Chinaman’s Chance

Chapter 12

It was nearly seven o’clock that Friday evening when Icky Norris cautiously swung the big twenty-nine-foot Winnebago Custom into Sea Breeze Lane — a narrow, one-way alley in Venice that separated some rambling, patched-up beach cottages from a row of two- and three-story houses, all of which needed paint and nearly all of which wore faded ROOM FOR RENT signs.

Norris stopped the motor home and looked down the alley, which was choked with cars. Most of the driveways and garages that faced the alley bore stern signs warning, NO PARKING — VIOLATORS WILL BE TOWED AWAY AT OWN EXPENSE.

“Where we gonna park this mother?” Norris said.

Tony Egidio, who was seated in the swivel seat next to him, searched the alley until he found what he wanted, a small, crudely hand-lettered sign that said, PARKING 50¢.

Egidio pointed. “There.”

Norris eyed the narrow alley, made even narrower by the parked cars. “Shit, man, I don’t know if we can make it.”

Egidio stuck his head out the side window to look and judge. “You got plenty of room.”

Icky Norris made his own assessment. “Maybe we got plenty of room on your side, but we damn near scrapin’ on mine.”

“You want me to drive?”

“Shit, man, I don’t want you to drive. I can drive this mother all right. Just askin’ how much room we got, that’s all.”

Norris slowly drove the big vehicle down the alley and carefully turned it into the unpaved parking lot that seemed to be empty except for two derelict Ford sedans, both of them products of the early 1960s. Using his rearview mirror, Norris backed the Winnebago into place. Then he switched off the engine and sighed his relief.

“You had plenty of room,” Egidio said.

“Yeah, well, maybe you wanta explain to Solly how you went and got his brother-in-law’s new Winnebago all scratched up, but I sure as shit don’t.”

They climbed out of the motor home and locked it. As they started to move away, the door of one of the derelict Fords opened and a slight, starved-looking man of no more than twenty-two got out. He had a long, matted beard that clean might have been ash blond in color. Now it was a gritty gray, as was his equally long hair. The hair stuck up from his head in a crown of carefully twisted spikes. He was twisting a new spike into shape, apparently not conscious of what he was doing, as he shuffled slowly toward Egidio and Norris. He wore a filthy green tank top and old, patched jeans. He could have used a bath.

“That’ll be a dollar,” he said.

Egidio looked at him and then at the sign. “Sign says fifty cents.”

The man with the spiky hair turned to look at the sign. His eyes were a wet, glittery gray and probably a bit mad. They examined the sign — or perhaps something a thousand yards on the other side of it. Then he turned back to Egidio and Norris.

“The printed word,” he said bitterly, and then shook his head to express his contempt. The spikes writhed — a bit like snakes. “That’ll be a dollar.”

Egidio started to argue, but Norris said, “Pay the fucker.”

The man accepted the bill, looked at it curiously, then examined Egidio and Norris. He shook his head again and the hairy spikes danced once more. “You eat meat, don’t you?” he said, turned, and shuffled barefoot back to the 1962 Ford that was his home.

Egidio grimaced, spat, and said, “Fucking dope fiends.”

When they reached the alley they paused. “Which one?” Norris said.

Egidio nodded. “That one.”

The building Egidio had nodded at was a moldering six-story apartment hotel built out of red brick. It was located on the ocean side of the alley, and the black-and-white sign that stretched across one side of it just below the roofline had been painted there in 1928. The sign, almost obliterated by time read, SEASHORE HOTEL–VENICE’S FINEST — ROOMS $2.50 AND UP.

Egidio and Norris walked along the side of the hotel until they reached its front, which faced a broad cement sidewalk and beyond that the beach. They went through a glass door into a vacant lobby. An elevator with a green door was to the left of the alcove that once had been the hotel reception area. The area held garbage cans now, most of them full.

The elevator’s red IN USE sign was on, but Icky Norris punched the Up button anyway. Then he sniffed a couple of times, wrinkled his broad nose, and said, “Dead cat somewheres.”

Egidio sniffed, frowned, and then nodded his agreement.

The elevator hit the first floor with something of a bump, the red IN USE sign went off, and the door clanked open. An almost pretty girl started out of the elevator, but hesitated when she saw Egidio and Norris. She was young, very young, probably still in her teens, with wary brown eyes and a small mouth that was now shaped into a terrified O. She at first shrank back from the two men and then forced herself to sidle around them.

“Boo!” Icky Norris said.

The girl yelped and fled across the lobby and out the door.

“That little mama done been raped once or twice already, I bet,” Norris said as they entered the elevator, Egidio punched the 6 button and nodded, not speaking. Many times he didn’t bother to reply to Norris, who usually had some totally unfounded observation to make about almost everything. Sometimes, Egidio thought, the nigger just talks too much.

On the sixth floor they walked down the uncarpeted hall until they reached number 611. It was toward the front of the building, near the beach. Egidio knocked.

A man’s voice called, “What?”

“It’s us,” Egidio said, “me and Icky.” He raised his voice to make it go through the door.

The door opened and Eddie McBride stood there, dressed only in white boxer shorts. He looked at both men and then frowned.

“Saturday, you said.” McBride frowned some more. “Saturday, noon.”

“Saturday, Friday, it don’t make no difference now,” Norris said. “Shit man, you in clover.”

“The deal still on?” McBride said.

“Sure it’s on,” Egidio said, “We just came by because Solly wants to see you.”

McBride stepped back, and Norris and Egidio entered the room. It was a typical cheap hotel room, but far neater than most. The bed was almost primly made; the chair in front of the small, scarred writing desk was exactly in place; a comb and brush were precisely centered on the dresser Eddy McBride felt better when things were neat. The Corps had taught him that, and he had learned that when the Corps teaches you something it dies hard.

“Why’s he wanta see me tonight?” McBride said. “Why not tomorrow?”

“He’s going outa town tomorrow,” Egidio said. “Up to Big Bear for the weekend. We got his brother-in-law’s camper outside. We’ll run it over to Solly’s place, you can talk to him, and then we’ll bring you back in his car.”

McBride thought about it. He didn’t much like the way it sounded, but when he thought it over it sort of made sense, especially if Solly was going out of town. At least they couldn’t stiff him out of any money. Solly’s first offer for the map had been the $5,000 that McBride owed him. That was already gone, of course — long spent. McBride had then held out for the interest that he owed, and after some bickering over the phone, with Egidio serving as intermediary, Solly had agreed to cancel that too. That had bothered McBride a little. Solly had given in too easily.

“Well,” McBride said, still hesitating, “I guess I better get dressed.”

He pulled on a pair of white duck pants and was slipping a dark blue T-shirt over his head when Egidio took a small piece of paper from his pocket and looked at it.

“Those two names you gave me over the phone this afternoon,” he said.

“What about ’em?”

“I don’t know if I got ’em spelled right.”

“Durant,” McBride said and then spelled it. “Quincy.” He spelled that too.

“And the Chinaman’s?”

“W-u.”

“Shit, I spelled it W-o-o.” Egidio borrowed a ball-point pen from Norris and corrected his spelling. “And you said his first name’s Artie?”

“Yeah.”

“Real name’s Arthur probably, huh?”

“Arthur Case,” McBride said as he pulled on a pair of socks and slipped his feet into carefully burnished loafers.

“Funny fuckin’ name for a Chinaman,” Icky Norris said. “Arthur Case Wu. He half Chinese or what?”

“He’s all Chinese, but I don’t think he talks any. At least, I never heard him talk any.”

“Well, you ready to go?” Egidio said.

McBride patted his pockets to make sure he had everything.

“Yeah, I’m ready.”

“Got the map?”

McBride reached behind the mirror on the dresser and withdrew a No. 10 envelope that had been Scotch Taped to the mirror’s rear.

“That ain’t too slick a hidin’ place,” Norris said.

“Yeah, well, my wall safe’s busted.”

Egidio held out his hand for the envelope containing the map that had the X where $2 million had been hidden somewhere in the U.S. Embassy complex in Saigon.

McBride stared at him. “I think I’ll give it to Solly,” he said. He pulled up his shirt, stuck the envelope halfway down his shorts, and then used the still sticky Scotch Tape to fasten it to his lean, flat stomach. Once the envelope was in place McBride pulled his shirt back down, but not before Egidio noticed that McBride still wore his Marine Corps belt with the big, heavy buckle.

Egidio shrugged. “Okay by me,” he said.

McBride led the way out of the room. Icky Norris was the last to leave. He paused and examined the room with his eyes as though to make sure that nothing incriminating had been left behind. Then he closed the self-locking door and grinned at McBride. “You got a real nice little place here.”

“It stinks,” McBride said.

“Well, least you keep it nice.”

They took the elevator down to the empty lobby and then walked along the side of the Seashore Hotel until they reached the parking lot. The camper was still the lot’s only customer, although its superintendent was now atop his derelict Ford, seated cross-legged, the spikes of his hairy crown waving gently in the sea breeze as he stared raptly out over the ocean south and west toward Bora Bora.

“Shit, he’s out of it, ain’t he?” Icky Norris said.

“He always is,” McBride said.

Norris unlocked the Winnebago and waited for McBride to climb in first. Then Norris got in and slipped behind the wheel, followed by Egidio. McBride, now halfway to the rear of the camper, stood looking around.

“It’s the first time I’ve ever been in one of these things,” he said. “They’re sorta neat, aren’t they?”

“If I was your age and single, this is sure what I’d have,” Icky Norris said as he headed out of the parking lot. “I’d live in it. Got plenty of room for one. Got plenty even for two.”

“Mind if I sort of look around?” McBride said.

“Help yourself,” Egidio said.

McBride inspected the three-burner stove and opened the small refrigerator, which seemed to be fully stocked. He then opened the cabinet doors and read the labels of some canned goods, took a look at the head, turned the taps in the sink on and off, and even looked underneath it where somebody kept the Spic and Span, the 409, the Clorox, the Windex, the Dove, and a glass bottle of blue ammonia and another one of white gasoline.

“Jesus,” he said, his tone full of admiration, “you wouldn’t need anything but this. It’s kind of like a boat.”

“Don’t cost as much as a boat, though,” Norris said. He had stopped the Winnebago at a red light and was waiting to turn left on to Lincoln Boulevard, which he would stay on until he reached Colorado Avenue in Santa Monica.

“How much they cost?” McBride said.

“You almost bought one, didn’t you, Tony?” Norris said.

“Yeah, I was thinking about it,” Egidio said. “You can get a new one, maybe not quite as big as this, for fifteen, twenty thousand. Get a used one, though, a lot cheaper’n that.”

“What kind of mileage they get?” McBride said.

“Terrible,” Norris said. “Four, five, sometimes not even that much.”

McBride had sat down on one of the upholstered benches that could be made into a bed. He reached over and turned one of the taps in the sink on and off again as though fascinated by the fact that it worked.

Egidio turned his swivel seat around so that he could face him. “Hows your thumb?”

McBride glanced down at his left hand. The bandage was becoming soiled. “It’s okay.”

“It wasn’t nothing personal, you understand?” Egidio said.

“Sure.”

“Just business.”

“Sure.”

“Well, we just didn’t wantcha to think it was anything personal.”

They didn’t find much to talk about after that. Norris turned right off Colorado Avenue in Santa Monica onto Seventh Street. He put the big machine up to thirty-five to make the lights and actually made most of them. They went through a business district that turned into an area of three-and four-story apartment houses, fairly new, with SORRY, NO VACANCY signs out in front of most of them. Seventh also had some very nice eucalyptus trees along that stretch, but they disappeared when the area of one-family houses began.

At San Vicente Boulevard, Norris stopped for the light. But when it turned green, instead of turning right he went straight ahead as Seventh became East Channel Road.

For a few moments McBride didn’t say anything. Then he said, “Solly lives in Brentwood.”

“That’s right,” Egidio said. He had turned his swivel chair back around so that he was again facing the front.

“This isn’t the way to Brentwood.” McBride’s voice was flat and even a little sad.

“That’s right,” Egidio said, and swung around in the swivel chair. He held the automatic in his right hand. With only a glance McBride automatically classified it: a.45 Colt automatic, service issue. A lot of gun.

“Well, shit,” McBride said.

Egidio shook his head — a small, commiserative shake. “It’s the way things work out sometimes, Eddie.”

“Just business, huh?”

“That’s right,” Egidio said. “Just business.”

“You better get him to give you the map now,” Icky Norris said as he twisted the Winnebago around the sweeping curves that led down Santa Monica Canyon to the Pacific Coast Highway.

“Yeah, we don’t want any holes in the map,” Egidio said, and then chuckled at his own little joke.

McBride pulled up his shirt so that he could get to the envelope. But before he could touch it, Egidio said, “Don’t touch your belt buckle, Eddie. Don’t try for the knife. In fact, just take it out real nice and easy, like they say in all those dumb cop shows.”

“Now?” McBride said.

“Yeah, now. Real slow.”

McBride did something to his belt and the buckle came away. It formed the handle for a wicked, 4½-inch stiletto. He handed it carefully, buckle first, to Egidio. Without removing his eyes from McBride, Egidio handed the knife to Icky Norris, who grinned at it and laid it on the shelf in front of the steering wheel.

“I told you he had one of those mothers,” Norris said. “Shit, everybody in Nam used to have one, especially those fuckin’ jar-heads.”

“Now the envelope, Eddie,” Egidio said.

McBride peeled the tape away from his skin and handed the envelope over just as carefully as he had handed the knife. Then he pulled his shirt down, slumped back on to the bench, and stared out the window. They were on the Pacific Coast Highway, heading north.

Nobody spoke until they reached the Getty Museum, and then Icky Norris said, “We sure gonna have us one pretty sunset.” McBride looked, but Egidio didn’t.

Instead, Egidio decided to lecture McBride. “You know what the trouble with guys like you is, Eddie?”

“What?”

“You don’t get nothing steady. I mean, guys like you come back from the war and you don’t try to get yourself lined up with something steady. You try to make cute deals, and shit, you ain’t smart enough to make a living doing that. Now, Icky here, he was over in Vietnam, weren’t you, Icky?”

“Sixty-four to ’65,” Norris said. “Hell of a time.”

“But when he came back, he lined himself up with Solly. He didn’t run around trying to pull off any half-ass deals. He got hisself something steady.”

“Breaking thumbs,” McBride said.

“Ain’t no use talkin’ to him,” Icky Norris said. “Hell, he know it all.”

“Yeah,” Egidio said. “You’re probably right. Try to give somebody a little good advice and what do they hand you back — smart ass, that’s what.”

Nobody spoke for the next dozen miles, not until they were passing through the heart of Malibu.

“That Durant guy,” Egidio said. “He lives out here, don’t he?”

“Farther out,” McBride said.

There was more silence until they passed Pepperdine University, whose somewhat futuristic campus belied its fundamentalist underpinnings. “You know where you’ve seen all those buildings before?” Icky Norris said.

“What we’re looking at?” Egidio said, not taking his eyes off McBride.

“Pepperdine University.”

“I’ve seen it when I’ve come by here before.”

“Nah, I mean where you seen it on TV.”

“Where?”

“The Six Million Dollar Man. You watch that, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I watch that all the time.” Egidio thought about it. “By God, you know, you’re right, Icky.”

“Course I’m right.”

A mile or so past Pepperdine University, Norris turned the camper right into Latigo Canyon Road, a narrow strip of blacktop that snaked its way up and back into the mountains. A highway sign with a long, wiggling black line on it read, NEXT 9 MILES.

Most of that nine miles was uphill, one curve after another. After three or four miles the houses ran out and there was nothing but the blacktop road and the sheer drop-off into the canyon below. The sun had gone down behind the mountains, but it was not quite dark. McBride picked his time carefully.

It was on a particularly treacherous curve, a blind one. He took a deep breath and yelled it: “Look out for that fuckin’ car!”

Icky Norris hit the brakes. Despite himself, Egidio turned away from McBride, then caught himself and started turning back. But McBride was already squatting beneath the sink. He had the door to the cabinet open, and the bottle of gasoline was in his left hand. His right hand was digging into his pants pocket.

He came up fast in one smooth motion, cracking the top off the bottle of gasoline with a sharp, rising blow on the sink. He yelled, because it made his thumb hurt. But he kept his movement going, even as Egidio brought up the automatic. The gasoline, nearly a pint of it, sloshed over Egidio’s ace and head and into his eyes. He yelled.

McBride’s right hand came up out of his pants pocket. It held a Zippo lighter, the one with the Marine Corps emblem on it. Its top was already open. McBride was thumbing its wheel as it came out of his pants pocket. The lighter caught, and he tossed it against Egidio’s gasoline-drench shirt.

The flames shot up, igniting the film of gasoline that still covered his face and bald head. Tony Egg screamed, dropped the automatic, clawed at his eyes, and slapped at the flames.

Icky Norris finally stopped the camper, slamming on its brakes. The camper skidded dangerously close to the sheer drop-off at the left edge of the road. Norris glanced back, swiveling his head quickly, trying to see what needed his attention more, Egidio or the camper. He decided on the camper. It was a mistake.

McBride snatched up the.45, thumbed off the safety, and shot Icky Norris in the back of the head. Most of the left side of Norris’ head smeared itself over the windshield, already cobwebbed by the.45 round. Norris slumped down over the wheel, and his foot slipped off the brake. The camper started creeping toward the long drop down.

McBride moved quickly. He scrambled over the still smoking Egidio, who, with the flames finally out, had drawn himself up into a tight, quivering, screaming ball on the floor. As he stepped on Egidio’s head, McBride thought it all looked strangely familiar, and then he remembered some burn victims he had seen in Vietnam. They had all scrunched themselves into tight little balls like that.

McBride fought with the door latch and hurt his broken thumb again. The motor home was still moving, five, perhaps ten, miles per hour, a dead man’s foot on its accelerator. The door finally came open. McBride jumped.

He picked himself up just in time to see the Winnebago go over the edge of the canyon. It kept to its wheels for almost ten seconds and then started rolling, sideways at first, then end over end. It came to rest in the bottom of the canyon, almost a thousand feet down. It rested there for a moment and then burst into flames.

McBride looked at it. Then he looked at the.45 he still held in his right hand. He wiped it off with his shirt and then threw it by the trigger guard as far as he could. McBride watched the gun fall, and for a moment longer he stared down at the burning motor home.

“Burn, you fuckers,” Eddie McBride said.

Chapter 13

The coyotes followed McBride for nearly an hour. There were five of them, and they never came closer than twenty yards, although the biggest one sometimes loped in just a little closer than that — showing off, McBride thought.

The coyotes had picked McBride up fifteen minutes after he left Latigo Canyon Road. He was now trying to work his way along the bottom of the canyon back to the ocean. It was hard going, and McBride had stumbled and fallen several times, and once he had fallen so hard on his left hand that he thought he had broken his thumb again. When he fell that time, he got mad and yelled and picked up a rock and threw it at the coyotes. He missed, and they had laughed at him. Or at least it looked as though they were laughing at him.

After that it got dark and McBride could no longer see the coyotes, but he knew they were there. It was just like in one of those crummy Westerns that he sometimes read, McBride thought. The cowboy’s stumbling around in the desert or somewhere after dark, and although he can’t see it, he knows that the mountain lion’s out there. Or the Indians or whatever. McBride had a sudden, new respect for Westerns.

The coyotes escorting McBride were just five of the hundreds who ranged over the Santa Monica mountains living mostly off snakes, rodents, and rabbits and whatever else they could catch. But sometimes they would raid a sparsely settled residential section and dine on fat tabby and pampered poodle. There was many a three-legged dog and tail-less cat in Malibu who had been patched up by the local veterinarians after a brief and painful counter with a couple of coyotes.

The five that had picked up McBride followed him until he could see the lights of some houses high up. After that, the coyotes turned and trotted off back into the hills. Again, McBride could only sense that they were gone.

The going got easier after that, and McBride didn’t stumble nearly s often and fell only once more. An hour later he was standing on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Coast Highway about a mile north of where Icky Norris had turned into Latigo Canyon Road.

McBride found a defile and followed it down until he reached the highway. He waited until he could see no cars in either direction and then raced across. On the other side of the highway was a high chain fence. He moved along it until he found a place that had been pried open. He slipped through and carefully felt his way down to the beach. Then he stopped and rested, sprawled on the sand. He estimated that he had walked for a little more than two hours and that he had covered at least six miles. Maybe seven.

Feeling the need for a cigarette, McBride fished a box of Marlboros out of his left pants pocket, wincing at the pain that it caused his thumb. He put the cigarette in his mouth and then swore softly, remembering what he had done with his lighter. Shit, he thought, they’ll find it, and with that emblem on it they’ll figure out that it belonged to some Marine or ex-Marine, and it won’t take Solly long to tell ’em which one, either. He wondered if the burned Winnebago had been discovered yet. If it had, he speculated about how long it would take the police to trace the license and get to Solly’s brother-in-law and then to Solly. An hour, probably. Maybe two.

McBride tried to think what he should do. There was no sense in going back to his room in Venice. By the time he got there they would probably be waiting for him — either the cops or some of Solly’s boys, some he hadn’t even met yet. He tried to look down at his clothes to see how presentable he was, but it was far too dark. He knew, however, that the white duck pants were soiled and stained and that the blue T-shirt wasn’t in much better shape. Then too, he was probably scratched and bruised all over from where he had fallen. If he walked into a motel with no car, they would take just one look and call the cops.

McBride tried to think his way out of his predicament — logically at first, but he was really no problem solver, and dimly he realized this. So he rose and dusted the sand off the seat of his pants and headed north almost intuitively toward someone another mile or so up the beach who was smarter than he and who might have some ideas. He headed toward Quincy Durant.

Durant was seated on the couch in the living room, a secretary’s spiral notebook in his lap, and on the record player the Cleveland Quartet was doing extremely well with Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue in C Minor (K. 546). Durant started when over the Mozart he heard the clump of McBride’s leather-heeled loafers on the flight of wooden steps that led up from the beach. But because there was so much noise Durant relaxed as he realized that someone was trying to announce himself.

He glanced at what he had written in the notebook. There was a heading in printed, almost architectural lettering that read, SILK ARMITAGE. After that there were four paragraphs of no more than three lines each, all of them numbered. When he heard the steps on the stairs, Durant had just written number five. He closed the notebook, tucked it away out of sight under the cushion on the couch, rose, and went over to the sliding glass door. He switched on the outdoor light and slid the door open just as McBride reached the top of the stairs.

McBride stopped and grinned weakly. “How’re ya?” he said.

Durant examined him. “Well, I’d say I’m just one hell of a lot better off than you are.”

McBride nodded wearily, suddenly realizing how tired he was. “Yeah,” he said. “Can I come in?”

“Sure.”

Durant stepped back to let McBride in. Once inside the living room McBride stood for a moment, quite still. He closed his eyes, swayed a little, and then opened them. “That music,” he said. “That’s nice. Classical, isn’t it?”

“Uh-huh,” Durant said. “Classical. Try that one over there,” he said, indicting the Eames chair. “If you bleed on it, the blood’ll come off the leather.”

“Am I bleeding?”

“Not much.”

“I didn’t know I was bleeding.”

“You’ve got a couple of deep scratches up here,” Durant said, touching his own left temple.

McBride, accustomed, as is everyone, to a mirror image, touched his own temple, but the right one. Then he remembered and touched the blood that was trickling down from the two inch-long scratches that were almost gashes along the side of his left temple. He looked at the blood his fingertips and said, “Huh.” Then he sat down on the chair.

“What do you want,” Durant said, “Scotch or bourbon?”

“Gin,” McBride said. “You got gin?”

“I’ve got gin,” Durant said. He turned and went into the kitchen, reached up and opened the cabinet above the refrigerator, and took down the still unopened bottle of Tanqueray gin. He also took down the bottle of Scotch.

“Straight?” he called to McBride.

“Yeah. Straight.”

Durant found a couple of tumblers, put some ice into one of them, and poured a measure of Scotch into it, adding some water from the tap. Then he opened the bottle of gin and poured almost three ounces by guess into the other tumbler. He put the bottles back, picked up the glasses, and went back into the living room.

“Here you go,” he said, “a hooker of gin.”

“Thanks,” McBride said. He sounded grateful. He swallowed a big gulp of the gin and made a face. “Jesus.” He started to fish the pack of Marlboros out of his left pants pocket, but snagged his thumb and said, “Oh goddamn son of a bitch, oh Jesus H. Christ.”

Durant picked up his own package of Pall Malls from the coffee table, shook one out, and offered it to McBride. “Here,” he said.

McBride took the cigarette and let Durant light it for him. He drew the smoke far down into his lungs, coughed, and said, “These fuckers are strong, aren’t they?”

Durant looked at him carefully. “Are you okay now?”

“Yeah, I’m okay.”

“You’re not going to faint or anything?”

“No, I’m okay.”

“I’ll be right back.”

McBride drank gin until Durant returned with his open shoe box of medical supplies. McBride’s scratches weren’t as bad as they had first seemed, not even the two gashes on his forehead. Durant cleaned the blood off and dosed the scratches with an antiseptic. Then he sat back on his heels in Oriental fashion and studied McBride for a moment.

“I don’t even think you need any Band-Aids.”

“Yeah, well, thanks. I appreciate it.”

“How about your thumb?”

“It hurts like hell. I think maybe I busted it again.”

“I doubt it. You want me to look at it?”

“You know about busted thumbs?”

Durant smiled. “A little. Enough, probably.”

McBride frowned as he debated about whether he should trust his thumb to an amateur physician. When he decided finally that he should, he thrust his left hand out at Durant and said, “Here.”

Durant smiled again and examined the job that the dope-clinic doctor had done on McBride’s thumb. Careless, he thought. Even slapdash. The thumb stuck out from McBride’s hand at a thirty-degree angle. Using a pair of surgical scissors, Durant quickly snipped away the old tape and, using the same splint, fashioned a new bandage that pressed the broken thumb against the side of McBride’s left forefinger. His movements were quick and deft and curiously gentle. McBride yelped only once. When finished, Durant sat back on his heels again, and McBride examined his freshly bandaged thumb as though it were a new and highly prized toy.

“Jesus, that’s neat. That’s a hell of a lot better than that dopers’ doctor did.”

“I brought it in against your hand. Now you won’t snag it as much.”

“Yeah, that’s right, isn’t it? I was always catching it on something before. Where’d you learn how to do that?”

Durant shrugged. “You pick it up here and there.”

“You never were a doctor, were you?”

Durant smiled and shook his head. “No. Hardly.”

“You do it just like a doctor does it. You can tell. What I mean is, you got the same moves.”

Durant studied McBride for a moment. Then he said, “How’d it happen, Eddie?”

“You mean tonight.”

“That’s right. Tonight.”

McBride got his cigarettes out of his pants pocket without discomfort and lit one with a table lighter. He also took another swallow of gin. Then he looked away from Durant and said, “I had to kill both of them. I ain’t making it up, either. It was either them or me and I couldn’t think of any good reason why it should be me.”

