I also do the Milo Hahn mysteries. Milo Hahn is a private investigator who travels around the United States in a camper pickup unravelling sordid deals. That’s why I talked to the detective I mentioned before — to get some background. Not that I really needed it just to read the books. The author writes three a year, and the titles are all plays on state slogans. Alaska was “Beyond Your Dreams, Within Your Nightmares,” Connecticut “Full of Deadly Surprises.”
Usually, I record at a studio in Glendale. If Martians were to land here and build their conception of an Earth city, I suspect it would look like Glendale: the open streets, the trees that line up a little too well, the eccentric and vaguely futuristic architecture.
Today I’m finishing “It Must Be Murder,” a mystery set in Maine. It concerns a woman who wants Milo to find her son. Only he’s not really her son, as it turns out, but one of the world’s most ingenious cocaine thieves — until, that is, his corpse washes up on a rock, where seals keep trying to shove it off, which you can understand, because it is their habitat.
“I used to be happy,” I read. This is Milo talking to himself at the end of the book. “I’d roll into town, grill a steak, drink some Lagavulin, and watch the sun go down. Now I don’t know. Now I can’t chase out of my mind the crazy lies that people convince themselves of and then try to sell me. And for what? So that I’ll find the answers? Make their stories true? Are you kidding me? There ain’t no answers, people — that’s what I want to say. No answers, no true stories. There’s only the highway and a full tank of gas and a call on my cell phone from some guy in Baltimore, who’s got a bit of a nasty problem and thinks maybe I can help. And the hell of it is, maybe I can.”
(The reference to Baltimore, see, will direct the audience to the next book, set in Maryland. The series goes in alphabetical order.)
I look up. Terry Finn is on the other side of the glass. He runs the sound board and lines up the jobs. He got into an accident last spring while riding his motorcycle on the Angeles Crest Highway, and had to have reconstructive surgery on his shoulder. Now he can’t lift his left arm over his head.
“You nailed it, Bobby,” he says. “Morose, yet optimistic. Only it was just maybe a little too fast.”
“Oh, you always say that,” I tell him.
“Well, you always rush the ending.”
“You know, this is in your mind. You hear what you want to hear.”
“Hey,” he says, “I wish I did.”
This is what Milo Hahn would do about the bottle of Blind Street Ale. He would set a fire in the Dumpster at Mr. King’s liquor store, and while everybody was outside trying to put it out he would rifle through the records. Milo Hahn is a master of rifling, and a combustion expert; he’s constantly setting diversionary fires. When he found what he was looking for, he would rip it out of the ledger. (This is what I find troubling about the books: Milo always finds what he needs to find; in life, when you look for things, you’re usually looking in the wrong place.) Later, Mr. King would probably turn up murdered, which would tip Milo off to the fact that the case was more complicated than it had at first appeared.
Terry says, “Just read from the break.”
So I do.
“ ‘Here’s your money,’ Mrs. Cahill tells me. She’s wearing an astrakhan jacket in the parking lot of an Arby’s and not looking too much at home. ‘And a little something for your college fund.’
“It’s a stack of hundreds, the fresh kind, sharp as a razor, coated with the bitter powder of the vault.
“ ‘I guess this seals the deal,’ I say. It’s a crummy joke and I don’t care if she gets it or not.
“But she does, all right. She gets it. Her eyes flash like the tail-lights of a Maserati Spyder fresh off the lot, cash on the barrel, no questions asked.
“ ‘Don’t press your luck, Mr. Hahn,’ she says. ‘Someday it might press back.’ “
Rosemary, the herb, grows around one of the trees in our front yard, and a couple of nights later I’m cutting it back. We cook with the stuff, but you can’t really cook fast enough to keep up with the growth of rosemary. The dogs are on long leads that aren’t tied to anything, but they don’t realize that, so they’re just hanging around. The phone rings and I go inside. It’s Ingrid.
“Where are you?” I ask.
“My Place.” That’s what she calls Mi Piace, in Old Town. It’s a big, open restaurant with white tablecloths and vast cold Martinis.
“Go ahead and eat,” she says. “We haven’t even ordered, so it’ll be a couple of hours.”
“You’re celebrating,” I say.
“The Phaethon has landed.”
“Another one?”
“No, the same one.”
“What’s it doing?” I figure she might tell me, since she sounds a little looped.
“It’s talking.”
“Oh yeah? To who?”
“I’ve said too much already.”
I tell her to call me when she wants to come home, and I put the phone down, though the rosemary resin on my fingers makes them stick to the receiver.
When I go back outside, Raleigh is gone. Tag lies in the grass looking melancholy. His leash is wrapped around the A.D.T. Security sign. I put him in the house and go down the street calling for our mindless little beagle. Three houses away, I see her on the high cantilevered roof of someone’s garage looking down at me with big yellow eyes. Because the houses on our block are built into ledges, this is not as great an accomplishment as it seems. Still, I’m impressed.
I walk the length of the garage, and in the short distance from the front to the back the yard climbs to a bank of ground cover that’s flush with the roof. Raleigh seems surprised to see me on her level when I was down on the street a minute ago.
Luckily, no one comes out of the house. I rescue my dog and carry her home under my arm like a football.
An hour later, the phone rings again. It’s Mr. King this time. Four bottles of the ale I was asking about went out this morning. He heard about it but didn’t see it happen. He gives me the name and address on the check.
The mission seems a little specious now, but I don’t mind having something to do. So I sit down at my desk and write:
I look the letter over and change the period after the last sentence to an exclamation point.
It seems less hostile somehow.
Then I drive to the address Mr. King gave me, a house in a quiet neighborhood off Linda Vista. It’s one of those big Craftsman places that seem to be perpetually under renovation. Scaffolding rises on all sides, giving the house the look of a great sailing ship in drydock.
I park near the mailbox and get out of the car and put the letter halfway in the slot so that whoever lives here will see it. While I’m doing this, a deep-green sports car — a Maserati, as it happens — comes around the corner and stops next to my car.
“Are you here about the environment?” the driver says. He is a man in his fifties, maybe, wearing a blue shirt with “Los Angeles Dodgers of Los Angeles” printed in white.