The Monkey

31

The sky was still gray the next morning when I drove back to Garrett Rice’s house. All down the mountain, little rivulets of debris and mud veined the roads. Traffic moved quickly, as it always did during the rains, with the Angelenos’ innate belief that driving in rain is the same as driving in dry, only wetter.

Maybe Barry Fein would be able to turn a lead on Garrett Rice, but maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe Garrett and the dope and Cleon Tyner were long gone. If they were, I had to know. If the dope was gone, I’d have to come up with another way to deal with Domingo Duran. Maybe severe public reprimands.

I left my car on Sunset Plaza and walked up the little cul-de-sac, gun loose in the holster and ready for the housecoated woman and her killer Yorkie.

Everything looked just as it had yesterday, only damp. No sign of Cleon’s Trans Am or any other car. No one had moved the letter tacked up by the cops. No lights or sounds came from the house. I walked straight up the drive, across the little motor court, and into the narrow alley alongside Rice’s garage as if I knew exactly where I was going and as if the gentleman of the house expected me.

There were three large plastic garbage cans, wet from the rain, with a heavy musty smell, and a chest-high chain-link gate knotted with ivy and bougainvillea. A little Master combo lock secured the latch. I looked back toward the street. Still free from dogs and neighbors and armed response patrols. I hopped the fence, walked the length of the garage, turned right past a pool pump and filter, then out a redwood gate to Garrett Rice’s pool deck. The pool was a tasteful oval, small, but still filling most of the backyard. The deck and the patio areas were flagstone. A flagstone retaining wall followed the curve of the pool where Rice’s lot had been carved out of the hillside, and the hill angled and rose away up behind the house. Little piles of pebbles and silt were on the back deck where they’d run off the hillside with the rain.

The back of the house was mostly glass, landscaped with ferns and bamboo and something that looked like a mimosa tree. There was a nice, gladelike feel to the place. Secluded. Probably just right for skinny-dipping with starlets and playing grabass.

The musty smell was stronger, the way a dark room in an old house might smell, wet and moldy and slightly sour. I kept trying to put it on the rain. Only it wasn’t the rain. Cleon Tyner was face down under a giant fern at the back of Garrett Rice’s house.

I slipped out my gun and went up to him, watching the windows and big glass doors. One of the big glass doors was open.

There was no pulse in his neck. His skin was cold and pliable over stiff muscles. He was lying mostly on the right side of his face, the left looking up and back toward the pool. His left eye was open but droopy, and rolled back in his head. I tried to close it but the eyelid wouldn’t go down. There were no pools of blood or bullet holes in his back. I tilted him up, saw chest wounds, then lowered him. Cleon had been out here quite a while, out here while I was ringing the front door bell yesterday, out here while the rain came down and churned the ground beneath him to mud. That Cleon, what a stick-in-the-mud.

I went into the house. It was damp and cold and wet on the floor where the rain had driven in under the soffit and through the open door. There was a Westec Alarm box just inside the draw drapes. All the lights showed green. It had been turned off.

Garrett Rice was on the kitchen floor beside a cook island. He was naked, and even in death his flesh hung loose and crinkly and pale, his sunlamp tan ending abruptly on his upper chest. There were contusions on his face and dried blood on his mouth and nose, and a single small-caliber bullet hole above his right ear. On the back of his left thigh was an ugly spiral burn the size and shape of the largest burner on the cooktop. There was another burn like it on his stomach. He’d voided himself.

I went back out through the living room to the open glass door, sucked in wet air, then searched what used to be Garrett Rice’s house for the dope. It didn’t take long, mostly because I knew I wouldn’t find anything. If the dope had been here, Garrett Rice would’ve turned it over long before his clothes were yanked off and he was pressed down onto a red-glowing stovetop.

Perry Lang!

I made an anonymous report to the cops, then tore down a shower curtain, took it outside, and covered Cleon Tyner’s body. I squatted by him, trying to think of something to say, but all that came to mind were questions. Sorry, Cleon. I’ll check on Betty, time to time. I went back to my car and drove into Westwood.

By the time I reached 11001, the clouds had broken the way they break when they’re going to seal up again. I used Barry Fein’s card key to get into his building through the parking garage. The cars were still in his parking slot, only they were reversed, the DeLorean on the inside now, the Porsche behind. I put the Corvette in the No Parking zone in front of the elevators, used the card key again, and rode up to 6.

