for a million bucks. I put my arm up on the back of the couch so the jacket would open and he could see the Dan Wesson. I waited.
He was breathing harder now, the way a fat man does after a flight of stairs. He looked at the door again. Maybe he was waiting for a pizza delivery. “I got calls,” he said. “I dunno where Mort is. I haven’t seen him for a week, maybe longer. What do I look like, his keeper?” He went back to his desk with the case.
I stared at him.
He fidgeted. “What?”
“Who beat you up, Garrett?”
He held the briefcase to his chest like a shield. “You’d better not fuck with me. I’m warning you.”
“I don’t want to fuck with you, Mr. Rice. I just want to ask you about Morton Lang.”
He looked past me at the door again, only this time he said, “Well, thank Christ! Where the hell you been?”
The man in the doorway was a little taller than me and a lot wider, with the sort of squared-off shoulders boxers get. He wore a heavy Fu moustache, a little business under his lower lip, and a two-inch Afro that was thicker on top than on the sides. Not quite the Carl Lewis look. He was very, very black. He looked at me. He looked at Garrett Rice. “Nature call. You didn’t want me to mess the floor, right?”
Rice said, “Throw this asshole outta here. C’mon.”
The black guy looked back at me and sucked a tooth. “How ’bout that, Elvis? Think I oughta throw your ass outta here?”
I sucked a tooth back at him. “She-it,” I said. “How’s it goin’, Cleon?”
Garrett Rice looked from Cleon Tyner to me and back to Cleon. “What the hell is this? ‘Cleon. Elvis. Howzitgoin?’ Throw the sonofabitch out, goddamnit!”
Cleon said, “Unh-unh,” and let himself down in the chair opposite Rice’s desk. He wrapped one arm over the back of the chair so I could see his Smith. It was in a pretty, gray brushed-leather rig. Cleon was wearing dark blue designer jeans, a ruffled white tuxedo shirt, and a gray sharkskin jacket. The jacket was tight across his shoulders and biceps. “You’re looking good,” I said.
He tried to give me modest. “Cut down on the grits. Dropped a few pounds. Workin’ out again. How’s Joe?”
Garrett Rice said, “Hey, hey, this guy walks in here, he’s got a gun. Look right there, under his goddamned arm. He starts pumpin’ me, he won’t leave when I ask, he could be anybody, goddamnit, and you’re shootin’ the shit with him. What in hell I hire you for?” His forehead was damp.
Cleon let out a long, deep breath and shifted forward in the chair. Rice jerked back an inch. Probably didn’t even know he’d done it. Cleon’s voice was polite. “I know this man, Mr. Rice. He won’t take muscle work. If he does decide to move on you now, why, then I’ll step in. That’s what I take the money for. But if all he wants to do is ask you about something or other, then you talk to him. That’s the smart thing.” Cleon gave me the sleepy eyes. “That’s all you wanna do, blood, is talk, am I right?”
“Sure.”
Cleon looked back at Rice. “There. You see. Why make somethin’ out of nothing?”
Garrett Rice chewed his lip. He said, “I don’t know where Mort is, all right. I told you.”
“You told me you saw him about a week ago. He say anything about leaving his wife?”
“Look, it was a party, see? A social situation. We were meeting with a potential backer about this project of mine. Mort had some bimbo with him. An actress. It was good times, that’s all. Mort wouldn’t’ve brought up any shit about his wife.”
“Kimberly Marsh?”
“Yeah, I guess that was her name. The bitch was all over me. That’s the way it is, see? These bimbos find out you’re a producer, they’re all over you.” Talking about that brought him to life.
“Sounds rewarding.”
He leered and made a pistol with his fingers and shot me. I considered returning the gesture with my .38. Cleon picked his thumb, ignoring us. I said, “Can you think of anyone else Mort might’ve talked to?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“We had business.”
“You played cards with them. Every week for almost a year.”
“Hey, I’m everybody’s friend. You want me to be your friend? I’ll be your friend, too. I’ll even play cards with you. I’ll even lose, you want me to.”
I looked at Cleon. He shrugged. “It’s a gig, man.”
“Not what you call your quality employment.”
“Is it ever?”
I stood up. Cleon shifted, rolling the big shoulders. “Leaving,” I said. Cleon nodded but stayed forward. Cleon knew the moves. I looked back at Garrett. “I like the bruises. They go with the liver spots.”
“Some asshole thought I stole his script. That happens, this business.”
“Must be some asshole, you hiring on Cleon.”
“Man just dig quality, bro, that’s all.”
I nodded. Garrett Rice gnawed at his lip.
I said, “This has been disappointing, Garrett. I bucked rush hour for this.”
“Tough.”
I said, “I see Ellen Lang, I’ll give her your best.”
“Tell her Mort’s an asshole.”
“She might agree.”
“She’s an asshole, too. So are you.”
I looked at Cleon. There was a little smile to his eye, but you’d never know it unless you knew him well.
I went out along the cement walk and down the metal stairs and took the long walk back to my car. I drove to Studio City to pick up eggplant parmesan and an antipasto from a place called Sonny’s and a six-pack of Wheat beer from the liquor store next door. By the time I got out of Sonny’s, the sky was a deep purple, coal red in the west behind black palm-tree cutouts. I drove south on Laurel Canyon, up the hill toward home.
I had very much wanted to turn up some good news for Ellen Lang. But good news, like magic, is sometimes in short supply.
