“I’ll buy that,” said Surface. He must have been thinking of his ribs.
“So picture this,” I said. “After Surface and me, Phoneblum is sour on the idea of outside help. He’s got a new kangaroo gunman with an itchy trigger finger. Phoneblum gives him the assignment of tailing Celeste, the same way he hired Walter—without the kangaroo ever meeting Maynard Stanhunt. And the orders were the same: Take the new boyfriend out of the picture.”
I paused for effect, and they both shot arrows at me with their eyes.
“Maynard Stanhunt was a pretty heavy Forgettol addict—at least by the standards of six years ago. The first time I tried to call him at home, he didn’t know who I was. I’d warned Angwine of the danger of tangling with people with huge gaps in their day-to-day memory, but I hadn’t really thought through the implications myself. Maynard and Celeste were both having affairs in the Bayview Motel, in the same room, in fact. With each other.”
I turned to Surface. “Walter, you saw Stanhunt, only you didn’t know it. He was the guy you spotted at the motel. Sure, Celeste had left him, but there was slippage in her resolve, as there so often is. She agreed to meet him for quiet afternoons in the motel—but his morning self, the one that hired the detectives, didn’t know about the arrangement.”
Surface just gaped.
“Yesterday you told me it was illegal now in L.A. to know what you did for a living, and that was when it clicked for me. Stanhunt was an early prototype of that. The part of him that wasn’t getting any action with Celeste was murderously jealous of whoever she was seeing in the Bayview Motel, and he told Phoneblum to have his boys blow the guy away. The kangaroo didn’t know what Stanhunt looked like any more than you did, Walter. He just did as he was told and killed the boyfriend. Stanhunt hired his own hit.”
I stopped talking and gave them some time to sort it out. Catherine’s face went through a brief series of expressions, most of them skeptical, but in the end she was too smart to pretend it didn’t have the satisfying weight of something inevitable and true. I watched her get to that point, and then I watched her remind herself that she had my card in her drawer, and that nothing necessarily had to get out of this room if she didn’t want it to. She hardened quickly—I guess she’d had a lot of practice in the intervening years. She was more changed than Barry, or Surface, or Testafer, or anyone else I’d dealt with since coming back. She went with the desk and the office with the big window now.
“It’s an interesting story,” she said. “What are you hoping it’ll get you?”
“I want to see Angwine defrosted,” I said. “I’ll make your job hell with this if he isn’t.”
She just smiled.
“Humor me, Teleprompter,” I said. “Let me think I’m a threat. It’s no skin off your nose. The guy’s harmless—and innocent.”
She punched something into her desktop monitor. I guessed it was Angwine’s file, but it could have been anything, really. Maybe just a stall for time. She squinted at it for a minute, and I remembered how she wouldn’t let me see her in glasses the first time we met.
“I’ll see what I can do,” she said.
I thought about it. I’d come a long way on Angwine’s fourteen hundred dollars. “That’s not good enough,” I said. “I need more.”
She looked me dead in the eye. This time it was me who didn’t blink.
“Okay,” she said. “Tomorrow. You’ve got my word.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me,” she said. “Thank your lucky fucking stars. Take your stuff and get out of here.” She opened her drawer and gave Surface his card and his pad back, and then she gave me my card and put my gun out on top of her desk I reached for it, but her hand was still over it, and she looked at me and I looked at her and I think possibly I saw the faintest hint of a smile cross her face. The moment passed, and she let me pick up the gun and put it back in the pocket of my coat.
She leaned on the button of her intercom and spoke to the muscle waiting outside her office. “Get them out of here,” she said. “Put them on the street.”
They took it literally, bless their hearts.
CHAPTER 7
THE PARKING METER OUTSIDE THE WHITE WALNUT REST Home played me a couple of bars of Hawaiian bottleneck guitar when I dropped in the quarter, but I didn’t stick around to hear out the tune. It had been a long drive up into the hills and my head didn’t feel so good. My bloodstream wouldn’t quit asking and I was running out of ways of saying no. Cold turkey was a merry-go-round I couldn’t get off, and instead of a wooden horse I was riding a porcupine.
I went inside. The place was nice and quiet, all rosewood antiques and bunches of flowers. I found the office. The woman at the desk seemed frightened by my presence, but I don’t know whether it was my red eyes and pasty complexion or the fact of who I was asking to see. Both, probably.
They had him in a dayroom, a pretty one, with windows on three sides and a collection of wicker furniture for putting glasses of lemonade on. He was watching television, or maybe I should say they had him facing the television, because when I moved around his wheelchair and stood in his line of sight, he didn’t notice, though his eyes were open. Except for the deadness in what had once been exceptionally lively eyes, he looked pretty much the same. His beard was unkempt, but he still had a full head of hair. I waved the attendant out of the room and sat down in one of the armchairs.
We sat like that for a while, me watching motes of dust float through the sunlight, him supposedly watching the television. The only sound was the rasp of his breathing. Then 1 reached over and turned off the picture.
“Phoneblum,” I said.
He murmured like he was asleep.
I got out of my chair and took the collar of his robe in my hands. His eyes brightened considerably. “Wake up,” I said. He put his big clubby hands over mine and pushed me away.
I watched as he blinked away his stupor. His forehead wrinkled like a question mark as he looked me over.
“You’re an inquisitor,” he said. The voice rolled out of him like secondhand thunder, acquired cheap. It was a voice from the past, and I was impressed at the way he could still summon it up.
“That’s right,” I said.
“Very good.” He curled a finger and rubbed at his nose with the knuckle. “Do questions make you uncomfortable? I prefer to relax the conventional strictures.”
He was running on empty, but the old routines died hard. I had to tip my hat to him. It was a bluff, but his junk was better than most guys’ fastballs. In another setting, minus the television and the wheelchair and the layer of dust, I might have bought it, might have believed he was still in the saddle. But the bright hard intelligence behind his eyes was missing. He didn’t know who he was talking to.
“Questions are my bread and butter,” I said.
He didn’t remember the answer. He just nodded and said: “Good. What can I do for you?”
“I want to ask you about Celeste,” I said.
I watched him chew it over. He obviously knew the name. It seemed to lull him back a step towards dreamland.
“You remember Celeste?” I said.
“Why, yes,” he answered. He wasn’t looking at me anymore. “I remember Celeste. Of course.”
“I’ve been working on her murder,” I said.
His eyes shot back to mine. “That’s a long time ago,” he said.
“Couple of days, to me. I’ve still got her blood on my shoes.”
I said it casually, but I could see it was having an effect. His forehead lifted.