“… and the first step will be a temporary prohibition of alcoholic beverages based on wartime need. That’s the way the Eighteenth Amendment came last time, after the war, and they’re talking about it again. Temporary will become permanent and the bootleggers, gangsters, and politicians will lobby to keep it that way, and the country will agree to keep it that way because it will add to the underground economy, and who will suffer?”
He looked around for an answer. The six of us didn’t have an answer. Jeremy didn’t drink and I was good for a Rainier beer about once a month. So the little guy answered for us.
“I’ll suffer and people like you and me will suffer. The alcoholics, the winos. Drinking will go back to the middle classes. It’ll be a game. For us it’s a damn necessity and we’re the ones who’ll suffer. Now isn’t some straight citizen out there going to tell me I’ll be better off?”
He looked around for a straight citizen to do battle with him. Jeremy and I were the closest thing to it in the small group. No one wanted to mess with Jeremy.
“Not me,” I said.
“Then amen to you, brother,” said the little man, clutching himself as the first drops of rain came. One man in the small group shuffled off.
“It’s not the government’s job to save my life or tell me what’s good for me,” he said. “Why not ban smoking? Coffee? As long as I don’t hurt you, you’ve got no right to hurt me.”
Two more in the dwindling crowd went for shelter as the rain got a little more serious. The little man was shivering seriously now but he didn’t plan to give up, though there were only three of us left.
“The brewers, the distilleries, they’re going to fight it, but they lost before and they’ll lose again. I’m going to run for Congress and in Congress I’m going to fight, scream, and filibuster for the right of every man to have a drink when he wants or to goddammit commit suicide with dignity if he wants.”
The rain was serious now. The man next to Jeremy moved forward and helped the shivering little man from the box. He picked up the banana crate and led the little man toward the shelter of a store awning nearby. Jeremy and I moved the other way under the protection of a wind-blown tree.
“That man used to be a senator,” he said, rubbing the sheen of water from his smooth head. “Not a state senator, a United States senator. Without conviction and cause he would be dead in a few months. Every man needs a joy of life or a sense of meaning.”
“No quarrel with that,” I said, and then as the rain imprisoned us in darkness against the trunk of the tree, I told him what had happened since I had last seen him.
“The streets in Santa Monica are numbered,” I said. “But there is no Thirteenth there either. Thirteenth Euclid.”
“Spectator,” Jeremy said pensively.
“You’ve got an idea,” I said hopefully.
He took the magazine from under his arm and showed it to me. It was the latest issue of Atlantic Monthly. He flipped it open, found what he was looking for, and read to me:
“Houses have crumbled in my memory as soundlessly as they did in the silent films of yore.”
He closed the magazine and looked at me.
“That’s nice, Jeremy.” I felt a chill creeping through my soaked windbreaker.
“It’s in a short story by a young man named Vladimir Nabokov,” he explained. “You have forgotten a house, Toby Peters.”
“Can you help me remember, Jeremy?”
“It is never so meaningful as when one remembers oneself,” he admonished.
“Then I’ll regret my loss,” I said. “While you’re trying to improve my mind …”
“Your soul,” he corrected.
“My soul,” I accepted. “Another person could be murdered.”
“Why does the note say ‘Senor’?” asked Jeremy.
“The note’s to Dali. He’s Spanish,” I said.
Jeremy shook his head sadly, patiently.
“The first note had ‘Place’ in capital letters,” he said. “And this one has ‘Street.’”
“So,” I said, watching a woman dash across the street with a sheet of cardboard over her head. “Street is someone’s name. Where? There aren’t thirteen people named Street in the L.A. phone book.”
“Senor,” said Jeremy, “it is in the Town of the Spectator.”
“Hollywood,” I said.
“In Spanish, spectator is mirador,” Jeremy explained.
“Holy shit. Jeremy, remember when we were in Mirador about a year ago on the Hughes case, the sheriff was …”
“Mark Nelson,” said Jeremy.
A shot of thunder.
“I don’t like things like this,” I said. “I like it straight and simple. I don’t like puzzles, and I sure as hell don’t want to risk running into Nelson. What am I going to do?”
Jeremy looked down at me and said nothing.
“Right,” I said. “I’m going to Mirador.”
When the rain slowed enough to make it less than insane to do so, I headed back to the Farraday Building. When I got there, I put on a dry if not clean shirt I kept in my office and removed the.38 Smith amp; Wesson five-shot revolver I kept locked in the lower drawer. I almost never carried the gun. In the last five years, I had lost it three times, been shot by it once, and never used it to stop or even confront anyone threatening me. But now I was on the trail of a killer who was leaving clues like at a Crime Doctor movie, a killer who had made a third eye in the forehead of a taxidermist named Place and was ready to do something equally nasty to a citizen named Street.
I made it to the Crosley with a newspaper over my head, got in and headed for the Pacific Coast Highway. The skies grumbled, stayed gray but stopped raining as I did my best to keep from thinking. It didn’t work. Try it some time.
Was someone killing people just because their names left interesting clues? Did Place have anything to do with the Dali theft? If there was a Street in Mirador, was he or she a part of this or just a poor sap who happened to have the right name?
An hour later I turned off the highway at the Mirador exit and two minutes later was on Main Street. I didn’t know if Mark Nelson was still sheriff. I hoped I didn’t have to find out. We hadn’t gotten along like arms-around-the-neck buddies.
Downtown looked almost the same as it did the last time I had hit town. There were six store-front buildings on the main street. One of them was the sheriff’s office, another was a restaurant named Hijo’s. A place that used to sell “Live Bait” was now a hardware store, and three shops that used to be boarded up were now in business, though closed for the day. One of the shops, Old California, a few doors down from the sheriff’s office, sold antiques. The second specialized in “New and Used Clothes” and the third was Banyon’s Real Estate. The war boom had hit Mirador. There was no one on the street but a big guy in overalls looking into the window of the antique shop. Whatever was in there had his full attention. His face was flat against the window.
I kept driving till I came to a gas station I remembered. It was open. I got the kid on duty to fill the Crosley and went in to look at his phone book. The kid, tall and pimply with straight corn-colored hair and overalls, came in and said, “Eighty-three cents.”
“How many people live in Mirador?” I asked.
He shrugged as I handed him a dollar.
“Keep the change,” I said.
“Maybe a few thousand if you count the rich ones who only come in the winter,” the kid said, pocketing the whole buck and putting nothing in the till.
“There are thirty listings in the phone book for people named Street,” I said.
“Lot of Streets,” he replied seriously.
The inside of the station was small, crowded with stacks of oil cans and old Dime Detectives. It smelled of gasoline and musty pulp magazines.
“Why?”
“Streets founded the place,” he said. “My grandma on my ma’s side is a Street.”
“The thirteenth Street listed in the phone book is a Claude Street,” I said. “On Fuller Drive. How do I get there?”