Chapter 4
I t was eight o’clock when I pulled into the carport. I put the eggplant in the microwave to reheat and ate the antipasto while I waited. Oily. Sonny’s had gone downhill. The little metal hatch I’d built into the door off the kitchen clattered and the cat walked in. He’s black and he walks with his head sort of cocked to the side because someone once shot him with a .22. I poured a little of the Wheat beer in a saucer and put out some cat food. He drank the beer first then ate the cat food then looked at me for more beer. He was purring. “Forget it,” I said. The purring stopped and he walked away. When the eggplant was ready I carried it and the beer and the cordless phone out onto the deck. The rich black of the canyon was dotted with jack-o’-lantern lit houses, orange and white and yellow and red in the night. Where the canyon flattened out into Hollywood and the basin beyond, the lights concentrated into thousands of blue-white diamonds spilled over the earth. I liked that.
I’m in a rustic A-frame on a little road off Woodrow Wilson Drive above Hollywood. The only other house is a cantilevered job to my east. A stuntman I know lives there with his girlfriend and their two little boys. Sometimes during the day they come out on their deck and we’ll see each other and wave. The boys call my place the teepee house. I like that, too.
When I bought the house four years ago I tore off the deck railing and rebuilt it so the center section was detachable. I detached it now, and sat on the edge of the deck with my feet hanging down, eggplant in my lap, and nothing between me and Out There. The chill air felt good. After a while the cat came out and stared at me. “Okay,” I said. I poured some more of the Wheat beer on the deck. He blinked, then lapped at it.
When the eggplant was gone I called the answering machine at my office. There were three messages from Ellen Lang and one from Janet Simon. Ellen Lang sounded scared in the first two and teary in the third. Janet Simon sounded like Janet Simon. I called Ellen Lang. Janet Simon answered. It works like that sometimes.
“Mort came back and tore up the house. Could you come over here?”
“Is she okay?”
“He was gone when she got here. I made her call the police but now she’s saying she won’t let them in the house.”
“Want me to pistol-whip her?”
“Don’t you ever let up?”
Apparently not. It took me eighteen minutes to push the Corvette down the valley side of Laurel, up onto the freeway, and over to Encino. Ellen Lang lived in the flat part above Ventura Boulevard in what’s called a sprawling California Tudor by realtors and Encino Baroque by people with taste. Janet Simons pale blue Mustang was on the street in front of the house. I pulled into the drive behind a Subaru wagon, cut the engine, and went up to the door. It opened before I could knock. Ellen Lang was pinched and thin behind her glasses, more so than this morning. She said, “I called you. I called and called and you weren’t there. I came to you so the police wouldn’t get involved and now they are.”
Janet said, “Oh, for God’s sake, Ellen.”
I had one of those dull aches you get behind the eyes when your beer drinking is interrupted.
Ellen Lang said, “Well, it’s Mort’s house, isn’t it? He can do what he wants here, can’t he? Can’t we call the police back and tell them it was a mistake?”
I followed them like that into the living room.
Every large piece of furniture had been turned over and the bottom cloth ripped away. Books had been pulled off the shelves and cabinets thrown open. The back was off the television. A palm had been worked out of its heavy brass pot, scattering dirt over the beige carpet. The Zenith console stereo was turned on its face and about two hundred record albums spilled out on the floor. One of those large ceramic greyhounds you see in department stores was cracked open on the hearth, its head intact but lying on the carpet upside down. It looked asleep.
Some mistake.
“How long ago did you call?” I said to Ellen Lang.
Janet Simon answered. “About forty-five minutes. She told them it wasn’t an emergency.”
“If you had they’d have been here forty minutes ago. As it is, they’ve called it out to a radio car. They’ll be here any time.”
Ellen Lang crossed her arms in the keep-me-warm posture and began nibbling the side of her mouth. Every light in the house was on, as if Janet or Ellen had gone through, making a point of driving out as much darkness as possible. There was a little night-light behind a wingback chair beside the fireplace. Even it glowed.
“He leave a note?” I said.
She shook her head.
“Take any clothes for the boy?”
Shook her head again.
“Take anything else?”
She squinted and did something funny with her mouth, blowing air out the corners while keeping the lips together. “I checked my things. I checked the silver. The Neil Diamond records are still here. Mort loves Neil Diamond.”
“This is A-plus help you’re giving me, Mrs. Lang.”
She looked at me like I was fading out and tough to see. “Mort isn’t a thief. If he took anything of his, that isn’t thievery, is it? He paid for it, didn’t he? He paid for all this and that gives him some rights, doesn’t it?” She said that to Janet Simon.
Janet Simon reached a cigarette out of a little blue purse, tamped it, fired up, and pulled enough smoke into her chest to fill the Goodyear blimp. “When are you going to wake up?” she said.
I left them to it and went down the hall. There was a door on the left, closed, with the sounds of running water. “That’s the bathroom,” Janet Simon called. “The girls are in there.” The girls’ bedroom was just past the bath but on the right. It was pink and white and had twin canopy beds and probably used to be quite nice. Now, the mattresses were half on and half off and one of the box springs had been turned upside down. There was a dresser and a chest, but all the drawers were out and the clothes were scattered on the floor. Bruce Springsteen was on the closet door, which spoke highly for at least one of the girls. Clothes hung neatly on the crossbar even though the closet floor had been trashed. Just outside the closet, there were two three-ring binders and two stacks of schoolbooks. The binders and the dust covers on the books were covered with doodles and designs and words. Cindy loves Frank. B. T. + C. L. Robby Robby Robby, I want you for my hobby. BOOK YOU. I found a folded piece of three-hole paper in Cindy Lang’s geography book with a message written on it in pencil. The message was ELAM FREID BITES THE BIG ONE!!!!! I wondered if Elam Freid knew that. I wondered how much he’d pay to find out.