Durant nodded as though he understood perfectly. “But that was late wasn’t it? That was toward the end.”

“Yeah, that was toward the end.”

“Go back to the beginning. Take your time.”

“You gonna call the cops?”

“I don’t know. I won’t decide that until after you tell me.”

McBride had to think about Durant’s reply. He turned it over in his mind, and as he did he saw his alternatives slipping away. I haven’t got any choice, he realized. I haven’t got any choice at all. After that he sighed and said, “Well, this is exactly what happened.”

It took Eddie McBride fifteen minutes to tell his tale. He told it in a low monotone that gave the same emphasis to both the coyotes and Icky Norris’s exploding head. He left nothing out, and in leaving nothing out he created no villains and invented no hero. It was a flat although bloody account, curiously lacking in either anger or passion. He’s doing what he unconsciously set out to do, Durant decided. He’s making it dull.

When done, McBride leaned back in the leather chair, finished his gin, and said, “And that’s it. That’s what happened.”

Durant nodded slowly and said, “You left out one thing.”

“What?”

“Why. You left out why they wanted to kill you.”

“The map. They wanted the map.”

“You were going to give them the map anyway.”

“Well, maybe they thought I had a copy of it and I’d try to sell it to somebody else.”

“You do, don’t you?”

“What?”

“Have a copy.”

McBride smiled — a grim, hard, utterly mirthless smile. “I got a dozen copies. Or had. They’re all in my room. The cops’ve probably found ’em by now.”

Durant shook his head. “You don’t have to worry about the cops.”

“You mean you’re not going to call ’em.”

“I won’t and neither will Solly Gesini. He’d have to explain too many things. It wouldn’t wash.”

“And you’re not gonna call ’em either?” McBride had to be sure. “No.”

“Why? I mean, I’m grateful as hell, but we’re not exactly buddies.”

“No, we’re not, are we? But then, I’m not Malibu’s most upright citizen, either. It’s a failing, probably. One of my many. Anyway, let’s say that’s reason number one. Reason number two is that I think maybe we can use you.”

“To do what?”

Durant stared at him. “Do you care?”

For a long moment, McBride didn’t answer. “No,” he finally said. “I don’t care.”

“Three hundred a week, Eddie?”

“Yeah. Okay. Three hundred a week.”

Durant rose. “Let me call Artie. We’ll find you a place to stay — at least for tonight.”

Durant dialed Wu’s number. It was answered on the ninth ring by Artie Wu, who said, “What do you want?”

“Did I interrupt something?”

“Not really,” Wu said. “Nothing important, anyhow. I was just making love to my wife, but I’m finished, although I’m not sure that she is.”

Durant heard Aggie Wu say something that sounded sharp. Then Wu said something that Durant couldn’t quite make out, and after that Aggie Wu giggled.

“I could call you back,” Durant said.

“No, it’s all right. I was going to call you anyway.”

“You want to go first?”

“No, go ahead. I can listen to you and tickle Aggie at the same time. It gets her over her postcoital sadness.”

Again Aggie Wu said something that sounded sharp, and again Wu made some reply that Durant couldn’t hear. But after that he could hear both of them giggle. Durant sighed.

“Okay,” Wu said.

“It’s Eddie McBride.”

“Oh?”

“He’s in a jam that I’ll tell you about later, but I’ve put him on the payroll at three hundred a week. I think we can use him.”

“Maybe down in Pelican Bay?”

“That was the idea.”

“It makes sense,” Wu said. “How bad is the jam?”

“Bad enough. We’ve got to keep him out of sight, though. Tonight anyhow.”

“Let’s put him in with Otherguy,” Wu said. “They can be roomies.”

“I’ll let you call Otherguy and tell him.”

“I’ll like that,” Wu said. “Anything else?”

“No, nothing that can’t wait.”

“Well, I got a call — about an hour ago. He’s in town.”

Durant didn’t have to ask who he was. “Where?”

“The Beverly Wilshire.”

“Let me guess. He wants a breakfast meeting.”

“What else?”

“When?”

“Nine tomorrow. He started by suggesting seven, then eight, but I worked him down to nine.”

“He just couldn’t let it alone, could he?” Durant said.

“Did you expect him to?”

“No. Not really. Well, I’m going to have to let Eddie have my car, so you’ll have to pick me up.”

“Ah, shit,” Wu said. “I’ll have to leave by seven, then.”

“What time does Randall Piers usually come by here with those dogs?”

“Between five-thirty and six. Why?”

“I thought I’d invite him in for a cup of coffee tomorrow morning and see what he can tell me about the guy that he sold his record company to.”

“Vince Imperlino?”

“That’s right,” Durant said. “Vince Imperlino.”

Chapter 14

Eddie McBride’s toilet kit, which was now contained in a small plastic bag, consisted of a razor, a hairbrush, a comb, a toothbrush, and a bar of soap. There was no shaving cream, mouthwash, deodorant, aftershave lotion, or toothpaste. Eddie McBride brushed his teeth with salt when he had it; with nothing when he didn’t.

He put the toilet articles into the shopping bag that sat in the middle of the floor of Room 611 at the Seashore Hotel in Venice. Almost everything McBride owned in the world was in that shopping bag — except his car. He worried about the car for a moment, the 1965 Mustang convertible, because he was convinced that it would become a classic in just a few more years. But since he wasn’t at all sure that he would be around quite that long, McBride said good-bye to the car with a silent Fuck it, picked up the shopping bag, and moved to the door.

He paused to make sure that nothing had been forgotten. He was leaving behind no television set or radio. They had been pawned long ago. He examined the room once more and then went out the door of Room 611 for the last time with everything he had acquired in thirty-one years — the entire McBride estate, contained now in a Safeway shopping bag that held one jacket, three pairs of slacks, five shirts, some underwear, a pair of shoes, some socks, a passport, an honorable discharge from the Marine Corps, a dozen Xerox copies of a map that purportedly told where a stolen $2 million was hidden. Tucked up his rectum in an aluminum capsule was the rest of the McBride fortune, the $875 that remained from the thousand that he had been paid for his time by Durant and Wu.

McBride had taken a risk, a quite calculated one, by coming back to his room. But after he had talked it over with Durant they had agreed that the police would almost certainly not be waiting for him. Whether Solly Gesini would have someone waiting was the chance McBride would have to take. It had seemed unlikely. With a mind like Solly Gesini’s in charge of the hunt, McBride’s room could well be virtually the last place that any trackers would come searching for him. Nobody’s gonna think I’m that dumb McBride had told Durant. Not even Solly.

McBride made it down in the elevator and out the door of the hotel without incident. A block away he climbed into Durant’s Mercedes, placed the shopping bag on the seat beside him, and drove off. Forty minutes later he was knocking on the door of Otherguy Overby’s apartment.

Overby opened the door and inspected the man who stood there with the shopping bag in his hand. They stared at each other for a moment, searching for common points of reference, and found them in a kind of mutual recognition. McBride would become Overby in another ten years — if he lived that long.

“You’re McBride, huh?”

“Check.”

“What the hell does that mean — check? You’re McBride or you’re not, yes or no. I don’t need any of that cutesy check-and-double-check shit. I’m too old for that.”

“Okay, I’m Eddie McBride, unless it makes your piles hurt.”

“Yeah, well, come on in, I guess.”

Overby stepped back to let McBride enter. Carrying his Safeway shopping bag, McBride went in, put the bag down, and looked around, allowing his gaze to pause only for a second on the girl who sat in the overstuffed chair wearing nothing but green bikini panties, a can of beer in her hand.

“Jesus,” McBride said, “just like the Hilton.”

“The Hilton would like that fancy luggage of yours.”

McBride looked around some more. “At least it looks right at borne here.”

“Well,” Overby said, “that’s Brenda. This here’s Eddie McBride, my new assistant.”

McBride looked at him. “I am, huh?”

“That’s what they tell me.”

“What do I do — assist you across the street?”

“That’s pretty big-time stuff,” Overby said. “We’re gonna have to see how you work out first.”

McBride nodded agreeably as though to signify that thus far the exchange of diplomatic protocols had been both extremely frank and highly productive. He changed the direction of his nod so that it took in Brenda.

“Who’s that?”

“Like I said, that’s Brenda.”

The girl waved her beer can. “Want some of my beer?”

McBride shook his head, rejecting both the girl and her offer. “Brenda looks like she might have a lot of friends. And friends talk a lot.”

Overby frowned. “Yeah, that wouldn’t be too good, would it?”

“No.”

“I guess maybe I’ll have to explain things to her.”

“Explain what?” Brenda said.

Overby moved over to Brenda. He looked down at her for several moments. “You never heard of any Eddie McBride, did you, sugar?”

The girl shrugged. “What’s an Eddie McBride?”

“Get rid of her,” McBride said.

Brenda pouted. “I don’t wanta go home. I just got here.”

Overby turned to McBride. “You wanta fuck her first?”

McBride shook his head. “I don’t take wet ducks,” he said. “Get rid of her.”

Overby turned back to the girl. “Brenda,” he said.

“What?”

“Out.”

The girl put her beer down and got up. “You got some real weird friends, Otherguy, that’s all I gotta say.” She started toward the door, but paused when she reached McBride. She put her hands on her hips, arched her back, and thrust her crotch up against McBride’s, rotating it slowly. Her mouth was open, and she let her long pink tongue run slowly around her lips.

“You got any idea what you’re missing?” she said.

McBride stared at her coldly for a few seconds, not responding to the bump and grind of her pelvis. After another moment or two he said, “Go wash your feet, Brenda.”

The girl stopped her efforts and, pouting again, moved quickly to the door. She opened it, then turned back to look at Overby. “You know what, Otherguy?”

“What?”

“You suck.” With that she was gone, carefully slamming the door behind her.

Overby sighed. “She lives across the hall.”

“Handy.”

“You want a beer or something? I’ve got bourbon.”

“Beer’s fine.”

Overby moved across the room to the kitchen alcove and opened the refrigerator door. “You known ’em long?” he said as he took out two cans of beer.

“Who?”

“Durant and the Chinaman.”

“Not long. Have you?”

Overby didn’t answer until he had handed McBride a can of beer. “About nine years. Maybe ten.” He popped his beer open and tossed the top at an ashtray. He missed. McBride opened his can and placed its top in the ashtray, then bent down and picked up Overby’s top and placed it beside his own.

“What do they do?” McBride said. “I mean, what do they really do?”

“How’d you meet ’em?”

“They came looking for me. I had something to sell and they thought they might buy, but it didn’t quite work out.”

“What was it, something tricky?”

McBride nodded. “Yeah. A little.”

Overby took a swallow of his beer. “Well,” he said, “I’ve known ’em for damn near ten years and that’s what they’ve always done — something just a little bit tricky.”

McBride drank some beer and then sat down on the couch. “But they re smart, aren’t they? Both of them. I mean, they’re the kind of guys that don t make too many mistakes.”

After thinking about the question for a moment, Overby took another swallow of his beer and said, “Well, now, I don’t know if they never made any mistakes, but they’re smart, all right. Especially the Chinaman.”

“I thought Durant sort of had the edge.”

“Well, he’s no dummy either, but that Artie Wu is one smart Chinaman, and a smart Chinaman is just about twice as smart as anybody else.”

“I don’t know if you’re gonna believe this, but I don’t even know what they’re up to.”

“Well, I don’t either exactly, but as long as the money’s okay I don’t care just one hell of a lot. What about you?”

“No,” McBride said after a moment, “I don’t guess I really care either.”

At 5:30 that morning, the eighteenth of June, a Saturday, Solly Gesini was asleep in his bedroom on the second floor of his house on Medio Drive in Brentwood when the phone began to ring.

Gesini came awake slowly. He didn’t snatch up the ringing phone. Instead, he lay there alone in his bed trying to divine what misfortune had struck. He knew with absolute certainty that it wasn’t going to be good news — not at 5:30 in the morning.

Finally, on the tenth ring, he picked up the phone and said hello.

The man’s voice that replied was both loud and excited. “I’m gonna sue you, you cocksucker!”

Solly Gesini woke up. “Who’s-this-who’s-this?” he said, running the words together, even stumbling over them a little.

“It’s me, you dirty wop son of a bitch, that’s who.”

“Oh,” Gesini said. “You. How’re ya, Ferdie?” Ferdie was Ferdinando Fiorio, his brother-in-law.

“I’ll tell you how I am. I just called my lawyer. That’s how I am. He’s gonna sue your ass.”

“Sue? What’s all this sue shit?”

“They’re on the way, Solly. I didn’t know nothing about it. I told ’em that. I told them they wanta find out about it, you’re the guy. That’s what my lawyer says, too. Boy, are we gonna sue your ass.”

“You don’t make sense, Ferdie. But you don’t make sense at noon, so why should you make any at five-thirty in the fuckin’ morning? Just calm down and tell me one thing — who’s on the way?”

“The sheriff, that’s who.”

“What sheriff?”

“What sheriff? The sheriff who found it, that’s who. I don’t know if it is the real sheriff. There were two of ’em. Young kids with mustaches. Maybe deputy sheriffs. Anyway, they found it.”

“Found what?”

“My thirty-two-thousand-dollar Winnebago, that’s what.”

“Where’d they find it?”

“Down at the bottom of a canyon all burned up, not a fuckin’ thing left everything ruined, and you said you were gonna borrow it to go up to Big Bear and I oughta know by now never to believe anything you ever tell me and you just wait, am I gonna sue your ass.”

“What canyon?” Gesini said.

“What canyon? I don’t know — Latigo Canyon out in Malibu. I think it’s Latigo. I think that’s what they said. And those two guys you sent over to borrow it, that big nigger and that other one with the bald head, the white guy, Tony what’s-his-name. There ain’t nothing left of them neither. I shoulda known better. The only reason I did it was because of Anna-Maria, you never take her anywhere, and I thought she’d like to get up to Big Bear and—”

Gesini cut him off. “There were just two guys in it?”

“Yeah, two guys. I told ’em that the nigger and that other one, Tony, had borrowed it for you and they asked me how big they were and when I told ’em they said they think that they probably’re the two who got burned up in it. I don’t think my insurance is gonna cover this. One of ’em was shot. I don’t know which one. I told ’em I didn’t know anything. I told ’em to go to talk to you about people getting shot. I told ’em you knew all about that. I told ’em—”

Solly Gesini didn’t listen to what else his brother-in-law had told the Los Angeles County deputy sheriffs. Instead, he slowly hung up the phone. They fucked it up, he thought. Tony and Icky. They let the kid take ’em somehow. Jesus, I’m gonna have to tell Mr. Simms something. I’m gonna have to figure that out. But later. Yeah, I’ll do that later.

Gesini nestled slowly back in the bed. He drew his knees up as far as he could, pulled the sheet up over his head, and waited for the deputy sheriffs to arrive.

Chapter 15

At a little past six that Saturday morning Quincy Durant was standing out on the redwood deck of his rented yellow house dressed in a pair of light gray slacks and a blue lamb’s-wool pullover sweater. He stood with a mug of coffee in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and watched as Randall Piers came down the beach at a brisk walk, the six greyhounds bunched at his heels.

When he was still some distance away, perhaps fifty yards, Piers waved at Durant, who waved back and then held up the coffee mug, pointing at it with the hand that held his cigarette. Durant could see Piers nod his head at the invitation.

Neither man spoke until Piers started up the steps. Then he said, “You know something?”

“What?”

“They miss half of it.”

“Who?”

“People who live on the beach. They pay a lot to live here and then they never get up in time to watch the sun rise. What a waste.”

“You’ve got a point,” Durant said politely.

Piers shook his head. “Not much of one. Just my thought for the day. You got any of that coffee of yours left?”

“Sure.”

Piers made one of his abrupt, nearly brutal hand gestures and the six greyhounds promptly flopped down on the deck. Two of them yawned at each other, one of them gnawed at something that seemed lodged in his paw, and the other three looked around with the interested, curious gaze of the knowledgeable tourist who never gets bored.

Inside the house, Durant poured Piers a cup of coffee and warmed up his own. They moved into the living room, where Piers looked around, a slightly puzzled expression on his face. Then the puzzlement vanished and he turned to Durant. “You had them take it out, didn’t you?”

“What?”

“The Reuters ticker.”

“Yesterday. We had them take it out late yesterday.”

“You covered, huh?”

“Yeah, we did. It seemed about time.”

Randall Piers ran yesterday’s closing prices through his head. “You made some money.”

“A little. Our broker said we should have hung in there awhile longer, but what the hell. We made enough.”

“So,” Randall Piers said, lowering himself into the leather chair that Eddie McBride had bled on a little the night before. “You said you were going to take a run down to Pelican Bay.”

“We did. Yesterday.”

“What’d you find out?”

“Something’s happening down there.”

“What?”

“We’re not sure,” Durant said, and lowered himself to the couch. “We’re trying to put a man inside.”

“Inside where?”

“Reginald Simms — consultants. Mean anything to you?”

“No. Should it?”

Durant shrugged. “Let me try another one, Vince Imperlino.”

Piers’s face grew still. He put his coffee mug down on a small table with a white marble top. He had to turn slightly to do it. When he turned back, his face had become more stiff than still. He stared at Durant for a moment and then said, “What about him?”

“They say you sold your record company to him.”

“It was a complicated deal. Very complicated. By the time Imperlino surfaced it was too late to pull back. Too many commitments had already been made. You want the details?”

“No.”

“It was a complicated deal.”

“You said that.”

“There was a lot of pressure on me then.”

“Okay. Fine.”

“How did Imperlino’s name come up?”

“He’s bought himself something else. Or so they say.”

“What?” Piers said.

“The newspaper at Pelican Bay. The Times-Bulletin.”

Piers’s face relaxed. “How’d he buy it?”

Durant shrugged. “For cash, I suppose. Probably a lot of it.”

“I mean, what device did he use?”

“I think there was a company that owned a company that owned a company and so forth that bought it. Imperlino’s name doesn’t appear anywhere. Or so we’re told.”

“That’s usually the way they work.”

“Who’s they?”

“Who do you think?”

Durant smiled. “The ones whose names all end in vowels.”

“That’s close enough. They’re buying a lot of things.”

“For instance?”

“I could name you a couple of movie studios that if they don’t own yet, they control.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Yeah, I guess that is pretty common knowledge. Maybe I’m just trying to rationalize my letting them grab off Nightshade. There was a certain point after I finally found out about Imperlino that I could have still said no. It would have been difficult, very difficult, but I still could’ve killed the deal.”

“But you didn’t?”

“No.”

“Did your sister-in-law ever know him?”

“Which one?”

“Silk.”

“Yeah, Silk knew him. So did Lace. But Ivory knew him best of all. She was living with him for a while. That’s really why they broke up the group. Silk wouldn’t put up with it. I mean, she wouldn’t record for him. She didn’t object to Ivory’s being shacked up with him. She didn’t like it any more tha Lace did, but neither one of them would ever have dreamed of telling their sister who she could sleep with. He kept her in dope, of course. Ivory, I mean — but she finally left him. Went off by herself, just wandering around the country, and then wound up dead of an overdose down in Miami Beach.”

“What kind of affair was it?” Durant said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, was it public or private? Did the press pick up on it? You know Mob Boss Squires Folk Star — that kind of thing.”

“You don’t know much about Imperlino, I take it.”

Durant shook his head. “Not a hell of a lot.”

“He’s a hermit. Well, maybe not exactly a hermit. Recluse would be better. And Ivory, except when she was singing, was probably the world’s most private person. They got along alone, if you follow me. Imperlino has three guys on his payroll who do nothing but try to keep his name out of the paper. They did a good job then and they do a good job now.”

“What’s he like?” Durant said.

“I only met him twice.”

“What about when the negotiations were going on for the record company?”

Piers shook his head. “He was never a part of those. Even today, I doubt that anyone could actually prove that he controls Nightshade. Everybody knows it, of course, or thinks they do.”

“But you met him?”

“Twice, as I said. Once he and Ivory had Lace and me over to dinner at his place in Bel Air. They’d wanted Silk to come too, but she refused. Silk has — well — principles. Lace and I went because Ivory asked us to.” Piers smiled — a crooked, rueful smile. “And I suppose our principles are a little more, well, flexible than Silk’s. Also, I was just curious as hell. I take a lot of kidding about that place of mine, you know. But it’s what I wanted, I paid for it, and I live there, so to hell with them. But this place Imperlino built himself in Bel Air. It’s got everything but a moat.”

“A castle, huh?”

“Not exactly. He built it in the ’60s and it looks as though it’s been there since 1647. There’re some who claim that he had a guy on Disney’s staff design it for him. It’s sort of half fairy tale and half English country house, it works. God knows how much it cost him. So anyway, Lace and I went to dinner there that time.”

Piers paused as though remembering, then picked up his coffee and finished it. “Jesus, that’s good.”

“Like some more?”

“Yeah, I would, thanks.”

Durant picked up the two mugs and took them into the kitchen. When he came back, Piers said, “That recipe you gave my wife. It’s not bad, but it’s not like this.”

“I’m not sure I told her to put in a pinch of salt.”

“Salt?”

“Just a pinch.”

“I’ll tell her.”

“What was he like?”

“Imperlino?”

Durant nodded.

Piers took a sip of his coffee first. “Smooth,” he said. “Not slick smooth, but gracious smooth, if you know what I mean. Somewhere he’s acquired a lot of polish — the effortless kind. I mean, he doesn’t have to remember his manners, and let me tell you something, they’re perfect. And he also must have gone to a voice coach at one time, because he skips his R’s a little and the A’s are slightly broadened, but not much. Lace claims to know for a fact that he hired George Sanders to give him elocution lessons, but Lace knows more apocryphal tales than anyone I’ve ever met.”

“You didn’t talk about the record company, I take it?” Durant said.

Piers shook his head. “It never came up. Well, all four of us were there in what he called the Big Hall with the fireplace blazing in July and the air conditioning keeping the temperature down to sixty-five and Imperlino and I in black tie and the two ladies in party dresses and four servants and six courses, or maybe seven, I don’t remember now, and Imperlino orchestrating the conversation.”

“What’d he talk about?”

“Eliot.”

“T.S.?”

“Right. Imperlino delivered a nice little fifteen-minute lecture on how Ezra Pound’s editing saved Eliot’s — uh—”

“The Waste Land?”

“Right. Well, Christ, I hadn’t read Eliot since I was in college and didn’t much care for him then. But Imperlino managed to make him and Pound sound fascinating as hell. I don’t know. Maybe they are. It seemed so while he was talking, at least. After that he somehow very smoothly, very gently coaxed Ivory into reciting some poetry she’d written. I didn’t know she wrote poetry. I knew she wrote lyrics, of course, but the poetry was a surprise. And it was good. Damned good, although, of course, I’m no critic, but that’s not the point. The point is how he got Ivory to recite it Then he starts drawing Lace out on growing up in Arkansas. Well, that was no big deal. Lace’ll go on about that for hours if you’ll let her. But she made it funny and amusing, and the next thing I know he’s got me going on about how brilliant and clever I am. I must have gone on for ten minutes all about me before I realized what was happening. But even then I didn’t mind. Who would?”

“And that was the evening?”

“Yeah, that was it. A good time was had by all and delicious refreshments were served. I came away with the impression that I’d just been had. I think he must have studied charm the way I studied electronics — except that he’s better in his field than I am in mine, and I’m not exactly a slouch.”

“A charming recluse?”

“It’s a paradox, isn’t it?”

Durant nodded. “It would seem so. What’d your wife think?”

“Well, we weren’t married then. This was back in ’70. But she thought that if she ever needed her throat cut, she would go to him because he would not only know how to do it, he would also make her enjoy it.”

Durant lit a cigarette, his third for the morning. “You said you saw him once again.”

Piers nodded slowly and then drank some more coffee. “The end of 1970. Down in Miami. I went down to claim Ivory’s body. Neither Lace nor Silk could face it, so I went. He showed up. He and Ivory’d split by then, but he was there anyway. He wanted to see her. He also wanted me to go with him. Well, what the hell, I did. He went in and looked at her. I waited for him outside. Ivory wasn’t very pretty by then. She’d quit eating, and the dope and the horrors had finally got to her.

“Well, when he came out he was crying. He wasn’t sobbing or anything, but he was crying in this quiet, dignified manner. I don’t know. Maybe he learned how to do it in charm school. But, by God, he did it well. He told me that he wanted Ivory’s body. He wanted to take it back and bury it at his place in Bel Air. I told him that that wouldn’t be possible because the sisters had already made arrangements to bury her in the family plot in Arkansas next to her mother and father. He nodded as if that were perfectly understandable. He was still crying, but not apologizing for it or anything.

“Then he asked if I knew what the police had found out. Well, I told him that they thought Ivory had bought some bad dope off a Cuban bellhop who worked in the hotel she’d stayed at. But they didn’t have any proof. He nodded as if he found that sort of interesting, but not terribly, and then we shook hands, and that’s the last time I ever saw him. But there’s a postscript.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Two days later they fished that Cuban bellhop out of the ocean. He’d had his throat cut. Then there’s the post-postscript.”

“What?”

“Two weeks after they buried Ivory in Arkansas, somebody dug her up and made off with the body. You like it?”

Durant shook his head slowly. “Not much.”

“Neither did Silk. She wanted to raise all sorts of hell until Lace and I talked her out of it.”

“So he’s a sentimentalist.”

“Or weird.”

“Maybe both,” Durant said. “What about his Washington connections?”

The question surprised Piers, and his face showed it. His eyebrows went up and his mouth turned down at the corners. “I hadn’t heard,” he said. “Are there any?”

“There’s a rumor, but it’s pretty low-grade stuff.”

“Where’d you hear it?”

“The name wouldn’t mean anything to you.”

A new expression slid across Piers’s face, one that was both skeptical and wary, “You spend one day down in Pelican Bay and you come back talking about a mob boss and his Washington connections. Is that really possible?”

“Anything’s possible. We’re just looking for your sister-in-law, but to do that we have to poke around to find out where to look. Any objections?”

Piers rose. “None. I’m not paying you to be orthodox.” He started for the door, but paused. “By the way, when my wife was here the other day, did you make a pass at her?”

Durant examined Piers for several moments before replying. There was something in Piers’s eyes, Durant thought. A sadness perhaps. Finally, Durant said, “No.”

“I guess that’s what she was complaining about.” He grinned then, but not very merrily. “She likes to play little games like that,” he said, “I wouldn’t take her too seriously, if I were you.”

Durant kept his expression grave. “I’ll try to remember that.”

By seven o’clock that morning Randall Piers was seated behind his desk in his combination library-office-study. Before him was a three-page, single-spaced memorandum from his executive assistant, Hart Ebsworth. The memorandum was entitled RUNDOWN — DURANT AND WU. Piers picked up a blue pencil and circled one paragraph consisting of four lines. He then picked up his phone, pressed a button, and said, “Come on in.”

Ebsworth came in and took his usual seat. Piers slid the memorandum across to him. Ebsworth glanced through it and said, “The paragraph you circled?”

“Right.”

“Early ’70 until early ’72. When they came back to Bangkok from Florida and Durant got his scars.”

