“Ay caramba,” Chollo said.
Big Red went out without shutting the door behind him. Unmannerly.
“Well,” I said. “That went well.”
Chollo smiled.
“I’m here to protect you from that?” Chollo said.
“Give them a chance,” I said.
“Why don’t I go back to LA and send my little sister out?”
“They’ve killed a couple of people,” I said. “One of them FBI.”
“Anybody can kill anybody,” Chollo said. “These people are amateurs.”
I nodded.
“I know you won’t go for it,” Chollo said. “But I could spike both of them and be kicking back in Boyle Heights tomorrow.”
“When’s the last time you were in Boyle Heights?” I said.
“Kicking back?”
Chollo grinned.
“1991,” he said. “Been there since, but not kicking back.”
“On business?” I said.
“For Mr. Del Rio,” Chollo said. “How ’bout Hawk and Vinnie, they in this?”
“They’re with Susan,” I said.
“And I get you,” Chollo said.
“Somebody had to,” I said.
“So Alderson thinks there’s a stalemate,” Chollo said. “He’s got your money and you’ve got his tapes and neither one of you can make a move without you losing the money or him losing the tapes.”
“Yes,” I said.
“So we sit around and await developments?” Chollo said.
“Maybe we’ll snoop a little,” I said.
31.
My phone rang. It was Epstein.
“Alderson came to see you,” he said.
“I told him I had the incriminating tapes, beyond what he got from Doherty’s house.”
“And?” Epstein said.
“I offered to sell them to him for fi fty thousand. He came to negotiate.”
“Who’s the big red-haired guy?” Epstein said.
“Don’t know,” I said. “You photograph him?”
“Of course we photographed him,” Epstein said. “We’ll run him through the system.”
“Show him to Belson, too,” I said. “He remembers people that aren’t in the system.”
“You get the money?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think he ever planned to pay it. He was just trying to get the lay of the land.”
“You got some backup?”
“An adorable little Latin person,” I said.
Chollo was drinking coffee.
“I’m not so little,” he said.
“Well, I assume you hire good help,” Epstein said.
“The best,” I said.
Chollo nodded.
“He won’t take a run at you until he knows where the tapes are,” Epstein said.
“And he thinks I won’t give you the tapes until I get my fifty thousand.”
“A Mexican standoff,” Epstein said.
“Sí.”
Chollo said, “You speak my language.”
I grinned at him.
“Somebody talking to you?” Epstein said on the phone.
“My bodyguard,” I said. “He likes to practice his English.”
“Me too,” Epstein said. “You think he’s going to try for leverage on you?”
“Once he’s sure greed won’t do it,” I said.
“You got Susan covered,” Epstein said.
“Yes.”
“Hawk?” Epstein said.
“Yes,” I said. “And Vinnie Morris.”
“Don’t recall Morris,” Epstein said.
“He’ll do,” I said.
“So you don’t need anything from me on that front.”
“No.”
“Well, stay on that,” Epstein said. “Anyone who does any looking around knows that she’s the breach in your wall.”
“True,” I said. “But she’s also the wall.”
“Whatever that means,” Epstein said. “What now?”
“We’ll see,” I said.
32.
T he neighborhood on Magazine Street, where Lyndon Holt lived with Sheila Schwartz, reeked of graduate student. The gray clapboard apartment building had once been a large single residence. The Holt/Schwartz apartment was a second-floor walk-up that overlooked somebody’s two-car garage.
I rang the bell and waited. In a moment a woman’s voice said, “Who is it?” over the intercom.
“Spenser,” I said. “I called, from Arsenal magazine? I’m here with my photographer.”
“Oh sure,” the voice said. “Top of the stairs.”
“Arsenal?” Chollo said.
I shrugged.
The intercom buzzed. I heard the door lock click and opened it. Chollo and I went into the little hallway and up the stairs. Chollo was wearing a camel-hair overcoat and carrying a camera bag over his shoulder. Sheila was standing in the open doorway. Low jeans, short T-shirt, showing a lot of stomach. If she was going to dress like that, I thought, she ought to do a lot of situps. Lyndon stood behind her in the doorway. The full slacker: white T-shirt, multi-striped dress shirt, unbuttoned with the shirttails out. Jeans, hiking boots. Everything but the boots had obviously been home-laundered.
“Sheila says you’re doing a piece on Perry?” Lyndon said.
“Yes,” I said. “We thought it would make an interesting story the way events in the Middle East have, so to speak, reinvigorated the remnants of the counterculture.”
“Remnants?” Lyndon said.
“The opposition had lowered its voice for a while there after Vietnam.”
“They’d like you to think that,” he said.
“Would you folks like some coffee?” Sheila said.
“That would be swell,” I said. “You don’t mind if my photographer takes some shots? You know, ambience shots, maybe some candids of you folks.”
“No, that’s fi ne,” she said. “You don’t mind, do you, Lyn?”
“I want to see the story before it’s published,” Lyndon said.
“That will be between you and my editor,” I said. “Won’t do any harm to have some pictures, however, in case we need to use them in the story.”
“You mean we might end up in the magazine?” Sheila said.
“Definitely your names, parts of the interview. Pictures is up to the photo editor. We just send in the undeveloped fi lm.”
“I don’t see any harm, Lyn,” Sheila said.
He shrugged.
“Go ahead,” he said. “But I’m not signing any photo release until I see what’s in the story.”
I nodded and looked at Chollo.
“Okay, Casey,” I said. “Just get some informals while we talk.”
“Sí,” Chollo said.
They both stared at him as Chollo took a big 35mm camera out of the bag and began focusing.
“He used to be a crime photographer,” I said.
Chollo clicked off a couple of shots. They kept trying to smile into the camera as he moved around the room.
“Pay him no mind,” I said. “They’ll never use anything smiling into the lens.”
They looked quickly away. I got out my notebook.
“So,” I said. “How long have you known Perry Alderson?”
“Since we started grad school,” Sheila said. “We took his seminar and it blew us away.”
She looked at Lyndon. He nodded.
“Did you two know each other before you came here?” I said.
“No, we met in Perry’s class,” Sheila said.
“Where did you do your undergraduate work?” I said. Chollo drifted around pretending to be Francesco Scavullo.
“Wisconsin,” Sheila said.
“Berkeley,” Lyndon said.
I wrote diligently in my notebook.
“And did you come here because of Professor Alderson?” I said.
“No,” Sheila said. “At least I didn’t. I hadn’t heard of him until I got here.”
“You?” I said to Lyndon.
He shook his head.
“Why did you come here?” I said.
“I liked the college,” Lyndon said. “It had a reputation for, you know, diversity and inclusiveness.”
Sheila nodded.
“I wanted to come to Boston, too,” she said. “You know? See what it was like?”