“I’m day labor, man,” Troy said. “I just got hired to drive and help out if there was a hassle.”
“Who hired you?”
“Him.” Troy pointed with his eyes. “Franco, the fat guy.”
“Franco what?”
“I don’t know, you know how a guy is. You see him around, you just know his name.”
“Franco his first or last name?”
“I don’t know.”
A ways off I heard a siren. I put the gun back under my coat, got in the Pontiac, started up, and drove away. In the rearview mirror I saw Troy get up and head toward the market. On the seat next to me was a Colt .32 automatic, half-hidden under a newspaper.
I rammed the Pontiac between a wine-tasting shop and the rear of the Market, out across Third Street, through the lot of a shopping center and out onto a side street that led down toward Wilshire. About a block past the shopping center was a kind of a housing development that spread out around a central circle. I parked there, put on my sunglasses, took off my jacket, pulled my shirttails out to cover my hip holster, and stuffed the Colt in my belt in front under the shirt. I went down a little side street and came out on Fairfax. I folded my coat and put it down on the grass along the sidewalk, then I walked back up toward the Farmers Market. My experience with eyewitnesses told me that I had concealed my identity all I needed to. They’d seen a neat man in a gray jacket with no shades. I was now a sloppy man with his shirt out and no jacket wearing sunglasses. I came in the Market from the Third Street side. It wasn’t very busy. I didn’t see the fat man. The police siren would have made him fade. His buddy Troy had probably cut through the Market and screwed into the neighborhood south of Third. There was some activity around the doors on the far side of the market. That’s where the cops would be: What happened? There were these guys fighting, one had a gun. Where are they now? I don’t know. One drove away. What did they look like? Short. Tall. Fat. Thin. Blond. Black. Old. Young. Who called? I don’t know. Smell.
I get to the door of the ladies’ room, pushed it partway open, and yelled, “Hey, Candeee.”
She came out before I stopped yelling. “For God’s sake what’s going on?” she said.
“I’ll tell you later. Go get your car. If a cop speaks to you, smile at him. Show him your press credentials. Ask what’s going on. Wiggle your ass at him if you feel that’s appropriate. Then, when you can, drive down Fairfax, toward Wilshire. I’ll be walking along. Stop and I’ll get in, and I’ll explain while we go see that agent you used to sleep with.”
She gave me a hard look but did what I told her.
Chapter 8
I GOT my jacket back. It was right where I left it and I had it slung debonairly over one shoulder when Candy Sloan pulled up to the curb and honked her horn once. I got in.
“Any trouble?” I said.
“No. One of the police recognized me and just said I shouldn’t park there. I smiled and wiggled and off I went.”
“Good,”‘ I said, “Let’s go see your priapic agent.”
“Why don’t you let up on that,” Candy said. “I regret the remark.”
I nodded. Candy turned east on Wilshire and we went past the L.A. County Museum of Art and the La hrea Tar Pits. At La Brea Avenue Candy turned north.
“What was all the excitement about? What happened to the men who were following us?” Candy said. I told her about Troy Donahue and the fat man. I also got my shirt tucked in and the Colt stored in the glove compartment of the MG.
“Know how to use one of those?” I said.
“No.”
“I’ll show you. It might be useful knowledge.”
She took in a deep sigh and let it out. “I suppose so. Whose gun is that?”
“I took it away from Troy.”
“Isn’t it awfully small?”
“Yes.”
Straight up La Brea the Hollywood Hills rose like a clumsy flat in an amateur play. We turned left on Sunset, and drove west toward Beverly Hills. Below us Los Angeles stretched out flat and far. The modern skyscrapers downtown around Figueroa and sixth streets caught the lowering slant of the afternoon sun and glistened above the herd of low California buildings that filled the L.A. basin. I’d never seen an urban place where the contours of the natural land were still so visible, where the memory of how it was remained so insistent.
Sunset got quite flossy down toward the West Hollywood-Beverly Hills line: small stucco buildings with glass and brass and limned oak decor, restaurants with fake antique doors, boutiques, two-story bungalows with the names of production companies and agents in gold leaf on the doors, an occasional high rise.
Past Robertson, near the top of Doheny, Candy pulled into an open meter. It was only a short walk to Hamburger Hamlet. We’d lunched early. I could claim it was time for high tea. I looked at Candy. She seemed sort of grim. I figured my high tea suggestion wouldn’t seem businesslike to her. I suppressed it.
“In downtown Boston,” I said, “you can never find a parking meter open.”
“That’s true in downtown Los Angeles too,” she said. “But I’ll bet you could in the Boston equivalent of Beverly Hills.”
“The Boston equivalent of Beverly Hills is a shopping mall in Chestnut Hill,” I said. “They have a parking lot.”
We walked to a two-story white building with a small canopied entrance that looked like a funeral parlor. Across the top of the canopy it said: THE MELVIN ZEECOND AND TRUMAN FINNERTY AGENCY.
“Here,” Candy said. We went in. There was a receptionist on a switchboard just inside the door in a small hallway, behind a glass partition.
“I’m Candy Sloan,” Candy said to the receptionist. “Is Zeke in?”
The receptionist asked us to take a seat in the foyer. We did. The foyer was oval shaped. Big enough for two upholstered gray couches and four or five leather-covered wooden-armed chairs. There were copies of Daily Variety and People magazine on a coffee table in front of one of the couches. The ceiling was slightly domed and some fluorescent bulbs along the bottom of the dome behind some molding lighted the place indirectly. The place had been recently painted, and in spots along the molding the painters hadn’t scraped the previous paint adequately.
Several corridors ran off of the foyer, and I could see offices opening off of them. Everyone I could see seemed to be talking on the phone. A secretary in a green dress with the skirt slit to the thigh came out of one of the corridors and said, “Miss Sloan?”
Candy said, “Yes.”
“Zeke’s on the phone long-distance,” the secretary said. “He’ll be with you as soon as he can.”
I grinned at the dome. “How quickly they forget,” I murmured.
Candy said, “Just shut up.”
The secretary said, “I beg your pardon.”
Candy said, “I was talking to him. We’ll wait.” The secretary and her slit skirt swished off down the corridor.
“Long-distance,” I said.
“Shut up.”
“Probably if it were a local call, he’d hang right up and be out here.”
“Shut up.”
“Probably be swirling a little white Bordeaux in a silver wine bucket.”
“Champagne,” Candy said.
We were quiet. No one else was in the waiting room.
I had the feeling everyone else called up. The waiting room was probably for deliveries.
A tall woman with prominent teeth and a three-piece gray suit hurried through the foyer and leaned her head into the open door of the office nearest us down the right-hand hallway. With the suit she was wearing a poppy shirt with a small pin-collar and a narrow black knit tie. She hurried back across the foyer. Then a man appeared in the middle corridor and said, “Candy, honey, this is terrific.”