“Yeah,” Piers said. “It’s a little sketchy there.”

“You want more.”

Piers nodded. “I want it all.”

Ebsworth leaned back in his chair and sighed. “It’ll cost. And I don’t mean money, either.”

“Get it,” Piers said.

Chapter 16

Because it was Saturday the traffic was light, and they made it from Malibu to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in a little under thirty minutes, which may have set some kind of record. Artie Wu drove the way he always did — with what Durant usually thought of as wild abandon. When Wu drove, Durant kept his eyes closed much of the way.

He opened them once just in time to see Wu fake out a white Rolls-Royce at the corner of San Vicente and Gretna Green. Durant caught a glimpse of the Rolls’s driver, open mouthed and apoplectic, as Wu whipped the big Chrysler past with not much more than a quarter of an inch to spare.

Durant closed his eyes again and said, “I think you hit him.”

“I didn’t hit him.”

“You nicked him.”

“Never.”

His eyes still closed, Durant said, “Your driving—”

Wu interrupted. “Don’t tell me again.”

“It’s just that I’ve come up with a theory that might explain it.”

“What?”

“Somewhere in your ancestry, and not too far back, there must have been some Chinese bandits.”

Artie Wu nodded as though pleased by the suggestion. “Yeah,” he said, “I’d like to think so, anyway. You know how you drive?”

“I’m an excellent driver,” Durant said. “No, not excellent. Superb.”

“Bullshit. You toodle along like it’s always Sunday morning and you’re early for church.”

“But I get there.”

“We’ll get there. On time, too.”

“He does like promptness, doesn’t he? Probably a fetish.”

“Along with his bow ties.”

“At least he ties them himself.”

“Yeah,” Wu said. “There’s that.”

Wu covered the next four miles in a little less than seven minutes and they arrived at the Beverly Wilshire at three minutes until nine. Wu turned into the drive that separated the new section of the hotel from the old and handed the car over to an attendant.

“He’s in the old section, I bet,” Durant said.

“Where else?”

They got out of the elevator on the sixth floor and turned left, heading down the richly carpeted hall toward the suite numbered 61719.

“You know, I read somewhere that they’ve got a rating system in this hotel,” Wu said.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. If you’re almost somebody, or at least make out like you are, you get fresh flowers in your room. But if you really are somebody, which means that maybe you got your name on Cronkite once, then they send up a bottle of champagne. I don’t remember whether it’s French or not.”

“Probably California,” Durant said.

“Probably.”

“I wonder whether he got champagne or flowers?”

“Well, he was an assistant secretary of state once.”

“And ambassador to Cambodia,” Wu said.

“Not to forget Togo.”

“Plus a few other things. Five bucks he got champagne.”

“No bet,” Durant said just as Wu knocked on the door.

The man who opened the door was Whittaker Lowell James, who was sixty-four years old and used all three names whenever the opportunity presented itself. He was white haired and very tall, just a little over six-three. He held himself stiffly erect, almost in a brace, and it gave him a somehow distant, almost forbidding air that his wintry smile, which he had just turned on, did nothing to dispel.

“Gentlemen,” James said, and looked quickly at his watch before offering a his hand first to Wu and then to Durant.

“Hello, Whittaker,” Wu said, because he knew that James hated for anyone to call him Whit.

“Arthur,” James said. “You’re looking fit. And you, Quincy — you, I think, could use a few pounds.”

“How’ve you been?” Durant said, wondering how long it had been since anyone had called Wu anything but Artie. Not since Mrs. Billington at the orphanage, he decided. She had always called him Arthur.

James told Durant he had been fine — splendid, in fact — and then Artie Wu said, “I like your flowers.”

James turned toward a blue, glazed vase that held an artfully arranged assortment of carnations, chrysanthemums, Dutch iris, and delphiniums touched up with some baby’s breath.

“The management sent those up,” James said. “Along with a quite good bottle of champagne.”

Wu and Durant didn’t look at each other because they knew that if they did, James would catch it. At sixty-four, Whittaker Lowell James was as alert as he had ever been, which was very alert indeed.

“Why don’t we sit over here,” he said. “At least, until breakfast arrives, which should be within” — he glanced at his watch again — “the next minute or so. I took the liberty of ordering for all of us.” He looked around as though ready to fend off any challenge to his judgment, and when none came, he smiled his December smile again.

James had waved Wu and Durant over to a striped maroon-and-white couch with overly delicate legs. Durant sat down on the couch. Wu chose a boxy easy chair covered in some kind of nubby pale gray fabric. James hesitated and then decided to sit in the chair that matched the couch. He sat as stiffly as he stood.

“Quite a nice hotel, this,” he said. “They even have kippers, which I thought we might have. You like kippers?”

“I do,” Wu said, “but Quincy hates them, although you don’t have to worry about it. All he ever has for breakfast anyhow is a raw egg.”

“You’re not as much of a gourmet as is our plump friend here, are you, Quincy?”

“I just don’t like to cook.”

“You still do quite a bit of fine cooking, Arthur?”

Wu smiled. “Whenever I get hungry.”

“I like to cook, you know. But rather simple fare, I’m afraid. A chop now and then, a salad, or perhaps an oyster stew. I do that quite well.”

The conversation had begun as it always began whenever Wu and Durant met with Whittaker Lowell James. They invariably talked about non-essentials at first — about nothing, really. And as they talked James inspected them both, measuring their posture and pauses and eye movements for possible signs of disenchantment and sloth and even incipient treachery. James was an extremely suspicious man, and he prided himself on his ability to read the small, telling signs that a body made. His guideposts were a tremor, a tic, a stammer, a gesture, a glance — even a silence.

James searched for them now as he talked about nothing. He had long made it a rule to talk about nothing before he hired anyone. Or fired them.

They were still talking about hardly anything at all when the knock came. James rose and opened the door. The Mexican waiter pushed the wheeled table into the room, smiling as though he enjoyed his job. James fussed for a moment about where the table should be put. When that was settled, the waiter started bringing the dishes up from the hot boxes underneath, and he and James chatted with each other in rapid Spanish.

Durant half-listened to the Spanish and felt grateful that James was talking to the waiter about the warm weather. Perhaps he’ll spare us that. Durant noted that James had made a concession to California informality by abandoning his usual dark gray or blue suit for a navy blue blazer and gray slacks. But he had clung to the bow tie — butterfly, of course, blue with white polka dots. And his gleaming black shoes were the kind that needed laces. Durant tried to remember when he himself had last worn shoes that demanded laces. At least ten years, he decided. Probably more.

When the waiter had gone they sat down at the table. Artie Wu took a lot of everything, including the kippers. James had a soft-boiled egg, some bacon, a bit of kipper, and a piece of dry toast. Durant took nothing but a piece of toast, which he buttered carefully.

After he had finished his egg, James patted his lips carefully with a napkin and said, “I must confess, gentlemen, I’m a little disappointed.”

“I thought it was good,” Wu said, helping himself to another portion or scrambled eggs.

“He’s not talking about the food,” Durant said, and lit a cigarette.

“No kidding,” Wu said. He finished the last of his eggs, used his napkin, leaned back in his chair with a sigh, and produced one of his long, slim cigars, which he held up to James.

“Mind?”

“Not at all.”

Wu carefully clipped an end off his cigar, then lit it with his usual kitchen match, and when he was sure that he had it burning nicely, he peered through the smoke at James and said, “Tell us about your disappointment, Whittaker.”

“In two months not a single report.”

Wu shrugged. “We had nothing to tell you.”

“Even that would have been interesting, if not useful.”

“Well, we were busy,” Durant said.

“How?”

“We had to set it up,” Wu said.

“I should have liked to know what steps you were taking.”

“What’d you want us to do,” Wu said, “call you up and tell you that we were looking for a dead pelican?”

James frowned, and when he did the chill in his pale gray eyes seemed to drop several degrees. “Perhaps we should review,” he said. “Would you like to start with the pelican?” He came down hard on “pelican,” almost biting the word in two.

Artie Wu smiled. “Let’s start before that. Let’s start with Aberdeen.”

“All right,” James said. “Let’s. And since I was privy to at least that part of our little venture, perhaps I should take the class.” He looked at both men as if again expecting a challenge. What he got from Durant was a slight smile and an even slighter nod. Wu waved his cigar a little.

“In Scotland — in Aberdeen, to be precise — we met and I explained the problem. From a short list of several names my little group had selected yours because we naively had thought that you — especially you, Quincy — might be highly motivated. I think it took only five minutes of conversation with you both before I realized how sadly mistaken we had been.”

Durant rubbed bis left eye. “Revenge is an awfully old-fashioned motive, Whittaker.”

“Apparently.”

“But when you mentioned money,” Wu said, “I think we perked up considerably.”

“Yes, you did, but my little group is not the government and we don’t have unlimited funds at our disposal.”

“What is it again that you call yourselves?” Wu said. “Something cute as I remember.”

James seemed almost embarrassed, but not quite, “The R Street Fudge and Philosophical Society,” he said, and then glared at the two men defiantly.

Artie Wu grinned cheerfully. “Cute, like I said.”

“How many are there, a couple of dozen of you?” Durant said.

“Approximately.”

Durant started putting out his cigarette. “And how many of you are ex-Cabinet members. A dozen, fifteen?”

“All of us have served in government in one capacity or other.”

Durant nodded. “And all of you are millionaires or better. Much better.”

“A number of us are comfortably fixed,” James said a little stiffly, trying to make it neither a boast nor a confession.

“And used to it,” Wu said.

There was no warmth in James’s look. “To a comfortable living?”

Wu shook his head. “To running things. Let me put it another way. If a pot starts to boil somewhere, you guys are right there with a lid.”

James sighed. “You overestimate both our scope and our influence, Arthur.”

Wu smiled. “Do I?”

“I’m afraid so. We have limited resources, far more limited than you think. And for purposes of security we decided that this particular project had to be self-financing. I made that clear in Aberdeen.”

“What you made clear in Aberdeen,” Wu said, “was that if anything went wrong in Pelican Bay, your R Street bunch would come out with hands so clean that they’d be almost antiseptic.”

“You’re not complaining about the financial arrangements, are you, Arthur?”

Wu shook his head. “No. You found us a quick buyer for the chili parlor, and then we took what we got and went short on Midwest Minerals, the way you advised, and we made ourselves a bunch of money. I’m not complaining about that. It’s just that my teeth hurt whenever you start talking poor-mouth.”

James smiled another of his bleak and chilly smiles. “I’ll try to be less parsimonious in my future remarks. In any event, after selling your — uh — establishment in Aberdeen — what was it you called it? The Something Chili Parlor.”

“The Nacogdoches Chili Parlor,” Durant said.

“Yes, to be sure. Interesting name.”

“My wife thought it up,” Wu said. “She likes American names.”

“And how is that splendid woman?”

“Okay, except that she loathes California.”

“She rises even higher in my estimation. But to continue. After leaving Aberdeen, you gathered up kith and kin and came to Washington, where we three met several times and devised a general strategy. It was about then, of course, that the Congressman was killed out here, which presented us with an alternative avenue of approach in the form of Randall Piers and through him to his sister-in-law. Silk Armitage. Are we still of the opinion that she could be the key?”

“It depends on what she’s got,” Durant said.

“Well, we’re pretty sure of what the Congressman had,” James said. “After all, he had been a policeman and, from what I understand, a very good one. What a pity that his wife killed him.”

“Maybe she didn’t,” Durant said.

A new layer of frost settled over James’s face. “Well, now,” he said. “That little bit of information might’ve been included in one of those reports that you didn’t send me.”

“We only learned about it yesterday,” Durant said, and looked at Wu. “Or was it the day before?”

“Yesterday.”

“I see,” James said. “Perhaps you gentlemen should continue the review — from when you left Washington until now. Provided, of course, that there is something to review other than a general description of life at the beach.”

“Okay,” Durant said, and lit another cigarette. “We went to San Francisco first. You know that, of course. We went there because we knew some people there who knew who was in L.A. and who wasn’t. By that I mean who was down here that we might use. After that I came down to L.A. first. Since Randall Piers and I don’t travel in the same circles, the problem was how to make the approach without letting him know that he was being approached. I decided on proximity. Then I had some luck and found the house on the beach.”

“You sent me a postcard of that, I believe,” James said, “with something like ‘Keeping busy, having fun’ on it. Oh, yes, and your address and phone number, too.”

“See, we did keep in touch,” Wu said.

“Okay. After I found the house,” Durant went on, “Artie came down and got settled in Santa Monica. Then using the information you gave us we looked up Eddie McBride and opened what he thought were negotiations.”

“He thought the money was still there, I take it?” James said.

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t disabuse him of that notion?”

“No,” Durant said, shaking his head. “Well, after we established proximity to Piers, the next thing was to create familiarity. Piers walks his dogs nearly every day along the beach, so Artie started jogging along the beach.”

James’s silver eyebrows went up. “I thought you hated exercise, Arthur.”

“I do. I especially hate it right after dawn, which is when Piers walks his dogs.”

“What kind of dogs?”

“Greyhounds,” Durant said. “Six of them.”

“Six?”

“Six.”

“My word. But why did you decide that Arthur should do the jogging? Why not you, Quincy? After all, it was your house.”

“I’m more exotic,” Wu said.

“Yes. Yes, I see.”

“It was part of the whole mystique,” Durant said. “The come-on. Finally, when we decided that Piers was ripe, we had to set up the accidental meeting.”

“That’s when we went looking for a dead pelican,” Wu said.

“There really was a dead pelican?”

“Sure,” Wu said. “I needed something to trip over.”

“To be sure,” James said, murmuring the words, not even bothering to hide his disbelief.

“Dead pelicans are hard to find, by the way,” Wu said. “But we finally found one down at Zuma Beach, and I planted it the next morning. Then when Piers came along I tripped over it and sprained my ankle. I mean. I really sprained it.”

“It wasn’t a sprain,” Durant said. “It was a mild twist.”

“It felt like a sprain.”

“And Piers came to your rescue?” James said.

Artie Wu nodded. “He helped me into the house. We’d really worked to give it the right atmosphere. The furniture was all very good stuff, but just a little worn. We even rented a twenty-thousand-dollar Oriental rug and put it on the floor. Also, Quincy here kept his shirt off so that Piers could get a good look at his scars. And finally, over in a corner, we had the Reuters financial ticker clacking away.”

“A nice touch,” James said. “Very nice indeed. And?”

“He nibbled at first, and then he bit,” Wu said. “We used MidMin to let him know how smart we were. Then we brought up Eddie McBride and his two million — just mentioning it, of course; a throwaway almost, certainly not a sell. And there you have it — a house on the beach with a twenty-thousand-dollar Oriental rug on the floor, a wall of books, a news ticker in the corner, and a fat Chinaman and his mysterious, scar-backed partner getting rich by riding the wire. Not to mention a map of where a stolen two million bucks might be buried. Now, if you had a missing sister-in-law and needed a couple of hard cases to find her and ran across us at six-thirty in the morning, what would you think?”

“That I’d stumbled across a nest of brigands,” James said.

“Exactly,” Artie Wu said, and smiled.

Chapter 17

Whittaker Lowell James was an expert listener. As Durant and Wu talked, James sat quietly in his chair, moving almost nothing but his eyes except when he occasionally sipped cold coffee from his cup.

The report was delivered almost in relays, Wu and Durant spelling each other off with some kind of silent system that seemed to James almost prearranged. They skipped nothing and they embellished nothing, and James’s only interjections were an occasional “I see” and “Of course” and “Indeed.” When Durant came to the deaths of Icky Norris and Tony Egidio a brief frown wrinkled itself across James’s forehead, but it lasted only a second. Perhaps less.

After Wu and Durant were done, James looked at his watch and said, “There should be fresh coffee here within the next few minutes.”

They waited in silence then. James toyed with a spoon. Durant sat quietly, slumped back in his chair, his lean hands locked behind his head.

Artie Wu’s cigar, forgotten while he talked, had died from neglect in an ashtray. Wu picked it up, looked at it fondly, and stuck it into the left side of his mouth. As he chewed on his cold cigar, Wu examined James for evidence of the reaction that would soon be due. A patrician, Wu thought, if there is such a thing. He could be coming to a boil, but you’d never know it.

If there were any clues to James’s thinking, Wu felt that they would be found in the eyes and the mouth. But the eyes had all the expression and color of ice cubes forgotten in the refrigerator since last summer. And the mouth, underneath the slightly beakish nose, was stretched into a tight, reproving line that could mean either stifled rage or trouble with the kippers.

Wu was about to break the silence and say, “Well?” when somebody knocked at the door. James rose and admitted the same room waiter as before. The waiter put the fresh pot of coffee down, and James complimented him on his promptness and tipped him a dollar. When the waiter asked if they would like the table removed, James shook his head no.

When the waiter had gone, James served the coffee in fresh cups. He almost made it into a ceremony, and when it was over he leaned back in his chair and looked first at Wu and then Durant.

“Well, it’s better than I expected,” he said.

Durant, his hands still locked behind his head, stretched and looked at the ceiling. Wu simply chewed on his cold cigar some more.

“He knows you’re here,” James said. “That might be good.”

“Simms?” Durant said.

“Yes. Reginald Simms.” James said the name as though he were biting into it for the first time and were not at all sure that he would like what he found.

“We assume that he knows,” Durant said.

“Well, yes, he probably does. I would say that it’s a safe assumption. Alter all, someone wanted your names from McBride, didn’t they? We can assume, then, that it was Simms. Or one of his henchmen.”

“Henchmen,” Wu said. “My God, I don’t think I’ve heard that used in twenty years. Not since Princeton.”

“It almost goes back that far, doesn’t it? You and Simms, I mean.”

“Almost,” Durant said.

“It all began in Mexico, didn’t it — in ’61 or thereabouts.”

“In ’61,” Durant said, still staring at the ceiling.

“And exactly what were you doing in Mexico then?”

“Exactly?” Wu said.

“Yes.”

“We were in jail.”

“Yes, I remember, but I don’t recall the details.”

“You mean why?” Wu said.

“Yes. Why.”

“We were involved in pre-Columbian art,” Durant said, shifting his gaze from the ceiling to James and smiling a little.

“Counterfeiting it, you mean.”

Durant shrugged. “Some of the pieces we sold are still in museums. Old Carrasco was a real artist. A genius, probably.”

“You were how old then?”

Wu did some mental subtracting. “Twenty-two.”

“And Simms showed up,” James said. “And he recruited you.”

Wu shook his head. “He didn’t recruit us. He gave us a choice. We could either stay in a Mexican jail or join the Peace Corps and go to Indonesia for him.”

James smiled, and for the first time a small amount of mirth crept into it. “I can think of no two less likely candidates for the Peace Corps, I mean. What did he see in you — did he say?”

“Our youth,” Durant said with a grin.

“Yes, of course. For two so young you hadn’t led an exactly sheltered existence.”

“Not quite,” Wu said.

“And so you went to Indonesia for ‘the Peace Corps.’ ” James carefully put the name in quotes. “Java, wasn’t it?”

Wu nodded. “About seventy miles out of Djakarta.”

“Who was your contact?”

“A Dutchman called Jonckheer. Simon Jonckheer.”

James sipped his coffee. It had grown cold, but he seemed neither to notice nor to care. “Yes, Jonckheer. The Chinese doubled him, didn’t they?”

“That wasn’t until later,” Wu said. “In late ’62.”

“How long did it take for him to burn you?”

Durant shrugged. “He let us run awhile.”

“Why?”

“We were cutting him in.”

James nodded. “Cigarette smuggling, wasn’t it?”

“Partly,” Wu said.

“What else were you feeding him?”

“Jonckheer?”

“Yes.”

Durant smiled again. “We made things up. If we caught a rumor, we’d fancy it up and pass it along to him. He liked us.”

“And the Peace Corps?”

“They were happy as hell with us” Wu said. “We increased the per capita income of the village we’d been assigned to by five hundred percent in the first six months. Of course, we had almost the entire village on our payroll by then.”

“How was the jail?” James said.

“You mean the one in Djakarta?”

James nodded.

Durant shrugged. “It was Dutch built. Solid. Lousy, of course, but we got to meet Sukarno.”

“Did he come just to look?” James said.

Artie Wu thought about it for a moment. “He talked to us a little. About Hollywood. He was a film nut.”

“But nothing else?” James said.

Wu shook his head. “They had us cold. On the smuggling, anyway. They would have had us on the other except Jonckheer was found dead with a bullet in his back, and after that they couldn’t prove anything.”

“That was just about the time that our Mr. Simms appeared on the scene again.”

“Right,” Durant said.

There was another long silence. James’s face had acquired a dark, almost brooding look as he stared down at the tablecloth. Finally, he looked up and said, “Simms killed him, of course — Jonckheer, I mean — and then worked a deal with Sukarno to let you go. An expensive deal, I might add.”

“Money?” Wu said.

“No, not money.”

There was another silence, and then James said, “And after Indonesia came Tahiti, didn’t it, and Simms pulled the strings with the French for your licensing and so forth. That was your payoff, wasn’t it?”

“That’s right,” Durant said.

“Or you would have gone public?”

There was nothing pleasant in the smile that Wu formed around his dead cigar. “We mentioned it to him in passing, I think. Once or twice.”

“Would you have?”

Wu shrugged. “Maybe. But probably not.”

“But he still had you on his string?”

Durant shifted in his chair. He leaned his elbows on the table and stared at James. “Let’s get one thing straight. We were never on anybody’s string. We were never anything but pea pickers — casual labor, seasonal help. We got into it because we were blackjacked into it, and afterward we played along because sometimes it was useful, but not very. And finally there toward the last, we did what we did for money and for nothing else. But as for being spies, if that’s what we ever were, Artie and I were pretty much of a bust.”

Wu grinned around his cigar again. “Everybody in Papeete used to tell me I looked like a spy. What the hell, it was good for business.”

“After Papeete, then?” James said.

Wu moved his heavy shoulders slightly in a shrug of sorts. “We moved around the Pacific for a while and then to Bangkok.”

“He was there, wasn’t he? In Bangkok. Simms.”

“Yeah, he came through a few times.”

James looked as if he wanted to pursue that further, but then abruptly changed his mind. “And from Bangkok you went back to the States and finally down to Key West. This would be ’69 by now, right?”

“About then,” Durant said.

“Who made the approach?”

“He sent somebody,” Wu said.

“Who?”

“One of your old buddies from your OSS days. Simms’s gray eminence. The Frenchman.”

“Lopinot?” James said.

Wu nodded. “That’s right. The sly fox himself. What was he then?” he asked Durant.

“In ’69? Fifty-three probably. Maybe fifty-four.”

“And Lopinot made you the proposition?”

“Right,” Durant said.

“Tell me about it.”

Durant leaned back and looked at James curiously. “You know all about it.”

“I think we should review.”

Durant rubbed his nose and sighed. “All right. He and Lopinot had teamed up, and the Agency had sent them into Cambodia with God knows how much money. They set up their own fiefdom and sent out the word that they were looking for recruits. Well, they showed up from all over — Germans, South Africans, old Foreign Legion types, a lot of the scum from the Congo, a few Biafra veterans, some English, even some Americans. Their job was to soften things up for the Cambodia — what did they call it — incursion. The problem was supply. Lopinot offered us the contract.”

“And you took it,” James said, making it almost an accusation rather than a question.

“That’s right,” Wu said. “We took it.”

“For the money, of course.”

Wu nodded. “It was a fat contract.”

“So you set up shop in Bangkok again.”

“We had an office and a warehouse and some trucks in Bangkok and a jumping-off place at the border. We leased two helicopters from one of the CIA fronts, hired some pilots, and flew the stuff in at night. Either Artie or I would go along on every trip.”

“How many men did he have?” James said.

“He had about five dozen mercenaries, not counting what he’d had rounded up by press-gangs. It wasn’t an unusual situation. The Agency had a number of guys like Simms operating out there then, although most of them were in Vietnam. And most of them had smaller operations than Simms, but not all. He controlled about a fifty-mile-square area, and they’d started calling him the Dirty Duke.” Durant paused. “With good reason.”

“And you ran him supplies until when — ’72?” James said.

“May fifteenth,” Durant said automatically as if the date were as familiar to him as his birthday.

James nodded slowly. “You had known Mlle. Gelinet for quite some time then, hadn’t you?”

“About a year,” Durant said. “A little more.”

“And she was with—”

“Paris-Match.”

“Yes. She was quite an excellent journalist.”

“And photographer,” Wu said.

“Yes, of course.” James used his right hand to smooth his thick white hair. It was the first even slightly nervous gesture he had made. His second one came when he cleared his throat before saying, “You were quite fond of each other, I understand.”

Durant stared at him for a long moment, for nearly five seconds, and then nodded slightly, just once.

Artie Wu took his stub of a cigar out of his mouth, looked at it, and said, “They were sweet on each other. They were going to go back to Paris and get married. Or live together. Whichever.”

Durant glanced at Wu. “I’ll tell it.”

Wu shrugged. “Sure.”

“The rumors started filtering in. About Simms, I mean. The Dirty Duke. All sorts of rumors. Christine wanted to do a story on him, an interview. The next time I went in I checked it out with Lopinot. He liked the idea — maybe because she was from Paris-Match. Lopinot liked publicity. You remember that book he wrote.”

“Yes,” James said. “Rather self-serving, I always thought.”

“Anyway, Simms wasn’t around, but Lopinot gave the okay. We set the drop zone for a week later. Well, when I got back to Bangkok another old friend of ours had shown up. Jack Crespin of CBS. We’d known him in Papeete and then later down in Key West. He’d heard about the Dirty Duke too. I said okay, fine, he could go along when I took Christine in. So we went in and they were waiting for us.” Durant paused.

James waited for him to go on. When Durant didn’t, James cleared his throat again and said, “They?”

“It was a crack combat team. North Vietnamese. A long-range group led by a Captain Kham. We came in at night, of course, and the signal lights were right. They knew we were coming.”

There was another silence. “I got out of the chopper first. Then Christine. They shot her a second later. I don’t know why. Kham later said it was a mistake. Jack Crespin, well, he was half out and half in and he was trying to get all the way back in when they shot him too, and he fell back in. The pilot didn’t wait around for me.”

James shook his head and murmured, “Most unfortunate.”

“Wasn’t it, though?” Durant said.

“Then came the interrogation?” James said.

“They used a whip,” Durant said. “That was later, of course. They wanted to know a lot of things that I didn’t know, so I tried lying. Making things up. Well, I wasn’t too good at it — not good enough, anyway — so the Little Shit brought out the whip.”

“The Little Shit?”

“He was their intelligence officer. Very smart, very mean, very little about five feet high, maybe less. His name was Lieutenant Nguyen Van Dung. The Little Shit. He had a seven-foot-long whip made out of water buffalo hide. I got three dozen of the best over a period of three days. They got everything out of me that they wanted and after that they left me alone. It was seven feet deep. The hole, I mean. Maybe two feet wide and five feet long. What it really was, I guess, was my grave.”

James looked at Wu. “How did you manage it?”