I went to the boy’s room next. It was smaller than the girls’, with a single bed and a dresser and a big oak chest. The chest was turned over and the dresser was on its side and the mattress and box springs leaned drunkenly against the wall. I had wanted to go over the boy’s room. I had wanted to read his diary and sift through his comics and peek under his mattress. I had wanted to go through the wads of paper in his trash and page through his notebooks and study the drawings that he made and pinned to the wall. A week before they left, maybe Mort had said something to the boy and the boy had left a clue. All of that was gone. There was only a big mess here that made me hope the boy wouldn’t suddenly come through the front door, run back here, and see it.
The master bedroom was at the back of the house looking out on the pool through some nice French doors. It smelled of Ana-1/2s Ana-1/2s. I pulled the bolts at the top of each French door and ran my fingers along the stiles. They hadn’t been jimmied. There was a kingsize platform bed, a dresser, a chest, and a desk, and all of it was torn up pretty much like the others. They had one of those sliding wall closets with the mirrored hanging doors. The left half was Ellen and the right Mort. Boxes and shoe bags and a Minolta camera case and a larger box that said Bekins had been tossed out to the center of the room. Mort had some nice pants and some nice shirts and half a dozen pair of Bally shoes. There was a tan Nino Cerruti shirt I liked a lot hanging beside three dark gray Sy Devore suit bags and two from Carroll’s in Westwood. A lot of clothes to leave behind, but maybe Mort traveled light.
A collection of family pictures hung over the bed. The lads. Mort and the kids. Ellen. Mort and Ellen. Mort didn’t seem to be playing favorites. The nicest had Mort in the pool with the younger girl on his shoulders and Perry and the older girl in his arms. Nothing looked wrong in those pictures. Mort didn’t look crazy. Ellen didn’t look small. Nothing ever looks wrong in the pictures. Everything always goes wrong when the cameras turned away.
The bathroom door was still closed, the water was still running, Janet Simon was still smoking, Ellen Lang was still standing with her arms crossed, cold. I went into the kitchen. Every cupboard had been emptied, every bag of sugar and rice and flour and box of cereal spilled. The grill had been pulled off the bottom of the refrigerator and the stove had been dragged away from the wall, scarring the vinyl with ragged furrows. I found a bottle of Extra Strength Bayer aspirin in a mound of Corn Chex, ate three, then went back out into the living room.
Janet Simon gave me frozen eyes. Ellen Lang watched the floor. I cleared my throat. “Someone was looking for something and someone knew where someone else might want to hide it,” I said. “This was professional. Mort didn’t do this. You’re going to need the police.” Stating the obvious is something I do well.
Ellen Lang said, “No.” Softly.
Janet Simon crushed out her cigarette and said, “Yes.” Firmly.
I took a deep breath and smiled sweetly. “I’m going to check around outside,” I said.
It was either that, or hit them with a chair.
Chapter 5
I went out to the Corvette and got the big five-cell I keep in the trunk. I looked for jimmy marks on the front door lock stile and the doorjamb, but didn’t find any. Three bay windows at the front of the house overlooked a flower bed with azaleas and snapdragons. The windows weren’t jimmied and the flowers weren’t trampled. I walked around the north side of the house and there were four more windows, two and a space and then two more, each still locked on the inside. I let myself through a wooden gate and walked the back of the house past a little beaded bathroom window to the pool. No openings punched in the wall, no sliding door off its track, no circular holes cut into glass. No one slugged me with a ball peen hammer and disappeared into the night. I stopped by the pool and listened. Motor sounds from the freeway to the south. Water gurgling through pipes to the little bathroom. Somewhere a radio going, Tina Turner coughing out What’s Love Got to Do With It?. Through the glass doors, I could see Ellen and Janet in the living room, Ellen with her arms squeezed across her chest, Janet making an explanatory gesture with her cigarette, Ellen shaking her head, Janet looking disgusted. I thought of great teams from the past: Burns and Allen, Bergen and McCarthy, Heckle and Jeckle. I took a deep breath, smelled jasmine, and kept going.
On the south side of the house it was the same thing. No footprints beneath the windows. No jimmy marks. No sign of forced entry. That meant a key or a lock pick. Maybe Mort had hired somebody to go in there and given them his key. But if so, what could he have wanted? Stock certificates? Negotiable bonds? Nudie shots he was scared Ellen would show their friends?
I went back out to the front just as a black and white pulled up. They pegged me with their spotlight and told me not to move.
“Should I grab sky?” I said.
The same voice came back, “Just stand there, shithead.” Service with a smile.
One of the cops came forward with his hand on his gun. The other stayed behind the light. You can never see what they’re doing behind those lights, which is why they stay there. The cop who came out was about my height but thicker in the butt and legs. It didn’t detract from his presence. His name tag read SIMMS.
I spread my arms, careful not to point the five-cell in their direction. “White pants and jacket. The latest in cat burglar apparel.”
Simms said, “Little man, I’ve cuffed’m that went out in red tights. Let’s see some ID.”
“I’m Cole. I work for the owner. Private investigator. There’s a Dan Wesson .38 under my left arm.”
He said okay, told me he was going to reach under and take the gun, then did it. “Now the paper,” he said.
