“You’ll have to tell the sheriff’s deputy about what you heard,” Sonia said as though Al hadn’t spoken. “All we can do is hand you off to them. It’s their territory.”
“We’ll put you right with them, though,” Hammond offered. “All you got to do is tell them what happened, tell them about the little doily who hired you, and go home.”
“ Al,” Sonia complained, sounding like a wife.
“Yeah,” Hammond said. “Sorry.” Then he chuckled, deep in his chest. “How about old Hazel, huh?”
“Don’t go thinking she’s still in love with you,” Orlando volunteered maliciously. “It’s just the loss of power she’s worried about.”
I turned left from Fountain onto Flores as Hammond maintained a ponderous silence. I could practically hear him counting to ten.
At about eight, Sonia observed, “Nice area.”
“If you like fruitcake,” Hammond said automatically. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. But you know, even though there may not be a lot of real good reasons to work for the LAPD, one of them is that the Sheriffs got Boys’ Town.”
“West Hollywood, you bigot,” Sonia snapped.
“The city government leases them,” I said, trying to avert a prehoneymoon separation. After all, they’d only been married half an hour. “It’s a private contract. But they’re thinking of setting up their own force.”
“I can see the uniforms,” Hammond said. “Like Singapore Girls, only packing.”
“That’s enough, Al,” Sonia said sharply.
“What’re we, on 60 Minutes?” Hammond grumbled. Then he caught his bride’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “Sorry, darling.”
“What a piece of raw material,” Sonia said, softening. “Absolutely everything needs to be changed.”
“Over there,” I said, looking at the cluster of Sheriffs’ cars and the yellow crime-scene tape.
As I pulled Alice toward the curb, a deputy stepped forward. He had the standard-issue mustache, mirrored sunglasses, and tight khaki uniform. In his early thirties, he had no love handles to speak of. I braked, and he came around to the driver’s side and tapped on the window.
“Help you, sir?” he said as I rolled the windows down.
I looked up into two convex versions of my face, reflected in his shades. “I’m the one who called it in.”
“And how did you-” he started, and then peered into the car, seeing Hammond in his LAPD blues and the orchid lei, Orlando in his tux, Sonia in full uniform with a bridal veil in her lap, and, behind us, the black stretch limo. It was enough to make him take off his sunglasses.
“He got a phone call, sonny,” Hammond growled. The LAPD and the Sheriffs had a long and stormy history. “And he was here just before the old queen got killed. And he’s volunteered to come all the way here-’
“Fine, sir.” The deputy looked at me. “I’m sure Sergeant Spurrier will want to talk to you.”
“I’m sure he will, too, stupid,” Hammond muttered, setting me right with the Sheriffs.
Two minutes later Hammond and Sonia were Honolulu-bound, and Orlando and I were following the deputy up the steps to Max Grover’s front porch. I’d promised to run him back to Parker Center to pick up his car, and the deputy had looked at him when he didn’t get into the limousine, and then looked back at me. Then he’d shaken his head.
On the other side of the screen door, flashbulbs popped and someone laughed. The laugh ripped a little hole in the waning daylight and let in an early piece of the night: It was a nasty little laugh, the laugh of someone who’s just seen a silent-movie actor slip on a banana peel and thinks it’s funny because he doesn’t know the man wasn’t really hurt.
“Fasten your seat belt,” I said to Orlando. “This is going to be a bumpy flight.”
The deputy swiveled to face us. “Was he here with you?” he demanded, referring to Orlando.
“No.”
“So who is he?”
“A friend.”
The deputy thought about it. His face took on the expression of someone jogging dutifully uphill, suggesting that thinking was something he did infrequently and reluctantly, and only when there was no alternative. Then he pointed his chin at Orlando. “He stays here.”
“Your tuchis,” I said pleasantly.
He slid the mirrored shades back up the slope of his nose so that his eyes were concealed. “Beg pardon?”
“He comes in. With me.”
“The kid stays here,” he said, going for tough. The tag on his chest read KLEINDIENST.
“Get your superior, Deputy Kleindienst,” I said. “Surely you have many.”
“Kleindienst,” someone called through the screen door, “who you jacking around out there?”
Kleindienst seemed inclined to give the question some thought, so I said, “I’m the one who called you on this.”
“And he brought a little friend along,” Kleindienst said scornfully.
“That so,” said the man behind the door. He pushed it open and looked out at me. “Ike Spurrier,” he said. He was short and compact and broad through the chest, with coloring that made him look as though he was dissolving slowly in a glass of water: almost albino, with white-blond hair and a spiky little white-blond mustache and melancholy eyes the color of wet sand. Beneath the mustache was a plump, shiny red lower lip, as wet and sharply articulated as an earthworm. He wore street clothes: a rumpled off-yellow tweed sport coat with a red polo shirt beneath it, and pressed blue jeans.
“Simeon Grist.” We didn’t shake hands.
“Thanks for calling us.” Spurrier’s sad-looking eyes drifted beyond me and found Orlando. “How’d you know he was dead?”
“Someone phoned me and told me so.”
“That so,” he said again. He shifted his gaze back to me and pushed the screen door open. “Whyn’t you come in here and tell me about it.”
“Let’s go, Orlando,” I said.
“He’s not going to want to come in.” Spurrier leaned toward me and raised his eyebrows like someone sharing a confidence. “He’s really not going to want to come in.”
“I can handle it,” Orlando said.
“I don’t give a shit,” Spurrier said tranquilly. “This is a crime scene, and I don’t need you in it.”
I didn’t like the way this was going at all.
“He comes with me,” I said.
Spurrier looked directly into my eyes for two or three long seconds. “Or?”
“Up to you. I can either tell you what I have to say, or I can go to the West Hollywood station and tell them.”
Spurrier tucked a portion of his lower lip between his teeth and gave the street a thorough survey before allowing his eyes to settle on Orlando again. “If you faint, sonny, don’t hit any furniture. We’re not through printing.” He held the door all the way open, and I went in with Orlando following and Ike Spurrier taking the rear. Spurrier let the door bang shut behind us.
The house seemed dark after the slanting afternoon light on the street, and I had time to make out a group of four or five men huddled around something on the floor before a flashbulb went off and blinded me completely. Orlando must have been looking away when it popped, because a second later I heard him gasp, and then I felt his fingers on my arm.
“Told you,” Spurrier said, sounding satisfied, and my vision cleared and one of the men in front of me stepped aside and I saw Max Grover.
He lay on his right side in a shallow lake of blood that surrounded him completely, head to foot. The little white pebbles were teeth. Bloody footprints, many sets of them, went toward him and away from him. His knees were pulled up self-protectively, and his right arm was beneath him, twisted somehow, so that it extended behind his back.
His shirt, dark with blood, had been ripped open, baring one of his shoulders. The thing on the floor was a discard, the carelessly mutilated remains of some animal traditionally eaten on a holiday, the way a turkey carcass might look to a turkey. Nothing that had been Max was left.