Wu shrugged. “I knew where he was — or where the drop zone was, anyhow — so I hired some help and went in and got him out. It was hit and run just before daylight. Nothing fancy.”

“It sounds extraordinary.”

Wu clamped down on his cigar as if to cut off any further discussion. “It wasn’t.”

“And afterward?” James said.

“Artie canceled us out of everything after we got back to Bangkok,” Durant said. “I was in a hospital for ten days. After that we went to Honolulu. And from there to Aberdeen.”

“Why there?”

“It was cold and wet and far away and it seemed like a good idea.” Durant paused. “And it was.”

“And Simms?”

“What about him?”

“Did you ever figure out why?”

“Sure,” Artie Wu said. “Lopinot should’ve checked first before he agreed to let Quincy bring Christine in. When Simms found out, he canceled everything and moved — except he didn’t bother to tell us.”

“Kham caught a straggler,” Durant said. “That’s why the landing signals were right.”

“How did you feel?” James said.

“About what?”

“Simms.”

Durant smiled slightly. “I would’ve killed him. Then.”

“And now?”

Durant shook a cigarette out of his pack and lit it. “It all happened a very long time ago, didn’t it?”

James brushed a few crumbs off the table. “That was quite a mess you two left behind.”

“But you cleaned it up, Whittaker,” Wu said. “You sat on it and most of it never got out.”

“After Cambodia, Simms kept operating, you know. Right up until the very last. In Vietnam.”

“Till ’75, you mean?” Durant said.

James nodded. “Lopinot finally got killed in rearguard action during the retreat from Phuoc Long.”

“We heard,” Durant said.

“He’d become an anachronism by then, almost. Simms, I mean. He showed up at the embassy at almost the last moment. From what I’ve been able to gather, he was considerably shaken. His world was collapsing around him. He still had a lot of friends, of course, so to keep him busy — almost therapy, I suppose — they let him burn the money.”

“Six million dollars,” Wu said.

“Yes. They bagged it first, you know.”

Wu shook his head. “I didn’t.”

“They used green plastic garbage bags.”

“And he pulled a switch, right?” Durant said.

“He and your young friend. The Marine.”

“McBride.”

“Yes. McBride. Who still thinks it’s there.”

“How’d he get out?” Wu said. “Simms, I mean.”

James shook his head. “We can only speculate. He waited until the embassy was completely evacuated, of course. But getting out of Saigon would have been no problem. Not for him.”

“The name he was using then?” Durant said.

“It was the same one he’d used all through the war,” James said. “Childester. Luke Childester.” He cleared his throat for the third time and patted his hair again. “Tell me, how did you two feel about it?”

“About what?” Wu said.

“The war.”

Wu glanced at Durant, who shook his head and shrugged. “What did we think about it?” Wu said, not caring about the amazement that coated his tone.

“Yes.”

“Tell him we were steadfast in our opposition,” Durant said. “That’s what he wants to hear.”

“You would grant that it was an immoral war?”

“Immoral?” Wu said. “What the hell has morality got to do with it? The only moral wars are the ones you win. After that you can have a parade and make speeches about not dying in vain. But if you lose one, you try to forget it like a bad mistake — which, because you lost, it sure as hell was.”

“You just made a speech,” Durant said. “Although I thought you might have had a line or two in there about the Yellow Peril.”

“You share Arthur’s views, I take it?” James said.

“Oh, sure, I’m opposed to war — along with famine, pestilence, flood, earthquakes — the lot.”

“Yet you went?”

“To the war?”

“Yes.”

The smile that came to and went from Durant’s face was so bitter that it almost made James flinch. “I didn’t have to go,” Durant said. “If they had tried to make me go, I probably would’ve gone somewhere else. Sweden, most likely, for the girls and the politics, which I find rather sensible. The girls, I mean. But I went to the war to make money, not to get shot at. When I got shot at, I went home.”

James shook his head several times in what seemed to be both disbelief and disapproval.

Durant watched him, then smiled again, quite skeptically this time, and said, “What about you, Whittaker? Any regrets?”

“No,” James said. “None.”

“If you hadn’t gone on record against it,” Durant said, “at least not quite so vehemently, you probably would’ve been Director today. You had a clear shot at it. There was no one better qualified — according to all the pundits.”

“I’m enjoying my retirement,” James said.

“Sure,” Wu said. “Lots of time to read, I bet.”

“We want Simms stopped,” James said, ignoring Wu.

Durant nodded. “We know.”

James rose and paced toward the window that looked out over Wilshire Boulevard. He peered out, then turned and paced back to the table. He was on his way back toward the window again when he said, “We had a meeting just before I came out here.”

“The Fudge and Philosophical Society?” Durant said.

“Yes. Something bad is about to come out.”

“About the Agency?”

“Yes.”

“How bad?”

“Lies and more lies.” James sighed. “He was such a liar, you know.”

“Yes.”

“Well, we’re trying to put a lid on it. We’re not sure that we’ll succeed. If not, I suppose the Agency will survive. But if something happens out here with Simms and all this comes out, well, it might be the last straw.” He stopped his pacing to turn and face Durant and Wu. “Despite your sophomoric nihilism, can you bring yourselves to agree that this country does have need for a workable and effective intelligence-gathering organization?”

Wu sighed. “Don’t make us a speech, Whittaker. Not us.”

“No. Of course not. I should’ve known. We want him stopped.”

Durant nodded slowly. “Fine. We’ll stop him.”

James stared at them for a moment. “You two don’t need any frosting, do you?”

Wu stuck a fresh cigar into his mouth. “We never did.”

“All right. Then I’ll give you the tidbit that I’ve been saving. Simms and his new associate, Mr. Imperlino. I thought you might be interested in the fact that they were roommates at college.”

Durant nodded, digesting the information. “That might explain a few things.”

“Yes, it should, shouldn’t it.”

“At Bowdoin?” Wu said.

“Yes, Bowdoin.” James brought a small notebook out of his pocket, tore off a sheet, and handed it to Wu. “When you have something to report, call me at this number.”

Artie Wu glanced at the area code. “That’s Santa Barbara, right?”

“Yes,” James said. “It’s a bit more civilized up there, don’t you think?”

“Absolutely,” Durant said.

Chapter 18

If Pelican Bay was a long and grimy finger that poked itself up into what some often charged was the backside of Los Angeles, then that finger’s dirty fingernail was Breadstone Avenue.

It wasn’t an avenue really. It was just a street that served as a line of demarcation between the two cities, and for a long time it had been called simply Division Street. Then an unpopular Los Angeles city councilman, one Noah Breadstone, had died back in 1936 and the street had been changed to an avenue and named after him. The mayor of Los Angeles at the time had called it a fitting memorial. The Breadstone family had called it cheap, because Pelican Bay had had to pay half the cost of putting in the new street signs. Shortly thereafter the Breadstones had left Los Angeles — some said in a huff — and settled up north in San Luis Obispo.

Breadstone Avenue in its 2200 block had long been about half residential and half commercial. The residences were mostly fifty-year-old squatty bungalows jammed up against each other on forty-foot lots. Occasionally, there would be larger, two-story houses that usually wore a ROOM FOR RENT sign. Nearly all the houses boasted a porch or veranda of some kind, a sure indication that they had been built long before the almost twin advent of smog and air conditioning.

It was now a mixed block racially, integrated by economic necessity rather than choice. The Mexicans had come first, followed closely by some blacks, some Chinese, and now some Koreans. The sprinkling of whites who remained sighed often and kept their doors locked. As in nearly all poor neighborhoods, there were many children, most of them with enormous eyes.

Betty Mae Minklawn was one of the whites who still lived in the block at 2220, a three-bedroom bungalow on the Pelican Bay side of Breadstone Avenue. The bungalow’s mortgage had been paid off in full ten years before, just a month before her husband, J. B. Minklawn, a railroad engineer had died of a stroke at the throttle of the Santa Fe Chief just outside La Junta, Colorado. J.B. had left his forty-year-old widow a small amount of insurance, the house, an almost new car, a modest pension, and $893 in a joint checking account.

At fifty, Betty Mae was still a large, handsome woman who worked hard at maintaining her big-breasted figure. She also kept her beehive hairdo an amazing shade of almost chrome yellow with the weekly help of Margarita, who worked at the Gonzalez Beauty Salon down at the corner next to the Honorable Thief Cocktail Lounge, whose Korean owner, Sang Ho Shin, was having trouble with his young wife.

As a cure for loneliness after J.B. died, Betty Mae had made friends with many of her neighbors. Those who didn’t want to be her friends she had cheerfully turned into enemies, enjoying the resulting feuds quite as much as she did her friendships. One way or another, Betty Mae Minklawn knew everybody on her block and nearly everything about them. What she didn’t know she quickly found out. She had recruited a network of superb spies, most of whom were nine and ten years old and got paid off in Sara Lee and Gatorade.

Of all the days in the week, Saturday was now Betty Mae’s favorite. For on Saturdays she paid her weekly visit to Madame Szabo, a Hungarian seeress who had strayed into the neighborhood a couple of months before and whose intelligence gleanings were already nearly as good as Betty Mae’s own. Then after Madame Szabo’s it was down to the Tex-Mex Bar & Grill for a couple of beers, maybe three, and conversation with the Tex-Mex owner, Madge Perkinson, and anybody else who happened to drop by. Most of Betty Mae’s friends patronized the Tex-Mex. Most of her enemies hung out across the street in the Honorable Thief.

Betty Mae usually returned home on Saturdays about seven o’clock, which was in plenty of time to prepare a light supper which she ate on her lap before reruns of Mary Tyler Moore. Although she didn’t watch the soaps on TV much because they weren’t nearly as juicy as what went on in her own neighborhood, Betty Mae almost never missed an episode of Mary Tyler Moore. In fact, Betty Mae was now convinced that when younger she had very much resembled the actress — a conviction shared by absolutely nobody else.

After the program, Betty Mae always took a long bath and then retired to her bedroom to await the weekly visit from her roomer, Santiago Suárez, thirty-six, who drove a shuttle bus for Avis at Los Angeles International Airport and had a wife and three kids down in Mexico some place. Suarez was trying to put by enough money to bring his family up North, Betty Mae at first had charged him $87.50 a month for his room, but after their first time in bed together, she had lowered his rent to $75 and then promised to lower it another ten if only he would do some rather peculiar things to her, which Santiago Suarez had cheerfully done.

Betty Mae was getting dressed in fits and starts that Saturday morning because she kept going to the window to inspect the car that was parked across the street. The car was a black four-door Plymouth Fury sedan. Betty Mae watched as little nine-year-old Sandy Choi sneaked up on its rear and wrote FUZZ in the dust on its trunk and then ran off giggling. Betty Mae was a little surprised that Sandy could spell that well.

She had known it was a cop car from the moment she had spotted it an hour before. But she couldn’t quite decide at first whether it was the Pelican Bay or the L.A. police. Then she put on her glasses and took a better look at the pair who sat slumped in the car’s front seat, wearing the patient, bored look of men who get paid to wait and watch.

The two men seemed to be in their forties, and because of the sour look that one of them wore Betty Mae classified them as belonging to the Pelican Bay force. Vice cops maybe, she thought. They look mean enough.

Betty Mae kept going back to the window, half dressed, to see whether she could figure out whose house the cops were watching. Maybe it’s mine, she thought, and since the notion gave her a small thrill she decided to expand on it. Maybe Santiago has killed somebody at work and they’re waiting for him to come back. She discarded the idea almost immediately, because she knew that except in bed, Santiago Suarez was one of God’s gentlest creatures.

After one final peek out her window, Betty Mae got dressed. She was wearing what she thought of as her drinking uniform. It was a teal green polyester pantsuit with a tight white nylon blouse. On her feet she wore a pair of old and comfortable huaraches that she had picked up down in Mexicali one time.

Betty Mae made sure that her front door was securely locked and then moved slowly down to the sidewalk and turned right. It was out of her way, but she wanted a better look at the two cops. As she moved past them she saw that the one at the wheel was the younger of the pair — probably forty. The other one was maybe forty-nine or fifty.

Their eyes slid over her as she went past, and Betty Mae shivered a little, wondering what the older one would be like in bed. He was a heavy-shouldered man with a big head and not much neck. He had a lot of hair, a sort of dirty gray, that he wore long at the sides to compensate for his jug-handle ears. His face seemed to have been made out of mismatched parts and then given a coat of boredom. There were a lot of jaw and nose and very little mouth, but what there was looked sour and disappointed. He had tiny slitlike eyes that seemed to have been stuck so far back into his head that almost nothing could be seen of them except their glitter. It was a seamed, cruel face, and Betty Mae shivered a little again because on Saturday nights she liked a little cruelty.

The other man in the car, the younger one, wasn’t worth a second glance in Betty Mae’s estimation. He was big and blond and pug-nosed and blue-eyed with one of those upturned mouths that Betty Mae thought probably lied easily and often.

She jaywalked behind the car and crossed Breadstone Avenue into Los Angeles. She thought she could feel the policemen’s eyes on her as she turned into the cracked cement walk that led up to Madame Szabo’s two-story frame house. A covered wooden porch ran around its front and right side. The porch, like the house, had been painted gray many years back, and Betty Mae could remember when it had boasted some rather nice wicker furniture. Now the only porch furniture was a junked Kelvinator refrigerator, its door removed, that sat next to the window with the big sign that advertised Madame Szabo’s powers. The sign was a red hand, palm outward. Down the side of the palm, in vertical red letters, ran the one word READINGS.

Betty Mae looked at her watch and then knocked at Madame Szabo’s door. It was eleven o’clock — only a little after, really — which meant that Betty Mae was almost on time. Nearly seven weeks ago Betty Mae had been fifteen minutes late for her appointment and Madame Szabo had canceled it without explanation, warning Betty Mae that in the future she must be exactly on time.

It was the book, of course, Betty Mae had decided. Madame Szabo accepted only a limited number of clients because she was writing a book that demanded nearly all of her time. The book, Madame Szabo had hinted darkly would set the scoffing scientific world on its ear. Betty Mae believed it, because Madame Szabo certainly had told her a strange thing or two. Betty Mae figured that the Madame had a little money put by, because sometimes days would go by without a single client’s visiting the gray frame house at 2221 Breadstone Avenue. Betty Mae knew because she sort of kept watch.

Of course, Madame Szabo probably made a little money off those four boarders of hers, Betty Mae had decided. They were polite kids, two boys and two girls, all of them in their mid-twenties. They were gone most of the day, Betty Mae had noted, and when they came home at night they usually stayed there, although occasionally you would see them picking up some groceries down at Patty Pow’s Markette on the corner.

Madame Szabo opened the door to Betty Mae’s knock and then stepped back. “Welcome, madame,” she said in her deep voice that seemed to come from far down in her throat, the heavy accent turning her W into a V.

“Not late, am I, honey?” Betty Mae said.

“Not at all,” Madame Szabo said, although the accent made it come out something like “not tat tall.”

Privately, Betty Mae felt that Madame Szabo used too much makeup. Especially too much green eyeshadow. She could have been sort of pretty if only she’d have got rid of that black wig she always wore, which came down low over her forehead, almost reaching her eyes. It was hard for Betty Mae to tell just what color those eyes really were because Madame Szabo always wore a pair of wire-framed glasses with heavily tinted rose lenses.

Madame Szabo was about five feet six. That was plain enough. But it was difficult for Betty Mae to decide whether she was fat or thin or maybe sort of in between, because she always wore that very loose caftanlike thing that covered everything up except her hands, and they had all those rings on them that Betty Mae thought looked cheap.

The caftanlike robe was of dark green velvet, and it had a high turned-up collar that covered Madame Szabo’s throat and made Betty Mae suspect that the seeress might be sensitive about her neck’s turning crepey. But if that was true, then Madame Szabo had to be at least forty. Of course, she had once hinted to Betty Mae that she had narrowly escaped from Hungary back in ’56 when they were having all that trouble with the Russians, and that would make her about forty now maybe, but it sure was hard to tell with all that heavy makeup.

The two women moved down the hall until they almost reached the flight of stairs that led up to the second floor. There wasn’t much furniture in the hall, just a few pieces that looked hand-me-down. There was also a strip of carpet that had some worn traffic spots, especially around the stairs. Madame Szabo paused at a pair of sliding doors that opened into what had once been the dining room. She slid them apart, stepped back, and said, “Please,” although it came out “Pleece” — or almost. For some reason, Betty Mae loved to hear Madame Szabo talk.

The room that they entered was dimly lighted by a lone fringed floor lamp that had a weak bulb. The windows were entirely covered with heavy dark red draperies. There were a few pictures on the walls, mostly steel engravings of vaguely European street scenes. There were a worn brown couch and a couple of upholstered chairs, one green, the other sort of a wet sand color. A flowered rug, not new, was on the floor, and near the lone lamp was a small, round polished table with two chairs drawn up to it. The chairs looked as though they might once have belonged to a dining-room set. Spotted here and there about the room were some useless knickknacks — a plaster bust of somebody unimportant; a stuffed bird, probably a falcon; a single goldfish swimming aimlessly around in a square fish tank with a china cat clinging to its edge; and in a far corner a tall blue jar with some pussywillows sticking out of it. It looked like a fortune-teller’s room done by a cheap advertising agency with a low budget. Betty Mae thought it looked just great.

Madame Szabo waited until Betty Mae sat down in one of the chairs drawn up to the small round table. Then she slowly lowered herself into the chair opposite. She sat with her head bowed for a moment, then raised it slowly and stared intently at Betty Mae through the heavily tinted glasses. Betty Mae shivered a little in anticipation.

“The man Suárez,” Madame Szabo said after a moment.

Betty Mae nodded. “Santiago,”

“I have had signs.”

“What kind?”

“There is another woman.”

“His wife, huh? I’ve been expecting that.”

“No. Not his wife. This woman has red hair.”

“That son of a bitch.”

“Please do not swear. It interferes.”

“How’d you know about her?”

“Please,” Madame Szabo said, and held out her hand for Betty Mae’s own. Madame Szabo examined Betty Mae’s palm for several seconds. Then she nodded and said, “Here, you see.”

“Where?”

“There. Your fidelity line.”

Betty Mae bent over to look. “Oh, yeah, that one.”

“The slight interruption — just there.”

“Yeah. Un-huh. What’s it mean?”

“Her name is Red — no, not Red. Rusty. Yes, Rusty.”

“Rusty Portugill,” Betty Mac said. “Little bitch works weekends down at the Thief. Santiago swore he wasn’t gonna see her anymore.”

“I’m afraid that that is not true.”

“When?”

“Two nights ago.”

“Bastard.”

“Please do not swear.”

“Sorry, Madame Szabo, but it just makes me so damn mad. I don’t care if he sees her, but she’s gonna take him for every dime he’s got and probably give him a dose while she’s doing it. And Santiago’s got this real nice wife down in Mexico, and three kids, I’ve seen pictures of ’em, and he’s been trying to save enough to bring ’em all up here and I’ve been trying to help him out, you know, and now he’s messing around with her. You know about her, don’t you?”

“I have only the signs to go by.”

“Well, let me tell you about Rusty Portugill. She was a hooker working Hollywood until about six months ago and then she got shacked up with Donnie Sumpter, that big mean spade who lives about three doors down — or did until they busted him a couple of weeks ago. He’s still in jail and now Rusty’s looking to shack up with somebody else, and lemme tell you, she s got her cap set for Santiago on account of he’s got a steady job and he hasn’t exactly got too much of the smarts, if you know what I mean. But he’s sweet.”

Madame Szabo threw her head back and gazed up at the ceiling. Her lips moved soundlessly for a few moments. Then she whispered, “Sumpter... Sumpter... I am getting something... Sumpter...”

“Donnie Sumpter,” Betty Mae said helpfully.

“Yes... yes... he was in — inside this place—”

“In jail.”

“Do not interrupt, please.”

“Sorry.”

“He was in... yes, inside... and now, there is something else, it is difficult... and now he’s out. Yes, that is it. He is out.” Madame Szabo’s head dropped abruptly so that her chin almost rested on her breast.

She raised her head slowly. Once more she examined Betty Mae’s palm. “Yes, it is here, see?” She pointed to a line. Betty Mae nodded.

“You will have no more trouble with the redheaded woman. This man — Sumpter?”

“Yeah, Sumpter.”

“He has taken her away.”

“No shit,” Betty Mae said.

“Please do not swear.”

“He busted out, I bet. That’s why the cops are out there now. Of course, you knew about that, didn’t you? The cops, I mean.”

“Cops?”

“Police,” Betty Mae said. “We call ’em cops in this country, but shoot, I bet you know that. Well, they’re outside now. I thought maybe they had an eye on your place, but I guess what they’re really looking for is old Donnie.”

Madame Szabo rose quickly and went to the window, drawing back the heavy red draperies just enough to peer out. Betty Mae was now beside her.

“See ’em?” Betty Mae said. “That black Plymouth over there.”

Madame Szabo almost spun around from the window. Her usual composure, almost implacable, seemed shattered. She bit her lower lip hard. “I’m afraid we will have to cancel the rest of today, my dear,” she said and almost, but not quite, lost her accent.

Betty Mae looked at her curiously. “You’re not gonna charge me five bucks just for this, are you?”

“No, of course not. I have this headache — yes, this headache — it just suddenly came. The pressure from the signs, you know.” Madame Szabo’s accent was now firmly back in place.

“Well, okay, if you say so,” Betty Mae said.

“You will excuse me?”

“Sure.”

“I must go now. Good-bye.”

Madame Szabo turned quickly and left through the swinging door that led from the former dining room into the kitchen. Betty Mae hesitated, then turned to leave. She was almost at the sliding doors when she stopped and turned back. She could hear a phone being dialed in the kitchen. Maybe she’s really sick, Betty Mae thought, inventing a handy excuse. She tiptoed back to the swinging door and pushed it open slightly. There was nothing to see — just the old kitchen. She pushed the door open wider. And when she did, her eyes met those of the seeress.

Madame Szabo was standing at the wall phone, her black wig discarded, her rose-tinted glasses shoved up on top of her honey blond hair. A cigarette was in her right hand. Her eyes, now almost as wide as Betty Mae’s own, were a curious, almost golden brown color. It was the first time Betty Mae had seen them plainly.

“I’ve got to go,” Madame Szabo said hurriedly into the phone without any accent at all. She hung it up as Betty Mae moved back and let the swinging door close. Betty Mae started moving toward the doors that led to the hall. Madame Szabo came through the swinging door quickly and stepped between Betty Mae and the sliding doors.

“I have to talk to you,” Madame Szabo said, the accent all gone.

Betty Mae’s mouth was open and full of amazement. A funny, tingling sensation kept running through her body as she stared, almost transfixed, at the other woman.

“You’re... you’re... I mean, you’re not—”

“No.”

“Good Lord, honey, you’re — I mean — you’re—”

“That’s right, Betty Mae,” Madame Szabo said. “I’m Silk Armitage.”

Chapter 19

It was a wondrous yarn that Silk Armitage spun for Betty Mae Minklawn over a cup of tea. It involved a crooked agent and a conniving business manager and an embezzled $1.3 million. Silk confided that the rascally pair had been cheating her for years and that she was now in hiding while she got her records and proof into shape for the impending court battle. She dredged up old gossip, invented more, and dropped as many famous names as she could think of as she bounced her tale from Sunset Boulevard to Las Vegas to London and New York and back to Beverly Hills and Malibu. It was a heady potion that Silk Armitage served up along with the tea, and Betty Mae drank in every drop and thirsted for more.

“And those four young kids that live here?” Betty Mae said.

“One of them’s my bodyguard,” Silk said. “You know, the tall one.”

“And the other ones?”

“Well, the two girls are researchers, and the other one — you know, the young guy with the glasses — well, he’s a lawyer who’s with this big law firm that’s handling everything.”

“You really need a bodyguard?” Betty Mae said, hoping that the answer would be yes.

Silk Armitage didn’t disappoint her. “We figure that there’s a million, three hundred thousand dollars involved. These two guys are desperate, and they’ve got some funny connections that, well—” Silk let her sentence trail off.

“Mafia?” Betty Mae almost breathed the word.

Silk nodded.

Betty Mae had read the gossip about Silk and the late Congressman Ranshaw, who had been her lover. She thought of asking Silk about the Congressman, but decided not to. Not yet, anyway. Instead, Betty Mae pressed her thighs together in excitement and delight. This was better than any old Mary Tyler Moore Show. This was the real stuff, and here she was sitting in this tacky old kitchen drinking tea with Silk Armitage, who was in all sorts of trouble, real danger, and there was just no telling what might happen next.

“Where’d you ever learn to tell fortunes like that, honey?” Betty Mae said, determined to scrape up every last crumb of information.

“Down home.”

“You’re from Arkansas, aren’t you — you and your sisters? I read that some place.”

“Uh-huh,” Silk said. “Arkansas.”

“And that’s where you learned it?”

“There was this real old lady down there. Some folks said she was a witch, but we never believed it. She taught me and Ivory — that was my oldest sister. Lace, that’s my other sister, you know; well, Lace never was much interested.”

“Ivory’s dead now, isn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Was she in the same kind of trouble like you’re in now, honey?”

Silk closed her eyes. Forgive me, Ivory, she thought. Then she opened her eyes and said, “It wasn’t quite like this. Not exactly, I mean.”

“Sure, I understand. But how’d you get all your dope about what’s going on around here?”

Silk smiled. “Kids. The same way you do.”

“I never saw any come in here,” Betty Mae said, and immediately wished that she hadn’t because Silk might get the wrong impression and think she was a snoop.

“The back door,” Silk said, and smiled again. “They came to the back door. You know that little Chinese boy, Sandy Choi?”

Betty Mae nodded. Sandy was one of her best sources.

“Well, he was sort of the ringleader. There was a whole bunch of them. They started out charging a quarter; then they went up to fifty cents. But they sure know what’s going on.”

Betty Mae felt somehow betrayed by the defection of her spy ring. But she decided to ignore her resentment, because there was something else that she wanted.

“Honey, I was just thinking,” she said.

“Yes?”

“I was just wondering if maybe I could still come and see you sometimes. I mean, you don’t have to be a palm reader or anything anymore. But you know how I keep a pretty close check on what’s going on around here, and if I saw something suspicious — like those cops out there this morning. Well, you didn’t know about that. But if I spotted somebody else nosing around, maybe you oughta know about it.”

Silk smiled. “I’d like that, Betty Mae.” She looked at the big blond woman searchingly. “But you can’t tell anyone about me. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Oh, sure, honey,” Betty Mae said. “You don’t have to worry about me. I know how to keep my trap shut.”