I produced the PI license and the license to carry, and watched him read them. “Elvis. This some kind of bullshit or what?”
“After my mother.”
He looked at me the way cops look at you when they’re thinking about trying you out, then gave me the benefit of the doubt. “Guess you take some riding about that.”
“My brother Edna had it worse.”
He thought about it again, figured I wasn’t worth the paperwork and handed back the gun. “Okay. We got a BE call.” The other cop came around and joined us but left the spotlight on. I clicked off the five-cell.
“They’re inside,” I said. “The client’s name is Ellen Lang. She owns the place. She came home and found it busted up. Another woman is with her. I checked the windows and the doors but it looks okay.”
The new cop said, “You don’t mind if we see for ourselves, do you?”
I said, “This guy is good, Simms. He’s a comer.”
Simms put his hand on my arm and pointed me toward the house. “Come on, let’s you and me go see the ladies. Eddie, take a walk around.”
When we got into the living room I said, “Look what the cat dragged in.”
Ellen Lang said, “Oh, Lord,” and sat down as the two girls walked in. The oldest was fourteen, the youngest maybe eleven. The older one was tall and gawky and had a couple of major league pimples forming up on her forehead. The younger one was slender and dark and looked a little bit like Ellen. They were carrying pink and white overnighters. The oldest had a pissed-off look on her face. “We’re packed,” she said. She ignored me and the cop.
“Oh, honey, that’s not warm enough. Get a sweater.”
The younger one stared at Simms, then at me. “Is he the detective?”
“Wanna see my sap?” I said.
Ellen Lang took off her glasses, rubbed at her eyes, put her glasses back on, and said, “Please, Mr. Cole.”
The younger one said, “What’s a sap?”
Simms ignored all that. “This place looks like hell.”
The older one said, “It’s not the arctic, Mother. We’re only going to Janet’s.” Her face reeked of disapproval. Teenage girls reek of disapproval better than anyone I know.
“Oh, honey, please,” Ellen Lang said. It wasn’t nice to hear. It’s never nice to hear an adult whine to a child. The older one closed her eyes, sighed dramatically, and said, “Come on.” They went back down the hall and disappeared.
Simms said, “I’m Officer Simms. There’s another officer outside checking the yard. What we’re going to do is look around, then sit down with you and talk about it, okay?” He had a good style. Relaxed and easy.
Ellen Lang’s “Yes” was very soft.
Eddie tapped at the glass doors that led off the dining room out to the pool and Simms went over. They mumbled together, then Simms said, “Poolhouse is inside out. I’ll be right back,” and went out to see. The jasmine floated in the open door.
I said, “You want the cops in on this or not? They’re in now and it’s smarter if they stay in.”
She shook her head without looking at me.
Janet Simon said, “Oh, for God’s sake, Ellen,” for maybe the 400th time, and took a seat on the hearth.
I said, “It is my professional opinion that you allow the police to investigate. I checked Kimberly Marsh’s apartment this afternoon. It looks like she went away for a few days. If she did, there’s a good chance she went somewhere with Mort. If Mort’s out of town, then he couldn’t have done this. That means you had a stranger in your house. Even if Mort hired somebody, that’s over the line and the cops should know.”
Janet Simon said, “Wow. You work fast.”
Ellen Lang went white when I mentioned Kimberly Marsh.
She tried to swallow, looked like she had a little trouble, then stood up and said, “I won’t have the police after my husband. I won’t do that to him. I don’t want the police here. I don’t want ABPs. I don’t want Mort in any trouble.”
“APB,” 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.
Chapter 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, no!”
“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 X 10 of Kimberly Marsh. Patricia looked at it, turned it over and read the r+!sum+!, 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 Warner’s 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?”
Chapter 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 IRA 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 fix 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 X 10’s. On the back of each 8 X 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.”
She shifted in the chair. I sat and ate a Tuscan pepper. I prefer chili peppers or serranos, but Tuscans are fun, too.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” she said.
“In the box on the desk.” I showed her the stack of paper.
She closed her eyes. “Oh, God. I’m sorry. I put those things in there this morning. I don’t know why I didn’t see them.”
“Stress. You give a person enough stress and they begin to fog out. People start having little fender benders in parking lots. People forget their keys. People can’t see things right under their noses. It happens to everybody. Even Janet Simon.”
She took a nibble of her sandwich, then rearranged it on the plate. “You don’t like her very much, do you?”
I didn’t say anything.
“She’s my friend. She’s a very strong lady. She understands.” Sit, Ellen. Speak.
“She’s your anchor,” I said. “She is that because she’s abusive and insulting and she reinforces your lousy self-image, which is what you want. If she’s right about you, then Mort’s right about you. If Mort’s right about you then you deserve to be treated the way he treats you and you shouldn’t rock the boat which is something you do not want to do.” Mr. Sensitive. “Other than that, I like her fine.”
“You made a joke.”
I had said a very hard thing and she wasn’t angry. She should’ve been, but she wasn’t. Maybe enough years of Janet Simon will do that to you. Or maybe she hadn’t heard.
I shrugged. “Being funny, that’s one way to deal with stress. Investigators, cops, paramedics. Paramedics are the funniest people I know. Have you in stitches.”
She looked at me. Blank.
“Paramedics are the funniest people I know. Have you in stitches.”
“Oh.”
“Another little joke.”
We smiled at each other. Just your basic lunchtime conversation.
“Did you mean that, what you said about Janet?”
Maybe she had heard. Maybe, deep down, she was even angry. “Yes.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Okay.”
