Sean blinked. “I don’t — this says they cremated him the month before he died,” he said. “Not possible. Can’t be right, Lane. This proves something’s off.”
Damn my guilty heart, this whole time I’d been thinking about juggling the workload at Lane Terry & Associates. I had just finished the undercover work for a swoop-and-squat insurance-fraud case. The only other nonretainer client we had was an unhappy mistress who thought her married lover was cheating on her — go figure — and that file was being handled by my associate, Ace Benoit, who was probably relishing every minute, the little pervert. I was free to take on a new case. I told myself it was for Daniel, and I heard someone with my voice say a little too fast, “So I guess you want me to check Ludlow out for you. Well, I’ll see what I can do.”
“You will?” he asked, relief crossing his face, and he grabbed my hand with both of his. Maybe it was only to shake on the deal, but the physical contact still had quite an effect. When he finally let my hand go, it was left feeling sad and lonely.
No doubt about it. My new client, once known as Baby Dude, had grown up to be Ooh, Baby, Baby.
Monday morning, I got up with the seagulls and channeled my wholly unprofessional lust into lots of productive work. After checking with the usual computer databases about a business license for Academy Transport — that was in the name of Darren Ford, person unknown — I looked for a criminal record for him and for a Nick or Nicholas or even Nikolai Ludlow. I came up nil and decided to go snoop around Southern California Pacific U’s medical school next and see what I could find out. Figuring I wouldn’t be very credible as a body donor, I decided to be a student, or a potential student.
The weather had turned hot overnight, the formerly rain-bearing wind shifting, then kicking into a dry, nasty Santa Ana, and here we were in February with a winter heat wave. I tried to look like a rich, plain-vanilla college student, with lots of product on the hair, retro horn-rimmed glasses, a tank top with full frontal couturier-of-the-week logo, a creamy strip of skin above the cropped hiphugger jeans, and a pair of designer-knockoff stiletto sandals convincing to all but the most devoted fashion slut. It was hot and gritty already at eleven A.M., and I was glad not to be back in the swoop-and-squat world of un-climate-controlled body shops and stuffy parking garages the insurance-fraud job had introduced me to.
The donation center was, appropriately enough, located in the basement, and I found a good lurking place just outside the row of burnished aluminum elevator doors flanked by large fan-shaped palms in architectural planters. Pretty fluffy, as my mother would say. The medical school must have been getting more donations than just cadavers. The plants offered sufficient cover for me to watch people come and go without attracting too much attention. Many of the medical students were identifiable enough, as they were younger and wearing those green pajama-looking scrubs, stethoscopes hanging around their necks as though to say, “Hey, check me out, I’m a freaking doctor!” Most of the real doctors, male and female, seemed to be wearing suits, a few fairly sporty outfits. Virtually nobody had the Marcus Welby shirt I remembered from my childhood, white tunic with a priest’s collar, made out of some creepy half-see-through material that showed the guy’s undershirt or worse, chest fur. Now, that’s best seen on purpose and in private or not at all, as far as this girl’s concerned.
Just after eleven by the brushed-nickel built-in clock over the opposite bank of elevators, a very elegant, cosmetically thin, silver-haired woman in a tailored blue pinstripe trouser suit, who had been up and down the elevator several times, stopped and offered to help me “find something.” She looked like somebody’s boss, and wondered if I were lost.
I smiled winningly. “Oh, no, I’m just waiting for a friend and it’s hot outside.”
She looked surprised. “It is?” She looked down at her wrist, where there was a thin platinum timepiece that must have cost her at least a day in consultation fees. “I do believe I worked right through the night and half the day again.” She shook her head and trotted away in her comfort pumps, looking too busy to worry about me, and I continued to lounge. Finally, just before noon, I saw a strawberry-blond guy in a long black leather coat stroll over to the elevator and, hands clasped waist high, index fingers straight, lean into the Up button. I hated the little hotdog already, but this was my elevator, and I was getting on. Fortunately for me, it was lunchtime, and several others crowded into the car ahead of me, so Ludlow never noticed me. I consider myself an excellent chameleon anyway, legs and arms pressed against the side of the elevator, turning pale silver and invisible.
I spent that afternoon shadowing the unmarked van in the firm’s black SUV, grateful that they’re now so common in Southern California as to be rendered as anonymous as a beige Honda Accord once was. I hated gassing it and parking it, but for visibility of the quarry, it was the P.I.’s car of choice. I hung way back and escorted Mr. Nick Ludlow from a discreet distance as he stopped in Fullerton to pick up a big blond ape with a droopy moustache who looked like a sweaty over-buffed bouncer. I made note of the address on my digital voice recorder, a priceless — and safety-conscious — substitute for pen and ink while driving. It was just possible that the ape was Darren Ford, DBA Academy Transport.
Ludlow’s van returned south to an upscale nursing home in Corona Del Mar, where the two went in with a wad of papers and came out with an occupied body bag. They took their delivery to the medical school’s loading area, where I couldn’t follow, but I waited on a hunch, and they came back in five minutes with an identical-looking bag. We took the freeway to an area north of San Pedro where there were several oil refineries and one Heritage Cremation Services, Inc., the same outfit that had cremated Daniel — well, what someone had passed off as Daniel, presumably. The men disappeared inside with the bag, and I sat and thought. It could have been an honest error, of course, but I trusted Sean as a judge of character — hadn’t he come looking for me? In any case, you had to wonder about a guy who won’t take off his leather coat when it’s over eighty-five degrees, or had friends who looked like that blond creep.
When they drove past where I waited outside down the block, I followed them onto the freeway ramp, staying well back, but then some pissy little worm in a rice rocket cut me off, and I lost them in the afternoon traffic going south. I got off at the next exit and sat in a strip-mall parking lot cursing the worm and myself until I calmed down to consider other options. On impulse, the SUV having blacked-out windows that facilitate quick wardrobe changes, I altered my image with the substitution of a black knit dress for the tank and jeans, black flats for the stiletto sandals. I kept the horn rims but added some pink lipstick, then wrestled my shoulder-length hair into something resembling a loose French twist. My own mother wouldn’t have picked me out of a lineup. I got back on the freeway going north, returned to the crematory, and strolled in. My business card claimed I was a reporter for the Orange County News Agency, a local concern that was acquired out of existence five years previous, now one of the bank of fictitious corporate voicemail systems created for the use of Lane Terry & Associates. I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not illegal to impersonate someone if it isn’t a sworn peace officer. I only do that when I have to.
A severe-looking older woman with her hair slicked into a tight little bun that probably never got a vacation looked up, then came to the counter. If the place smelled like anything worse than hot bricks, fortunately the surrounding refineries covered it up with their industrial stench. She looked sour and thin-lipped. I thought she was going to be tough, like trying to pry a giant clam open with a set of blunt nail clippers, but when I handed her the card, she smiled brightly and asked what she could do for me. Maybe she didn’t get a lot of visitors — well, not the kind you could talk to. “I’m on a story about funeral options,” I explained. “With overpopulation and real-estate prices and all, so many people are going the cremation route—” I gestured globally — “and I wondered if you could tell me something about it — like, how’s business?” I smiled expectantly, and she shrugged.