We Know

Chapter 24

Slumped against the wall of the elevator, I ran through the ambiguities and half answers I'd gotten out of the Voice. For every question I'd knocked off the list, four more had popped up. After being led out of the darkness by Jocelyn, I'd asked the staff about my mysterious dinner partner. Of course no one had seen anything-the blind waitstaff at least had an excuse-but the host's goatee had twitched with a faint smirk that said he was exercising Swiss discretion.

The doors dinged open, and I stepped out into the hall. Kim Kendall was leaning against my doorframe, shoulders pressed to the wood, her body an arc beneath them. Her thick hippie braids squirmed on her shoulders as she rolled her head to take me in. Her full lips, pronounced on her slender face, tensed, and she said, "His wife's gonna let it drop. The homeless guy. Wendell Alton. What do you call him again?"

I walked toward her. "Homer."

"Right, Homer. I thought you'd want to know. I mean, you seemed so worried about the guy, Nick."

"How do you know my name?"

"I work for a PI, remember? You didn't think I'd spy on your and Homer's little charity get-togethers without putting a name to the face."

I slid the key into the lock next to her. "It's not charity."

She put her hand on my arm. "How about you shut up and be flattered I came back here?" She shoved herself off the wall and kissed me on the cheek, catching me off guard. Those lips felt as good as I'd imagined they would. The effect was enhanced by relief-relief to be doing something normal again after chasing down spooks, getting calls from the president, being summoned to pitch-black rendezvous.

She said, "What's a girl gotta do to get invited in?"

I fumbled my keys into the locks, and we entered. She looked around and said, "The hell happened here?"

"Tasmanian devil."

She walked straight into the bedroom and fell on the mattress, propping her head on her fist and looking at me. Her waistband had slipped below one pale hip, and I could see the side thread of her thong. She said, "I brought you something."

She reached into her pocket and pulled out a black-cord necklace. The perceive-no-evil monkeys, carved from boxwood, formed a small, circular pendant. "I saw it on Melrose and figured it was appropriate. For you not ratting me out."

I draped it over my hand. "This is cool. Thanks."

"Let's see it on." She lowered it over my head. Her translucent green eyes, up close, showed sparks of orange.

"Lemme check it out in the mirror." I got up, went into the bathroom, and closed the door. The pendant had a seam along the edge where the sculpted face was attached to the backing. I took a can of shaving cream from the shower and set the pendant on the counter. Reaching for the raised toilet seat, I flipped it closed just as I hammered the shaving cream can down on the three monkeys. I poked through the wood pieces and saw the little silver bug, half the size of a Tylenol capsule, glued into the hollow.

"It looks really good on!" I called out.

I swept the wood shards into my pocket and walked out quickly, breezing past her toward my front door. "Hey, Kim-right? — I just realized I parked my truck on the wrong side of the road. Street cleaning tomorrow at seven A.M. Lemme move it real quick."

I figured she'd be thrilled at the chance to poke around. The cash and sheet of numbers were hidden in the kitchen, and I doubted she'd make it out of my bedroom if I hurried.

I moved swiftly down the hall, dropped the bug down the trash chute, then tapped at Evelyn's door. She answered, New York Times in hand, folded back to the dimpled crossword. "Ten-letter word for unkempt?"

"Thanks a lot," I said. "Listen, I locked myself out of my apartment again. Can I climb over your balcony?"

A mournful sigh. "You know that scares the hell out of me, Nick."

"I know, but Eldy's not in until Monday with the master keys."

"Fine, but I'm not watching." She aimed the newspaper at me. "You be careful."

I thanked her and slipped onto her balcony, then climbed one apartment over the other direction. I moved through the vacant living room into the bedroom. Kim's pillow and blanket were still there, and the overnight bag. The bathroom smelled of darkroom chemicals. I clicked on the light. My face stared back from all around. Photographs, clipped to the shower rod, taped to the tile, hung from the clothesline above the tub. Some of them still wet. She'd captured me putting the disassembled Nokia phone on the lawn. Wanding down my truck in the alley. Removing the bug from behind the visor.

