“Can I use your phone, Milo?”
The legal intellectual let his shoulders rise, indicating that he’d done all he could do. He gestured toward Loretta with one of his huge hands, and I rose from the orphan chair like an acolyte dismissed by a great teacher who had failed his task.
“Hello,” the nondescript voice hummed.
“Whisper.”
“What’s up, Paris?”
“Can I come over?”
“Always welcome,” he said.
The words were friendly if the tone was not.
Whisper’s office was on Avalon. The building was perfect for the elusive sleuth. It was three stories and narrow, made from dark red brick. The front door of the building didn’t face the street. Instead you entered into a little recess, turned to the left, and walked up a small set of granite stairs that brought you to an old white door that was locked and far too pulpy to sustain a serious knock.
But for those in the know there was a buzzer inside of a black mailbox that the postman knew not to use. All the letters were put through a slot in the door; packages were held at the post office for pickup.
I pressed that button.
Two minutes later the detective opened the door, giving a rare, and momentary, grin.
“Paris.”
He led me up a carpeted stairway to the top floor, where he had his office. Over the years I had been to Whisper’s sanctum a few times. The visits were always about hard business, but still I stopped to appreciate his sense of style and decorum.
The main office was paneled with real oak, giving it that rich woody-brown feel. The carpet was maroon, edged in royal blue, and there were tall bookshelves on either side of his heavy oak desk. The shelves reached all the way to the ceiling, which was at least fourteen feet high. It was an intelligent room that invited you to sit and contemplate until the problem was solved.
I liked the chamber very much, but it was his one window that always grabbed me.
He must have had it put in specially. It was only a foot and a half in width but ran from a foot above the floor to six inches below the ceiling. It presented a view of the northern mountains and L.A.’s blue-and-amber skies. Something about the slender slice of the outdoors made your mind want to expand.
Whisper gestured to the blue cushioned chair that looked upon the window. I sat down, feeling almost as tranquil as I had in Mum’s arms.
“What’s up, Paris?”
You could have spoken to the man for half a dozen years and he would have used only a couple of hundred words, excluding proper names and numbers.
“I need your help on something,” I said.
His hands, raised palms upward toward his shoulders, asked me what.
“I need to speak to Bobo and Gregory Handsome,” I said. “Them or Lonnie Mannheim. I don’t know where they are and I need that information.”
From his appearance, Whisper could have been a bus driver or a teacher’s aide at a public school; he could have been a deacon at a small church or a single father raising nine kids. He looked like anything but a man who’d run into an open door to root out armed gunmen shooting wildly and intent on taking life.
“Thanks for last night,” he said.
“Sure. You know I didn’t do nuthin’ except for trip ovah my own big feet.”
“You might’a saved Fearless and you shoutin’ took that rifleman’s aim on you.”
Even the thought of such an action put fear in me.
“What happened in there?” I asked.
“Fearless had knocked out both Al Rive and Rex Hathaway before I got inside. Then we went up the stairs. I started shootin’. It was an office buildin’ so I didn’t have to worry about people gettin’ hurt. Steven Borell was shootin’ down the stairs at me while Fearless went out a window and then back in through a side stairway. He jumped Borell and knocked him ovah. Nobody got killed an’ the cops had their bail jumper, so they didn’t question how we got it done.”
Those were the most words I’d ever heard come out of his mouth.
“Thank you,” he said again.
“You the ones did the work,” I said.
“I’ll find the Handsome brothers and Mannheim for you, Paris,” he said. “Gimme a day, two at most, an’ I’ll have what you want.”
“I can pay you,” I said.
“No, brother. You already have.”
Chapter 40
Finally i drove home. I wasn’t worried about losing business; people were used to my being closed at odd hours now and then. And it wasn’t like there was any other bookshop in the neighborhood. The customers I had would come back when my problems were over — that is, if I lived that long.
I carried Useless’s leather suitcase upstairs to my desk, thinking about the trouble he’d caused. I hadn’t even let him in the front door and still my fat was in the fire. It was so pathetic that I had to chuckle. Useless was more deadly than an outbreak of smallpox in a tuberculosis ward.
I put the suitcase on the far side of my big desk.
Sun was streaming down from the window behind me. There was the scent of Mum’s floral perfume rising from my shirt. A sheath of sweat was forming at the back of my neck, and I felt unsure about opening Useless’s bag.
Instead I tried to think my way back along the path I had taken. It was what I did whenever I got lost on the road; I’d pull my car to the side and sit there remembering all the turns I had taken and directions in which I had gone. Whenever I did that, the right way would come to me.
I thought about Useless at my front door and Jessa after him. I remembered running down Central and being saved by Sir and Sasha. There was Ha Tsu, Jerry Twist, Auntie Three Hearts, and an Angel with horns. I thought about Tiny Bobchek with the hole in his temple. Hector had killed him. But who had killed Hector? Lionel Sterling? No. Jessa?
Mad Anthony had been murdered too. Useless had admitted to that killing. He claimed self-defense and I believed him. Mad Anthony was a killing machine. Shooting him from the back with a tommy gun was self-defense in my book.
I made a turn at Mad Anthony. He was the leg breaker. That made sense. I went from him to Hector. Hector was deep into all of this mess. He was after Useless because my cousin was going to take the money and run. Angel and Useless had found out about the counterplot and bolted. It was all falling together. There was reason in the mayhem. I was somewhere near home when I ran into Sterling. He wasn’t afraid of some unknown assassin. His fear was of someone he knew and worked with.
A dead end. As if I thought that murder would ever be as neat as a road map.
I eyed the worn leather of Useless’s suitcase, wondering idly who had owned that luggage before my cousin. It looked old enough to belong to Useless’s great-grandfather: the general who had either loved or raped, as some versions of the story went, Three Hearts’s husband’s father’s mother. The name was given as a kind of oral history that would pass down from father to son, memorializing both the greatness and base nature of our beginnings.
Who had owned that suitcase? There was a leather tag holder strapped to the handle. I flipped it open, but the name, written in purple ink, had gotten wet and was nothing more than a blur.
I had spent half an hour trying to work out that name when I realized that I had gotten lost again.
From the bottom drawer of my desk I took a pair of thin cotton gloves that I kept for just such a purpose.
I undid the straps and flipped the latch of the suitcase. Inside, there was a large accordionlike folder made from durable brown paper. The folder had eighteen separate sections. Fifteen of these were in use. Fourteen of them contained an accounting sheet, between three and six black-and-white photographs, letters of love, and a little bag of receipts from hotels, restaurants, and upscale luxury stores that sold expensive clothing and jewelry.