“No thank you, ma’am,” he said hurriedly. “Did you tell the cops about her being here two nights in a row?”
For the first time, Etty Mae looked uncomfortable.
“To tell the truth, Mr. Heslip, I can’t rightly say that I did. With all the excitement, it just sort of slipped my mind.”
He had been right. He really needed a mug shot of Yana Poteet. “And you could pick her out of a lineup if you had to?”
“Absolutely. I watched her twice with my binoculars.”
Bart used the pay phone next to the restrooms at the Jack in the Box three blocks from Etty Mae’s house to call Giselle.
“Yana was down here the night before.”
“Are you sure it was Yana? If she can prove she was up here on either of those two nights, she’ll have a murder alibi!”
“How’s she gonna do that? The cops won’t listen, they’re convinced she’s guilty. And we don’t know where she is.”
“Yes we do! Larry’s got her staked out. We’ll get a chance to talk to her before the cops do.”
The receptionist, and Harvey Parsons, the hostile embalmer, came out of Brittingham’s Funeral Parlor at 5:00 P.M.. But no Yana. By five-thirty Larry was starting to sweat it. At six, he went in to find Brittingham in his private office.
Larry said, “We spoke last night. I—”
“Of course. Mrs. Henderson’s nephew. You wanted to meet Ms. Thatcher.” His prim features tightened in anger. “She just walked off this afternoon and left Mrs. Hennessey’s face half-made-up.” He glared at Ballard. “I won’t take her back.”
“Sure not,” agreed Larry. “But if you have her residence address maybe I can reach her there.”
“The Columbine Residence for Women.” As Ballard headed out the door, Brittingham stood up to almost shout after him, “I won’t take her back. You tell her that!”
She wasn’t there to tell. Stern-faced Mrs. Newman rang Miss Thatcher’s room, but there was no response. A chunky Latina maid in a blue uniform coming by with a blue plastic bucket full of cleaning materials stopped beside them.
“She is no here.” She made a zooming motion with one hand. “Her mother die, she fly away.”
Stern-faced Mrs. Newman become sterner of face.
“I think that answers your question, young man.”
She pointed to the door and Larry left. Yana must have seen him at Brittingham’s after all, and just walked out while he was getting back to his truck to stake the place out. His only consolation was that he was getting less and less sure he wanted to find her for the other Gypsies.
Halfway down the mountain, Dan took a stab at it.
“So this whole thing is about that orangutan?”
“Dat orangutan, or Old Man uff de Forest, iss now very rare in de vild. If vun vanted one in its true, native, totally unspoiled state—”
“One wouldn’t want Freddie,” said Dan. “Freddie uses a computer. And I swear he tried to sign something to me.”
“You know dot American Sign Language?” demanded the Baron.
“A deaf girl worked for DKA after school for a couple of summers. The hand movements looked familiar, that’s all.”
Knottnerus-Meyer considered him carefully.
“I vas vatching through dot observation vindow. Unt I know some sign language...” He paused, then added with an entirely straight face, “I belief dot ape signed, ‘HELP. I AM BEING HELD PRISONER.’ ”
Thirty-eight
O’B finally admitted it: he was having a dry spell in more ways than one. He was off the booze, and he hadn’t repo’d one single car since the Panoz up in Sonoma. At almost the end of May, he was dead last on the repo board in the upstairs office. That had never happened before. Drastic measures were needed, so he was at the DKA office primed for shameful work. It was that or go have a drink, and he wasn’t going to do that.
Long before Jane Goldson arrived at 7:30 A.M. to open locks, switch off alarms, and check the fax and e-mail for overnight assignments, he planned to poach new REPO ON SIGHT assignment sheets from the other guys’ In boxes on her desk. Go grab the cars, up his monthly average, and blandly say they must have been given to him by mistake.
He reached greedy fingers for a juicy new Integra in Trin’s In box, and an angry voice yelled at him from the stairs that led down from the second floor above Jane’s desk.
“Hey, what the hell you think you’re doing there, man?”
Morales vaulted over the railing to grab the repo order out of his hands. Trin grubbed in his box for his other assignments, memos, close-outs, gold-colored copies of the skip-tracers’ work on his various cases, and stormed out. O’B drank six Dixie cups of cold water from the cooler, then meekly followed.
“He’s not a bad man,” said a woman’s determined voice.
She was standing on the sidewalk outside, a little thing in her early 40s, not over five-three, wearing a cloth coat against the morning chill. Her sharp nose had a red tip, her hair was stringy, her eyes close-set, her thin lips determined.
“Of course he’s not,” said O’B heartily, knowing she sure didn’t mean Morales. “What’s the old devil up to these days?”
“As if you didn’t know,” she said almost coyly. Then she was serious again. “The temptation was just too much for Joel, you see. He figured that after a while the big man would stop looking. But he never did. He never said anything, he was just there, waiting, watching, leaving those cards with DKA on them.”
The big man had to be Ken Warren, and this had to be Meg Doman, wife of Joel Doman, ex-UpScale salesman. Meg Doman was rummaging in her purse, still talking.
“You’d think, him being a used-car salesman and all, that wouldn’t bother Joel. But he’s sensitive to pressure. He was going to pieces. So this morning I just did it.”
Her fisted hand came out of her purse convulsively — to press a set of keys into O’B’s open palm. Now that he looked, the car was squatting right in front of the closed sliding doors to DKA’s storage lot: 1990 Jag XJS convertible, champagne over black, just 75,000 miles on the clock, listed retail at $17,995.
“Faith and BeJaysus,” breathed O’B. His long drought was finally broken. He even drove Meg Doman home.
Larry’s descriptions — big and tough — had been apt. When Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern stormed up to Giselle at ten-thirty and badged her, she unobtrusively flicked open the intercom key, hoping Kearny was back from the bank to listen in. Rosenkrantz sat down on the corner of her desk, started idly swinging his leg.
Guildenstern snapped, “Where’s that fucking Larry Ballard?”
“Don’t use foul language in front of me,” Giselle said, hoping to upset their interrogation rhythm.
“Few days ago, Ballard worked us for everything we had on Ephrem Poteet,” said Rosenkrantz indifferently. “Said he hadn’t seen the wife, Yana, for something like six or seven years.”
“Why would he lie?”
Guildenstern leaned across the desk. “Larry lies when he says ‘Hello.’ We start going up Yana’s backtrail, and whadda we find? We find his footprints all over our case.”
Sure enough, it was time for the first joke. Rosenkrantz asked, “How did Pinocchio find out he was made of wood?”
“Don’t,” Giselle warned. “You’re treading on thin ice.”
Rosenkrantz was undeterred. “His hand caught fire.”
“That’s the first time,” she said icily.
“Next,” said Guildenstern, “we find out at Marine World in Vallejo that Heslip was asking a lot of questions about Poteet. So we call Harry Bosch down in L.A., and guess what? There’s Heslip’s big number nines all over Harry’s case. Cops don’t like P.I.’s mixing in murder, so we—”