The Night Crew

'He's not what I expected,' Anna said. 'The prowler was fast, and the guy who shot Creek, hewas fast. Really fast. He had to be a young guy.'

'So we've got twopeople giving us a hard time?' He looked at her with thin amusement. 'And we can't find either one of them?'

The Philadelphia Grill was a baked-meatloaf-and-powered-potatoes place on Westwood, jammed into the lower corner of a colored-concrete building; it had a wraparound glass window, but the window was blocked with blinds pulled nearly shut.

Inside, the clientele seemed to hover over their coffee, arms circling the cups, as though somebody might try to take the coffee away from them; and they tended to look up whenever the door opened. The blinds, which blocked the view in, were open just enough that, from the inside, they could see out.

'There he is,' Anna muttered.

Tarpatkin looked like her idea of a crazy killer: his pitch-black hair, six inches long, streamed away from his narrow face, as though an electric current were running through it. He had thin black eyebrows over a long, bony nose; his lips were narrow, tight, and too pink, the only color in his face. He was dressed all in black, and was reading a tabloid-sized real-estate newspaper. He had one hand on a cup of tea, showing a tea-bag string and tag under his hand. He was wearing a heavy gold wedding band, but on his middle finger. An empty cup sat across the table from him. 'What if he's the guy?'

'Do you know him? Ever met him?' Harper said.

'No. I'd remember the face.'

'Then he's not the guy, because you know the killer, at least a little bit,' Harper said. 'Slide into the booth across from him; I'll get a chair.'

Tarpatkin watched them coming, eyes just over the top of the paper. His expression didn't change when Anna slid into the booth: 'Hi,' she said, smiling. Harper hooked a chair from an empty table across from the booth, turned in backward and sat down, just blocking Tarpatkin's route out of the booth.

'Mr Tarpatkinname's Harper, and my friend here is Anna.'

'Hello, Anna,' Tarpatkin said. 'Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?'

'No, no, it's a gun,' Anna said pleasantly.

'We'd show it to you, but in here'Harper looked around'somebody might get excited and we'd all start shooting.'

'What do you want?' Tarpatkin asked.

'Just need to talk,' Harper said.

'That's all you guys ever want,' Tarpatkin said. 'Talk. Then your ass winds up in jail.'

'What?' Anna's eyebrows went up and she glanced uncertainly at Harper.

Tarpatkin caught it, and clouded up: 'If you assholes ain't cops, you can get the fuck out of my booth.'

'We're not cops, but I used to be, and I still know a lot of deputies,' Harper said. 'The thing is, you're caught right in the middle of a major murder case and the cops are freaking out. You can talk to us, off the record, or talk to them, on the record.'

'You're talking bullshit, man, I don't know any murder mysteries.' His language veered from formal, almost scholarly, to the street, and then back again; he might have been two people. Tarpatkin shook out the newspaper, as though he were about to resume reading.

'One of your clients, Jason O'Brien, got taken off in a really bad way a couple of days ago. Beat to death, carved up with a knife.' When Harper said it, Anna was watching Tarpatkin's eyes: they flickered when Jason's name was mentioned. 'And maybe you know a guy named Sean MacAllister?'

Another flicker: 'He knows them both,' Anna said to Harper, not taking her eyes off Tarpatkin.

Tarpatkin didn't deny it: this was news he could use. 'Carved up?'

'You know a guy who likes knives?' Harper asked.

Tarpatkin thought for a second, then said, 'I know a couple of them, but they don't know those two. When did this happen? I haven't seen anything about it in the paper.'

Anna told him, briefly, and then said, 'We're looking for a guy selling wizards. We understand you don't, but we're hoping that you might know who does. Right around herethe university neighborhood.'

Tarpatkin looked her over for a moment, then said, 'Honey, I don't know what kind of mission you're on, but you really don't want to mess around with those people. They're amateursthey're crazy and they'll kill you for a nickel.'

'Somebody might be trying to kill me for free,' Anna said. 'We're trying to get him to stop.'

'Huh.' He pulled at his goatee, then said, 'Let me give you fifteen seconds on how the smart part of this business worksand for the tape recorder, if you're wearing one, you'll notice that this is all hypothetical.'

He pulled a napkin out of a chrome napkin holder and smoothed it on the tabletop. Anna thought he was going to write on it, but then he started folding it as he talked: L.A.-diner origami. 'Suppose you got a small-time dealer,' Tarpatkin said. 'He's got maybe seventy-five, a hundred regular customers. He only takes new customers from recommendations, and only after looking them over.

'This guy is making, say, ten grand a week after expenses, no taxes. He flies over to the Bahamas a few times a year and makes a deposit, takes a little vacation. In ten years, with some careful investments, he's got eight or ten million in the bank, and he moves to the Bahamas full time. Or Mexico. Costa Rica. Somewhere.

'If he's smooth, he don't have to worry too much about the cops, because he's such a small-timer, and when they come around, he cooperates. The cops always want the big guysChrist, if they busted everybody like this small-timer, they'd have to build twenty new jails. So, they don't. I mean, hey, he's a small businessman. A little better than insurance, maybe not so good as selling stocks and bonds.'

Anna broke in: 'But these other guys are different.'

Tarpatkin shook a finger at her, like a schoolmaster making a point. 'I'm coming to that, honeythey're very different. They go into the dope business, and they think, "If I sell a pound of crank, I make ten thousand dollars. If I sell a ton of crank, I make twenty million dollars. So I'll sell a ton of crank. This year."

'And since they've been to the movies, they know the business is dangerous. So they buy a load of guns and knives and dynamite and chain saws and whatever else they can think of. Then to get their heads right, they get into the product themselves. The next thing you know, you've got these drug freaks with guns and dynamite and chain saws, and there's crank all over the street and everybody's going crazy looking for themcompetitors, cops, DBA. They always find them. Go to jail, don't get your twenty million. Or wind up in a bush somewhere, with your head cut off.'

He shook his head sadly, and asked in his street patois: 'Is this any fuckin' way to run a fuckin' business?' And then back to the scholar: 'I think not. But these are the people who are selling your wizards.'

'So can you put us onto somebody?'

Tarpatkin shook his head. 'No, I can't. I stay away from those people. However, if one of you has a cell phoneor a regular phone, for that matterI could ask around and call you.'

'So you wanna talk to the cops,' Harper said.

'No. But I don't know anythingnot what you want. Why would I? I don't hang with those people. I stay as far away as I can.'

'That's bull,' Harper said. 'You guys have always got your ears to the ground.'

Tarpatkin shrugged: 'Well, you could drag me out into the street and beat the shit outa me until I tell you what you want. except that I don't know it.'

Anna and Harper looked at each other, and then Anna dug in her purse, found a pen and wrote her cell phone number on Tarpatkin's folded napkin. 'Call me anytime,' she said.

'I will. You're a little sweetie.'

'About your hypothetical dealer sending his hypothetical money to the Bahamas,' Anna said. 'How long has he been doing this, hypothetically?'

'Could be eight years,' Tarpatkin said. He bobbed his head and smiled; one of his canine teeth was solid gold, and it winked at her from beneath his ratty mustache.

Outside, Harper said, 'I don't know what we could do: all we got is threats of siccing the cops on him.'