Silk Armitage drew the heavy red draperies back just enough to watch Betty Mae Minklawn as she hurried down the walk toward the Tex-Mex bar. Forty-eight hours, Silk thought. She’ll tell somebody as soon as she hits that bar and it’ll take forty-eight hours for the word to spread. Maybe seventy-two, if I’m lucky. She watched Betty Mae move past the parked black Plymouth that contained the two watchers. Once again their eyes brushed over Betty Mae as they classified and filed her away. I’m not even going to have forty-eight hours if those two guys over there aren’t really looking for Donnie Sumpter, Silk thought. She tried to think of where she might hide next, but her mind — usually so inventive and even fanciful — refused to function. And for the first time in weeks, Silk Armitage felt the quick, shuddering chill that was fear. It seemed to make everything inside her turn cold. So she did what she always did when she was afraid. She sat down at the small round waxed table, clasped her hands before her, and began to sing softly to herself. And as she sang, she thought and planned and schemed.

Betty Mae Minklawn had almost reached the Tex-Mex bar when her resolution evaporated. She had grimly resolved — sworn, really — that she wouldn’t tell anyone about Silk Armitage’s being Madame Szabo and all. But the excitement of her morning’s adventure had been too much and now she had to tell someone or burst. Well, she would tell Madge Perkinson and that was all. And she’d make Madge swear not to tell anyone else. She’d make her swear it on a Bible. Betty Mae crossed the street and hurried into the Tex-Mex wondering if Madge still kept a Bible in the place.

The older man in the black Plymouth that was parked across the street stirred and fished an unfiltered Camel out of his shirt pocket. He lit it with a paper match and blew the smoke out the open window.

“Well?” he said.

The other man, who was behind the wheel of the car, yawned and stretched. “Somebody’s going to have to get inside.”

The older man thought about that for a moment. Then he said, “Maybe. Maybe not.”

“What else?”

The older man rubbed his big nose. “Maybe if we squeeze a little, she’ll scoot.”

The other man nodded. “Yeah, that’d be good, wouldn’t it?”

“Good?” the older man said. “I don’t know if it’d be good. All I know is that it’d be better than the fuck-all we got now, which is nothing but an anonymous tip from somebody who doesn’t seem to like the way she tells fortunes. I don’t much like to count on people who go to fortune-tellers. Most of them are whackos.” He brooded about it for a moment and then said, “Let’s go find a phone.”

The other man straightened up and turned the key to start the engine. “How you gonna work the squeeze?” he said, and pulled the car out into Breadstone Avenue.

“You don’t seem to understand.”

“Understand what?”

“The problem’s not how we’re gonna do it. The problem’s if we’re gonna do it. And since I’m just the chief of police and you’re just a pissant homicide lieutenant, then it oughta be clear to you by now that we don’t make important decisions like this. This is a very delicate situation, in case you haven’t noticed. Very delicate. I mean, a situation like this calls for a lotta thought and study. You and me, Lake, we come across something like this and we’re liable to just go ahead and, you know, do it. Just like we’d take a shit or get a haircut. I mean, you don’t think about that too much either. But this. Well, this has probably gotta have what they call a feasibility study.”

“You’re letting ’em get to you, Oscar.”

The big man, whose name was Oscar Ploughman and who was Pelican Bay’s chief of police, smiled briefly, exposing his square yellow teeth that seemed too large for his small mouth. It was a bitter, sardonic smile that seemed to be Ploughman’s response to some awful private joke.

“I’d sort of appreciate it if you’d call me Chief Ploughman, Lake. Just because we’ve known each other for fourteen, maybe fifteen years and even used to chew on the same pussy sometimes, that’s no reason why we can’t have a touch of formality. They’re awful big on formality in this town, in case you haven’t noticed. Awful big. So maybe you oughta try calling me Chief Ploughman. Start out with once or twice a day and then sort of work up to it. I don’t want you to go into shock or anything.”

“Go fuck yourself, Chief Ploughman,” Lt. Marion Lake of Homicide said.

Ploughman flashed his bitter yellow smile again. “That’s better, Lake,” he said. “Much better.”

They found an outside phone booth at the corner of Wyoming and Thirty-third. Ploughman got out and went into the booth. He was so big that he had trouble closing the door until he turned and pressed himself back against the opposite wall. He dropped the dime and dialed, and when his ring was answered, he said, “This is Chief Ploughman. Lemme talk to Mr. Simms.”

He waited until Reginald Simms came on to the phone. “I think I might have something,” Ploughman said.

He listened for a moment, and then he said, “That’s why I wanted to check with you.” He listened again, and before responding he let his bitter smile come and go. “Well, maybe if I used the siren, I could make it in five minutes.” The grin came back and stayed in place while Ploughman listened to Simms’s response. “No, sir, I’m not really going to use the siren. It was just a joke, sir. A very, very small joke. Tiny, almost.” The smile went away as Ploughman listened to Simms. “Yes, I think I can make it by then... No, sir. No siren.”

After he got back into the car Ploughman said, “One thing you gotta say about Mr. Simms, Lake.”

“What?”

“He’s got this terrific sense of humor. I mean, he’s nothing but giggles and chuckles and ho-ho-ho. A regular Jolly Green Giant.”

“You’re letting ’em get to you, Oscar.”

“You think so, huh?”

“Yeah, you’re getting like you got back in Jersey when the DA started dumping on you. All mean and sarcastic, and then you start switching that nasty smile on and off, which sorta makes you look like a caution light.”

Ploughman rubbed his teeth with a forefinger and then twisted the rearview mirror around so he could examine the results.

“Irium,” he said.

“Who’s she?”

“It’s not a she, it’s an it.”

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“You’re not all that young,” Ploughman said. “They used to put it in Pepsodent. Don’t you remember? ‘You’ll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent.’ ” Ploughman sang the jingle in a harsh bass voice.

“I don’t remember that.”

“They put Irium in Pepsodent. It was a magic ingredient that some guys in this advertising agency dreamed up. Of course, it wasn’t no magic ingredient. It was just the same shit they put in all toothpaste. Pumice or whatever. But they needed a three-syllable word that sounded kinda scientific, so these guys came up with Irium and everybody rushed out to buy it.”

“I don’t remember that,” Lake said.

“It happened back in the ’40s. Things were better back then. I was younger. And a hell of a lot smarter.”

Lake shook his head and twisted the rearview mirror back into place. “You’re letting ’em get to you, Oscar.”

Ploughman flashed his yellow grin on and off once more, and then all the way down to the Plaza del Mar Towers he sang over and over again, “ ‘You’ll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent.’ ”

The Plaza del Mar Towers was a symbol of what some thought of as Pelican Bay’s civic schizophrenia. It was located on the beach side of Seashore Drive just across the street from what at one time had been the heart of the city’s downtown section. The section was still there and it was still downtown, but in a typical one-block stretch there were two vacant department stores, two empty jewelry stores, a vacant specialty shop or two, and a large motion-picture theater that advertised CLOSED on its marquee. The block was not much different from the rest of downtown Pelican Bay. A few businesses with a slippery look to them and EASY CREDIT signs had moved into some of the vacated stores. A couple of older, established businesses still hung on glumly, either too tired or too despondent to move on or give up. Only the banks still seemed solid and imperturbable.

To get to the Plaza del Mar Towers, Lt. Lake had to circle around Freddie, the twenty-one-foot-tall concrete pelican that had been built by the WPA back in 1937. Nobody could remember how he had come to be called Freddie, but that was his name now, and often people would say, “I’ll meet you by Freddie at noon.” At one time Freddie had had a clear view of the bay, but that was before the Plaza del Mar Towers had gone up a year ago.

The Towers were actually only one tower, which was perfectly round and twenty stories high and built mostly of tinted glass and as little steel as possible. It was an apartment building with suspect financing that had gone up as the downtown business section had declined. The apartments on the ocean side cost more, of course, than did the ones that had downtown Pelican Bay and Freddie to look at. And the higher the apartment the higher the rent until you reached the twentieth floor, where an apartment on the ocean side topped out at $2,000 a month. There was only one such apartment, however, and in it lived Reginald Simms.

Freddie was now the last pelican in Pelican Bay, and he sat, or rather stood, in a little round park in the middle of the intersection. The park had a few benches and some grass, and it was a good place to meet people or just to sit and watch the traffic. The real pelicans had disappeared from Pelican Bay some years ago, killed off by the DDT that ran down from the farms into the rivers and then into the sea. The DDT had done something to the shells of the pelicans’ eggs — made them too soft, some said — and so there were no more pelicans in Pelican Bay, even though DDT had since been banned. There were no more pelicans, that is, except Freddie.

“Hello, Freddie,” Ploughman said as Lt. Lake drove around the concrete bird and then turned right into the curved drive that led up to the entrance of the Plaza del Mar Towers.

Chapter 20

From a professional standpoint, Ploughman had to admire the Plaza del Mar’s security setup. Although the uniformed doorman who admitted him didn’t look like much. Ploughman knew that he was a retired street-smart Pelican Bay policeman whose suspicious sixty-year-old eyes were almost as good as an electric scanner.

But if trouble somehow got past the old ex-cop, its next hurdle was the reception desk, which was manned by a retired thirty-nine-year-old former CID major who wore a carefully concealed .38 Chief’s Special on his left hip. Ploughman knew that the gun was there because he had signed the permit for it. And he knew that it was the ex-major’s left hip because he had once watched him fire it at the indoor police range and the ex-major had fired left-handed and hit what he aimed at.

Behind the reception area was another room which, Ploughman remembered, contained a bank of closed-circuit television receivers that poked and pried into almost every exposed nook and cranny of the building twenty-four hours a day. Of course, in a round building there weren’t too many nooks and crannies; in fact, hardly any at all except down in the underground garage. Even so, the closed-circuit television setup was constantly monitored, which added considerably to the rents of the Plaza del Mar tenants, who seemed quite content to sacrifice privacy for security.

Although the ex-major knew perfectly well who Ploughman was, he still very politely asked the police chief to wait while he called upstairs to make sure that Mr. Simms was really expecting him. As Ploughman waited, he inspected the rather flashily decorated lobby, which had a lot of low, comfortable-looking chairs and couches that nobody ever seemed to sit in.

Once cleared, Ploughman took the high-speed elevator up to the twentieth floor and moved down the curving hall until he reached Penthouse B. He rang the bell, and the door was opened by a reserved black man in a white mess jacket, who ushered Ploughman down a tiled hall that was covered with Oriental throw rugs. The hall led into the living room.

Penthouse B was shaped like a wedge of pie with its first bite already gone, and the living room ran along about three-fourths of the pie’s outer crust, where all the glass was. It was a large, strangely subdued room, almost sparsely furnished with good, but undemanding pieces. There were only two paintings, both mild abstracts, and Ploughman dimly perceived that the room had been carefully decorated so that nothing would detract from its magnificent view.

There was blue ocean to look at, miles and miles of it, and to the right was the curving coastline that was edged in lace when the waves came in. Ploughman was staring out the window when the voice behind him said, “Rather spectacular, isn’t it?”

Ploughman turned to find Reginald Simms standing by a small wet bar across the room.

“Yeah,” Ploughman said. “That’s what I was thinking. Hell of a view.”

“Would you care for a drink, Chief?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

Simms turned to the bar. “Let’s see — you’re a gin drinker, I believe.”

“That’s right. Gin.”

“Nothing with it, right?”

“Nothing.”

Ploughman watched as Simms made the drinks. Simms wore a soft tweed jacket of grayish blue, dark gray slacks, black loafers that were carefully underpolished, and a shirt that was too pale to be cream and whose open collar was filled by a paisley scarf. Fred Astaire, Ploughman thought. The son of a bitch tries to dress just like Fred Astaire.

When Simms handed him his drink, Ploughman saw that it was a generous double. Simms’s own drink was a pale amber, and Ploughman put him down as a Scotch drinker. Over the years Ploughman had found that he got along more comfortably with those who drank bourbon rather than Scotch. He felt most at home, of course, with gin-heads like himself, but there weren’t too many of those around anymore. He was automatically suspicious of anyone who drank vodka; he believed that vodka drinkers had something to hide. Ploughman had many such prejudices which he enjoyed because of their certitude.

“I think over here, don’t you?” Simms said, gesturing slightly with his drink toward a corner that was formed by a long pale couch and a matching chair with heavy arms. Ploughman nodded and sat down in the chair after Simms chose the couch. There was a thick glass table with chrome legs in front of the couch and chair. Ploughman put his drink down on it while he lit one of his Camels.

“Well,” Simms said, “I believe you said you had something.”

Ploughman blew some smoke out, waved it away, and nodded. “A fortune-teller, maybe a Gypsy, that lives just over the line in L.A. We got a tip that maybe she isn’t a Gypsy at all.”

“What’s her name?”

“Szabo. Madame Magda Szabo.”

“Hungarian?”

“If I thought she was Hungarian, I wouldn’t be here, would I?”

“And what makes you believe that she isn’t?”

Ploughman stared at Simms coldly. “You really want to know?”

Simms smiled slightly. “No, I don’t suppose I really do.” There was a brief silence and then Simms said, “You’re not completely sure, though, are you?”

“No.”

“You’ll have to get inside.”

“Will I?”

“I would think so. Perhaps you could use a policewoman. She could pose as a housewife who wanted her fortune told.”

Ploughman picked up his gin and finished it. Then he wiped his mouth, sighed his appreciation, and said, “I don’t think this is a police matter, Mr. Simms. I mean, here we got this Gypsy or Hungarian or whatever reading palms over in L.A. and as far as I can tell, minding her own business. Now, if she should turn out to be somebody else, maybe even somebody famous, well, that’s sorta interesting, maybe even kinda cute, but I can’t see why it should interest the Pelican Bay Police Department.”

Ploughman leaned back in his chair with the air of a man who was through for the day. Simms examined him for a moment, smiled faintly, and said, “Go on.”

“Go on?” Ploughman said, trying to put something like surprise into bis voice and succeeding fairly well.

“That’s right. Go on.”

“Oh, well, it sort of occurred to me that if somebody who said he was a reporter, or maybe even a private investigator, started nosing around the neighborhood over there on Breadstone Avenue — kind of asking questions about Madame Szabo and dropping a hint here and there that maybe she’s not Madame Szabo at all, but maybe somebody else, maybe even somebody sorta famous — well, I was just wondering what would happen if word about all this got back to Madame Szabo.”

“She’d run.”

“You know, that’s sort of what I figured.”

Simms kept the patient, interested look on his face with effort. “And then?”

“Well, then it’d sort of be up to you, Mr. Simms, wouldn’t it — seeing as how the Pelican Bay Police Department hasn’t got the slightest official interest in some Gypsy fortune-teller who’s not hardly bothering anybody over in L.A.”

“No official interest, anyway,” Simms said.

A stubborn, unbudging look spread across Ploughman’s lined face. As though to give it emphasis, he shook his head slowly from side to side. “The Pelican Bay Police Department has got no interest — maybe I’d better repeat that — no interest, either official or unofficial.”

Ploughman had never seen a more implacably polite smile than the one Simms gave him. It was a smile that made Ploughman grow tense and wary as he braced himself for the onslaught that he knew would come.

“How old are you, Chief Ploughman, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Fifty-one.”

Simms nodded approvingly, the polite smile still in place. “A good age,” he said. “I believe it’s what’s called the prime of life — probably because a man is well seasoned by then and at the peak of his powers.” The smile went away and Simms shook his head a little regretfully. “Still, in this country, which puts such a premium on youth, it’s sometimes difficult for a man who’s past fifty — or even forty, for that matter — to relocate satisfactorily. Of course, you’d never have such a problem. You came out here from New Jersey at our behest — and on my personal recommendation, I suppose I should add — and what you did once you could easily do again. And although we’d hate to lose you, we certainly would give you a very warm recommendation.”

For several moments the two men stared at each other. Then Ploughman gave Simms his bitterest smile and said, “You know what I think?”

“What?”

“I think it’s time we cut out the shit.”

“Good,” Simms said, and looked at his watch. “You’ve got two minutes.”

Ploughman hunched forward in the chair, his arms on his knees, his bitter grin in place, his voice rumbling and confidential. “You and me, buddy boy, are stuck with each other. Of course, like you said, I could probably find another job — maybe as a doorman or a rent-a-cop some place. But hell, I like this job. I like the town and I like the climate, and my wife likes it so much that she ain’t hardly ever home anymore, which is another blessing. Fact is, I’ll probably even retire here in another nine years or so. Of course, the pension’s not gonna be too much, but if things go the way they’re supposed to, then I don’t figure I’ll have much trouble picking up an extra dollar or two here and there. Why, shit, I might even get me one of those Swiss bank accounts that you’re always hearing about. I’m not exactly sure how’d you go about opening one up, but I can always look it up some place, or maybe just ask you, because I figure you’d probably know.”

Simms looked at his watch. “That’s one minute.”

Ploughman stubbed his cigarette out in a ceramic tray. He took his time. “Well, I’m out here from back East just a couple of months or so and what happens? I get a big case dumped in my lap. Congressman Ranshaw’s wife gets drunk and shoots him in some motel and then kills herself. A hell of a thing.”

Ploughman shook his head sorrowfully and then lit another cigarette. “So guess who’s not more than a couple of blocks away at two o’clock m the morning when the squeal comes in? Me and Lt. Lake, and how’s that for coincidence? Now, I don’t know how many homicides Lake and me’ve handled — hundreds, probably — but this is the goddamnedest thing you ever saw. I mean, the Congressman’s wife shoots him okay. No problem there. But then she shoots herself in the stomach and then I guess she changes her mind and crosses over to the door somehow, maybe going for a doctor or something, and then changes her mind again and puts the gun up against her nose and pulls the trigger.”

Ploughman shook his head in wonderment. “Right up the nose, can you imagine? Well, there were a couple of other things that looked sort of funny — at least to a homicide cop. But almost anybody else could see it was an open-and-shut case, especially after Lake and I sorta tidied things up a little. And of course, since he was a Congressman we figured that maybe he had some important documents with him. Maybe even top-secret government stuff. But we didn’t find a thing. Not in the room, anyhow. So we decided to go out and look in his car.

“Well, there wasn’t any car. So this kid on the desk, the one that called it in, he tells us that just after he heard the shots he waits a little while and then goes outside and sees this car driving off. It’s about two o’clock in the morning and dark, but the kid’s seen a lot of TV and stuff, so he writes the license plate down. In fact, the kid heard another car driving off just after the shots, but he didn’t get the license plate of that one. He was sort of scared to go out, probably. Well, there’s a lot more, about who the plate checked out to and stuff, but I guess my time’s up. Besides, you know all the rest.”

Ploughman leaned back in his chair — not smiling now, but a relaxed, almost confident look on his face.

After a moment, Simms said, “You’re very convincing.”

“Well, you gotta be logical about these things.”

Simms nodded. “Suppose we do it your way. Whom would you use — Lt. Lake?”

“We might as well keep it in the family.”

“When?” Simms said.

“Well, that all depends upon how long you’re going to need.”

“We’ll probably have to bring someone in.”

“That makes sense.”

“Today’s Saturday. I think you could start Lake on his — uh — inquiries Monday. No later than Monday.”

“Okay. Anything else?”

“There is one small matter.”

“What?”

“I have reason to believe that we may be having a couple of unwelcome visitors.”

“Oh? Who?”

“Two men. An Artie Wu and a Quincy Durant.”

“That first one sounds like a Chinaman.”

“Yes. A rather large one. Both in their middle thirties — around there.”

“What do they want?”

“I’m not quite sure.”

“Trouble?”

Simms nodded. “Possibly. Probably, in fact.”

“I’ll look into it.”

“You might have to be rather convincing.”

Ploughman rose. “I’ll think of something.”

Simms was also up now, and the two men moved across the room together toward the tiled hall. “I appreciate your frankness, Chief,” Simms said. “It helped clarify several points that have been bothering me.”

“Well, you’ve gotta talk things over every once in a while.” Ploughman paused almost in mid-stride, turned toward Simms, and snapped his fingers as if just remembering something. “There is just one more thing,” he said.

“What?”

“Whenever this help that you’re gonna bring in gets done, you might tell ’em that they oughta dump everything over in Burbank. That’s what the L.A. cops do a lotta times. Over in Burbank, well, over there they won’t even hardly notice it.”

Chapter 21

The old man who wore his long white hair in a ponytail was still holding down the reception desk at the Catalina Towers when Wu and Durant entered the lobby at 1:30 that Saturday afternoon. He leaned his elbows on the counter and nodded knowingly several times as the two men approached across the small lobby.

“You two guys again, huh?” he said.

“That’s right,” Artie Wu said.

“Looking for Overby, huh?”

Wu nodded.

The old man grinned, delighted with the bad news that he was about to deliver. “He skipped.”

Durant sighed and looked around the lobby. “When?”

“About three hours ago. He and that other guy, the young one. No notice or nothing. Just waltzed out bag and baggage, except the young guy didn’t have no baggage except one of those shopping-bag kind of things. Down on his luck, I figured.”

“Just turned in his key and left, huh?” Wu said.

“That’s it,” the old man said, trying to keep the greed out of his voice.

“I don’t suppose Overby would have left a forwarding address,” Wu said with far too much reasonableness.

The old man was quick enough to sense the warning in Wu’s tone, but avarice won out over common sense. “Maybe,” he said in a smart voice “and maybe not.” He wore his greed now like a mask.

Wu drummed his fingers on the counter. Durant leaned on it, staring and smiling into the old man’s face. “My fat friend here has a few kinks,” Durant said. “One of them is beating upon old folks.” He closed his eyes as if trying to shut out the horror of it all. “Terrible,” Durant said, and opened his eyes.

The old man took a step back. “You’re shitting me,”

Durant solemnly shook his head, his white, almost warm smile now almost fixed. Wu continued to drum on the counter.

A whine crept into the old man’s voice. “Jesus, fellas, it oughta be worth something.”

Durant looked at Wu. “Not a dime,” Wu said, still drumming his fingers.

Durant made his shoulders go up and down in a helpless shrug. “Well, I guess you got him mad,” he said, and glanced at Wu. “Five bucks, maybe?”

Wu shook his head. “Not... a... dime,” he said, spacing the words.

Durant shrugged again. “It’s up to you now, Dad.”

“I don’t need your fucking money,” the old man said. “I wasn’t always just a pissant room clerk. I was a top salesman for Bender Brothers before they went broke. Had me a nice place over in Silverlake. All paid for. I was somebody then, by God. I don’t need your fucking money.”

“The address,” Wu said.

Everything drained from the old man’s face — defiance, pride, even greed — leaving only defeat behind. “The Sandpiper Apartments,” he said. “It’s down at Third and Seashore right on the beach. You can’t miss it.”

Artie Wu smiled and brought his left hand out of his pants pocket. In it was a crumpled ten-dollar bill. He smoothed it out on the counter. The old man looked at it for several moments, then bit his lip, sighed, and pocketed the money. “You guys were shitting me, weren’t you?”

“You press it a little hard, Pop,” Wu said.

The old man nodded. “Yeah, you’re probably right. Sometimes when you run out of money, you run out of brains too.” He leaned on the counter, the confidential look back on his face. “That place I was telling you about, the Sandpiper Apartments.”

“What about it?” Durant said.

“Well, it ain’t new, but it’s still nice. Expensive, too. I figure that shit Overby must’ve come into some dough. Made a score somewhere, probably. He sure as hell didn’t go to work.” He sniffed. “Not him.”

“Maybe a rich uncle died,” Wu said.

The old man thought about it, his face now glum, almost despondent. “It’s the shits like Overby that’s got ’em, isn’t it?”

“Got what?” Wu said.

“Rich uncles,” the old man said.

The Sandpiper Apartments looked like quiet, solid money — the kind that comes from Triple A municipal bonds and ironclad trust funds. Careful money. Old money. Money that could afford the upkeep on the twenty-seven-year-old right-hand-drive tan Bentley that was now parked beneath the striped canopy that sheltered the building’s arched entrance.

There seemed to be something vaguely Moorish about the Sandpiper Apartments. It might have been the pale yellow stone from which it was built, stone that looked as if it had been hacked out of the desert and then dragged to the edge of the ocean. The building rose seventeen stories above Seashore Drive and was topped off by four round, somewhat exotic towers that might have passed for minarets. The towers provided a touch of the South Mediterranean, a sly hint of Africa, but it was the only hint, because the rest of the building was as exotic as the gasworks.

After parking the Chrysler in a lot, Wu and Durant crossed the street. They watched an elderly uniformed chauffeur help an even older woman inch her way from the apartment’s entrance to the Bentley. The old woman, wearing a dark dress, a hat, white gloves, and a determined expression, was only halfway to the car by the time Wu and Durant had crossed the street and were entering the hotel. The old woman looked up from her shuffling feet as Wu and Durant went past.

“Hell of a thing,” she said with a grin. “Being old.”

Durant grinned back. “Hell of a thing.”

The Sandpiper’s lobby was a dimly lit place with stuccoed walls and high vaulted ceilings and lamps in the form of fake torches that leaned out from the walls. There were some rugs on the floor, which was made out of big square polished red tiles. The two men’s leather heels clacked on the tiles as they moved over to the reception counter, where a middle-aged woman with blue hair presided.

“Mr. Maurice Overby, please,” Durant said.

“You’d like to see him?”

“That’s right.”

“Your names?”

“Mr. Wu and Mr. Durant.”

The woman inspected Wu and Durant for a moment, then turned to an old-fashioned switchboard, plugged in, and worked a switch a time or two. When she received a reply, she turned her back on the two men and talked in a low voice into the phone.

“The poor man left word that they didn’t want to be disturbed,” she said as she turned back. “He’s just in from Singapore, you know.”

“Yes,” Durant said, “we know.”

“His jet lag must be something terrible.”

“Probably.”

“We usually don’t rent our furnished places to people who just walk in off the street, but Mr. Overby has such excellent references from the Governor.”

Durant nodded. “They’re old friends.”

“That’s what Mr. Overby said. Well, he’s in 1229.”

“Thank you,” Durant said.

The elevator was almost new and very fast, and it seemed almost to leap up to the twelfth floor. A few moments later Otherguy Overby opened the door to Wu’s knock.

Overby stepped back and said, “It’s about time.”

Wu and Durant entered the room, stopped, and looked around.

“We had a little trouble getting your new address,” Wu said.

“I gave that old guy five bucks to tell you where I was.”

Wu looked at Durant, who grinned and shrugged.

“Well, how do you like it?” Overby said, gesturing at the large room.

Wu and Durant turned slowly, inspecting the room with its three arched windows that looked out over the sea, its thick carpet, high ceilings, glittering chandelier, rich draperies, and solid, well-maintained furniture that seemed to be at least thirty or perhaps even forty years old.

As they made their inspection, Eddie McBride came through a door that led down a short hall. “Whaddya say?” McBride said.

“Not much,” Durant said.

McBride held out his arms slightly and glanced down at himself “Whaddya think?”

“About what?” Wu said.

“His new clothes,” Overby said. “I don’t know just what you guys’ve got in mind, but if he’s gonna work with me, he can’t go around looking like some beach bum.” He eyed McBride’s new outfit critically and added, “A perfect thirty-nine regular.”

“Very nice,” Durant said as he admired McBride’s new dark brown hopsack jacket, the yellowish gabardine slacks, the semi-turtle neck, off-white sweater-shirt, and the burnished new cordovan loafers. “A bit flashy,” Durant added, “but nice.”

