"Oh, he was busy. He was busy for hours. He had to clean up after Toby. When he got home I told him I was leaving. By the time I got Rebecca out of the hospital I was already gone. I'd taken the apartment over this shop."
"Who is he?"
"You really don't know?" I shook my head.
"Hartsfield is my first husband's name," she said. "In addition to being a widow, I'm deliriously happy to be the ex-Mrs. Dixie Cohen."
I sat back, and the books creaked and let out an aromatic gust. The two of us smoked in self-defense. The silence stretched around us. In the street someone laughed drunkenly.
"So," she said. "Is there anything else?"
"Yeah," I said. "Charge for the catalogs. Three bucks each. That way you're ahead either way."
She gave me a full-bore smile. "I knew I liked you," she said.
16
My third stop of the evening was in the Valley, so I had plenty of time to think as I drove. I needed it.
The main hope, of course, given the source of my almost fictitiously large paycheck, was that someone was trying to frame Toby. Unless, that was, Toby really had killed Amber, a notion that even an eyewitness couldn't altogether drive from my mind, given what I knew about the lad.
Even if he'd had nothing to do with Amber, there were plenty of people who might have wanted to put a big black period at the end of his life. When you live like Toby lived, there are always going to be people who want to pop your cork for good.
Heading west on Ventura Boulevard, a cherried-out old Buick, vintage 1953 or thereabouts, blew a fishtail kiss at Alice and began playing tag with me. First it tailgated me, and then it passed me, got in front, and slowed down. What looked like four very large kids kept glancing back, waiting for me to hit the horn or give them a bump in the rear. In Los Angeles that's a good way to get shot, so I just pulled into a service station and earned a disappointed finger from the kid in the front passenger seat. Hell, maybe they killed Amber. Three days on the case and I hadn't ruled anybody out, not even the golden boy himself, and new possibilities were blooming like wildflowers.
At two thousand a day I felt overpaid.
And I was curiously fuzzy about things. My mental state wasn't helped any by the fact that everybody who was involved seemed to have made up a name just for me. Toby, Nana, Dixie, Tiny, Saffron, certainly Chantra-almost everybody had an AKA; nobody had the Christian name he or she was born with. And the few who did, Norman Stillman, for example, had invented personalities instead.
It didn't delight me that I was now on my way to an encounter with the most improbable name of all.
Dixie, back in the good old days when I thought he was leveling with me, had given me the names and numbers of four of the pros he and Stillman had hired for Toby to knock around as a safe outlet for his boyish energies. One of the numbers had also popped up on the yellow pad I'd used to copy the contents of Tiny's phone book. Hookers move even more frequently than the average Angeleno, and that was the only number out of the four that was still good. My call had reached a machine that informed me that business hours were ten in the morning until twelve midnight and that she'd be at something called La Maison. I was headed for La Maison, and the woman I was going to see called herself Mistress Kareema.
Ventura Boulevard is a sad street. Back in the days of the third or fourth real estate boom, when Bob Hope and Bing Crosby owned everything the Chandler family didn't, the Valley had been positioned as paradise: no smog, an orange tree or six in every yard, the grime and crime of the city at a safe remove across the mountains. Ventura Boulevard was the artery of optimism, the pioneering east-west street, the first to be developed, with stucco storefronts and palatial motion picture houses. After fifty years, Ventura was a dotted line of prosperity and decline. No building material in history has ever decayed with quite the speed of stucco.
Mistress Kareema, whoever she might be, practiced her trade on a street named Sunny Vista, which, as I might have expected from the way things were going, was one of the few shady spots in the Valley. It was a narrow ribbon of asphalt that gnarled and knotted its way south of the boulevard, overhung with oaks and eucalyptus that had grown to an antebellum, Edward Gorey thickness. Even the moon couldn't peek through. The storefronts extended south a couple of blocks, and La Maison was the last commercial establishment before the houses took over.
La Maison had all the discretion of accomplished vice: whatever happened there, it happened inside a pale, anonymous stucco box with two windows in front that could have been installed to display anything from guitars to tires. The windows were masked with brown paper, new territory for Stillman's timeline. The sign was about the size of a piece of legal paper, and the building was as anonymous as the French Foreign Legion. The front door looked solid and locked. Junk newspapers littered the doorway. As I pulled through the driveway to park Alice in the rear, I wondered if it were even open.
I had started on foot toward the front of the building when I saw the back door. The sign, larger than the one in front, said La Maison. La Maison looked like the kind of place one entered through the back door, and I gave it a try.
It wasn't locked. A bell rang as I opened it, nothing electronic, just a regular old bell that got slammed by a piece of metal every time the door opened. I was in a dark corridor, not that much different from the Spice Rack. A single naked light bulb in a bare porcelain socket flung its forty watts valiantly into the gloom. The gloom won. I stood there in it, waiting for someone to answer the bell's summons.
After about twenty seconds, I heard somebody moan. Then she cried out. Then she cried out again, a choked, panicked, whimpering sound that made the hair on my arms stand straight up. Wishing I had the gun I'd left in Alice's glove compartment, I started down the hallway.
Ten feet down, the corridor turned left. There were doors on either side now. In each door there was a small window, about four inches by six. All but one were dark.
The cry turned into a scream. The scream died away into a kind of hopeless sobbing. Then I heard a smack that sounded like something hard against bare flesh, and I headed for the lighted window.
"No," a woman's voice cried out. "No, please, no. No more, no more, no more." She coughed, or choked, and I was at the window.
I was looking at a living room. There was a lot of ordinary furniture, most of it red: a red couch, a coffee table, red pictures on the walls. There was also one piece of extraordinary furniture, a kind of aluminum frame that looked like a cross between a sawhorse and a torture rack. On it was a small blond girl. She was strapped to it, bent over it brutally, spread-eagle and as naked as a saint's forehead. Between us stood Toby Vane, stripped to the waist with his back to me. In his hand was a whip. I surveyed the room as best I could through the little window. No Big John. Then Toby lifted the whip and brought it whistling down across the girl's spine. She cried out again and arched her slim back.
I kicked the door in on the first try. My right foot caught Toby behind the knee before he had a chance to turn around, and he crumpled headlong toward the floor. I managed to catch his chin with my foot as he fell. The sound of his neck snapping up was deeply satisfying. He twisted and landed on his face, and I slammed his left kidney with my heel for the sheer pleasure of it. He moaned and rolled over, curling into an embryonically protective ball.
That was when things started to go wrong.
The first thing I registered was that it wasn't Toby. It was someone I'd never seen before, a young man with so little chin that he must have knotted his tie directly below his overbite. The second thing I registered was the voice of the girl. She didn't say, "Thank God," or, "My hero." What she said was, "What the fuck."