"Do I look like a man who'd hold something back?" Neither of us said anything, so he crossed himself. "You've got it," he said. "On my mother's grave."
"Your mother's alive," Eleanor said.
"How do you know?" Hammond said, looking surprised.
"You're not married," Eleanor said, "and you see your mother often. It's written all over your face."
"Well, I'll be damned," Hammond said.
"Where, specifically?" I asked, looking at Hammond's face.
"His forehead," Eleanor said.
"My mother notwithstanding," Hammond said, "you've got a deal. What's the other murder?"
"Friday night in Santa Monica," I said.
"Huh?"
"The guy I mentioned, Harker or Fauntleroy." Hammond still looked blank. "In Santa Monica," I said again.
Hammond said nothing.
"In the TraveLodge, for Christ's sake. How many murders were there in the Santa Monica TraveLodge on Friday night?"
Hammond laid down his notebook and spread two empty hands. "None," he said.
Chapter 14
That was what I got for not reading the papers. I'd been assuming all along that Harker's death had been reported, when obviously a clean-up squad had been waiting in the wings. For whatever reason, they'd waited until I'd cleared out and then sent in the housekeepers. And for whatever reason, I told myself again, they'd left me alive.
So, we were dealing with a number of people. At least three, I figured: one to kill Harker, probably one more to help him, as Hamlet said, to lug the guts into the neighbor room-bodies are heavy-and one to go to my house and slip the cassette out of my answering machine. One or more of them had obviously been listening in when Harker called me, and Harker had probably known it but it hadn't worried him. He'd thought he was part of the gang.
On the whole, that made me happy. The more people you have involved in a murder, the more likely it is that one of them will do something stupid.
Hollering over the music in the Red Dog, Hammond had made it clear that, as far as he was concerned, I was the stupid one. If I'd done what I was supposed to do, which is to say call the cops, they'd have a body. He'd used language that had turned Eleanor scarlet, and I'd had no choice but to listen. As we staggered out of the Red Dog and into the rain on Hollywood Boulevard, I'd asked whether our deal still stood.
Hammond didn't seem to notice the rain. He stood there, solid and bulky, with water streaming down his face, and thought for a long wet moment.
"With a difference," he finally said. "The information is two-way. I get everything you get." He really wanted out of Records.
"Al," I said, "of course. I'd assumed that all along."
"Honey," Hammond said to Eleanor, who was shivering at my side, "go home with Peppi. She's a straighter guy than your buddy here."
"He's always been a liar," she said. So much for loyalty.
"All of it, Simeon," Hammond said to me. "And I mean it. Investigators' licenses are precarious things."
I got my legs to wobbling. "Look," I said, "you're making me weak in the knees."
Hammond took Eleanor's hand in both of his. "You're a beautiful little thing," he said, "and it's been a pleasure to meet you. Good-bye, jerk," he said to me. He turned abruptly and walked away into the rain. He hardly weaved at all.
"What a sweet man," Eleanor said. "His mother is a very lucky woman."
"Well, you beautiful little thing," I said, "where to now?"
"Home. We've got a lot to do tomorrow."
We hadn't even hit the Santa Monica freeway when the man on the radio said that there'd been a mudslide in Topanga, closing the boulevard from the Pacific Coast Highway to Old Canyon.
"Well, shit," I said. "That's an extra fifty miles."
"Stay at my place," she said absently.
"You're kidding," I said. Hope springs eternal.
"Why not? The couch is comfortable."
Hope, as Emily Dickinson once wrote, is a thing with feathers, and Eleanor had just twisted its neck. For lack of anything more interesting to do, I turned the windshield wipers onto high, and they responded by swinging back and forth at exactly the same rate as before. The silence in the car lengthened in an ominous fashion. I turned right from La Brea onto the long freeway on-ramp, heading west.
"Anyway," she finally said, "if you sleep on my couch you won't be sleeping with that Roxy or whatever her name is." She rapped her fingernails sharply against the window.
I swallowed a couple of times and wondered how she knew about Roxanne Then I stopped wondering. The Women's Network, the world's most successful subversive society, had done its stuff. "Who am I supposed to sleep with?" I said, more defensively than I would have liked. "My teddy bear wore out years ago."
"Simeon," she said with elaborate unconcern, "I don't care who you sleep with, as long as you don't catch anything. I mean, I certainly hope you don't think I'm being possessive."
Childishly I sped up; Eleanor hated it when I drove fast. This time, though, she seemed determined to ignore it. She chewed distractedly on the ends of her hair and gazed out the window on her side.
"I want to interview the Speaker and her mother," she finally said, "and that Dr. Merryman you keep talking about."
"Great," I said. "And Happy Trails to you."
"Are you going to come along?"
"They know me."
"So what? They don't know you're a detective, do they?"
"No, but they know my name isn't Algernon Swinburne."
"Good thing. I was getting tired of that name anyway. I couldn't keep calling you Algy. It sounds like something that grows in a pool."
"This is dangerous, Eleanor," I said for perhaps the twelfth time. "These folks kill people."
"Why is it okay for you and not for me?" she asked with a sudden burst of energy. "Is murder something new, some passing fad? Do you think I like it when you swashbuckle around all night, like some Boy Scout fantasy, and come home with holes in your head? This is the first time since you started this stupid job that I've gotten a chance to see what it's all about. So it's dangerous. So is driving like a maniac when it's raining. Simeon, would you please slow down?"
"Then you're in this for keeps," I said.
"Oh, come on. Stop playing Lochinvar. I don't want to get rescued. There's a story here. It could make a big difference in my life. The New Age is getting old. Are you going to slow down or not?"
I eased my foot from the accelerator. "One of the Speakers is dead," I said. "Let's try to locate the one who isn't. She couldn't be more than seventeen by now."
"What's her name?"
I didn't know, and it made me feel dumb. "Get it from Chantra," I said. "If she doesn't have it, we'll go downtown to that hotel the Church owns and pick up some literature. And where is Mr. Ellspeth? The current Speaker must have a father, but the Church only books mother-daughter acts."
"Why is he important?"
"I don't know that he is. But maybe he's on the outside wishing he were in. If so, he could be resentful enough to talk to us."
"Like Wilburforce," she said.
"Like Wilburforce. Go into the morgue at the Times, if you can do it without having to explain what you're doing to too many people. Can you?"
"I don't know. I've never looked in the morgue before. I've only worked for them a little while. Morgue," she said. "What an awful word. What am I supposed to be looking for?"
"Anything you can find on the Church. Or on the Congregation. Look for stories on the death of a girl named Anna Klein."
"Why and when?"
"She was the Church's first Speaker. I don't know when, but it had to be within the last seven or eight years. The Church is only twelve years old."
"The one who died, right? Some kind of accident?"