THERE WERE no parking lines painted on the weathered checkerboard of cracked concrete and asphalt behind the apartment building, so Sullivan just parked the van in the shade of a big shaggy old carob tree. He dug around among the faded papers on the dashboard until he found Houdini’s thumb, unpleasantly spitty and dusty now, and then he groped below the passenger seat and retrieved the Bull Durham sack and pushed the thumb back into it.
With the sack in his shirt pocket and his gun snugged in under his belt, he pushed open the door and stepped down onto the broken pavement. Green carob pods were scattered under the overhanging tree branches, and he could see the little V-shaped cuts in the pods where early-morning wild parrots had bitten out the seeds.
This would be the sixth apartment building he checked out. When he had come down off the freeway at Seventh Street in Long Beach, he had quickly confirmed his suspicion that motels never had garages, and then he’d driven around randomly through the run-down residential streets west of Pacific and south of Fourth looking for rental signs.
He had stopped and looked at five places already, and, no doubt because of his stated preference for paying in cash, only a couple of the landlords had seemed concerned about his murky, out-of-state, unverifiable references. He thought he would probably take the last one he had looked at, a $700-a-month studio apartment in a shabby complex on Cerritos Avenue, but he had decided to look at a few more before laying out his money.
He was down on Twenty-first Place now, right next to Bluff Park and only half a block from the harbor shore, and he had just decided that any of these beachfront rentals would be too expensive, when he had driven past this rambling old officelike structure. He wouldn’t even have thought it was an apartment building if it hadn’t had an APT FOR RENT sign propped above the row of black metal mailboxes. It looked promisingly low-rent.
Sullivan walked across the pavement now toward the back side of the building, and soon he was scuffing on plain packed dirt. Along the building’s back wall, between two windowless doors, someone had set up a row of bookshelves, on which sat dozens of mismatched pots with dry plants curling out of them, and off to his left plastic chairs sat around a claw-footed iron bathtub that had been made into a table by having a piece of plywood laid over it. He stared at the doors and wondered if he should just knock at one of them.
He jumped; and then, “Who parked all cattywampus?” came a hoarse call from behind him.
Sullivan turned around and saw a fat, bald-headed old man in plastic sandals limping across the asphalt from around the street-side corner of the building. The man wore no shirt at all, and his suntanned belly overhung the wide-legged shorts that flapped around his skinny legs.
“Are you talking about my van?” asked Sullivan.
“Well, if that’s your van,” the old man said weakly; he inhaled and then went on, “then guess I’m talking about it.” Again he rasped air into his lungs. “Ya damn birdbrain”
“I’m here to speak to the manager of these apartments,” Sullivan said stiffly.
“I’m the manager. My name’s Mr. Shadroe.”
Sullivan stared at him. “You are?” He was afraid this might be just some bum making fun of him. “Well, I want to rent an apartment.”
“I don’t need to… rent an apartment.” Shadroe waved at the van. “If that leaks oil, you’ll have to…park it on the street.” The old man’s face was shiny with sweat, but somehow he smelled spicy, like cinnamon.
“It doesn’t leak oil,” Sullivan said. “I’m looking for an apartment in this area; how much is the one you’ve got?”
“You on SDI or some—kinda methadone treatment? I won’t take you if you are, and I—don’t care if it’s legal for me to say so. And I won’t have children here.”
“None of those things,” Sullivan assured him. “And if I decide I want the place I can pay you right now, first and last month’s rent, in cash.”
“That’s illegal, too. The first and last. Gotta call the last months rent a deposit nowadays. But I’ll take it. Six hundred a month, utilities are included….’cause the whole building’s on one bill. That’s twelve hundred, plus a real deposit of…three hundred dollars. Fifteen. Hundred, altogether. Let’s go into my office and I can…give you a receipt and the key.” Talking seemed to be an effort for the man, and Sullivan wondered if he was asthmatic or had emphysema.
Shadroe had already turned away toward one of the two doors and Sullivan stepped after him. ‘I’d,” he said laughing in spite of himself, “I’d like to see the place first.”
Shadroe had fished a huge, bristling key chain from his shorts pocket and was unlocking the door. “It’s got a new refrigerator—in it, I hooked it up myself yesterday. I do all my—own electrical and plumbing. What do you do?”
“Do? Oh, I’m a bartender.” Sullivan had heard that bartenders tended to be reliable tenants.
Shadroe had pushed the door open, and now waved Sullivan toward the dark interior. “That’s honest work, boy,” he said. “You don’t need to be ashamed.”
“Thanks.”
Sullivan followed him into a long, narrow room dimly lit by foliage-blocked windows. A battered couch sat against one of the long walls and a desk stood across from it under the windows; over the couch were rows of bookshelves like the ones outside, empty except for stacks of old People magazines and, on the top shelf, three water-stained pink stuffed toys. A television set was humming faintly on a table, though its screen was black.
Shadroe pulled out the desk chair and sat down heavily. “Here’s a rental agreement,” he said, tugging a sheet of paper out of a stack. “No pets either. What are those shoes? Army-man shoes?”
Sullivan was wearing the standard shoes worn by tramp electricians, black leather with steel-reinforced toes. “Just work shoes,” he said, puzzled. “Good for standing in,” he added, feeling like an idiot.
“They gotta go. I got wood floors, and you’ll be boomin’ around all night—nobody get any sleep—I get complaints about it. Get yourself some Wallabees,” he said with a look, of pained earnestness. “The soles are foam rubber”
The rental agreement was a Xerox copy, and the bottom half of it hadn’t printed clearly. Shadroe began laboriously filling in the missing paragraphs in ink. Sullivan just sat helplessly and watched the old man squint and frown as his spotty brown hand worked the pen heavily across the paper.
The old man’s cinnamon smell was stronger in here, and staler. The room was silent except for the scratching of the pen and the faint hum of the television set, and Sullivan’s hairline was suddenly damp with sweat.
He found himself thinking of the containment areas of nuclear generating plants, where the pressure was kept slightly below normal to keep radioactive dust from escaping; and of computer labs kept under higher-than-normal pressure to keep ordinary dust out. Some pressure was wrong in this dingy office
I don’t want to stay here, he thought. I’m not going to stay here.
“While you’re doing that,” he said unsteadily, “I might go outside and look around at the place.”
“I’ll’ be done here. In a second.”
“No, really, I’ll be right outside.”
Sullivan walked carefully to the door and stepped out into the sunlight, and then he hurried across the patchwork pavement to his van, taking deep breaths of the clean sea air.