She took another microscopic bite of her sandwich, then pushed it away. Maybe she absorbed nutrients from her surroundings. “You must like being a private investigator,” she said.
“Yes. Very much.” I took the top off one of the sandwich halves, pulled the stems off two of the peppers, put the peppers on the sandwich, sealed it up again.
“Did you go to college for that?”
“University of Southeast Asia. Two-year program.”
“Vietnam?”
“Unh-huh.” I finished the first half of the sandwich, put three peppers on the remaining half, and started on that one.
“That must have been awful,” she said.
“There were some very real disadvantages to being there, yes.” I swallowed, took a sip of water, patted my lips with the napkin. “But adversity has a way of strengthening. If it doesn’t kill you, you learn things. For instance, that’s when I learned I wanted to be Peter Pan.”
She didn’t quite frown. She quizzled.
“You’re quizzling.”
“Pardon me?” Confused.
“Me being funny again. I learned to be funny in Vietnam. Funny is a survival mechanism. I started yoga. Pranayamic breathing is a great way to keep your mind right. We’d be in a bunker, six of us, breathing in one nostril, out the other, oming to beat hell as the rockets came in. You see how this gets funny?”
“Of course.”
“Yoga led to tai chi, tai chi led to tae kwon do, which is Korean karate, and wing chun, which is an offshoot of Chinese kung fu. All very centering, stabilizing activities.” I spread my hands. “I am a bastion of calm in a chaotic world.”
Blank eyes.
“I learned that I could survive. I learned what I would do to keep breathing, and what I wouldn’t do, and what was important to me, and what wasn’t. Just like you’re going to learn that you can survive what’s happening to you.”
She pursed her lips, looking away to pick at a bread crumb on her milk glass.
“If I can survive Vietnam, you can survive Encino,” I said. “Try yoga. Be good for you.”
“Yoga.”
Apparently she didn’t consider yoga an appropriate substitute for a husband. “Mrs. Lang, do you know where Mort kept his gun?”
She looked surprised. “Mort didn’t have a gun.”
I showed her the receipt, “Well, this is years ago,” she said.
“Guns tend to hang around. Keep an eye out for it.”
She nodded. “All right. I’m sorry.”
“You say that a lot. You don’t have to be sorry. You look away a lot, too, and that’s something else you don’t have to do.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Quite all right.”
She took a sip of her milk. It left a moustache on her upper lip. “You are funny,” she said.
“It’s either that or be smart.” I killed the rest of the sandwich and sorted the paperwork: bank stuff together, credit card billings together, phone stuff by itself. Without Janet Simon around, she was much more relaxed. You could look past the frightened eyes and mottled face and slumped shoulders and get glimpses of her from better days. I said, “I’ll bet you were the third prettiest girl in eleventh grade.”
Happy-lines came to the corners of her eyes. She touched at her hair again. “Second prettiest,” she said.
It was good when she smiled. She probably hadn’t done a lot “High school. Clarence Darrow Senior High in Elverton, That’s where we grew up. In Kansas.”
“High school sweethearts.”
She smiled. “Yes. Isn’t that awful?”
“Not at all. You go to college together?”
Her eyes turned a little wistful. “Mort was in theater arts and business. His parents had quite a large paint store there, in Elverton. They wanted him to take it over but Mort wanted to act. No one can understand that in Elverton. You say you want to act and they just look at you.”
I shrugged. “Mort didn’t have it so bad.”
She looked at me.
“He had the second prettiest girl at Clarence Darrow Senior High, didn’t he?”
She looked at me some more until she realized what I was doing, then she grinned, and nodded, and finally gave a short uncertain laugh. She told me I was terrible.
I pushed the paperwork across the table to her. “Be that as it may, I want you to go through and notate all the phone numbers that you can identify. Go through the credit card billings and see if the purchases make sense to you. Same with the bank statements and the check stubs.”
She looked at the stacks of paper. The smile disappeared. No happy-lines around the eyes. “Isn’t that what I’m paying you for?” she said softly.
“We’re going to have to take care of that, too. So far, you’re not paying me anything.”
“Yes, of course.” Awkward and uncomfortable.
I sighed. “Look, I could do this, sure, but it’s faster if you do it. I won’t know any of these phone numbers, but you will, and that will save time. I don’t know what you people bought from the Broadway or on Visa. I see a Visa charge from The Ivy for a hundred dollars a week every week, I don’t know you and Janet make a regular thing of it there every Thursday.”
“There’s nothing like that.”
“There might be something else.”
She was looking at the paper like it was going to jump at her. “It’s not that I don’t want to,” she said, “it’s just that I’m not very good at these things.”
“You’ll surprise yourself.”
“I’m so bad with figures.”
“Try”
“I’ll mess it up.” I leaned back in the chair and put my hands on the table. At the Grand Canyon, I’d seen a man with acrophobia force himself toward the guardrail because his daughter wanted to look down. He almost made it, both hands on the rail, leaning forward in a lunge with his feet as far back as possible, before the cold sweats cut his knees out from under him and he collapsed to the pavement. Ellen Lang’s eyes looked like his eyes.
She tried to smile again, but it came out broken this time. “It really will be better if you do it, don’t you see?”
I saw. “Mort really did it to you, didn’t he.”
She stood quickly and scooped up what was left of her sandwich and the Fred Flintstone glass. “You stop that right now. You sound just like Janet.”
“Nope. With me it was just an observation.”
She stood breathing hard for a second and then she went into the kitchen. I waited. When she came back out she said, “All right. Tell me what to do again.”
