I didn't drink or toke or add to the conversation, just threw in a ten when someone else went out to get a bushel of chicken wings from Colonel Sanders. The conversation soon left baseball and went to psychic stuff. Since the 2006 Stanford study of psychic phenomena, interest had surged on campuses.
The place was getting crowded. A girl who came in about the time the chicken wings arrived was a psychic photographer with a different shtick. Instead of people pointing their cameras at her and getting strange results, she pointed her Polaroid at other people. And my being a total stranger, she asked if she could take my picture.
"What does it do?" I asked. "Capture my soul?"
She laughed. "Maybe, in a sense. Usually I get a picture of the person surrounded by their aura."
"Kirlian photography?"
"No," someone else said, "better than that. Manuela uses ordinary Polaroid color film and gets the auras on that!"
"How does it work?"
She shrugged. I was standing; she was sitting on a tall kitchen stool. "Stand still and I'll shoot you," she said, so I did. After a few seconds she pulled the picture and stared at it. "Huh!" she said, "I never got one like this before." Two or three people looking over her shoulders seemed impressed too.
"Here." She handed it to me. It showed me, all right, but not in real time, and there wasn't any aura. It showed me standing behind Molly Cadigan's Town Van, peering in through the opened luggage doors. While from close behind me and a little to one side, an old man watched. Dimly you could see right through him! The farther down you got from his head, the more transparent, the less there he looked, but from what I could see of his feet, they were well above the pavement. His face was clear enough though, and from his expression, he did not wish me well.
Others crowded around to see. "How'd you do that, Manuela?" one of them asked.
"Darned if I know. I'm not sure it was me, this time. It felt as if someone, some spirit, was helping." She laughed then, pointing at the photo. "Not that one though. That is an evil spirit."
I just kind of sat there a while. This "evil spirit" was the wild card, the joker in the deck. Somehow it seemed to me he was behind the whole thing—Kelly Masters jumping into the scene, the apartment building blown up . . . The police recognizing Molly's van this evening, for chrissake! Though how someone like that communicated with people . . . But hell! Who else or what else knew I was using it?
Besides Molly. It could have been Molly. I couldn't have that though. I'd always been a good judge of character, and Molly wasn't someone who operated like that. She'd have . . . Geez! They'd trace her van and know where it came from! They'd probably been there already, and picked up Myers! I should have called! Where in hell was my head?!
"Can I use the phone?" I asked, loudly enough that whoever's place it was would hear. "Local call," I added.
"Go ahead," a guy said.
It was an old-fashioned voice-only phone. "Katey," I said, "is Molly there?"
Molly's voice came in then, on an extension. "Martti? Where the hell are you?"
"I'm not exactly sure, but I'm all right."
"The police just called, said my car was in a wreck. Totalled. I told them I'd loaned it to a friend. They said the driver was trying to elude a police cruiser and caused a pileup. They couldn't find him afterward; thought he must be wandering around hurt. They wanted to know your name, so I told them. Then I took Robert to stay with a friend of mine. A guy named Casey Jones. You want his number?"
I got it, memorized it, thanked her, and hung up. I didn't call Myers though. I just sat there awhile, not really thinking, just sort of mulling, turning over the same spadeful time after time and coming up with nothing. Finally I decided it was time to carry out my earlier plan, the one I had in mind when I'd left Molly's. I got up from my chair, Manuela, the psychic photographer, watching me. "You leaving too?" she asked.
"Yeah. I've got things I need to do."
She stood, and picked up her gadget bag. "So do I. You driving?"
"No. My car's in the shop. I'm walking."
"Maybe I can take you somewhere." She didn't wait for an answer, just went to the door with me and out into a lovely spring evening. It was nearly dark. "D'you know the spirit that helped me take the picture?" she asked.
"I'm not sure what you mean."
"It was a woman."
"Small?"
"Physically? Smaller than me." Manuela was a petite chicana, not a lot bigger than Tuuli, with small bones and fine features, about five-three and maybe a hundred pounds.
"How do you know?"
She shrugged. "You either know or you don't. Do you live around here?"
"Not close. I— I lived in the building that got bombed this morning."
Her eyes widened. "Jesus! Did you—lose anyone?"
She was thinking about the spirit, the female spirit she thought had helped her get the picture. I shook my head. "Acquaintances. My wife's out of town. Have you heard of Tuuli Waanila?"
"She's your wife? Tuuli Waanila's your wife?"
"Right."
"It must have been her then. Congratulations! . . . And to think I was going to make a pass at you!
"So where can I take you?"
Rather than tell her where I was headed, I had her drop me off at the Hollywood-Burbank Airport terminal. It wasn't that I didn't trust her. It just seemed wisest to keep things to myself. After she drove away, I turned and started walking. I had maybe a mile to go.
33
SETTING THINGS UP
Where I went was our security headquarters in an industrial section of north Burbank. It's where security crews are dispatched to short-term jobs. Prudential gets a lot of those: the grand opening of a new mall, a big celebrity party—that sort of thing. Guys logged in there by phone or radio when they reached the job, and it's the place they called their reports to at the end of their shifts. There are always guys without assignments, and it's where some of them would hang around and wait, reading or watching the tube, playing cards or pumping iron. At intervals, guys got physical exams there from a staff paramedic. Who also checked them for overweight. Joe doesn't mind a little overweight, luckily for me, but he won't stand for his guys getting actually fat. I knew some of the guys, and all of them knew who I was—sort of a celebrity investigator. I knew the senior sergeant in charge: Wayne Castro. "Martti!" he said when I came in. "How the hell are you?" It was obvious he didn't know I was in trouble. "What are you doing here amongst us peasants?"
"Is there a place we can talk, you and I? Privately? I'm on a case."
"Sure." He got up from his desk. "This way." They have a little debriefing room, and he took me inside. "How can I help?"
That's the attitude that made him senior sergeant in charge.
I wondered how private we really were there. Was that old man floating unseen beside us? I'd felt him before when he was. Hopefully I'd feel him if he was again.
"First I'm going to tell you what I've got in mind," I said. "If it sounds doable, I'll call Joe and check it out with him."
To begin with, I gave him the picture in brief, then told him what I had in mind. He turned really sober, but didn't let it throw him. After asking a few questions on details, he said it sounded doable—scary but doable. With Joe's approval. He'd have to call in some guys listed as occasionals—mostly off-duty sheriff's deputies and police from outlying communities, who moonlight with us from time to time.
I wasn't going to call Joe from there. If his house phone was monitored, they'd get my location. Instead I borrowed a company car and drove a few miles to North Hollywood, where I called from an outdoor booth at a shopping center. I caught him at home.