“Put that down,” Armentrout wailed.
The pan tipped up toward the old man’s mouth.
“Mm—” Armentrout choked on the word mom, and had to make do with just shouting, “Don’t drink that! John! Kick out that woman’s ghost for a minute and listen to me!”
Suddenly, from the gate by the garage, a man’s voice called, “Dr. Armentrout?”
“Get out of here!” Armentrout yelled back, struggling to his feet. “This is private property!”
But the gate clanged and swung open, and it was the young intern from Rosecrans Medical Center, Philip Muir, who stepped out onto the backyard grass. He didn’t have his white coat on, but he was wearing a long-sleeved white shirt and a tie. “John!” he exclaimed, noticing the one-armed old man standing in the ash circle on the patio. Long John Beach was noisily drinking the brandy now, and slopping a lot of it into the white whiskers that bristled on his cheeks and neck these days. Muir turned to Armentrout. “He’s supposed to be at Pacifica.”
“I—have him out on a day pass,” Armentrout panted. “This is none of your—”
“Richie!” called Armentrout’s mother’s voice from Long John Beach’s throat, bubbling around the last gulp of the brandy. “Can you hear me under water? I’ve got a beard! Did they have to give me…hormones? Pull the plug, darling, and let me breathe! Where’s some more of this whiskey?”
Muir sniffed sharply. “And you’re giving him whiskey? Doctor, I—”
“It’s not whiskey,” babbled Armentrout, “it’s brandy, she doesn’t know the difference—”
Muir was frowning and shaking his head. “‘She’? What’s the matter with you? Have you got Plumtree and Cochran up here too? I know Cochran is in the area, he telephoned the vineyard he works at—”
Armentrout interrupted him to call out, “I’ll get you more liquor in a moment! just—wait there!”
But Long John Beach blinked at him and spat. “I was never a liquor man,” he said. “I just ate smokes.”
Armentrout sighed deeply and sank down cross-legged beside the two velvet boxes. At least his mother was gone, for now. But Muir surely intended to report this, and investigate Beach’s transfer, and end Armentrout’s career. “Come over here, Philip,” he said huskily, lifting the lid of the box that contained the derringer. “I think I can show you something that will explain all of this.”
“It’s not me you need to be explaining things to. Why on earth did you give Plumtree ECT? What the hell happened during the ice-cream social last Wednesday? Mr. Regushi swallowed his tongue!”
Armentrout again got wearily to his feet, one hand holding the box and the other gripping the hidden derringer “Just look at this Philip and you’ll understand.”
Muir angrily stepped forward across the grass. “I can’t imagine what it could be.” “I guess it’s whatever you’ve made it.”
The flat, hollow boom of the .410 shot-shell was muffled by the cypresses and the hillside.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
TROILUS: What offends you, lady?
CRESSIDA: Sir, mine own company.
TROILUS: You cannot shun yourself
CRESSIDA: Let me go and try.
—William Shakespeare,
Troilus and Cressida
COCHRAN said he’s been walking and taking the cable cars to get down here into Chinatown,” said Archimedes Mavranos. “Maybe the cable cars were full today, and he’s gotta hike the whole way.”
Shadows from a slow ceiling fan far overhead swept rhythmically over the red Formica tabletop.
“He might have sold us out,” said Kootie. “Maybe bad guys are just about to come busting in here.” He had asked for a straw with his Coke, and now he glanced over his shoulder; the bartender was looking at the television in the corner above the bar so Kootie stuck his straw into Angelica’s glass of Chardonnay and took a sip of it. “It’s sacramental,” he explained to his foster-mother when she frowned at him. “The king needs a sip at noon, especially if bad guys are due.”
“I don’t need Coke in my wine,” Angelica said.
“If bad guys want to open a hand in a no-limit game like this,” said Mavranos with more confidence than he felt, touching the front of his denim jacket and glancing at Angelica’s purse, “they’re liable to see some powerful raises.”
Pete Sullivan was sitting beside Angelica at the table by the stairs that led down to the rest rooms, and he was deftly, one-handed, cartwheeling a cigarette over the backs of the knuckles of his right hand; it had been unlit, fresh from the pack, when he’d started, but the tip was glowing when he flipped it into the air off his last knuckle and caught it by the filter in his lips.
“Wow,” said Mavranos.
“Yeah, wow,” agreed Pete irritably as he puffed smoke from the cigarette. “Magic tricks. But if I try to hold a weapon, my hands are no good at all. Even a pair of scissors I drop, if I think about stabbing somebody.” He wiggled his fingers. “Houdini made sure his mask wouldn’t be capable of hurting anybody.”
Kootie grinned wanly. “He can’t even play video games,” the boy told Mavranos “The hands think he’s really trying to shoot down enemy pilots.”
Mavranos opened his mouth to say something, then focussed past Kootie toward the front door of the bar. “Heads up,” he said.
Sid Cochran had just stumbled in from the street, and Mavranos felt his face tighten in a smile to see the blond Plumtree woman lurching along right behind him.
Mavranos pushed his chair back and stood up. “I was afraid we weren’t ever going to see you again, ma’am,” he said to Plumtree.
Plumtree’s hair was wet, and Mavranos thought she looked like someone going through heroin withdrawal as she collapsed into the chair beside Kootie. There were cuts under her chin and at one corner of her mouth, and her face had a puffy, bruised look. “Shove it, man,” she said hoarsely. “I’m an accessory to a murder today. More than anything else in the world, I want not to be. Soon, please God.”
“A murder today?” asked Kootie.
Plumtree closed her eyes. “No. I’m still, today, an accessory to Scott Crane’s murder. Is what I meant. But tomorrow I might not be.”
“Tomorrow you might not be,” Mavranos agreed.
“She insisted on coming,” said Cochran nervously as he took the chair opposite her, next to Pete Sullivan. “We’re laying our cards on the table here, but we can see yours too. We saw your truck in the Portsmouth Square parking structure, and saw what had to be your, your dead guy under a tarp in the back of it. If we’d wanted to screw this up, we’d have put a bullet through Crane’s head right then.”
Plumtree was blinking around now at the gold-painted Chinese bas-reliefs high up on the walls, and she squinted at a yard-wide, decorated Chinese paper lantern hanging from a string above the bar. An old Shell No-Pest Strip dangled from the tassel at the bottom of the lantern.
“Can I get a drink in this opium den?” she asked. “What is all this shit? The entrance to this place looks like a cave.”
Mavranos could smell bourbon on her breath right across the table. “It’s named after a famous eighth-century Chinese poet,” he told her. “The pictures painted on that lantern are scenes from his life.”
“What’d he do to earn the No-Pest Strip?” she asked. “Somebody get me a Bud, hey?”