I told her. “Now, about my fee.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Two thousand, exclusive of expenses.”
“I remember.”
I looked at her. She looked at me. Nobody moved. After twenty or thirty years I said, “Well?”
“I’ll get it to you.”
I took the checkbook out of the stack of bank paper and pushed it across the table to her. “What’s wrong with now?”
A tick started on her right eye. “Do you’a take Visa?”
It was very still in the house. I could hear a single-engine light plane climbing out of Van Nuys Airport to the north. Somewhere down the street a dog with a deep, barrel-chested voice barked. There was a little breeze, but the jasmine was soured by the smog. I slid the checkbook back and looked at it. Most of the couples I know have the husband’s name printed out, with the wife’s name printed beneath it, two individuals. Theirs read: Mr. and Mrs. Morton K. Lang. There was a balance of $3426.15. All of the stubs were written in the same masculine hand. I said quietly, “Go get a pen and I’ll show you how.”
She went back into the kitchen. When she didn’t come out for a while I went to see. She was standing with one hand on the counter and one hand atop her head. Her glasses were off and her chest was heaving and there was a puddle of tears on the tile counter by the glasses. Streamers of mucus ran down from her nose. All of that, but you couldn’t hear her. “It’s okay,” I said.
She broke and turned into my chest, sucking great gasping sobs. I held her tight, feeling the wet soak through my shirt. “I’m thirty-nine years old and I can’t do anything. What did I do to myself? What did I do? I’ve got to have him back. Oh, God, I need him.”
I knew she wasn’t talking about Perry.
I held her until the heaving stopped and then I wrapped some ice in a dish towel and wet it and told her to put it on her face.
After a while we went back out to the dining room and I showed her how to fill in the check and how to maintain the balance on the stub. She was fine with the figures once she knew where to put them.
When the check was written she tried to smile but all the life had gone out of her. “I guess I’ll need to do this to pay the bills.”
“Yes.”
“Excuse me.”
She went down the hall toward her bedroom. I sat at the table for a while, then brought the dishes into the kitchen. I washed both glasses and the plate and the saucer, and dried them with paper towels, then I went back out, gathered together the bank records, and went into the living room by the overturned couch. She’d done a fair job of stapling the bottom cloth back on, but she would have a helluva time righting it. I listened, but couldn’t hear her moving around. I turned the couch over and put it where I thought it should go and left.
Chapter 8
F orty minutes later I was back at my office. It was nicer there. I liked the view. I liked the Pinocchio clock. I liked my director’s chairs. I arranged the rolodex cards I’d taken from Morton Lang’s desk neatly on top of his bank statements. I took out my bankbook and the two thousand dollar check Ellen Lang had written. Her first check. I filled out a deposit slip, endorsed the check, stamped FOR DEPOSIT ONLY over my signature, put it all in the bankbook, put everything back in my desk, closed the drawer, and put my brain in neutral, a relatively easy task. The outer door opened and Clarence Wu stuck his grapefruit head and thin shoulders into the little waiting room. “Is now a bad time?”
Pinocchio’s eyes went side to side, side to side.
Clarence came in with his briefcase. Clarence owned Wu’s Quality Engraving on the second floor, above the bank. I had stopped in a week ago to see about the business cards and stationery, telling him I wanted a more businesslike image. “I made up the samples,” he said. “You had some wonderful ideas.”
I didn’t remember having any wonderful ideas, but there you go. He put the briefcase on the desk, took some cards out of his shirt pocket, and laid them out on the case like a blackjack dealer. I looked at Pinocchio. Clarence frowned. “You seem preoccupied,” he said.
“A small loss of faith in the human condition. It’ll pass. Continue.”
He turned the case around. “Voil+a.”
There were four cards, two white, one sort of light blue, and one cream. One of the white ones had a human eye rendered in charcoal in the center with The Elvis Cole Detective Agency arced above it and the legend on your case beneath. “Businesslike,” I said. He beamed. The other white card had my name spelled out in bullet holes with a smoking machine gun underneath. Had I thought of that? The sort-of-blue card had a magnifying glass laid over a deerstalker hat in the upper left corner and the agency’s name in script. “Victorian,” I said.
“A certain elegance,” he nodded.
The cream card had my name centered in modern block letters with the word detective beneath it and a .45 Colt Automatic in the upper right quad. I looked at that one the longest. I said, “Get rid of the gun and you’ve got something.”
He looked confused. “No art?”
“No art.”
He looked confused some more and then he beamed. “Inspired.”
“Yeah. Gimme five hundred with my name and the detective and another five hundred that say The Elvis Cole Detective Agency. Put the phone number in the lower right corner and the address in the lower left.”
“You want cards for Mr. Pike?”
“Mr. Pike won’t use cards.”
“Of course,” Of course. He nodded and beamed again, and said, “Next Thursday,” and left.
Maybe I could find Mort by next Thursday. Maybe I could find him this afternoon. There would be advantages. No more trips to Encino. No more Ellen Lang. No more depression. I would be The Happy Detective. I could call Wu and have him change the card. Elvis Cole, The Happy Detective, specializing in Happy Cases. Inspired.