“What’s flashy about it?” Overby demanded.

“What I meant was springlike,” Durant said. “Very springlike.”

“How much, Otherguy?”

“Well, we bought him a suit and another jacket and a couple of pairs of slacks and the shoes and some shirts. Shit, he didn’t have hardly anything. This store we found was having a spring sale and we got a good deal, especially since he didn’t need any alterations on account of he’s a perfect thirty-nine regular. The whole thing came to seven hundred and twenty-six bucks.”

“Not the clothes, Otherguy,” Wu said. “The apartment.”

“Oh, yeah, well, that’s running a shade high, but Christ, I had to get a furnished place with two bedrooms, and I’ve sort of had my eye on this spot ever since I hit town. I mean, this place is respectable.”

“How much?” Wu said again.

“Eight hundred bucks, but that includes utilities.”

“It’s a hell of a nice place,” McBride said.

“Where’s my car?” Durant said.

McBride fished in a pocket of his new jacket and brought out a cardboard square. “I left it in a lot over by the other place,” he said, and handed Durant the parking ticket.

“Well, you guys want a beer or something?” Overby said.

“Is it free?” Wu said.

“Look, Artie, if you want me to front for you, I’m gonna have to spend a little money,” Overby said. “Don’t worry, I got receipts and I got it all written down. I’m not gonna stiff you guys.” He looked from Wu to Durant. “Well, you want a beer or not?”

“We’ll take a beer,” Durant said.

“I’ll get ’em,” McBride said, and left through a swinging door that led to the kitchen.

Overby jerked his head at the swinging door. “He’s not a bad kid, you know, once we got a couple of things straightened out, such as the fact that he’s gonna be my assistant.”

“Let’s promote him and make him your associate,” Wu said.

Overby frowned. “Does that mean I’m still in charge?”

“You’re in charge, Otherguy,” Durant said. “Just don’t overdo it.”

“Nah, I won’t. He’s not a bad kid when you get to know him.”

They sat down in three upholstered chairs with broad arms and thick cushions. The chairs were drawn up around a highly polished black walnut coffee table with a glass top. On the other side of the coffee table against a wall was a long, four-cushion couch.

“You’re going to have to get a maid,” Wu said.

Overby shook his head and smiled. “Nah, the kid said he’d keep things picked up and dusted. He can’t stand it when it’s not neat. Like I said, he’s not a bad kid once you get him squared away.”

McBride used his back to push open the swinging door. He was carrying four cans of beer, two in each hand. He served Durant first, then Wu, and finally Overby.

“I opened them in the kitchen,” he said, “because if I didn’t the slob here would toss his top on the floor.”

Overby grinned and nodded. “See, he likes things neat.”

Durant took a swallow of his beer, lit one of his Pall Mall cigarettes, and looked at Overby. “What about your meeting with Simms, Otherguy?”

“I called yesterday afternoon,” Overby said. “It’s set for nine Monday morning. The guy I talked to, this Chuck West, made sure that I knew it was gonna cost ten thousand bucks just to talk.”

“Jesus,” McBride said. “What kind of deal have you guys got going?”

“Interesting, Eddie,” Wu said. “Very interesting.”

“When do I get cut in?”

“As soon as we get Otherguy settled.” Wu looked at Overby. “I don t think you can do a single.”

Overby nodded. “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that. I think I’d better be point man for a small syndicate.”

“Scatter it all over the Pacific,” Durant said.

Overby grinned. “Run Run, maybe?”

“Run Run would be good,” Durant said.

“Jane Arden?”

Wu smiled. “Yeah, he’d probably be impressed by Jane. Everybody else is.”

“Who else?” Overby said.

“What about Pancho Clarke?” Durant said. “Is he still working out of Bangkok or is he in jail again?”

Overby chuckled. “Nah, he’s still out.”

“That’s three,” Durant said. “You need one more.”

Overby thought for a moment. “Gyp Lucas,” he said.

Wu nodded. “Good. You’d better call them tonight.”

“All of ’em?”

“Just in case somebody checks. Simms might.”

Overby frowned. “I’ll have a little problem with Run Run.”

Durant sighed. “Tell him you’re wiring him what you owe him.”

“What about the rest of them?”

“Five hundred bucks each,” Wu said.

“And when I see Simms how much have I got to play with?” Overby said.

“Mention a million and see what happens,” Durant said.

“And just one more thing, Otherguy,” Wu said.

“What?”

“This Simms is no dummy.”

Overby smiled — a predator’s smile. “Neither am I.”

“Who’s Simms?” McBride asked.

Durant glanced at Wu, who frowned and then shrugged in a kind of acquiescence.

Durant leaned forward toward McBride, who was sitting on the long couch. Durant smiled in a curiously gentle fashion. “He’s an old friend of yours, Eddie, except that his name wasn’t Simms when you knew him.”

“What was it?” McBride said.

“The last time you saw him, you were both skimming off twenty thousand from two million and his name was Luke Childester.”

Durant watched closely as McBride’s face sagged with surprise. Wu was also staring at McBride, who now sat quite still for a moment and then absently began to stroke his taped-up left thumb. His face lost its sag and stretched itself into a tight, sullen expression that seemed to border on rage. Even Overby was staring at him now. Overby looked puzzled.

When McBride spoke, his voice was flat and almost toneless.

“It wasn’t Solly, then, was it?” he said, directing the question more to himself than to anyone else. “I mean, out there in the canyon, that wasn’t Solly’s idea, it was his. That’s the only way it makes sense. He wants it all, doesn’t he?”

“He’s got it all, Eddie,” Wu said.

“What do you mean?”

“Just what I said. You were on the last chopper out of Saigon, right?”

McBride nodded, his face now pale and strained.

“An hour after you’d gone he had the money and was on his way out, probably by boat.”

“How do you know?”

“We know,” Wu said, and took out one of his long cigars.

“And you guys, you guys knew all the time, didn’t you?” McBride said.

“We only suspected,” Durant said.

“But you’re going into some kind of deal with him, aren’t you? You and Otherguy here.”

Wu went through the ceremony of lighting his cigar. When he had it going he looked at Durant.

“Don’t wink at each other and trade off those cute little nods,” McBride said, his voice rising. “You guys have been fucking me over so you can do a deal with him.”

Wu blew a smoke ring, a fat one. Then he looked at McBride and smiled, and there was warmth in it, even affection. “We’re not going to do a deal with him, Eddie,” Wu said, and stuck the cigar into one corner of his mouth. “We’re going to take him. We’re going to pick him clean.”

There was no sound for a moment until Overby said, “Aaaah!” in a long contented sigh. A big, hard smile appeared on his face as his eyes narrowed and glistened with anticipation. It was beginning to have the sound and the feel of his kind of operation, because picking somebody clean was what Otherguy Overby knew he did best.

Chapter 22

It took a while to mollify Eddie McBride and convince him that his stolen plunder was indeed gone. It took almost half an hour, in fact, and the clincher came when Otherguy Overby served up his own testimonial.

“Kid, let me tell you something,” Overby said. “I’ve known these guys for what is it now, ten years maybe?”

Wu nodded, “About that.”

“Since I got out of the Air Force in the P.I.s eighteen years ago I’ve worked a lot of scams with all sorts of guys out there.” Overby jerked his head west in a gesture that seemed to take in everything on the far side of Honolulu. “And Artie and Quincy and me’ve gone in a few times together on some sorta cute deals and I never had no regrets. But let me tell you this — and you can ask anybody out there.” Again, Overby seemed to scoop up the entire Pacific in a single nod. “These guys never stiffed nobody,” Overby said. “But nobody.” There was a brief pause and then an afterthought that was almost a codicil; “Unless they deserved it.”

“Jesus, Otherguy,” Wu said. “I think I’ll have that on my tombstone. ‘He Never Stiffed Nobody Unless He Deserved It.’ ”

“Well, it’s a fact,” Overby said. “I oughta know.”

The sullen anger was almost gone from McBride’s face now. In its stead was a bleak look of reduced expectations and near resignation. He stared first at Wu and then at Durant as he absently stroked his taped-up left thumb.

“What do I get to do, Durant?” he said. “Polish the silver and take out the trash?”

“Can you speak English, Eddie?” Durant said.

“Yeah, when I have to.” McBride smiled a little, but not much. “They like you to talk good in the embassies.”

Durant looked at Overby. “You got a paper man here, Otherguy?”

“In Long Beach.”

“He any good?”

Overby smiled. “He fixed me up with a hell of a nice letter from the Governor.”

“We heard about that. How is he on ID?”

“Tops.”

“I think,” Durant said slowly, “that we’re going to turn Eddie into a reporter.” He looked at Wu.

The big man nodded. “An out-of-town reporter,” he said. “Way out of town.”

“You want the whole kit?” Overby said.

“Everything,” Durant said. “Driver’s license, Social Security, a couple of credit cards, the works. But the main thing will be a press card.”

“Credit cards come awful high.”

“We know,” Wu said.

Overby shrugged. “Okay. What name and what paper?”

“What name would you like, Eddie?”

McBride thought about it. “Maybe one with an X in it. For some reason I’ve always liked names with X’s in them.”

“What about Max?” Wu said.

“Anthony Max,” McBride said. “Anthony C. Max.”

“What’s the C for?” Overby said.

“How the fuck should I know?”

Overby grinned. “What paper?”

“You know Washington, Eddie?” Wu said.

McBride nodded. “They had me at Arlington for six months. It was good duty except for the chickenshit.”

“Make it The Washington Post, Otherguy,” Wu said.

Overby’s eyebrows went up. “That’s a little rich, isn’t it?”

Wu shook his head. “I have the feeling that people out here probably think that talking to a Post reporter might well be their — uh — gateway to stardom.” Wu wrapped the phrase in heavy irony.

Overby didn’t notice. “Gateway to stardom. That’s kinda nice. And shit, you know something? You’re probably right. What else?”

“How hot are you now, Eddie?” Durant said.

“The cops aren’t looking for me. We checked. Or Otherguy did.”

“What about Solly Gesini?”

“He hasn’t been around his place. At least, not today. We checked on that too.”

Durant studied McBride for a moment. “You willing to take a chance?”

McBride looked down at his taped-up thumb and then back up at Durant. “What’s the payoff?”

“Five hundred a week instead of three, free rent, and a guaranteed ten thousand when it’s over. Plus a percentage of the net take, if there is any.”

“How big a percentage?”

“Ten.”

“Ten percent of how much?”

“We don’t know yet,” Wu said. “Maybe nothing.”

McBride once more looked down at his left thumb and began to stroke it gently. After a moment, still stroking and staring at his thumb, he said, “I’m in.”

“One more thing, Otherguy,” Durant said.

“What?”

“That reporter who works on the paper here, the one you dug up.”

“Herb Conroy. What about him?”

“How hard did you squeeze him?”

“Pretty hard.”

“Has he got anything left?”

It took a few moments for Overby to make up his mind. “Maybe. In fact, he might have a whole lot of stuff that he’s been saving up.”

“We want to make him prove how much he knows,” Durant said. “And we had an idea that we’d like to try out on you.”

Overby nodded.

“Suppose Conroy were to be offered a new job on a magazine by the magazine’s owner, and suppose that the offer were to be made in very impressive surroundings. A rich man’s club, for example. Would he bite?”

“Hard,” Overby said.

“And would he talk?” Wu said.

Overby grinned. “Forever. He’d probably think it was his last shot at the big time. He’d tell you everything he knew and then start making it up. But you wanta know what else he’d do?”

“What?” Durant said.

“He’d get drunk and blow it.”

Durant leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. “That would be too bad, wouldn’t it?”

“Nah, not really. You gotta understand guys like Conroy, and I’ve known a bunch of them. Guys like him way down deep wanta blow it. They’re hooked on fucking up the same way they’re hooked on booze. You see, as long as they keep on blowing things, then they’ve got their excuse to keep on drinking. And of course, after he blows it he can go around telling everybody how he’s been offered this big job and turned it down.”

“What does he think you are?”

“Some kind of businessman.”

“Could you set it up?”

“No problem.”

Durant looked at Wu, who nodded. “Your phone work?” Durant asked Overby.

“Sure. It’s not in my name yet, but they haven’t cut it off.”

Durant rose and crossed the room to the phone. He dialed a number and then talked softly into the phone for nearly five minutes. When through he returned to his chair.

“Okay, Otherguy,” Durant said, “here’s your pitch. You may want to write some of it down.”

Overby nodded and took a small black notebook from his hip pocket and a ball-point pen from his carefully tailored blue shirt with epaulettes and a small flap pocket on the left sleeve where the pen was kept. “Let’s hear it,” Overby said.

“Conroy thinks you’re a businessman, right?” After Overby nodded, Durant went on. “Okay, let’s say at a meeting — or rather, dinner — that you had the other day with the owner and publisher of The Pacific Magazine, he just happened to mention to you how difficult it was to find seasoned writers and editors. I think you might even use ‘seasoned.’ It’s a pretty good euphemism for hack.”

Overby wrote down seasoned and after it Pacific Mag.

“Well, you mentioned Conroy’s name. In fact, you did more than mention it — you made him sound like a potential Pulitzer Prize candidate. The owner-publisher of The Pacific is so impressed with your judgment, of course, that he expressed interest in meeting Mr. Conroy and asked you to invite him to lunch at one o’clock on Monday at the Woodbury Club in Beverly Hills.”

Overby wrote down 1 — Mon. — Woodbury Club and then looked up at Durant. Overby licked his lips, smiled a little, and said, “I’ve gotta have a name, don’t I?”

“Randall Piers,” Durant said, and out of curiosity he watched Overby’s reaction. Overby wrote Randall Piers down slowly without asking how to spell it. When he looked up again his eyes were narrow and glittering with suspicion and his mouth was stretched into a small, tight, stiff smile.

“You got a ring in my nose, don’t you, Quincy?” he said.

Durant smiled. “A small one.”

“And you’re just leading me along.”

“You’re forgetting something, Otherguy,” Wu said.

“What?”

“ ‘We Never Stiffed Nobody Unless He Deserved It.’ ”

Overby made a curious sound that was half snort, half bark. “Yeah, shit, but when I mentioned Randall Piers’s name to you guys before, you didn’t bat an eye. You just sat there, all big smiles, and let my mouth run.”

“We were listening, Otherguy,” Wu said.

“Sure you were. Okay, I’ll go along. I’ll go along in the dark because it feels fat and smells rich. But sooner or later you’re gonna have to let me in — all the way in.”

“We know,” Durant said.

“Okay. As long as you know. Now, are you two gonna be at the lunch?”

“We wouldn’t miss it,” Wu said.

“Who’re you gonna be?”

“I think we’re going to be two of Mr. Piers’s closest business advisers from San Francisco.”

“You wanta be Dr. Wu, Artie?”

“Why not?”

“Yeah, you can rattle off some of that economic mumbo jumbo, the way you used to. It always impresses the hell out of people.”

“Well, I guess that’s it” Durant said, and rose.

“Except for one thing,” Eddie McBride said. “Me. After I get to be a reporter, what do I do?”

“You start looking for someone, Eddie,” Durant said.

“Who?”

“We’ll let you know.”

McBride shook his head slowly. “You guys,” he said. “You guys don’t give away hardly anything, do you?”

“As little as possible,” Artie Wu said.

Wu and Durant left and took the elevator down and then got into the Chrysler and started off to pick up Durant’s car. Twenty-six minutes later they were in jail.

Chapter 23

When Oscar Ploughman, the police chief, and Lt. Lake came out of the Hungry Horse restaurant at Fifth and Seashore Drive after a late, long, and somewhat liquid free lunch, they walked slowly toward their unmarked black Plymouth, which they had left parked by the customary fireplug.

Lt. Lake went around the rear of the car and noticed for the first time the FUZZ that had been written in the dust on the trunk by little Sandy Choi. Because Lt. Lake didn’t like to get his hands dirty unless he had to, he asked Ploughman to hand him the dustcloth that was kept in the glove compartment.

While Lake got rid of the FUZZ on the back of the car. Ploughman out of habit quartered the street scene with his eyes, then divided it up into eighths; sifting the faces through his mind; separating them, as he always did, into thieves, potential thieves, and victims. Ploughman placed a great deal of faith in his physiognomical powers and often lectured Lt. Lake on the significance of such key features as too much earlobe or too little chin. Lt. Lake often told the chief of police that he was full of shit.

Ploughman was about to climb into the car when he noticed the big green Chrysler station wagon that came around the corner far too fast, narrowly missing a double-parked Coors beer truck. But it wasn’t the driving that attracted Ploughman’s attention. It was the driver. One word clicked into his mind: Chinaman.

“Let’s go,” Ploughman snapped, and slid into the car, slamming the door.

Lt. Lake got behind the wheel, too slowly to please Ploughman.

“For Christ’s sake, shake a leg.”

“Why?”

“That green Chrysler up there. I wanta take a look.”

It took them nearly two blocks to catch up with the Chrysler. At the siren’s low, tentative growl Artie Wu looked in his rearview mirror and saw the red light that Ploughman was flicking on and off through the Plymouth’s windshield. “Ah, shit,” Wu said.

“Just what we needed,” Durant said as Wu pulled the station wagon over to the curb.

“What the hell was I doing?”

“You were behind the wheel,” Durant said, “which should be a crime in any state.”

Ploughman and Lake got out of the Plymouth and walked toward the Chrysler with the slow, measured, somehow ominous tread that all policemen seem to use when going to do their duty. Ploughman went around the left side, where Wu was; Lake, around the right.

“Good afternoon, sir,” Ploughman said.

Wu nodded. “Afternoon.”

“Mind if I see your license?”

“Sure,” Wu said, and dug it out of the wallet that he had already taken from his pocket. On the other side of the car, Lt. Lake bent down for a look at Durant. They nodded at each other, but found nothing to say.

Ploughman examined Wu’s license and read the name off slowly. “Arthur Case Wu. That’s how you pronounce it, isn’t it? Wu — like in, well, Wu.”

“Yeah,” Artie Wu said. “Like in Wu.”

“You’re from Santa Monica, Mr. Wu.”

“That’s right.”

“Nice little town, Santa Monica. Quiet, pretty, not much smog. I wonder if you drive over in Santa Monica like you do here, Mr. Wu?”

“I drive about the same way everywhere.”

“Do you realize that you were doing forty-two miles per hour in a thirty-mile zone and that you were also weaving in what I’d have to call a dangerous manner?”

Artie Wu said what nearly everybody says to the arresting officer: “Who, me?”

Ploughman leaned down, stuck his head halfway into the car, and sniffed a couple of times — big, loud, ostentatious sniffs. He could smell the beer on Wu’s breath, which pleased him. Wu didn’t have to sniff to smell all the gin that Ploughman had drunk that day.

Ploughman straightened up and said, “Mr. Wu, I’d appreciate it if you’d get out of the car, please.”

Wu got out of the car. The two men were nearly the same height and the same weight. They eyed each other for a moment, exchanging silent appreciations of each other’s size.

“Mr. Wu, have you been drinking, by any chance?” Ploughman said, keeping his voice friendly and polite.

Wu tried to remember. There had been the beer at Overby’s. But that was all. “I had a beer,” he said.

“Just one?” Ploughman said. “Not a couple?”

“Just one.”

“You hear that, Lt. Lake? Mr. Wu blames his driving on a single beer.”

“From the way he was driving, I’d say he’d had a couple,” Lake said. “A couple of dozen.”

“Mr. Wu,” Ploughman said, “I wonder if you’d be kind enough to walk ten feet in that direction placing one foot directly in front of the other, then turn, and walk back to me in the same way. Would you do that for me, please?”

Wu made the walk up and back without difficulty.

“Did you see that, Lt. Lake?” Ploughman said.

“Having a little trouble, weren’t you, Mr. Wu?” Lake said.

Wu stared at Ploughman for a moment and then smiled a small, bitter smile. “You got any ID?”

Ploughman grinned broadly, almost merrily. “Absolutely,” he said, and produced for Wu’s inspection a small black folding case that contained his identification and enameled badge. Wu studied them for a moment.

“Just in case you’re a little too squiffed to read, Mr. Wu, permit me to introduce myself. I’m Oscar Ploughman, your friendly, conscientious chief of police.”

Wu nodded slowly. “And this is a roust, huh?”

“You hear that, Lt. Lake?” Ploughman said. “Our Mr. Wu seems to think that this is a roust.”

“Drunks will say anything,” Lake said.

“I wonder if you’d ask Mr. Wu’s colleague to step out of the car — if he’s able — and show us a little identification?”

Lt. Lake opened Durant’s door. “Okay, Slim. Out.”

Durant got out slowly and even more slowly reached into his coat pocket and yet even more slowly and carefully brought out his wallet. He found his driver’s license and handed it to Lake.

“And who have we got there?” Ploughman said.

“Quincy no-middle-initial Durant.”

“And how does Mr. Durant appear to you, Lt. Lake?”

Lake ran his eyes up and down Durant’s lean frame, sniffed a couple of times, and then shook his head sorrowfully. “Drunk as a goat, Chief,” he said.

“And disorderly?”

“Yeah,” Lake said. “Now that you mention it. Disorderly.”

“Well, suppose you slip the cuffs on Mr. Durant while I do the same for Mr. Wu and we’ll take them in for their own protection.”

While Ploughman was putting the handcuffs on, Wu twisted his head over his shoulder and said, “Did you ever hear of such a thing as a Breathalyzer?”

“Hear of it?” Ploughman said as he snapped the cuffs into place. “I practically begged you to take it, Mr. Wu. But you refused, and your refusal in this state is tantamount to an admission of guilt. Yessir, tant-a-mount, which is a word they kind of like to use for ‘like.’ ”

Ploughman walked Wu back to the Plymouth, opened the rear door, and said, “Okay, mister, inside and watch your head.”

It was a short drive to the Pelican Bay civic complex where taxes were levied, births and deaths recorded, justice meted out, and wrongdoers locked up in steel-and-concrete cages.

To get there, it was necessary to go around the twenty-one-foot-high concrete pelican, and Ploughman, as he always did, said, “Hello, Freddie.”

When they reached the civic complex, Ploughman twisted around in his seat and said, “Now, that’s a pretty nice little city hall, you gotta admit.”

Durant and Wu didn’t admit anything. Instead, they looked silently at the five-story pile of cream-colored concrete that baked in the warm California sun. It had been designed by someone who liked slabs as form. Some slabs went up and down and some went sideways and some overhung others. There seemed to be very few windows.

“Maybe you’re wondering why there aren’t too many windows?” Ploughman said, twisting around in his seat again.

“It wasn’t bothering me much,” Durant said, “but Mr. Wu here was beginning to fret a little.”

“Well, it’s kind of an interesting story. You see, the more concrete that was used, the bigger the kickback that this certain city councilman got. So when the plans came up for approval he kept taking out a window here and a window there until there wasn’t hardly a goddamn window left in the place. Well, that didn’t bother another councilman, who had the swing vote on account of he was getting a kickback on the air conditioning, and the fewer windows, the more air conditioning. It all worked out real nice. They both bought a couple of fifty-foot cruisers and keep ’em in Marina del Rey, where they don’t have to pay any taxes on ’em on account of they’re both registered and licensed up in Oregon. Sweet, ain’t it?”

“Very,” Artie Wu said.

Ploughman nodded comfortably. “I thought you’d think so.”

After they reached the civic center, Wu and Durant were neither mugged nor fingerprinted. Instead they were whisked up to Ploughman’s office on the fourth floor.

It was a large, almost square office with a single, rather narrow window that looked out over a seedy strip of the city that boasted some tattoo parlors, a couple of hot dog stands, several grim-looking bars, and a string of small shops that were in the unlikely business of selling souvenirs of Pelican Bay.

But just beyond all that was compensation. It was the Pacific, of course, looking just as elegant and expensive as it did at Malibu or Santa Barbara. To Durant, who stood now, still handcuffed, before Ploughman’s gray metal desk, the Pacific always seemed like a beautiful, overpriced whore who promised far more than she could deliver.

Ploughman went behind his desk and sat down in a high-backed swivel chair. Lt. Lake stood next to Durant and Wu. Ploughman swung around in his chair, as though to make sure that his ocean view was still there, and then swung back. While studying Durant and Wu, he ran his hand over the lower portion of his face, squeezing it a little as if trying to mold its rather mismatched parts into some kind of symmetry.

“You notice I got a window,” Ploughman said, and then twirled around in his chair to check up on the fact again.

“We noticed,” Artie Wu said.

Still admiring his window and its view, Ploughman said, “You also notice I ain’t read you your rights.”

“We noticed that too,” Wu said.

“You wanta know why?” Ploughman said, his back still to them.

Durant and Wu said nothing.

Ploughman spun around in his chair, his face split by a hard, yellow grin. “Because you ain’t got any, that’s why.” He shook a Camel out of a pack and lit it. After he blew the smoke out, he said, “Time was, you know, when if cops wanted to make a point, well, they’d take a guy into a back room and work him over a little. Rubber hoses. That’s what they always claimed. Well, shit, did you ever hit anybody with a rubber hose?”

Durant cleared his throat. “Not lately.”

Ploughman, pleased, nodded at the answer as if Durant were an especially bright and promising student. “Exactly. If you wanta work a guy over, you don’t use a rubber hose. That’s bullshit, movie stuff. You wanta know what you really use?” He put the cigarette in his mouth and then held out his hands, palms up, clenching and unclenching them into big fists. “You use these, that’s what.”

Artie Wu sighed. “Get to it,” he said.

Ploughman smiled again, as though Wu had reminded him of some pleasant but unfinished task. “Well, we don’t do any of that kind of stuff around here anymore because we don’t have to. You know what we do now when we wanta make a point? Well, we just put guys down in the Hole, and you know what we keep down there?”

“Animals,” Durant said.

Durant remained Ploughman’s star pupil. The yellow grin appeared again, this time not only pleased, but also appreciative, “Yeah, I’d imagine that you two would’ve spent a little time in the Hole. Not our Hole, of course, but somebody else’s Hole. Every town’s got its Hole that they use to drop guys like you into.” Ploughman nodded encouragingly. “Now, you two have spent some time in a Hole — ¿es verdad? as the Mexican folks say?”

“Es verdad,” Artie Wu said.

“Then you kinda know what to expect.” Ploughman looked at Lake. “Who we got down there, anybody interesting?”

“The Turk, he’s still in,” Lake said.

“What about Jimbo?”

Lake nodded. “Yeah, he’s still there.”

Ploughman looked at Durant. “Like you say, animals. Real animals.” He shifted his gaze back to Lake. “Lieutenant, I think you can take Mr. Durant and Mr. Wu down now so they can get a little rest. And maybe when they’ve sobered up, well, maybe they can come back up here and we’ll go on with our little talk. I don’t know about you two,” he said, looking at Durant and Wu again, “but I’m finding it real interesting. Are you?”

“Extremely,” Artie Wu said.