I collected the photos and walked back down the hall to my place. Quietly I opened the door. As I'd hoped, she was still in my bedroom. I heard her flop back to the mattress. "That didn't take long," she called out.

I walked in and threw the pictures on the bed, then the broken pieces of the pendant. She sat up quickly. "Shit," she said.

A quick knock, then Evelyn took a step into my living room, clutching the newspaper section. For once I'd left the door unlocked. She tilted her eyeglasses, peering into my bedroom. " 'Disheveled,' " she said triumphantly. She frowned, lowering the crossword. "You made it in one piece?"

"I did. Thank you."

"Is someone there with you?"

"This is a bad time," I said. "A really bad time."

She nodded and withdrew, holding her gaze on me.

I looked back at Kim. She was staring at the photos spread across the mattress, and I could have sworn it looked like she felt bad.

"Do I know you?" I asked. "Is this personal?"

"No. I was paid. To watch you."

"By who?"

"I don't know." She noted my face and said, "Look, I swear. I feel really bad about this."

"You're sweet."

"You have every right to be pissed off. But you can't let anyone know you caught me. This guy seems dangerous, all right? I wasn't lying-I am an art photographer. I do take PI jobs on the side. But never like this. This guy scares me."

"Tell me what you know."

She took a deep breath, studied the ceiling, exhaled hard. "I was tight on cash, so I pulled a posting off a Web site two days ago. Someone wanted a photographer like me, around my age. Had to be female. The guy had me meet him on a fire road by Runyon Canyon that night. He told me to park, turn off the car and lights, unlock the doors, angle away the rearview mirrors, and wait. So I did. He was twenty minutes late. Probably watching me, making sure I was alone. Just when I was about to drive off, he slid into my backseat. He told me your name and address and said he wanted me to spy on you, take pictures if I could. Get close. He knew that the condo here was getting renovated, but he'd had someone pay the owner to rent it for a few weeks. He told me to let myself get spotted by you, then have the pictures of the homeless guy waiting. Build trust, all that. He left cash and the necklace on the backseat. A lot of cash. He said to give you the necklace later. Then he told me to wait five minutes before leaving, and he walked off."

"Was the cash in hundreds, banded?" I asked.

"No. Twenties. Normal money, not fresh from a bank or anything."

"How old is he?"

"I didn't see him, obviously. He sounded older than me, though. Older than you."

"Did he have a smoker's voice?"

"No. Smooth, quiet. And calm. Too calm." Her eyes moistened, and then she blinked and they were as they'd been before. "Look, I just want to go back to my stupid life."

And I wanted to get the hell out of my condo, but if I did, the Voice wouldn't know where to find me, and I'd be giving up my shot at that second P.O.-box key. If there was a second key. I'd gone all-in on a single hand and couldn't leave the table taking anything with me. I blew out a breath and refocused. "How are you in touch with him?"

She sighed, stared up at the ceiling again. "I have a pager number, okay? If I input the number where I'm at, with a 1 after, he calls back. That's all I've done so far. But if I type a 2 after, it means I'm leaving something at our drop point."

"Which is where?"

"Echo Park. There's a garbage can next to the pretzel stand on the north side of the lake. I'm supposed to tape photos beneath the lid. But only if I get pictures of you meeting with other people. Everything else he's just had me describe over the phone."

I fished a piece of paper from a drawer and found a pen on my nightstand. "Write down the number."

She looked at me. "If you find him, you can't tell him."

"Write it down."

She jotted it down on a piece of paper for me. I dialed, got the two beeps of the pager right away, and hung up.

"Listen," I said, taking a page from Wydell's book, "let's pretend I believe you. You're scared. You should be. You don't even know who this guy works for. People have died already." Her eyelids flared convincingly, and she blanched. I said, "Is there anything else you can tell me?" Her eyes darted away, so I said, "What? "

"I don't know if it's anything," she said. "I don't even know what it means. But one time I dialed the pager from a pay phone, and after I input the number, I hit 4 instead of 1 by mistake. Right when I hung up, the phone rang." She'd gone cadaver pale, her voice thinned out with fear. "Before I could say hello, he said, 'Godfather's with Firebird, so all's clear. Get it to them.'"

