Mickey Snell, who apparently never went home and never stopped talking, followed several steps behind, downloading information about the grain of the wood and the hardwood pegs that held the floor in place. The old man ignored him, wrapped in a cone of concentration and the hum of his machine.
The bar was in place against the wall, dark wood gleaming. Brass spigots spouted from its surface. On the other side of the room stood a gaudy vertical arrangement of three large glass seashells above a white porcelain basin: Ferris’s fountain for the holy water, dry for now, and surrounded by dozens of spiky orchid plants.
When I stepped further into the room, the bandstand sparkled. Foil stars had been pinned to the deep blue drape, and more stars, made out of cut glass and silver wire, hung overhead from lengths of nylon filament. Clouds of cotton blossomed above the stars. High above it all was a pale crescent moon of old-fashioned milk glass, lighted from within. Max’s heaven.
With the hum of the old man’s buffer and the squeak of Mickey’s voice for company, I walked through the building. The kitchen was, as Henry had promised, dire, but it was spacious and I couldn’t see the food handlers having any problems, and the ovens were too small for anyone to hide in. The bathrooms had been scrubbed until some of the tiles had fallen out. A room beyond the bathrooms was locked, and I figured it had to be Mickey Snell’s office. The rear door was made of iron and was bolted shut. It would be open for the wake, but we’d have a man outside.
The conversation with Spurrier had been loud and long, and neither he nor Schultz had been happy when I put it on the speaker to give myself a witness. I’d handed Spurrier Mrs. McCarvey’s phone number and told him how the dog tags had led me to her, but I hadn’t given him the news that Henry and I had been the ones who found the Farm Boy’s apartment. He’d figure it out sooner or later anyway.
It had taken some doing, but I’d declined an invitation to the Sheriffs’ substation to discuss matters further. If Spurrier wanted to talk to me in person, I told him, he could do it tomorrow night, at the wake. Like Hammond, Spurrier had discounted the possibility that the Farm Boy would show, but we agreed to some commonsense rules that would allow him to put himself and three men on the scene without attracting attention. Spurrier was too experienced a public servant to risk missing the action if anything actually happened.
I sat on the edge of the stage and watched the old man work as Mickey chattered. He looked like one of Millet’s potato farmers, like someone who hadn’t lifted his eyes from the ground in years. Still, I thought, he’d managed to get old. That was more than most of the Farm Boy’s victims had done. Getting old may be no bargain, as my father never tired of saying, but all in all I thought I’d prefer it to the alternative.
I wouldn’t mind getting old the way that Max had. I’d want company, though.
Staying on the unpolished part of the floor and dodging the ghosts of dancers from the thirties, I said goodnight, and then I pointed Alice west on Santa Monica Boulevard for the long drive home. Twenty minutes later, at Twenty-sixth Street, persuading myself that all I was doing was avoiding a surprise visit from Spurrier, I turned left and went to Eleanor’s.
22 ~ Calligraphy
The door opened four inches and snagged on the inside chain, and Robert peered out, looking grim. When he saw me his face cleared.
“It’s your detective,” he called over his shoulder. Then he closed the door and slipped the chain, and when it opened again I saw Alan a foot behind him. Alan had a gun in his hand. It looked heavy and incongruous.
“Hi to you, too,” I said.
Alan glanced down at the gun and his mouth twisted wryly. “It’s been quite a morning,” he said. “Come in. Have some coffee?”
It was just past eleven, and the caffeine from Eleanor’s special brew was still rampaging through my bloodstream. Too much coffee can elevate you unnaturally, scramble your judgment, create a kind of false euphoria. “Sure,” I said.
“It’s fresh.” He stepped aside to make room for me. “God knows we need it.”
Close up, I could see a swelling under Robert’s left eye. Alan had a fat lower lip. “What happened?”
“Thugs,” Alan said. “Swine. Swine run in herds, don’t they?”
“I don’t think swine run at all,” Robert said. “I think that’s the point of being swine.”
“ These swine drove,” Alan said, tucking the gun into the belt holding up his Ivy League chinos. “Six of them, all scraped bald like medieval executioners. They got us outside the bank.”
“The two of you?” I asked.
“And Christy,” Robert said. He looked at Alan’s face and shook his head, and his ponytail did a little hula. “I’ll get the coffee.”
“Christy’s in the den,” Alan said, turning away from the Early American living room as though to guide me.
“Did they hurt him?”
“They would have,” Alan said. “We were in the parking lot when they came around the end of the row and drove toward us, as though they meant to run us over. You know, you see things like that in the movies, and the hero always jumps free at the last minute, but of course he knows it’s coming, he’s rehearsed it a hundred times and there are probably mattresses everywhere to catch him when he lands-” He broke off, listening to himself, and put three fingers over his mouth and then drew a deep breath. “Anyway, they stopped in time, and got out of the car. The driver was screaming, ‘Look where you’re going, faggot,’ and I saw that two of them had baseball bats in their hands.”
“Jesus.”
“Well Christy just jumped into the middle of them. He poked his fingers straight into one man’s eyes and banged his head into another one’s face, and then one of them lifted his bat and I got to him somehow and grabbed the end and kept pulling it around behind him, and he fell down. And then I had the bat, by the fat end, you know? and someone punched me and I hit him with the bat on the forehead and it started bleeding, and then all of a sudden the Sheriffs were there. Three of them, two men and a woman. One of them hit Robert, by mistake, I think.”
Spurrier, never far from center stage in my imagination, pirouetted into the spotlight in his yellow tweed sport coat. “Had the Sheriffs been watching Christy?”
“No.” He smiled and immediately regretted it. A knuckle touched the swollen lip. “They were staking out the bank. They had a tip it was going to be robbed.”
“So this is it? Your lip and Robert’s eye? No other damage?”
“Our confidence has a few wrinkles in it. On the other hand, our self-esteem is absolutely flowering. Six skinheads and three of us, and we walked away. Of course, they claimed we’d started it. Claimed I’d commented on their haircuts, if you can believe that.”
“Did the deputies?”
“No. These guys have been around for a while. They beat up a friend of ours a week ago behind Pavilions, you know, the market on Santa Monica?”
“Are the clowns in jail?”
“If they’re not out already. One phone call to Mommy or Thug Central and they’ll skate.”
“Are you still out here?” Robert asked, emerging from the kitchen with a tray full of coffee things. “Is there an invisible barrier blocking the door to the den?”
“Christy came out of this thing okay?” I asked again. “No trauma or anything?”
“Christy?” Alan sounded surprised. “Right now I’d say Christy is the least traumatized person I know.”
“Simeon doesn’t know about it,” Robert said. A look passed between them.
I watched them look at each other. “Know about what?”
“We’ll let Christy tell you,” Robert said. “He could have told you hours ago if Alan hadn’t lulled you to sleep in the hall.”
Neither of them gave any indication of being ready to move. “Well, let’s go give Christy his chance,” I said.