I went down to the deli, bought an Evian water, drank it on the way back up, then went through Mort’s finances. As of two weeks ago Monday, Morton Lang had $4265.18 in a passbook savings account. There was one three-year CD in his name worth $5000 that matured in August. I could find no evidence of any stocks or other income-producing investment in either his name, Ellen’s name, or in the names of the children. Irregular deposits totaling $5200 had been made into savings over the past six months. During the same period, $2200 was transferred to checking every two weeks. Figure $1600 note and taxes, $800 food, $500 cars, another $200 gardener and pool service, another $500 or $600 because you got three kids and you live in Encino. Forty-five hundred a month to live, next to nothing coming in. You only start dealing with a Garrett Rice when you’re scared.
I dialed ICM. They gave me to someone in the television department who had known Morton Lang when he worked there fourteen months ago. He had known Mort, but not very well, and if I was looking for representation perhaps he could help me out, ICM being a full-service agency representing artists in all media. I dialed Morton Lang’s clients. Edmund Harris wasn’t home. Kaitlin Rosenberg hadn’t spoken to Mort in three weeks, and I should tell him the play was going fine. Cynthia Alport hadn’t heard from him in over a month and why the hell hadn’t he returned her calls? Ric-with-no-K Lloyd hadn’t returned Mort’s call of six weeks ago because he’d changed agents and would I please pass that along to Mort? Darren Fips had spoken with Mort about two weeks ago because the contracts had never arrived but Mort hadn’t gotten back to him and Darren was getting damned pissed. Tracey Cormer’s line was busy. Fourteen minutes after I started, the rolodex cards were back in their stack and I still had no useful information. I dialed Kimberly Marsh, thinking maybe she hadn’t run off with Mort after all, and got her answering machine. I called Ellen Lang, thinking maybe she’d found something in the phone bills, or, if not, maybe she just needed a kind word. No answer. I called Janet Simon, thinking maybe Ellen Lang had gone over there, or, if not, Janet might know where she had gone. No answer. I got up, opened the glass doors, and went out onto the balcony to stand in the smog.
All dressed up and no place to go.
The phone rang. “Elvis Cole Detective Agency. Top rates paid for top clues.”
It was Lou Poitras, this cop I know who works out of North Hollywood Division. “Howzitgoin, Hound Dog?”
“Your wife’s here. We’re having a Wesson oil party.”
There was a grunt. “You workin’ for a guy named Morton Lang?”
“His wife. Ellen Lang. How’d you know?”
It got very still in the office. I watched Pinocchio’s eyes. Side to side, side to side. “What’s going on, Lou?”
“‘Bout an hour ago some Chippies found Morton Lang sittin’ in his Caddie up near Lancaster. Shot to death.”
There was a loud shushing noise and my fingers began to tingle and I had to go to the bathroom. My voice didn’t want to work. “The boy?”
Lou didn’t say anything.
“Lou?”
“What boy?” he said.
After a while I hung up and took out the photo of Morton Lang. I turned it over and reread the description his wife had written. I looked at the picture of the boy. Maybe he was with Kimberly Marsh. Maybe he was fine and safe and away from whoever had shot his father to death. Maybe not. I opened the drawer and took out my passbook and the check and the deposit slip. I put the passbook back and closed the drawer. I tore the deposit slip in quarters and threw it away. I wrote VOID across the face of the check. Her first check. I folded it in two and put it in my wallet and then I went to see Lou Poitras.
Chapter 9
I parked in the little lot they have next to the North Hollywood Police Department headquarters and went around front to this big linoleum-floored room. There were hardwood benches on two of the walls, a couple of Coke and candy machines, and a bulletin board. A poster on the bulletin board said POLICE FUND RAISER- A NIGHT OF BOXING ENTERTAINMENT- COPS VERSUS FIREMEN! SPECIAL EXHIBITION BOUT: BULLDOG PARKER AND MUSTAFA HAMSHO. Beside the poster a skinny white kid with stringy hair spoke softly into a pay phone. He leaned against the wall with one foot back on a toe, his heel nervously rocking. I went around two Chicano men in Caterpillar hats with green jackets and dirty broken work shoes and through a reinforced door, up one flight of stairs, and down a short hall into the detectives’ squad room. Also known as Xanadu.
The detectives live in a long gray room with all the desks against the north wall and three little offices at the far end. Across from the desks are a shower, a locker room, and a holding cell. Days of Our Lives was going on the locker room TV. Two brown hands were sticking out through the holding cell bars. They looked tired. Poitras’ office was the first of the three at the far end.
Lou Poitras has a face like a frying pan and a back as wide as a Coupe de Ville. His arms are so swollen from the weights he pumps they look like fourteen pound hams squeezed into his sleeves. He has a scar breaking the hairline above his left eye where a guy who should’ve known better got silly and laid a jack handle. It lent character. Poitras was leaning back behind his desk as I walked in, kielbasa fingers laced over his belly. Even reclined, he took up most of the room.
He said, “You didn’t bring that sonofabitch Pike, did you?”
“I’m fine, Lou. And you?”
Simms was sitting in a hard chair in front of Lou’s desk. There was another chair against the wall, but it was stacked high with files and folders. First come, first served. Simms wore street clothes: blue jeans and a faded khaki safari shirt with an ink stain on the pocket and tread-worn Converse All Stars. “You get promoted?” I said.
“Day off.”
Lou said, “Forget that. Gimme the kid’s picture.”
I handed him the little school picture of gap-toothed Perry Lang. He yelled, “Penny!” and flipped the photo over to read the back, jaw working.
Penny came in. There was a lot of dusty red hair and tanned skin. She had to be six feet tall. “Sheena, right?” I said. She ignored me. Lou gave her the little picture. “Color-copy this, front and back, and have a set phoned up to McGill in Lancaster right away.” When she left, Simms looked after her. So did I.
