Black Tom sat down right next to the radiant lady, who failed to acknowledge him. Making himself solid enough to be seen by ordinary folks depleted Tom’s energies fast, so he usually appeared only within the confines of Lia’s trained and receptive mind. She’d long ago taught herself not to focus on him when she was out in public.
Ingrid smiled through her aura of elegant sadness. She was actually wearing white satin gloves that went all the way up to her elbows. Lia had to imagine she’d also have an ivory cigarette holder secreted away inside her tiny purse.
“Lia,” Ingrid said. “It’s good to see you again. Please, don’t make me wait. Were you able to find anything?”
“I–I’m afraid not,” Lia said.
Ingrid stared at her. It was clearly not the answer she’d expected.
“Nothing?” she said at last, her tone filled with disbelief. “Nothing at all?”
Lia looked down at her hands, which were folded on the tabletop. “I’m sorry, no,” she said. “The building was abandoned. Completely empty.”
“Yes, but-”
“Listen, Ms. Redstone,” Lia interrupted, before Ingrid could protest further. “I don’t think your brother was ever up there. I don’t think anybody’s been there, not for years and years.”
“But… no,” Ingrid insisted. “I’m sure-I mean, there wasn’t any sign of him? Any little thing? He’s a smoker, he’s always leaving nasty cigarette butts behind, and he, he was in the Navy… Oh, I don’t know what, but didn’t you see anything?”
Black Tom raised an eyebrow, but Lia shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she lied.
Ingrid hung her head, struggling not to cry. Black Tom mimed a clicky-clicky motion, in reference to the cigarette lighter they had indeed found the night before. Lia glared at him for a split second, though she was certain Ingrid couldn’t have seen it.
“But…” Ingrid’s voice quavered, on the verge of breaking. She took a deep breath, keeping her eyes downcast. “But I know that’s where he was going. He gave me that exact address the last time I saw him.”
“The lock I jimmied hadn’t been touched in twenty years, probably more,” Lia said, and Black Tom nodded his expert concurrence with that opinion. “And besides, I didn’t see any evidence of the sort of thing you thought your brother was involved in. Believe me, it leaves evidence. If what you’re worried about had happened up there, I would’ve been able to tell.”
Ingrid nodded, trying to pull herself together. “That’s about what the private investigator said, too. The regular one. I just thought maybe you… someone like you…”
“I thought so, too,” Lia said. “But there wasn’t anything to see.”
The disappointment visibly crushed Ingrid’s frail hopes. She choked on a sob before she buried her face in her gloved hands and moaned: “Then he’s just gone, isn’t he?”
The woman was desolated, her shoulders quaking as she hid her face and fought not to make a public scene. The manager and a busboy were both looking in their direction, aware of Ingrid’s distress though not yet concerned enough to intervene.
Lia felt sick, but she still had an uncomfortable agenda here. “It-it’s important…” she began carefully, looking at a large, wine-colored garnet that Ingrid wore on a silver chain around her neck, instead of up into her eyes. “I mean, it’s probably best that you don’t, you know… go back there. Or send anyone else.”
“Oh?” Ingrid said, a touch of suspicion drawing her sable brows together into the slightest hint of a frown.
“Yeah,” Lia said. Rather lamely, she thought. “It’s just… well, I know it’s hard, but sometimes, if people who get involved in these sorts of things need to disappear… it’s really better to let them.”
“I see,” Ingrid said, sitting back and dabbing at her eyes with a paper napkin. “Well. We never did properly discuss your, ah… compensation. For your efforts. Did we?”
Lia uncomfortably waved off the suggestion of money. “Just move on,” she said. “For your own sake. That’s all I ask.”
Ingrid seemed about to protest, but then she crumbled and nodded in miserable resignation.
Lia got up. “I wish there was more I could do,” she said.
“Thank you,” Ingrid replied. “Anyway.”
Lia nodded and hurried out of the restaurant.
Black Tom lingered on in the booth next to Ingrid, watching Lia go.
Ingrid sat there, quietly weeping, until Tom eventually got up and left her, too. If her tears were insincere, he thought, then she was one hell of an actress.
Around the next block, he walked up to Lia’s vehicle as she was unlocking it. She looked at him across the roof. He looked back benignly.
“Shut up,” she told him. Then she got into the car. Impassive, Black Tom did likewise (without going to the bother of opening a door).
Inside the Mazda, where people were less likely to notice her talking to herself (not that it made much of an impression anymore, since the advent of cellphones and Bluetooth earpieces), she turned to Black Tom and said: “What do you want me to do? Really?”
Black Tom, predictably, said nothing.
“The important thing is that nobody else goes up there, isn’t it?”
Black Tom shrugged and Lia grew quiet, thinking about it. “What’s up in that office is beyond us,” she murmured. “You know that better than anyone.”
Black Tom conceded the point with the barest of nods.
“And we need to look out for us, too, don’t we?”
Black Tom nodded again.
“Well, then? That’s what I’m doing.”
Tom nodded a third time, but with much less certainty. It was still affirmation enough for Lia. She started up the car.
When they drove past the restaurant, headed westbound down Riverside, Tom glimpsed Ingrid through the establishment’s big front windows. Just a flash of her, like a snapshot. The astonishing redhead was still sitting in their booth, dialing a cellphone and raising it to her ear.
Then she was behind them, and gone from sight.
Chapter Six
Dexter Graves blew past a cop in his stolen car, doing ninety down the 170, racing in the direction indicated by the dashboard compass like his life-ironically-depended on it.
The instrument was on the fritz, Graves had already realized, spinning around with no regard for true north, and yet it somehow seemed to be leading him on. He couldn’t question it; he didn’t have the time. Interpreting the compass’s directives required all his concentration. When he saw police lights flashing in his rearview mirror he dutifully pulled over, more irritated by the interruption than anything else.
An imposing CHP officer got out of the cruiser behind him and sauntered up to Graves’ open window. “Please remove your hat and eyewear, sir,” the officer said in a bored, no-nonsense tone, as he flipped open his ticket pad and portentously clicked a ballpoint pen.
Graves’ distracted, six-decade-dead skeleton complied with the order.
The cop had no immediate response to the sight that confronted him when he looked up from his pad. He seemed about to say something, then thought better of it. Graves waited, cocking his skull at a quizzical angle. In his weirdly-consuming frenzy to find his lighter he’d almost forgotten what state he was in, physically speaking, and he couldn’t even imagine what this must look like to an officer of the law.
“You know what?” the cop said, after a long, long pause. “No. Nuh-uh, no way, just no. Not today. Fuck this.”
He walked stiffly back to his car, got in, and drove away. Graves shrugged, put his hat back on, and zoomed back onto the highway himself.
He exited at Roscoe Boulevard and headed east into an area he remembered as North Hollywood, a small incorporated city within the Valley’s patchwork of communities that bore no legal or geographical affiliation whatsoever with its better-known namesake on the far side of the Hills. In Graves’ day the area had been a thriving business center and transportation hub, serviced by a Red Car line that ran down to that other Hollywood, as well as by regular rail to Union Station, downtown. The old groves to its north had even then been giving way to housing or industry, and now, today, they were pretty much gone. So was most of the area’s vivacity and that early sense of promise.