Chapter 24

At approximately the same moment that Wu and Durant were being pulled over to the curb in Pelican Bay, Reginald Simms was turning his light brown, three-month-old leased Jaguar sedan right off Sunset into Bel Air’s west gate entrance.

Simms didn’t care much for Bel Air, finding it a bit gauche and showy, although certainly not so much so as Beverly Hills. At least in Bel Air the thick shrubbery afforded some vestige of privacy. In Beverly Hills, of course, it was simply naked wealth screaming to be envied.

Simms felt that power and wealth needn’t be advertised — indeed, shouldn’t be. His idea of city living was the quieter reaches of the East Sixties and Seventies in New York or Georgetown in Washington. And London, of course — almost anywhere in Mayfair.

But this, however, was California — Southern California, at that — and here, Simms felt, you were what you appeared to be. It was a section of the country that put a very high premium on face value.

Simms was on his way to a meeting with his former college roommate and present business associate, Vincent Imperlino, whom he always thought of as Imp. Simms was fairly sure that he was the only person in the country who still called Imperlino by that diminutive; doubtless the only one who dared to. Both men had traveled a far distance since their days at Bowdoin, but Simms was not at all surprised by their joint destination, which, when he thought about it, seemed somehow almost inevitable. During the years he had spent in Southeast Asia, Simms had acquired a hard streak of fatalism, which he now found comforting.

He and Imperlino had several matters to discuss, but the principal one would be how best to go about killing Silk Armitage. Simms made his mind form the word “murder” and derived a trace of sardonic amusement from the fact that the word made him experience no discernible revulsion. It had been a long time since the word or its concept had made him feel anything at all, and he promised himself that during the discussion with Imp he would use the word itself rather than some euphemism. He decided that Imp’s reaction — if any, of course — might prove amusing.

The turn that Simms was looking for was about two miles up into the hills. It was a narrow, twisting road with a sharp grade, and at the top of it were the huge iron gates that had come from France, and in front of them was the guard, one of the three who kept a constant twenty-four-hour vigil.

The guard wore no uniform — unless, of course, you thought that a Shetland tweed jacket and gray flannel trousers were a uniform: a kind of preppy one that somehow smacked of the 1950s and lost innocence. However, there was nothing innocent about the guard or his too careful eyes that stared down at Simms from a thirty-year-old face as dubious as a question mark.

“Mr. Simms?” the guard said, nothing but doubt in his voice.

“Yes,” Simms said.

“Would you mind?” the guard said, and held out his hand.

Simms produced his driver’s license and handed it to the guard, who looked back and forth several times from the color photo on the license to Simms. He had seen Simms before and knew who he was. But in this job you didn’t make mistakes. If you made a mistake, you got buried. Or worse.

The guard, Simms’s license still in his hand, moved over to the gate and used a house telephone to call somebody. As he talked into the phone, he kept his eyes on Simms. Finally, he hung up the phone, went back to the Jaguar, and grudgingly handed Simms back his license.

“Okay, Mr. Simms,” the guard said, and returned to the massive stone gatepost, pressing a button that swung the iron gates open. Simms drove through slowly, the carefully combed gravel of the drive crunching loudly under his tires. But that was what the gravel was there for — to make a noise. A loud one.

The nearly ten acres of grounds that formed Imperlino’s estate were carefully landscaped, but all Simms saw was green trees and shrubs and bushes with flowers that were either yellow or red or orange or blue or purple. Simms had never been interested in vegetation and knew the names of hardly any flowers other than roses and tulips. But he didn’t pride himself on his ignorance. It was simply that green, growing things had never interested him.

Simms preferred things that were built and made by man. That was why it was with some anticipation that he approached the crest of the hill, for on the other side of it, down in a kind of knell, was Imperlino’s dream, the childhood fantasy that he had made come true: the house that was, Simms knew, an extremely private joke.

Reginald Simms was probably one of the four or five persons in the United States who knew that Imperlino had handed his architect a forty-year-old volume of fairy tales, smeared with old chocolate and Crayolas, turned to a page, pointed to a picture, and said, “Make it look like that.”

“Exactly?” the architect had asked.

“Exactly like that,” Imperlino is supposed to have said. “But bigger.”

Simms didn’t stop his car when he reached the crest of the hill. That would have been unwise. But he slowed down enough so that he could enjoy the view.

The house was really too big to nestle, but that was what it seemed to do. Perhaps it was because of the trees that surrounded it down there in the knell, big tall pines and eucalyptus that were almost as high as the south tower where, in the fairy story, the good old witch had lived.

The roof, although made out of thick shake cedar shingles, somehow looked as though it were thatched, perhaps because of the way that the shingles curved back in under the eaves. The windows were all mullioned and irregularly, almost haphazardly, placed, and the brickwork seemed to be at least two hundred years old, which most of it was, having been salvaged from old houses in Boston and Richmond.

The house was two stories high in spots, one and three stories in others, and almost four stories where the tower was. It was the house where the good witch had lived a long time ago somewhere in England, and it was a triumph of practicality over whimsy and God knew how much it had cost. A lot, Simms thought. A whole hell of a lot.

After Simms parked his Jaguar behind a dark green Lincoln Continental, he got out and started toward the heavy oak door with its curious carvings and its heavy iron straps. The carvings were supposedly the cabalistic signs of magic, but no one was really sure of this because they too had been copied from the book of fairy tales.

The door opened before Simms reached it. The opener was a medium-sized man of about fifty-five with a hard, lined face, gray hair, and sure moves. He wore a black suit, a white shirt, and a dark tie. He was called Mark, although his name was Marcello Balboni, and he seldom spoke, if ever, because someone had forced most of a can of Drano down his throat in 1946 during a dispute on the Hoboken docks. He had been given to Imperlino as a college graduation present in 1952 and he did whatever Imperlino told him to.

Balboni nodded at Simms and then beckoned to him to follow with another kind of nod. Balboni had an extensive repertoire of nods and shrugs and gestures, which he used instead of words because his voice sounded very much like a parrot’s speech.

Simms followed Balboni down a hall of dark slate slabs. The hall, paneled in some kind of old, very dark, almost purplish wood, angled and twisted this way and that: Hung on the paneling at carefully spaced intervals was a series of old portraits of long-dead, thin-nosed people dressed in the clothing of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who all looked as if they might be kin to either Machiavelli or the Borgias.

After another confusing turn, the hall went up three steps. A few paces beyond the steps Balboni stopped, knocked once on a door, then opened it and with a jerk of his head indicated that Simms should go in.

Simms entered a large, book-lined room with leaded windows that looked out over a small, pretty English garden. It was a strongly masculine room with an ancient, trestlelike table that served as a desk. The rest of the furniture was mostly heavy stuff made out of dark leather and even darker wood. An Oriental rug, very old and very thin, covered most of the polished oaken floor.

Vincent Imperlino stood by the blazing fireplace beneath the oil portrait of a woman. He held a book in his hand, his place marked by a finger. It was difficult for Simms to remember when he had seen Imp at home without a book in his hand.

Imperlino smiled at Simms as they shook hands. He had an engaging smile, very white, very confident — an interesting contrast to Simms’s own warm but strangely shy one.

“It’s good to see you, Reg,” Imperlino said, and Simms said something equally polite and then watched as his former roommate turned and stared up at the portrait of the woman whom Simms now recognized as Ivory Armitage.

Imperlino stared at the portrait for several moments. He was a tall man, almost as tall as Simms, and sturdily built, but not yet heavy, although he might get that way in a few more years. He had one of those thin, handsome noses that saved his face from being brutal, although his eyes helped too. The eyes had the color and sheen of melted milk chocolate, and they were too soft and too gentle for the rest of his face with its heavy, thrusting chin and wide, nearly lipless mouth that, unless it was smiling, looked cruel and unforgiving.

Imperlino’s hair was nearly all of the same length, graying at the roots and it hung down over his head like some medieval cap. It seemed to have been carelessly combed with his fingers, but it went well with the book in his hand and the dark green cashmere slipover sweater, the white open shirt, and the dark gray trousers. He could have been some professor of comparative literature at a large California college — a ruthlessly ambitious professor perhaps, with designs on the chairmanship of his department.

Still staring at the portrait of the late Ivory Armitage, Imperlino said, “What do you think?”

“It’s quite good.”

“Yes, it is, isn’t it? I had it done by the same chap who painted one of her sister Lace — the one who’s the actress now. He had to do it from photographs, of course, but he had met Ivory once or twice, so he was able to draw on that too. I’m really quite pleased with it.”

Imperlino turned from the portrait. “Well, a drink? I have some sherry that you might like.”

“Good.”

Imperlino seemed to remember the book that he held in his hand. He looked at it and smiled fondly. “Rilke. I’ve been trying to read him in German with the help of a dictionary and the English pony that’s printed on the facing page. But my German is almost lost, and I tend to cheat. Do you read Rilke much anymore?”

“No.”

Imperlino put the book down and moved over to a nearby tray that held some cut-glass decanters and several glasses. “You should,” he said, pouring two drinks. “He improves with age. My age, I mean. I tried reading Rupert Brooke the other day, for no very good reason, and found him unbearably young; but then, of course, he was.”

He turned and handed Simms his drink. “How are you finding your middle years, Reg? I don’t think I’ve ever asked.”

Simms smiled. “Tolerable. And you?”

Imperlino shrugged. “I live in this rather splendid isolation which I more and more prefer, but I’ve been thinking about you and your new and rather romantic role as the disillusioned patriot turned renegade. Do you find it comfortable?”

“Both comfortable and profitable.”

“And you don’t miss the other — all that derring-do and arcanum and hugger-muggery?”

“Most of it was dull,” Simms said. “Dull and often pointless. What I do now I find amusing, even intriguing. Plus there’s a comforting absence of personal risk. I don’t miss that at all, which must be a sign of some sort of maturity.”

“And the fate of the republic?” Imperlino’s tone was more amused than sarcastic.

If it was bait, Simms refused to rise to it. Instead he smiled and said, “That weight seems to have been shifted to other, surprisingly sturdy shoulders.”

“You know,” Imperlino said, gesturing Simms to one of the wing-backed chairs that were drawn up before the fireplace, “you should have come in with me right after college.”

“Your hindsight is almost as good as mine.”

Now seated in one of the chairs, Imperlino crossed his legs and examined Simms in a rather speculative manner. His chocolate eyes seemed to harden and cool. “So,” he said, “no regrets?”

“None.”

“And your former colleagues?”

“Fuck the fuckers, as a number of my new associates seem fond of saying.”

Imperlino smiled slightly. “Yes, some of them are a bit awful, aren’t they? Particularly that little man, the one who runs the gymnasium in Venice — uh—” Imperlino snapped his fingers as if trying to recall the name.

“Gesini,” Simms said. “Solly Gesini.”

“Yes. What happened there?”

“I have to assume,” Simms said, “that he’s incompetent. I offered him twenty thousand to murder young McBride, and his people apparently botched the job.” Simms watched carefully to see whether Imperlino would react to the word and was amused when he didn’t.

“No problem with the police, though?”

Simms shook his head. “None.”

“But McBride could still be embarrassing, couldn’t he? But nothing more than that.”

“No, nothing more.”

“Then I suggest that you have Gesini himself kill McBride.”

“Is he capable?”

“Killing is his trade — or perhaps I should say murder.” A small smile ran about Imperlino’s thin lips — more of a twitch than a smile, really — and Simms realized with some small, odd pleasure that he had been caught out.

Imperlino sipped his sherry and went on. “Surprised? Well, back in the ’50s and early ’60s our little fat friend was the top assassin on the West Coast. I don’t think he’s demented enough to enjoy it, but he kills absolutely without compunction.”

“Then I’ll put him on it again,” Simms said.

“You might invoke my dread name. He’s frightened to death of me for some reason.”

“I can imagine.”

“Now, then,” Imperlino said, “we seem to have a couple of other visitors from your past, the ones you mentioned over the phone.”

“Durant and Wu.”

“Yes. Should they concern us?”

“I’m not sure,” Simms said. “They might want to repay me for something that arose a few years back out of a misunderstanding — carelessness on my part, really. But they’re not exactly the ‘don’t get mad, get even’ types — unless they could make a dollar or two out of it.”

“They’ve learned to cut their losses, I take it?”

“A long time ago,” Simms said. “But anyway, I’ve heard that they’ve been in touch with young McBride, although, knowing them, they must have found his scheme rather ridiculous.”

“So what do they want?”

Simms shrugged and drank some of his sherry. “They may have heard about the pickings,” he said. “I’ve asked Ploughman to look into it should they come nosing around Pelican Bay. Ploughman, incidentally, had some interesting news.”

“Which you’ve been saving.”

“Yes, that’s like me, isn’t it? The best at the end.”

“You have a strong streak of the dramatic in you, Reg. You always have had. I rather enjoy it.”

“Yes, well, the news is that Ploughman thinks he might have turned up the girl.”

Almost involuntarily Imperlino’s eyes went toward the portrait on the wall. “Might, you said.”

“He’s checking it out.”

“Will he kill her for us?”

“No.”

“Did you ask?”

“In a way.”

“And he refused?”

“Yes. His argument was rather good.”

“I trust he has no objection if we kill her — or have her killed.”

“None. He even suggested how we might dispose of the body.”

“Over in Burbank?” Imperlino said with a small smile.

“Yes, as a matter of fact. In Burbank.”

“The Chief learns fast.” Imperlino was silent for a moment. “Have Gesini kill her and for the same price — as penance.”

“All right.”

“Right away.”

“All right.”

“Tell me something, O friend of my youth,” Imperlino said, almost tasting the posied phrase, “does it bother you — all this talk of murder on such a pleasant spring afternoon?”

“No. Does it bother you?”

Imperlino rose and stood before the fireplace, gazing up at the portrait of the dead sister of the woman whose murder he had just arranged. “Yes,” he said finally, “it still bothers me.”

Chapter 25

The huge Armenian would have to be dealt with first, of course: the one with the historically imprecise nickname of Turk. For the past twenty or twenty-five minutes he had been describing the delights of Chinese pederasty to the five other men who were on his side of the large, windowless cell in the Pelican Bay jail.

There were no benches or bunks in the cell, only a toilet without a seat and a drain in the middle of the floor where the drunks’ vomit could be hosed away. The cell, with its concrete floor and metal walls, was about the size of a large living room, and Artie Wu and Quincy Durant sat leaning against the wall on one side, the five other prisoners across from them.

When Wu and Durant had first arrived, there had been only two other prisoners in the cell — a couple of middle-aged early-afternoon drunks who had been sleeping it off. Now one of the drunks was half awake and listening without much interest to the Armenian tell of the sexual delights that he had in store for Artie Wu.

In addition to the two drunks, the Armenian had as an audience a big, wise-looking black called Jimbo and a slim, young, almost pretty Mexican with a silky, deadly smile. The Mexican was called Dolores. All three men had been brought into the cell together shortly after Wu and Durant arrived.

Turk, the Armenian, had started in almost immediately on his sexual monologue, interrupted only occasionally by Jimbo, who kept staring at Durant and muttering something about the closer the bone, the sweeter the meat. The pretty Mexican had only smiled silkily and said nothing. Wu figured the Mexican for a knife.

After another five minutes the Armenian was beginning to repeat himself. Artie Wu closed his eyes, leaned his head back against the wall, and without moving his lips, said, “Well?”

“Let’s,” Durant said.

“Watch the Mexican.”

“Right.”

Wu opened his eyes and got up slowly. So did Durant. They moved over to where the other three men sat. The two middle-aged drunks were still sprawled on the floor. The one who had been awake had gone back to sleep. Wu stopped about a yard from the Armenian and stared down at him. Durant yawned and let his gaze wander, but kept bringing it back to the pretty Mexican called Dolores. The Mexican smiled at him sweetly. Durant smiled back.

“Gentlemen,” Wu said, “permit me to introduce myself.”

“You don’t have to introduce yourself, Chinaboy,” the Armenian said. “I know who you are. You’re my sweet candy ass, that’s who.”

“Candy ass,” the black said, and smiled hugely. “Sweet as sugar, I swear he is.”

The Mexican only smiled some more.

Artie Wu rocked back on his heels a little and shook his head slowly as if saddened by some misunderstanding. Then he bent forward a bit, stared down at the Armenian, and grinned wickedly. Durant watched the Mexican.

“You got it just a little wrong, friend,” Wu said softly. “You see, what I really am is the new chief motherfucker around here.” He jerked his head at Durant. “And he’s the new assistant chief motherfucker, and we’re sort of sick of listening to your mouth run.”

“Well, now,” the Armenian said, and got up slowly, keeping his eyes on Wu. The black called Jimbo also got up and gave his pants a hitch. The Mexican, still smiling, rose and with his eyes on Durant, started to sidle around to Wu’s rear. Durant turned with him. The Mexican was no longer smiling. Wu stepped back until he felt Durant’s back touch his. Then Wu relaxed and the smile reappeared on his face. Durant raised his hands slowly until it looked as if he were showing the Mexican the size of some just-caught fish.

Turk, the Armenian, had a long, spiked mustache, and he stroked it once as though to make sure that it was still there. The Armenian was as big as Artie Wu, perhaps even a little bigger, although Wu was older by several years. The Armenian had thick, hairy arms and there didn’t seem to be much fat on him anywhere.

“You ain’t the new chief motherfucker around here, Chinaboy,” the Armenian said; “you’re just my very own sweet candy ass, that’s what.” Then he threw the left.

Although Artie Wu had been expecting it, it still came far too fast — a hard, much-practiced blow with all of the Armenian’s weight behind it. Wu caught some of it on his forearm, but the rest slipped by, and it hit him hard just below his throat. Wu dropped into a crouch, and the Armenian’s follow-up right slid past his ear. Wu drove two quick, hammering rights low into the Armenian’s stomach. Very low. The Armenian’s breath rushed out of his lungs with a harsh rattling gasp, and he bent over, clutching at his stomach. Wu clenched his hands together up high and hammered them down hard on the bent-over man’s neck. The Armenian sprawled on the floor and lay there twitching and gasping.

The knife had appeared in the Mexican’s right hand suddenly with a magician’s deceptive movement. It had been shaped from a spoon, and its handle was a kind of papier-mâché made out of wet bread and newspaper, molded to fit the Mexican’s grip and then dried. It was a very personal knife, and Dolores, the Mexican, seemed fond of it.

He didn’t wave it around unnecessarily. He came at Durant with a slick, fast lunge, the blade aimed for just under the rib cage. Durant caught the pretty Mexican’s right hand, found the nerve in the wrist just below the pad of the thumb, and pressed hard. The Mexican screamed, but didn’t drop the knife. Durant twisted the arm up behind the Mexican’s back and broke it. The Mexican screamed again, and dropped the knife.

Jimbo, the big black, had been debating about whether to try a move on Wu. But when the Mexican screamed the second time, Jimbo frowned, hitched up his pants again, moved back to the wall, and settled down into a seated position on the floor.

He looked up at Wu, grinned without any mirth, and said, “Okay, Chinaboy, I reckon you is the new chief motherfucker around here.”

The Mexican kept on screaming, holding his broken arm, until a jailer opened the door and took a quick look around. Five minutes later Wu and Durant were back up in Ploughman’s office.

The chief of police was seated behind his desk when the two jailers brought Wu and Durant in. Ploughman stared at his prisoners for a moment and then dismissed their jailers with a go-away nod. After that he gestured for Durant and Wu to sit down in the two chairs that were pulled up to his desk.

Ploughman silently studied the two men for a moment or two longer, then smiled yellowishly, opened a desk drawer, and brought out a bottle of Gordon’s gin and three Kraft cheese glasses.

“You drink gin?” he said.

“We drink gin,” Durant said.

“Warm?”

“Any way at all.”

Ploughman poured about two ounces into each glass and slid two of them across the desk one at a time. He then picked up two thick manila envelopes and tossed them toward Wu and Durant.

“Your stuff,” he said, and took a swallow of gin.

Wu opened his envelope, found a cigar, and stuck it into his mouth. He then transferred his wallet and keys and change to his pockets. After that he had a drink of gin and then lit his cigar. Durant had a drink first, then transferred his possessions to his pockets, but not before counting the money in his wallet. After that he lit a Pall Mall. Ploughman watched them idly.

“I got curious,” Ploughman said.

Wu nodded. “Oh?”

“So I did a little checking. You two are a couple of cuties. I had to call San Francisco and then some guy at home in Washington.” He shook his head gloomily. “Nobody in L.A.’s ever heard of you.”

“Why didn’t you just talk to the guy who told you to roust us?” Durant said.

Ploughman eyed Durant thoughtfully, swiveling a little in his chair. “Now, that’s a pretty good question,” he said, and swung around to check on his view again. “You know what’s wrong with this town?” he said after a moment. He was still staring out the window at the Pacific, which was beginning to turn purple in the late-afternoon sun. Or perhaps just dark blue.

“You want a list?” Wu said.

“Nah, just the main thing.”

“What?”

“It’s too skinny,” Ploughman said, and spun back around. “I’m not kidding,” he added in response to the doubting looks that he got from Wu and Durant. “It’s shaped like a sharp stick that somebody stuck up L.A.’s rear end. Now, when they founded it, all the business section got built down by the beach. And behind the business section came the rich folks’ section, then the middle class, and then the poor folks. The poor folks got stuck as far away from the ocean as possible, of course. Well, you know what happened then?”

“What?” Durant said.

“The niggers started moving in, that’s what. Then the Mex, and then the Chinese and the Japanese and the Koreans and God knows what all. So the whites, at least the rich ones, took off for the suburbs or Balboa or Newport or some place, and then all those shopping centers started going up and the downtown section just went to hell, and what you got left here is a town without any industry to speak of, a business district that’s almost a ghost town, a lot of folks who’re poor or damn near that way, and a crime rate that’s practically out of sight. Sound familiar?”

“Very,” Wu said.

Ploughman nodded. “It’s happening all over the country. But what you’ve really got here, if you look at it from just the right angle, is a very ripe, very juicy plum.”

“So who’s going to pick it?” Durant said.

“You get right to the point, don’t you, Slim?”

“He’s very direct,” Wu said. “Honest, too.”

“Halfway,” Ploughman said.

“Halfway what?” Durant said.

“You guys are about halfway honest is the word I get, which means in this town they might put up a statue to you.”

“Bent, huh?” Wu said.

“Outa shape.”

“But ripe, you said.”

“Juicy.”

“So who’s going to pick it?” Durant asked again.

It took a while for Ploughman to answer. He had to smile first — a big. Wide, yellow, nasty smile.

“Me,” he said, and went on smiling.

“Aaah, so,” Wu said in his best Chinese voice. Or perhaps Japanese. “Tell us, Chief,” Durant said.

Ploughman spun around in his chair to check on the ocean again. “They brought me out from Jersey to be their tame police chief,” he said. “I don’t have to tell you who they are, do I?”

“Simms?” Wu said.

“He fronts for them.”

“And sort of runs things,” Durant said.

Ploughman nodded at the ocean and then turned around to face Wu and Durant again. “And sort of runs things. Well, I get out here and, by God, I like it. I like all this sunshine and the half-naked girlies in their bikinis and good stuff like that. So I figured I’d better lock myself in. But to do that you’ve got to have a base — a political base; and you know what?”

“You couldn’t find it,” Wu said.

Ploughman nodded slowly. “You nailed it, friend. There was one in the process of being built, but it went to pieces when the guy who was building it got himself killed.”

“Congressman Ranshaw?” Durant said.

“Yeah. Congressman Ranshaw. He used to be a cop too. A good one, so I hear. Smart. His wife killed him.”

Artie Wu blew a smoke ring. “Did she?”

Ploughman stared at him. “You hear any different?”

“Maybe.”

“You got any hard evidence, friend, you’re committing a felony by withholding it.”

Wu blew another smoke ring. “No hard evidence.”

“Just talk, huh?”

“Idle chatter. Very idle.”

“Tell us some more about the plum, Chief,” Durant said.

Ploughman nodded and smiled again. “Let me ask you this: You know what makes a city work?”

“Politics,” Durant said.

“And you know what politics is? Favors. That’s all. Favors. You do something for me and I’ll do something for you. You vote for me and I’ll get your idiot brother-in-law a job with the city. Or on a higher level, let’s you and me do each other a favor and gang up on Russia. Favors. Cities used to work, you know. Look at Chicago.”

“Daley,” Wu said.

“And before Daley, Kelly-Nash. Kansas City, the Pendergast machine. Crump in Memphis. Boss Hague in Jersey. I could go on. But let’s get back to Pelican Bay. Here you got a town of about a hundred and fifty thousand. Not a big town, but not little. And most of ’em are registered Democrats — I mean the ones who bother to register at all. And what do they want? Well, they want jobs, or to get on welfare, or to get their mother on welfare, or get the street light fixed, or their property-tax mess straightened out. Favors. That’s what they want. Favors. So who can they go to — the precinct committeeman? Who the fuck’s he? They don’t know. The ward boss? Never heard of him. The city councilman? Forget it. But what about the cop, the one who walks the beat? — and you can walk a beat in this town; it’s small enough. Suppose the cop on the beat was the guy who could get the pothole filled or Grandpa into the veterans’ hospital. Well, the folks’d be grateful, right? So grateful that when election time came around, they wouldn’t mind voting for who the cop on the beat recommended. So here you get a town with maybe a hundred thousand eligible voters and you get maybe eighty percent or eighty-five percent of them registered Democrat and then get damn near ninety percent of them to vote. And vote right. So up in Sacramento when election time comes around, the pols take a look at the map and say, What about Pelican Bay, what can we come out of there with? So somebody says, Maybe we’d better check with the man down there and see what he wants, because he’s got a lock on eighty, maybe ninety thousand votes and in a close election they could just make the difference — except they don’t talk like that, of course.”

“And what does the man want?” Durant said.

Ploughman decided it was time to check out the ocean again. He turned in his chair. “A little industry, maybe a new post office, maybe a state headquarters located here. Maybe a couple of Federal programs. A slice of the pie, really; that’s all.” He turned back again, a large, yellow smile on his face. “Like it?”

“The Ploughman Machine,” Artie Wu said.

A look of pure delight spread across Ploughman’s face. He tried the new name out, almost breathing it. “The Ploughman Machine. Now, by God, that’s got a ring to it, I must say. You like it, huh?”

“What?” Durant said.

“What I just told you.”

“Oh, sure,” Durant said. “You run the cops and the cops run the city and you’ve got it wired. Maybe a little touch of fascism here and there, but what the hell, who’s to notice?”

“I can think of some people,” Artie Wu said.

“Them, you mean?” Ploughman said.

“Yeah, them,” Wu said. “Are you going to deal them in or out?”

“Well, now, that sort of brings us up to where we are right now, doesn’t it?”

“Where’s that?” Durant said.

“Well, they’ve kind of got some plans for this town — plans that maybe I don’t necessarily go along with on account of they would sort of have me running errands. Well, these plans they’ve got, they’re sort of secret, and Congressman Ranshaw was kind of poking around in them before he got himself killed. In fact, I had a few lines out to the Congressman to see if he and I couldn’t work something out together. But then he went and got himself killed before anything came of it.”