Firebird. My mind went blank when I heard the word: Caruthers's old Secret Service call sign, from back when Frank worked with his protection detail.

The Voice in the Dark's information, though scattered, had pointed to Caruthers, but the phrase Kim had overheard seemed a solid indication that the senator was directly involved. As I sat there absorbing it, I began to wonder-was the snippet too pat, too convenient? Who the hell was Godfather? The handle seemed a bit on-the-nose for a mobster. The "accidental" message relay could have been disinformation. Call signs weren't classified; they were easy enough to find out and inevitably obvious, usually a jokey take on some feature of the principal. Everyone knew Reagan's was "Rawhide." When the Service had the pope back in '87, the newspapers even reported his call sign as "Halo."

"That's exactly what he said?" I asked.

"No. But it was something like that. And I remember the code names for sure."

"What did you say?"

"Nothing. I was scared. I mean, Godfather? So I hung up. I knew I wasn't supposed to hear whatever. He called back. The phone rang and rang. It scared me, so I took off. I almost hit someone backing out."

I watched her closely. My gut said I should believe her. Still, they could've played her to mislead me.

I said, "Wait until morning. Then page him to call you back. Tell him you gave me the necklace, but I told you I left it in my truck when I moved parking spaces. I had you follow me to the beach, but I lost you on the way. You spent a while looking for me, then went back to your place for the night. When you came back to the vacant apartment, you saw I'd broken in and gone through your stuff. I might've gotten his pager number, which you kept written down on the back of a business card in your overnight bag."

"What if he hurts me anyways?"

"You don't know anything. You're as useless alive as you are dead."

"Thanks."

"If you cross me on this," I said, "I'll make sure he knows you told me everything."

The fear in her eyes confirmed she'd been telling the truth, at least about some of it.

I stuck out my hand, and we shook.

Trust no one.

The dark palm trunks rose, breaking up the distant lights of downtown like the bars of a cell. Lotuses floated, black latticework along the lake edges. Toward the middle the fountain spouted, misting and slapping water. Bedded down in a scratchy stand of bushes, I swept my night-vision binoculars again past the garbage can next to the pretzel stand. A drug deal seemed to be going down by the Oriental bridge, but that's Echo Park for you. A homeless woman lay on her substantial stomach at the lake's brink, letting her tangled hair dangle in the water. A black teenager wheeled by on a dirt bike so small that his knees rose to his chest when he pedaled. Aside from an elderly man dumping a lemonade, no one had gone near the garbage can, despite the fact that I'd paged Kim Kendall's employer to the drop two hours ago.

My excitement was palpable as I hid there in the pseudobrush, waiting to see who would stroll up and check behind that trash-can lid. Sever? The agent I'd met at Caruthers's? Charlie, back from the dead again? Or, more likely, a perfect stranger, like Slim, who was no more to me than a windshield was to a bug.

I thought about how Kim Kendall's employer had kept her waiting twenty minutes in her car on Runyon Canyon while he got the lay of the surrounding darkness, and my mind flipped to Liffman's shaggy beard and eye patch and another of his countless rules: Even when you're spying on them, they could be spying on you.

I widened my search to see if I could spot another watcher. The park, rendered video-game green through my binocs, seemed to flicker with hidden life. Druggies. Stray cats. I traced the rim of the lake, rechecking the nighttime loungers, then explored the tree trunks and the shadows around the stairs. When I swung the lenses south up the concrete embankment, at first I was unsure what I was seeing by the bushes at the base of the fence. The image resolved swiftly, causing me to tighten my hands around the binoculars.

A sniper sitting, partially obscured by branches, peering through a scope directly at me. He tensed, surprised to find me looking back, and pulled his head away from the eye guard. I stared with panicked horror at the face of my mother's latest husband.