Then I went home. I decided to start with the eight who'd been single. I'd gotten their addresses at the time of enlistment; now I called up local directories and got the phone numbers for those addresses. At six of the eight, someone answered, none of them the subject. Only two knew, or admitted knowing, the person I was calling about. I pitched myself as an old army buddy trying to get in touch, and got addresses for the two; neither was in Ensenada.
Then I called up the Ensenada directory; two of the others were listed there. That left me with four to go. I called up the directories for their pre-enlistment home towns, then called the listed numbers. I put on a mild Finnish accent, in case people were suspicious that I was police. People don't usually associate foreign accents with police, except in some places Hispanic or Oriental accents.
One number got me an L.A. family. My man, Robert Myers, was their son. Until recently he'd lived in Ensenada, Mexico, they said, where he'd done security work and traveled a lot. But three weeks previous they'd called him and gotten a recording in Spanish. Their college-student daughter told them it meant the number was out of service. So they'd written to him. The letter had been returned: he was no longer at that address, and had left no forwarding address.
I promised them I'd let them know if I learned where he was, and the daughter gave me the names of three L.A. friends of his. The directory gave me numbers for two of them. The third was a Jesse Johnson. There were eight Jesse Johnsons listed, along with maybe thirty J. Johnsons, so I skipped him. At one of the two numbers, for an Osazi Gorman, a woman answered. She was suspicious and hostile, and said her husband didn't know any Robert Myers.
At the other number, a man answered. He told me he'd heard, a week or so earlier, that Robert was in town, but he hadn't seen him. And if his parents hadn't seen him, then . . . After a long hesitation, he suggested I call Osazi Gorman. There was also an Arnette Jones who was more likely than anyone else to have seen him, but Jones had no regular address. He hung out around Lafayette-MacArthur Park a lot, and was easy to recognize. An ex-Colorado State basketball player, he was seven feet tall and usually wore a feathered headdress.
You work at UCLA, so you probably live in Westwood, and might not be familiar with those midtown parks. They've pretty much been taken over by street people and assorted characters, many of them doing drugs. Was Myers in trouble? Maybe on drugs and gotten fired? Or run away? If SVI was smartly run, and it probably was, they wouldn't keep someone on the payroll who used drugs. He might blab; even sell information. Or had Myers gotten crosswise of them for some other reason? In either case they might not want him running loose.
Had Leo McCarver been another runaway from VSI?
It was conceivable that Myers was still with them, had gone underground for them on some job, though my gut reaction to that was rejection.
But the real question was, could Robert Myers give me any information regarding Christman.
30
MacARTHUR PARK
I'd planned to eat breakfast at home the next morning. I got up more than early enough, showered, shaved, and being alone in the apartment, turned on the radio. The first thing I heard was a news item about a newly reported development by a Brit research project. They'd built what they called a spatial transposer, and tried to move a rock from one side of their lab to another with it. Somehow it was supposed to relocate without moving through the intervening space! They transposed it, all right, but it arrived as a little pile of molecular dust.
Back to the drawing board. Yeah. But when they perfected it, and they probably would . . . What a terrorist could do with something like that! Or a dictator, or anyone else who was ruthless. What price peace then? Or privacy? What would happen to wilderness areas? Wildlife refuges? Homes? Convents for chrissake! Let alone what it would do to people's sense of what kind of universe they lived in. This report by itself would stimulate a new spike of craziness for the newscasts to tell about.
With that on my mind, I finished dressing without noticing. The next thing I knew, I'd put on my shoulder holster and was shrugging into my jacket without fixing breakfast. To hell with it, I decided, I could eat at Morey's. Tuuli'd be flying home later that day, and maybe the world would seem right again.
I left for work. Twenty minutes later I was driving south on Fairfax, still thinking about the spatial transposer and half listening to music on the radio. Then KMET interrupted with a special news bulletin. According to the station's traffic floater, a huge explosion in Van Nuys, a couple of minutes earlier, had done massive damage to an apartment building in the vicinity of Woodman Avenue, south of Ventura Boulevard.
My stomach spasmed and I jerked over toward the side of the street, braking, almost hitting a parked car and damned near getting rear-ended. Horns blared. For a minute I just sat there, till someone got out of a car and came over to see if I was all right. He thought I'd had a seizure of some kind, which I guess in a way I had. I thanked the guy, and told him I'd be all right; that I'd just heard on the radio my apartment house had been blown up. Because I had no doubt at all what building it was. A day later, Tuuli would have been there asleep when the place blew. If I'd eaten at home as planned, I'd have been there. Meanwhile, the building security guys were ours. Had been ours. I realized then that I'd heard the explosion and ignored it, dismissed it. As if it might be some demolition contractor bringing down an old high rise.
I drove on to work but didn't go to Morey's. Breakfast didn't interest me then. Instead I went into the lobby, pressed the up button, and waited for an elevator. When one arrived, who should step out but Rossi and Steinhorn, getting an early start on their day. I took myself totally by surprise. I slammed Steinhorn right between the eyes, driving him back into the elevator cab, stunning him and breaking his nose. Grabbing his feet, I dragged him back out in the lobby, got in the cab, and started upstairs, leaving poor Rossi staring, his lower jaw hanging down on his chest. Steinhorn was bleeding all over himself.
When I got upstairs, I didn't know what the hell to do, so I just sat down in reception. A minute later Joe came out of his office looking terrible. He saw me there, and asked if Tuuli was still out of town. He'd just gotten a call from one of the night guards who'd gotten off duty at 6:05; at the apartment. He'd stopped for breakfast at a Clancy's a few blocks from there—had finished eating and was drinking his coffee—when a huge explosion broke all the tempered glass windows in the restaurant.
He'd had a feeling it might have been "his" building, and had driven back, bleeding from glass cuts. It had been a car bomb, apparently on the entrance ramp to the underground garage. The whole front half of the building was rubble; there was even major damage to the building across the street. No way the entrance or garage guards could have survived. The hall man might have, possibly, if he'd been in the back of the building.
When he'd finished telling me, Joe went back into his office. Meanwhile Rossi had come up, and heard most of it. "Your partner," I told him, which made no sense to him at all. Made no sense, period. I started down the corridor, thinking how many people must have been killed. Most wouldn't have started for work yet. Kids wouldn't have left for school.
Rossi followed me into my own office. I knew what I had to do. First I removed the bug from the thermostat control; no use playing that game anymore. Then I called Tuuli. I told her what had happened, and to stay where she was a while longer. All after telling the computer to charge the call to my home phone, so the call and destination wouldn't be registered in the office computer.
When I disconnected, I told Rossi his partner was a plant, then asked myself aloud: "Why in hell have I been screwing around trying to get a line on Robert Myers, when one of the murderous assholes was sitting right here in our offices? And I knew it!" And I'd left him downstairs! I should have put him under citizen's arrest! Rossi said he'd told Steinhorn to go to the building infirmary, which was on the ground floor, so I called there. They hadn't seen him. I wasn't surprised. He'd realized his cover must be blown, and taken off. All the satisfaction I got from it was what Rossi told me: Steinhorn had been bleeding badly from the nose, and his eyes had started to swell.