Jonathan opened the door but didn’t step back, playing it tough. He stood a little crooked, as if his back bothered him. I was in the right mood to make it bother him a little more. I said, “Fuck with me I’ll kill you.”

Barry Fein’s voice came from inside. “For Christ’s sake, Jonathan. Jesus Christ, in the goddamn hall.”

A little smile broke crookedly on Jonathan’s face. He stepped out of the door, lifting his hands to show me they were empty. We went inside, him first.

Barry Fein was fidgeting around the big room. Charles sat on the couch, leaning forward with his forearms on his knees and his hands empty. A large gauze bandage was taped along his left jawline and another smaller gauze patch spotted his left cheek. His neck and the lower half of his face were shiny, as if he were wearing suntan lotion. His eyebrows were gone.

He said, “One day.”

I ignored him. “Where’d Rice move the dope, Barry?”

Barry paced. He said, “Listen, I asked everybody I could think of, right?, where Garrett might try to unload?”

Jonathan moved away from me to sit on the arm of the couch next to Charles. He rubbed Charles’s shoulders, then let his hidden hand drift down behind Charles’s back. I took out my gun and pointed it at Barry’s furry stomach. I said, “I’ll shoot him, Barry. And you, too.”

Barry rubbed at his hair. “Jesus Christ, Jonathan, would you get outta there. Shit!”

Jonathan went to stand beside the bar. I suggested Charles stand with him, and when he got up you could see the butt of a piece sticking out from behind the cushion. “Jesus fuckin’ Christ, I didn’t know!” Barry screamed. He picked up a couch pillow and threw it at them. “ You shits, you shits trying to get me killed! ”

Jonathan and Charles looked sullen and mean, like a couple of fourth-grade psychopaths caught sticking pins into puppies.

I put the gun back on Barry. “You asked everyone you know,” I reminded him.

He hopped around, rolling his eyes and trying to pick up the thread. Ten in the morning and he was already in another universe. “Yeah, right. Look, you gotta open your mind, see? I called around. I asked. Everybody I ask, and believe me, I know everybody Garrett Rice would know, they say Garrett ain’t called. He ain’t been trying to move nothing.”

I shook my head. “That’s not what you’re supposed to tell me, Barry. You’re supposed to tell me who Rice sold it to and when he made the trade.” I dropped the muzzle down to his crotch, let it circle, raised it back to his eyes.

He squirmed like he had to pee. “I swear to Christ. I called. I asked. Rice ain’t been trying to move anything. ”

I took short breaths, thinking. Jonathan and Charles glared. Barry hopped up and down. Jesus Christ, what if Garrett Rice hadn’t had the dope after all? What if, all along, it had been an inside job, the Eskimo taking down two keys to sock away for his retirement, or one of the Italian guests Kimberly Marsh described. Or a cat burglar, just passing by. I stopped breathing altogether, then took a deep breath using my stomach, held it, then let it out slow. Focus and relax. I put my head on Perry Lang and kept it there; anyplace else and everything starts to fall apart, and maybe Perry and Ellen and the two girls with it.

I said, “You ask about two kilograms of lab-quality coke, it’s going to come up if anyone else has been trying to sell some.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Tell me.”

“This guy I know, he says a friend of his wants to sell some. You know, called him up, shopping price.”

“What and when?”

“Key and a half. Said it was 99 percent pure. Said the guy called him three or four days ago, you know, like I said, calling around shopping price.”

“Who’s the seller?”

“Guy named Larson Fisk.”

Great. Larson Fisk. “Who the hell is Larson Fisk?”

Barry looked impatient. “He’s an actor. You probably seen his face a million times. Day player, you know. I sold him some stuff. Come here.”

Barry hopped over to the bar past Jonathan and Charles. He pulled down a thick Academy Players Directory from a shelf beside the bar. “I got lotsa clients in here,” Barry said. “Shit, I get jokes all the time how I oughta have my own star on Hollywood Boulevard. Maybe one day, eh?”

He showed me Larson Fisk. Sure, I’d seen him before. Larson Fisk was Larry, Kimberly Marsh’s boyfriend.