“She’s new,” I said.
Simms smiled. “Uh-huh.”
Poitras looked sour. “You two try to control your glands.”
“You get anything new on the cause of death?” I said.
“I called the States up by Lancaster after we talked. They say four shots, close range. ME’s out there now.”
“What about the boy?”
“McGill up there, he’s okay. McGill said there was nothing in the Caddie to indicate the boy was in the car when his old man got it. They put some people out to search the roadside, but it’s gonna be a while before we hear.”
“Okay.”
Poitras leaned forward and looked at me, his forehead wrinkling up like a street map of Bangkok. “Simms says you’re in on this.”
I started from the beginning, telling them how Ellen Lang had hired me and why. I told them about Kimberly Marsh and said her address twice so Lou could write it down, and then about Garrett Rice and what Patricia Kyle had given me as background information. I told them what I knew about Mort from Kansas and his failing business and his heavy monthly note and his midlife crisis. It didn’t take long. Somewhere in there Simms went out and came back with three coffees. Mine was cold. When I finished, Lou said, “All right. You come up with any angles on Lang?”
“No.”
“Enemies?”
“No.”
“How about connections?”
“Unh-uh.”
Simms liked that. “Sounds like you been busting your ass.”
Lou drummed his fingers on the desk. It sounded like firecrackers going off. I’d once seen Lou Poitras dead-lift the front end of a ’69 Volkswagen Bug. “Simms said somebody went through their house last night.”
“Simms knows what I know. The wife figures the husband did it. I don’t figure it that way, but it’s possible. I think somebody went in there looking for something.”
Simms cracked a knuckle. “You think the wife’s holding out?”
“No.”
Lou said, “What would somebody want?”
“I got no idea.”
A tall thin man in a dark gray three-piece suit walked in and gave me the checkout. He had a tight puckered face that made me think of Raid Ant Roach Killer. He said, “This asshole works with Joe Pike?”
I smiled at Poitras. “You two rehearse this?”
Lou said, “Wait outside, Hound Dog.”
Simms got up so the new guy could sit down, and Poitras shut the door behind me. It made me feel left out. The squad room was empty. Tail end of the lunch hour, all the dicks were still out scoring half-price meals. The big redhead came back with a sheaf of color copies and stopped when she saw the closed door. I was sitting behind one of the desks with my feet up, reading a Daily Variety. Half the desks on the floor sported show business trade papers. One of the desks even had American Cinematographer. These cops. She looked at me. I said, “Conference with Washington. Very hush-hush.” Then I wiggled my eyebrows. She stared at me a half a heartbeat longer and walked away.
I got up and wandered into the locker room for more coffee. An older cop with a bad toup and lots of gold around his neck was watching Wheel of Fortune. The place smelled like a ripe jock but he didn’t seem to mind. I poured two cups and brought one out to the holding cell but it was empty.
I was standing by myself in the middle of the squad room with a cup of coffee in each hand when Poitras’ door opened and Simms looked out. “I always take two,” I said. “One for me. One for my ego.”
“Inside. Bring a chair.”
I put the coffees down, took a chair from beside one of the squad desks, and went in. Lou said, “Elvis, this is Lieutenant Baishe. He took over from Cianelli a couple months ago.”
Baishe said, “He doesn’t need my pedigree.”
I looked at him.
Baishe was leaning into the corner behind Poitras’ desk, looking at me like he’d had to scrape me off the bottom of his shoe. Without waiting he went on, “I know about you. Big deal in the Army, security guard at a couple of studios, sucking around town with that bastard Joe Pike. They say you think you’re tough. They say you think you’re cute. They also say you’re pretty good. Okay. Here’s what we’ve got. The highway patrol up by Lancaster finds Morton Lang shot to death behind the wheel of his car, an ’82 Cadillac Seville. He’s got three in the chest and one in the temple, close range.” Baishe touched his forehead. Wasn’t much hair there to get in the way. “No shell casings in the car, but the people up there say it looks like a 9mm. There’s blood, but not a whole lot, and some peculiar lividity patterns so maybe he wasn’t popped there in his car. Maybe he got it somewhere else and he was put there. No sign of the kid. Car’s been wiped clean. Robbery’s out. He’s still got his wallet and the credit cards and forty-six bucks and his watch. Keys are in the ignition. You got all that?”
“I’m watching your lips, yes, sir.”
Baishe looked at me, then at Lou. Lou said, “Cole has a brain imbalance, Lieutenant.”
Baishe unwrapped his arms, came out of the corner, leaned on Poitras’ desk and looked at me. He looked like a Daddy Longlegs. “Don’t fuck with me, boy.”
I pretended to be intimidated. After a bit he said, “How do you fit into this?”
I went through it again. Baishe said, “How long have you known the wife?”
“Since yesterday.”
“You sure it hasn’t been longer?”
I looked from Baishe to Poitras to Simms and back to Baishe. Poitras and Simms were looking at Baishe, too. I said, “Come off it, Baishe. You got nothing.”
“Maybe we dig into this we see a bigger connection. Maybe you two are pretty good friends, so good you decide to get rid of her old man. Maybe you rig the whole act and you pull the trigger. Setup City.”
“Setup City?” I looked at Poitras. His mouth was open. Simms was staring at a spot somewhere out around the orbit of Pluto. I looked back at Baishe with what we in the trade call “disbelief.” He was looking at me with what we in the trade call “distaste.”
I said, “The Postman Always Rings Twice, right? 1938?”