“You keep saying ‘sort of,’ ‘kind of,’ ” Wu said. “Does that mean you’re on the outside looking in?”

Ploughman grinned. “Sort of. Kind of.”

“But you’ve got some pretty good ideas of what they’re up to?”

“Yeah, I do. And so when somebody like Mr. Simms suggests that maybe I oughta keep an eye out for you two, I get a little bit curious. I wonder just what Mr. Simms has in mind. I mean, maybe you two guys are gonna upset his honey wagon and get shit all over his face, which would be too bad.”

“Yeah, wouldn’t it?” Artie Wu said.

“But I went and did what he told me to, of course. I threw you in down there with the animals, although I hear they didn’t give you too much trouble. But I can tell Mr. Simms I did my duty — just in case he asks. But you know something?”

“What?” Durant said.

“Mr. Simms, he’s still sort of worried about Congressman Ranshaw.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, it seems that the Congressman had a girl friend who he was awful tight with. And this girl friend maybe knew everything that the Congressman knew before he got himself killed. Now, guess who this girl friend was?”

“Who?”

“You guys don’t know?”

Durant shook his head. “We didn’t say that.”

Ploughman picked up the bottle of gin and poured another drink into each of the three glasses. He then held his up and looked into it as if perhaps its contents would explain life’s mystery.

“You wanta know when this country started going bad?”

“When?” Wu said, and tried some of the warm gin.

“When the fucking Beatles came on the scene, that’s when. First the Beatles and then Kennedy got shot, or maybe it was the other way around, and then the war got going pretty good and then the whole damn country went to hell and there the Beatles were like some smart-ass chorus in the background. I never bought any of their records. You know whose records I used to buy?”

“Whose?”

“The Armitage Sisters, that’s who. Ivory, Lace, and Silk. Now, those girls knew how to sing. I mean, they might’ve been kind of loud, but by God, you gotta admit they could belt out a song. And the words made sense and rhymed and didn’t make you wanta go jump off a bridge, although they could make you a little sad, too, sometimes.”

Ploughman finished his gin in a gulp. “Silk Armitage was Congressman Ranshaw’s girl friend.”

“We know,” Durant said.

“Mr. Simms would sort of like to find her. Before anybody else does.”

Artie Wu blew a smoke ring. The three men watched it rise toward the ceiling, disintegrating along the way. “So would we,” Wu said.

“So that’s it, huh?” Ploughman said.

“That’s it,” Durant said.

“I’m sort of walking a tightrope, you know.”

Durant nodded. “Yeah, we know.”

“What would happen to Simms and all those nice fellas he’s fronting for if you found Silk Armitage before they did?”

“Nothing good,” Wu said.

“That a fact?”

“That’s a fact.”

Ploughman nodded and spun around for a quick look at the ocean. “Why don’tcha give me a ring Monday? Maybe Monday morning, and I might tell you where you oughta look.”

“Will it be a race?” Durant asked. “Between us and them?”

Ploughman turned back around. “Maybe.”

Durant and Wu rose and moved toward the door. Ploughman watched them. “Monday morning,” Durant said. “We can count on it?”

Ploughman grinned, much the way that old wolves sometimes grin. “You’ve got the word of the Ploughman Machine.” He shook his head with pleasure. “By God, I do like the way that sounds.”

Chapter 26

In the kitchen of the fortune-teller’s house on Breadstone Avenue the four young persons, two men and two women, watched silently as Silk Armitage wrote out the last check for $5,000. The tip of Silk’s tongue peeked out from one corner of her mouth as she signed her name, tore the check out, and handed it to Cindy Morrane, a pretty woman of twenty-six with glasses, a deadly earnest expression, and thick blond hair that she kept cut short.

The five of them were seated around the big table in the kitchen. The table was covered with worn oilcloth. Cindy looked at the check for a moment and then placed it on the table before her. The three other young persons had done the same with their checks.

One of the men, John Butler, a lawyer who was twenty-five and very tall with a rather ugly, horse-sense face, cleared his throat and said, “You don’t have to do this, Silk.”

“You all’ve done all you can,” Silk said. “I want you out of the way, somewhere safe. Saint Thomas is nice. Really it is.”

“And you?” Cindy Morrane said.

“I don’t want you to know where I’ll be. If somehow something goes wrong — well, I just don’t want you to know where I am. It’s better for you.”

The other young woman seated at the table picked up her check and placed it in her purse. She was Joan Abend, at twenty-seven the oldest of the four young persons and an economist who had earned her doctorate at Berkeley. She had a round, pleasant face, streaked brown hair, and calm, wise, hazel eyes. Like everyone else at the table, she had built her faith on the slippery rock of socialism, and there was nothing she liked better than baiting Maoists, assorted Communists, and old-line Trotskyites with her biting logic. Conservatives weren’t nearly so much fun, because they usually got mad before they got to the point. As for liberals, well, liberals were the kind who worked for Exxon during the day and then snuck off to stuff envelopes for Common Cause at night. Liberals, in Joan Abend’s opinion, would file docilely into the corporate concentration camps wearing buttons that read, WE MEANT WELL.

After she placed the check in her purse, Joan Abend snapped it closed with an air of finality and said, “Silk’s right. As usual. We’ve gone nearly as far as we can go.”

“Two names,” the other young man at the table said. “We came up with two names in two months. That’s all.”

“The same two names,” Silk said. “That’s what’s important.”

The big, blond young man frowned and shook his head. His name was Nick Tryc, which he pronounced “trice” instead of “trick,” although the sportswriters had dubbed him “Nick the Trick” when he had played quarterback at the University of Southern California while maintaining a 4.0 grade average in political science. In August he would be going back to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He was twenty-two.

“We put a T. Northwood in Chicago on the right date and in Miami on the right date,” Tryc said. “But it could be a coincidence.”

“You want me to figure the probabilities of that for you?” Cindy Morrane said. Cindy Morrane was a mathematician; a genius, her professors at UCLA had thought, and they had been saddened when she abandoned her graduate studies. Cindy’s implacable logic had led her to the peculiar brand of made-in-America, down-home socialism that was now embraced by 1,974 other visionaries in the United States. Cindy had counted them up after she had been elected the movement’s treasurer in Chicago last fall at their convention in a Holiday Inn. The Holiday Inn had put up a sign on its marquee reading, WELCOME U.S. SOCIALISTS. The day before, the sign had read, WELCOME JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY. The Holiday Inn didn’t care.

“You’re both right,” Silk said, “We know a T. Northwood was in both of those places on the right dates. If that old bat across the street hadn’t been such a snoop, maybe we could’ve had another month here to work on it. Maybe even two. And maybe that would have been all we would’ve needed But she’s going to talk, if she hasn’t already, and they’ll come looking for me next week. Next week at the latest.”

“You should get out of here today, Silk,” John Butler, the young lawyer said.

“I want to wait for the letter,” Silk said. “It should’ve been here today. He said he mailed it Wednesday, so it should’ve been here today. That’s four days. It’s got to be here Monday.”

The letter was to have been sent by Cindy Morrane’s brother, computer expert (some thought a genius) and dedicated socialist who lived in Miami and had connections with most of the nation’s major airlines.

“All it is is a Xerox copy of the airline records,” Joan Abend said.

“I know what it is,” Silk said.

“Where will you go, Silk?” Cindy Morrane asked.

Silk Armitage shook her head. “I’m not sure yet. But if I did know, I wouldn’t tell you. I want you all out of the country. At least for a month.”

“Can’t your sister help you?” Tryc said.

“She’d be glad to help me. So would her husband. But I love my sister and I’m kinda fond of my brother-in-law and I’m not going to see them dead on my account.”

“Jesus,” Tryc said, “you’re beginning to get me scared.”

“I want you scared. I want you all good and scared.”

“Don’t wait for the letter, Silk,” Joan Abend, said. “For God’s sake, don’t.”

“I want that letter,” Silk said.

“All it will prove is that a T. Northwood was in Chicago and Miami on the right dates.”

Silk looked at the young lawyer. “That’s a big step, isn’t it, John?”

“Well, it would help establish opportunity, I suppose.”

“And God knows there was motive,” Silk said. “The Congressman figured that out.” In her polite, Southern way, Silk always referred to her late lover, U.S. Representative Floyd Ranshaw, as the Congressman. “They gave T. Northwood this whole damn city to kill the Congressman and his wife. That was the motive.”

John Butler massaged his big chin, lawyerlike. “And that leaves what seems to me to be an insurmountable legal obstacle.”

“You mean proving who T. Northwood really is?” Silk said.

The young lawyer nodded.

“I’ll prove it,” Silk said, her pretty face going curiously hard and stubborn. “I don’t know how, but I’m going to prove that T. Northwood was in Chicago and Miami and that he killed them both and that they gave him this city to do it and that T. Northwood is Vincent Imperlino.”

“He’s going to kill you first, Silk,” Cindy Morrane said. “Or have it done. You’ll be dead. Just like the Congressman.”

“Then that’ll be all the evidence I need, won’t it?”

Silk Armitage looked around the table at the two men and two women and smiled weakly to show them that she was joking. After a while they made themselves smile back.

Solly Gesini was so nervous that he arrived fifteen minutes early for his appointment with Reginald Simms. He was so nervous, in fact, that he had ordered a shot of Scotch to go with the Tab that he was now drinking in the back booth of the Sneaky Pete Bar & Grill — the same booth where Eddie McBride had had his thumb broken.

When Reginald Simms had called nearly an hour before and requested a meeting, Gesini had been so shaken that when Simms had asked Gesini to suggest a place, the only one that had come to mind was the Sneaky Pete — probably because Gesini owned thirty percent of it, although it hadn’t made him a dime in two years. Despite the fact that he had the books audited twice each year, Gesini still suspected that his two partners were somehow cheating him. The fuckers’ve got ways, he had darkly warned the auditors, ways you guys ain’t even thought of yet.

Reginald Simms arrived at the bar in Venice straight from Imperlino’s. Simms didn’t like cheap bars, never had, and decided to punish Gesini a little for having suggested it. He was still trying to decide what form the punishment should take when he reached the back booth. Gesini scrambled up out of it awkwardly, nodding and grinning foolishly at Simms as he tried to decide whether he should offer to shake hands. You never can tell with these ninety-nine-centers, Gesini thought. Some of them don’t like to go around shaking hands all the time. But maybe Mr. Simms would expect it. Gesini stuck out his hand. Simms looked at it for a moment as though it were deformed, nodded coldly at Gesini, said his last name in an equally cold tone, and then slid into the booth.

Oh Jesus Christ it’s gonna be even worse than I thought it was, Gesini told himself as he sat back down in the booth.

“What are you drinking?” Simms said, eyeing the glass of Scotch and the Tab.

“Scotch and Tab.”

“Scotch and Tab,” Simms said, pronouncing the words as if they were the name of some dread and newly discovered disease.

“I don’t drink very often,” Gesini went on, the words tumbling out of his mouth, falling all over themselves in clumsy haste. “I don’t drink very often, like I said, but when I do, I like something sorta classy like Scotch.”

“And Tab,” Simms said.

“Yeah, I drink a lot of Tab. You know, for the weight. What can I getcha, Mr. Simms? I get pretty good service here on account of I own a piece of the place.”

“A piece of this?” Simms said, looking around with obvious distaste bordering on revulsion.

“Well, you know, it’s just sort of a sideline.”

“I suppose a bottle of beer would be safe. Can you arrange that along with a fairly clean glass?”

“Sure, no problem,” Gesini said.

But there was a problem, because the waitress was mooning over some customer at the bar and didn’t see Gesini’s waves that eventually turned into wild gesticulation. Finally, the bartender, who was one of Gesini’s two partners, saw the now frantic signals and sent the waitress back. She took her time returning with Simms’s beer, and Gesini decided to have her fired that very night.

He watched as Simms inspected the glass, then took out his breast-pocket show handkerchief and wiped it. Carefully. Simms poured his beer slowly, examined it carefully, and then tasted it with extreme caution. After that he turned his eyes on Gesini and stared at him coldly for several long seconds. Gesini squirmed.

Still staring at Gesini, Simms took out his case, lit a cigarette, and smoked it for several seconds, his eyes still fixed on the luckless Gesini, who squirmed some more and sweated.

“Mr. Imperlino,” Simms said, and then paused. It was a very long pause, one that made Gesini think Oh Jesus Christ Mary Mother of Goo now it’s coming and it’s gonna be bad, it’s gonna be awful.

“Mr. Imperlino is deeply disappointed with you, Gesini. Deeply.”

No “mister,” Gesini thought. He didn’t call me mister. That means he thinks I’m a fuck-up, nothing but a nickel-dime guy. To Gesini there was no worse fate.

He tried to think of something to say, something smoothly explanatory, but all he could come up with was “Well, I sort of tried to explain that to you, Mr. Simms. I mean I didn’t handle it personal is what I mean, you know.”

There was another silence as Simms let his cold stare bore its way into Gesini’s marrow. Simms knew what a stare could do. Sometimes it was better than words, much better.

“Mr. Imperlino,” Simms said, and then employed another cruel pause. “Mr. Imperlino was not only very disappointed with you, Gesini, he was also extremely angry. Yes, I would have to say extremely.”

Gesini tried to think of something to say, but nothing came to mind except “I’m sorry,” and what the fuck good would that do?

“Mr. Imperlino was not at all sure that you should be given another chance,” Simms said, and watched with amusement the wave of hope that rolled across Gesini’s face. “I, of course, interceded in your behalf.” Even insects and toads can be useful at times, Simms thought.

“Jesus” Gesini said, “I appreciate that, Mr. Simms. I mean I’m much obliged to you, I really am.”

“Even though you haven’t heard what Mr. Imperlino and I have decided that you will do.”

“I’ll do anything you and him say, you gotta know that. Anything.”

Simms glanced around for eavesdroppers and, finding none, leaned across the table toward Gesini. He lowered his voice until it was not quite a whisper. “We want you to kill two persons for us, Gesini. We want you to murder them.”

The proposed deed didn’t bother Gesini, but the words did. That wasn’t class, using words like that. There were a lot of other words that could be used — nicer words, smoother words, words that had sort of a wink to them. For the first time Gesini was a little disappointed in Mr. Simms. But he was careful not to let it show. Instead, he simply said, “Sure. Who?”

“Sure. Who,” Simms said. “An excellent response, Gesini. I’ll have to tell Mr. Imperlino about it. He’ll be very much... pleased. Sure. Who.” Simms gave his head a small amused shake and for the first time smiled.

Now, what the fuck did I say? Gesini wondered.

“Now to whom — or who, as you say. First, of course, McBride. Eddie McBride. Find him and murder him. Can you do that — personally, I mean?”

“Yeah. Sure.” Eddie McBride would be no problem. Gesini just wished Mr. Simms wouldn’t keep on using words like that. It wasn’t just a matter of class; it was also a matter of, well, good taste. Yeah, that’s what it is Gesini decided. Good taste. For a moment Gesini was comforted by the notion that he had better taste in some things than Mr. Simms.

“The second person we would like you to murder is a young woman.”

“Uh-huh,” Gesini said to show that he was both alert and willing. The idea was, as a matter of fact, kind of interesting.

“Uh-huh,” Simms said. “Another excellent response. Mr. Imperlino is going to be highly pleased, I can assure you. The young woman whom you will murder is Miss Silk Armitage.”

Gesini knew who Silk Armitage was. His wife was always buying her records and before that the records that she’d made when she was singing with her sisters, the one called Lace and what was the other one? Ivory. There was something about Ivory that Gesini thought he should remember, and then it came to him. A rumor he had heard about her and Mr. Imperlino. She and him had been shacked up together, hadn’t they? Well, now, by God, this was something. This was an opportunity to get back in good with Mr. Imperlino by taking care of something personal for him. And with Simms — him too, of course. But it was gonna have to be worth something. You just didn’t go around doing it to somebody famous like Silk Armitage for nothing. It was gonna make a lot of noise. A lot more risk than some dumb fuck like Eddie McBride who nobody gave a damn about. It was, Gesini decided, time for him to be both smart and smooth.

So very smoothly he said, “Where does she live?”

Gesini liked the big smile that appeared on Simms’s face. It was a smile of both delight and warmth with just a touch of amazement. I must’ve said something right, Gesini thought, but couldn’t figure out either what or why.

“Where does she live?” Simms said, savoring the question. “That was the absolutely perfect reply, Mr. Gesini. Absolutely perfect. No hesitation, no senseless caviling, just the sturdy soldier’s automatic response to duty. Mr. Imperlino is going to be most pleased.”

He called me mister again, Gesini thought, so that’s some progress. “What I mean is, you got her address?”

“We’ll have it for you by Monday at the latest. In the meantime, perhaps you could kill McBride and get that out of the way.”

“Yeah, sure, no problem there. I was just sort of wondering, though, Mr. Simms, about what the compensation will be for these two items.”

“You mean how much are we prepared to pay you for murdering both McBride and Silk Armitage?”

“Yeah, that’s kind of what I was getting at.”

“Penance, Mr. Gesini. Penance.”

“Peanuts?” Gesini said.

Simms sighed. “You made a mistake, Gesini. Now you’ll have to pay for it. Mr. Imperlino insists. So you will commit the two murders for the same price that we agreed previously, twenty thousand dollars. Two for the price of one, to make myself clear. It is clear, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Gesini said unhappily. “Two for the price of one.”

“And you will kill them both yourself.”

“Yeah, I’ll take care of it personally.”

“Good.” Simms rose. “We’ll be in touch with you Monday with the address for the woman.”

“Fine.”

“And do try not to bungle it this time, Mr. Gesini. Please.”

“Sure, Mr. Simms.”

Simms nodded, turned, and left. Gesini sat in the booth thinking. He was going to have to make some phone calls, a lot of them, to get the word out on McBride. Well, he might as well get started. He rose and moved to the bar, choosing a spot that was safe. The bartender who was one of the partners saw him and moved down the bar toward him. He was a thin, sour-looking man of about forty who didn’t drink and despised those who did.

“You want something else, Solly?”

“Yeah, Gobie, I want something else. I wantcha to keep your hand out of the fucking till.”

“Don’t get on my case about that again.”

“Also I want you to start putting the word out.”

Gobie Salimei’s lean face acquired a wise, knowing look. “On who?”

“A nobody called Eddie McBride.”

Salimei nodded. “How much?”

“Five hundred bucks for his address. No, make it a thou. I’m in a hurry.”

“He owes you, huh?”

“Yeah, that’s right, he owes me.”

Salimei gave the bar a wipe. “Anything else?”

Gesini pointed his forefinger at the waitress who was in deep conversation with a customer. “You still fucking her?”

Salimei shrugged. “Now and then.”

“Well, you ain’t anymore, because I just fired her ass tonight.”

Chapter 27

The knock on Durant’s door came just after midnight. It was more of a light, hesitant tap than a knock. Durant closed the book he had been half reading and turned off the small Sony television set with its old movie that he had been half watching. Then he rose, went to the door, and switched on the deck lights. Lace Armitage was smiling at him uncertainly through the door’s glass.

Durant opened the door. “Well, come in.”

“I saw your light,” she said as she came in. “Isn’t that what they always say, ‘I saw your light’?”

“Who’re they?” Durant said.

“I don’t know. Just they, I reckon. Those who come calling at midnight. Actually, I’ve been standing out there for fifteen minutes trying to get up the necessary nerve.”

“To do what?”

“To say ‘I saw your light.’ ” Lace looked around hesitantly, as though not at all sure what she should do next. Durant asked her to sit down. She chose the suede armchair where she had sat before. She was wearing dark green pants and tan sandals and a thin white velour sweater-shirt. The nipples of her breasts seemed to thrust and poke at the thin fabric.

Durant, who was still standing, said, “Can I get you anything? A drink, maybe?”

“Will you have one?”

“Sure. Scotch?”

“And a little water.”

Durant made the drinks in the kitchen and carried them back into the living room. He handed Lace hers and then sat down on the couch. Lace brought a box of Shermans out of her sweater-shirt pocket, extracted one and lit it quickly, almost nervously, with the table lighter, not waiting for Durant to make an offer to light it, apparently not even aware that he might.

Then, remembering something, perhaps her manners, she offered him the box. He shook his head and thought, Well, she’s got the drink and the cigarette, the props; now she can get on with the scene.

Lace sipped her drink, took some of the cigarette’s smoke far down into her lungs, blew it out, and said, “Anything about my sister yet?”

“Monday maybe.”

“Really?” Durant couldn’t decide whether the interest and excitement in her voice were real or merely acting. With her it was hard to tell — probably even for her.

“There’s a slight chance that we might learn something Monday, but very slight. Don’t count on it. That’s why I didn’t call you. Or your husband.” You do remember him, don’t you, Durant thought, the distinguished-looking guy with all the money?

“I’m very worried about my sister,” Lace said.

Durant nodded.

Lace smiled — a wry, rather lopsided smile which didn’t at all mar her beauty. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

“I believe you’re worried about your sister.”

“But you don’t believe that’s why I came here tonight.”

“You saw my light,” Durant said.

“That’s right. I saw your light and I started wondering.”

“About what?”

“About whether you still have those clean sheets on your bed.”

Durant nodded slowly, staring at her. “You want to fuck, is that it?”

“Yes,” she said, looking away from him, “that’s it.”

“Why me?” he said. “Why not your husband — or the pool man?”

“He’s not available,” she said, still looking away, this time toward the glass wall and beyond that the ocean.

“Your husband?”

She looked at him then with a direct, level gaze. “The pool man. Or the gardener. Or the chauffeur. Or even the guy who delivers the booze.”

“It’s like that, huh?” Durant said after a moment.

“It’s exactly like that.”

“I’m sorry.”

Lace’s face softened. “You sound like you really are.”

“I am.”

Something passed over her face, something that seemed both bleak and stiff. “Well, you don’t have to be sorry; all you have to do is take me to bed.”

“That’s partly what I’m sorry about.”

“You mean you won’t?”

Durant shook his head slowly, even sadly. “It’s not that I won’t.” He paused. “I can’t.”

Lace’s eyes went wide. “Are you saying — I mean, what you’re saying is that you can’t get it up?” There were sorrow and real compassion in her tone, and Durant decided that this time she wasn’t acting.

“That’s one way to put it,” he said. “A little inelegant maybe, but graphic.”

“Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry,” she said, and there was no acting this time either. Only more genuine sorrow and more compassion.

Durant grinned. “It’s sort of funny. I mean, you and I together are sort of funny, if you go in for heavy irony.”

Lace didn’t smile. “How long have you — well — had it?”

“You don’t have it. It just happens. It’s been about five years now, a little more.”

“Did something, well, happen to you?” Lace’s interest didn’t sound prurient to Durant. She sounded more like a doctor who was anxious to prescribe a remedy once he diagnosed the disease.

“I think so. At least, I can date it from a certain time, a certain event.”

“What?”

“There was a girl, or a woman rather, whom I was rather fond of. A French girl — woman. I got her into a place in Cambodia during the war where she shouldn’t have been. She was a writer, a journalist. She got killed because of my stupidity and carelessness, and since then God has been punishing me.”

“You don’t really believe that,” Lace said.

“About God?”

She nodded, very, very seriously.

“No, but I like to blame it on somebody.”

“Have you seen anybody about it — a doctor, I mean?”

“Have you?”

Lace looked away again. “Yes. A lot of them. It doesn’t do much good does it? They don’t have any answers or any cures either. And they try to be so fucking objective and above it all and God-like, but they still make you feel like what’s really wrong with you is that you’re just a nasty little girl with rotten morals.”

“It sounds rough,” Durant said.

“At least I can still do it. God, I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t. Did you — well — try much?”

“Incessantly.”

“Was it bad?”

Durant nodded. “Pretty bad.”

She looked out toward the ocean again. “Would you like to try with me?”

“It wouldn’t do any good.”

“I know a lot of — well — tricks.” She looked at him almost beseechingly, and the only apparent desire in her eyes was a desire to help. Still looking at him, she unbuttoned her sweater and slipped it off. She ran her hands over her breasts. “You like that? Some men like to watch me do that.”

Durant took it all in clinically. He commanded his brain to send some signal down to his groin. And when the command didn’t work, he willed it. But there was no response, only an indifferent emptiness that still managed to ache. Durant shook his head slowly at Lace, who smiled at him encouragingly, ran her tongue over her sensual lips, and with her eyes promised all kinds of unimaginable delights. Durant wanted to believe. He wanted to very much, but he simply couldn’t.

Lace unbuttoned the top of her pants and slipped them off quickly. Now she was completely naked. She rose and moved over to Durant and stood before him, moving her hands slowly over her body. Durant swallowed.

“You want me to talk to you?” she said. “You want me to tell you things?”

“No,” Durant said, leaning back on the couch and closing his eyes. “It’s not you, but it’s no good. I’m sorry — it’s just not going to work.”

“Look,” she whispered. “Please, just look.”

Durant looked. It was one of the most totally erotic things he had ever seen. Her body writhed as her hands moved over it, caressing herself, offering to herself and to him.

But there was nothing. No, you’re wrong there, Jack, Durant told himself, there’s less than nothing. He watched dully now as Lace Armitage drove herself toward some sort of climax. Just as she was achieving it, the door from the deck opened and Randall Piers walked quietly into the room.

Piers stood watching his wife for a few seconds, a look of almost infinite sadness on his face. Sadness that mingled with affection and pity and love. After a moment he said very quietly, “Let’s go home, Lace.”

She turned toward him casually. “Oh, hello, sugar. You shouldn’t have bothered to come out.”

Piers stood waiting, a small, stiff half smile on his face. Finally, he nodded at Durant. Durant rose.

“My wife has a problem,” Piers said, trying not to sound embarrassed.

“I’m sorry,” Durant said.

Lace picked up her pants and started putting them on. She had one leg into them when she stopped and looked at Durant. “You don’t have to worry about my husband, Mr. Durant,” she said. “He... well, he understands.”

Durant nodded.

The two men watched as Lace Armitage got dressed. Durant, staring at Lace, said to Piers, “Nothing happened.”

“No, of course not. I understand.”

“I’m not sure I do.”

“It’s a difficult thing to understand really well, I suppose,” Piers said. “The first thing you have to do is accept it, and then you have to live with it.”

Lace Armitage was now dressed. Piers moved over to her, put his arm around her waist, and kissed her very gently on the cheek. “You all right?”

“Fine,” she said. “It just sort of got out of hand and I’m afraid I came bothering Mr. Durant.”

“No bother,” Durant said because he felt he had to say something.

“I’m sorry about... well, about everything,” Lace said. She turned to her husband. “Mr. Durant thinks he might have some news about Silk on Monday.”

“Is that right?” Piers said.

“Maybe,” Durant said. “There’s a chance.”

“We have that lunch date Monday, don’t we?” Piers said to Durant.

“That’s right.”

“Well, until Monday, then,” Piers said. He took his wife’s arm and gently guided her toward the door.

“Monday,” Durant said as they went through the door and closed it softly behind them.