Back in his office, Rooney opened a fresh bottle of bourbon and poured himself six fingers, downing it in one gulp before he repeated the dose. Not until his third hit did he relax and begin to think straight. What possibilities had he missed, or glossed over? The FBI would go through everything with a fine-tooth comb. It pissed him off, even more so as he was sure Brendan Murphy was not their man. He rubbed his chin. This was the most complicated inquiry he had ever been on and he was nowhere. He had so little that he was almost depending on that whore Lorraine Page to come up with something. He reached for the phone to call her again. There was no reply.
Lorraine sat with Rosie in the car outside the address of Suspect One from the S and A garage, a Sydney Field. When he pulled up outside his house, Rosie got out and asked if he was a Mr Sam Field. He shook his head. She carried a clipboard. ‘I’m doing some market research, Mr Field. Do you work in computers?’
‘No.’ He was surly.
‘But you are Mr Sam Field, aren’t you?’
‘No, Sydney Field. I’m a mechanic, you got the wrong man.’ Rosie turned to leave and gave an almost imperceptible nod to Lorraine, who took two photographs. They spent the rest of the evening checking five more names listed from the vintage car garage. It had been a long, tedious afternoon and an even longer night. Six down, two more to go, and Lorraine had not yet seen the man who had attacked her.
The cost of the car rental and payment to get the camera out of hock meant she was already out of pocket, so the next morning she called Rooney. ‘I need some more money, Bill.’
‘Give me something first,’ he snapped.
‘I’m checking somethin’ out. I’ll have it by the end of the day.’
‘Drop by, I’ll give you a hundred bucks but this is out of my pocket and I’ll be out of here in forty-eight hours. FBI taking over.’
‘I’d prefer if we didn’t meet at the station.’
He swore and then agreed to see her near his Indian restaurant.
Lorraine replaced the receiver and turned, knowing Rosie had overheard.
‘What’s going on?’ Rosie asked.
‘Just trying to get us some more cash.’
Lorraine chewed her lips. ‘I’m doing this work for an old cop friend, that’s all.’
‘That why we’re taking photographs?’
Lorraine had underestimated Rosie’s dogged persistence. ‘This cop, he wouldn’t be the one you saw outside the gallery? Captain Rooney? Only he’s on these murders, isn’t he?’
Lorraine made no answer. If d be dark soon and if they were to make the most of what daylight remained they’d better leave.
They drove into the outskirts of Beverly Hills and parked outside a neat row of bungalows on Ashdown Road, a heavily gay area. Men were already parading up and down or gathering on street corners talking. A blonde woman was tap-dancing on a small square piece of cardboard, tap-tapping away, her flowered hat on the pavement beside her.
A car drew up and Rosie got out with her clipboard. Lorraine suddenly felt the adrenalin pumping. She knew he was not the man, which left only one to go. Who had to be the man, if — if — she was right.
Rosie returned to the car, smiling. ‘This is better than sticking down goddamned envelopes. Where to next?’
The final address was on the other side of town, on Beverly Glen. With a screech of tyres, Rosie took a sharp right, directly across the traffic.
‘Bastards, it’s my right of way!’ Lorraine clung to the side of the car as Rosie swerved across the road, and steered onto Sunset Boulevard. She peered over to Lorraine. ‘You sure we’re on the guy? This is movie-star territory.’
‘Yeah, it’s off to the right.’
They drove past the Bel Air Gates and took a left onto Beverly Glen. They headed up the winding road, passing the signposts to the Bel Air Hotel. Rosie veered from one side of the road to the other as she glimpsed the magnificent properties on either side of them.
Eventually she pulled up outside a secluded, three-storey house, surrounded by a high wall, a barred gate, and signs warning of guard dogs and electric fences. It was here that Steven Janklow lived, the last name on the list. Rosie got out and crossed the road to look through the gates. A Buick was parked in the drive, alongside an old Mercedes SL 180. She rang the intercom bell at the side of the huge gate. ‘Hi, I am doing market research into computer users and we have a query for a Michael Janklow. Could I please speak to him a moment?’
The phone went dead. Rosie rang again and repeated as much of her rehearsed speech as she could before the phone went dead again. A gardener tending the well-kept lawns walked towards the gates. Rosie smiled and waved at him. ‘Can you gimme a minute?’
He didn’t speak very good English, so she had to ask two or three times if a Michael Janklow was at home.
‘No, no, his name not Michael.’
‘Does he work in computers?’
‘No, he work in big garage, you have wrong man, go away.’
Rosie returned to the car. ‘I think he’s the last guy.’ She repeated what the gardener had said and gave the car registration numbers.
They waited over an hour but only saw the gardener drive out in an old truck, the gates closing automatically behind him. Then they saw a German shepherd dog sniffing and prowling around inside the gates.
Lorraine told Rosie to go home and that they would come back early next morning. She didn’t want Rooney to meet Rosie and it was nearly time for their appointment. She made the excuse that she wanted to work out, so Rosie dropped her off at Fit ’N’ Fast.
Fifteen minutes later Rooney arrived. ‘What you got for me?’ he asked as soon as Lorraine had got into the car.
She hesitated. ‘Well, I’ve been questioning a lot of the hookers. So far nothing much but a couple of them remembered a guy picking them up, real edgy, and I’m trying to find Holly’s pimp to see if he can help. You got anything on a vintage car garage, Santa Monica?’ She talked about one of the girls seeing the cufflinks, that she, herself, had discovered that fifty odd workers might have a pair. ‘What I’m doing is narrowing it all down, taking shots of the workers, taking them round to the girls. It might be your man, then again it might not. It’s costing, though, I had to get a good camera and I gotta pay a friend to drive me around, hire a car.’
Rooney took out his wallet. Lorraine leaned closer. ‘I’d like to talk to this profiler guy. Can’t you swing it for me?’
‘Why do you want to see him?’
Lorraine ran her hands through her hair. ‘Maybe I just want to talk to him. I was always good at piecing jigsaws together and he sounds like he knows what he’s talking about.’
He folded a hundred and fifty dollars and passed it to her. ‘Take it, but I want those photographs, and in the meantime I’ll do a quiet check on the men who work at this garage, see if there’s anyone with a record.’
‘Do it quietly, Bill. If your man works there, you don’t want to tip him off.’
He grunted.
‘I’ll call you.’ She had her hand on the door handle.
Rooney hesitated, and then muttered grudgingly, ‘I’ll give this Fellows a call. You can see him if he agrees. I’m up against it. Anything, Lorraine, anything, for chrissakes get it to me fast, you know what snot-nosed bastards those FBI agents are.’
She got out of the car and he watched her walking down the street, long legs, tight ass. All the guys had tried to get into her pants but she had never, to Rooney’s knowledge, got it on with anyone of the old team. It pissed them all off that she refused to have a scene with any of them and they had made her life as unpleasant as possible. To her credit she had treated it as a joke, but then she had always been tough.