"I had it in my car one night," he said. "I was barhopping… I must have hit every place on the — West Side of town. I got arrested for drunk driving about two in the morning. I bailed out that night. It wasn't until two or three days later that I realized the gun was missing. Yes, I know it's illegal to carry a loaded gun around in one's car. My answer to that is that I'd rather be safe than sorry. I'd rather be tried by twelve than carried by six. I'm ready to kill to protect myself and I don't care who knows it."
"Where?…"
Artie raised his hands and shook his head at the same time. "I have no idea where I lost it. It could have been stolen from my car at any one of eight or ten bars we hit that night. I had it in the glove compartment."
"Where were you arrested?"
"Right here in the city. On La Cienega. I was driving south on La Cienega. I'm pretty sure it was south. I was bombed, man. Three sheets to the wind. Soused. My girl friend was with me. She said I drank twenty grasshoppers during the course of the evening. If you so much as showed me a bottle of crème de menthe right now, I'd throw up right on this desk. Since it happened I drink only vodka on the rocks. You wanna know why? It's because I hate vodka. I drink less. For me it's the answer."
"What happened to your car after you were arrested?" Carr said.
"The police impounded it I guess. My girl friend picked it up for me the next day. The hangover was so bad I couldn't get out of-"
"Do you have a copy of the impound receipt?"
Artie pulled open the center drawer of the desk and rummaged through a mound of papers. "My lady friend stops by now and then to help me with the paperwork around here. Great gal. Just divorced from Trent Beckwith, the producer. She bought me a Rolex for my birthday … here it is." He pulled a blue receipt from the drawer and handed it to Carr. It was a receipt from a police contract tow service.
"May I keep this?"
"Sure," Artie said.
Charles Carr stood up to leave.
"You should stop by sometime when you have time to fire. I like to have cops around."
"Thanks," Carr said, moving to the door.
"The women around here all have lots of bucks. Lots of bucks and lots of time on their hands."
Carr opened the door, paused briefly. "Why didn't you report the gun missing?"
"I was embarrassed to tell the police I couldn't remember where I'd been that night."
"Thanks again," Carr said. He walked out the door.
It was Saturday morning.
Three weeks had passed since Jack Kelly had been shot. With the single exception of Carr's trip to Las Vegas with Sally, he hadn't taken a day off. As he parked at the curb in front of the auto impound yard, Carr realized that for the last few days he'd been waking up tired and staying that way all day … and he'd been drinking more than usual. He rubbed his eyes and got out of the sedan.
He walked past an open chain link gate into a lot filled with cars. A doorless shack that served as an office was next to the gate. Most of them were luxury cars; a few were smashed up, including a purple Maserati that looked like it had been crushed with a steamroller. All the vehicles bore grease-penciled numbers on the windshields.
Carr showed his badge to a puffy-eyed heavy woman whose feet rested on a grease-covered table in the shack. She wore a dingy mechanic's shirt and trousers and a smudged baseball hat that covered her closely cropped gray hair. She was reading race results.
"What can I do ya for?" she said in a nasal voice that reminded Carr of male comedians who imitated women.
Carr handed her an impound receipt. "I'm tracing a gun," he said. "The man whom the gun is registered to told me that he was arrested for drunk driving a couple of months ago, about a mile from here. The Beverly Hills Police booked him and impounded his car. He says the gun was missing from the trunk of his car when he checked it out of this lot."
"Did he make out a theft report?" she asked.
"He didn't report the gun missing because he didn't notice it was gone until a week or so after he'd bailed out and picked up his car. He figured making a theft report wouldn't help him get the gun back."
"People say things like that all the time," the woman said. As she spoke Carr noticed snuff between her lower lip and gum. She examined the impound receipt.
"May I see your copy of the impound receipt?" Carr said.
"It'll be the same as this copy except for the arresting officer's signature." The woman slung her feet off the table and got up, moving over to a cardboard box in the corner of the shack. Squatting down, she flipped through folders full of receipts. A short time later she stood up holding a blue copy of an impound receipt, handed it to Carr and returned to her chair.
Carr held the paper to the light of the grease-covered window. The signature line on the bottom of the printed form read:
D. Piper Serial # 1439
Beverly Hills P.D.
Carr handed the receipt back to the woman. "Thanks," he said.
"Sure." The woman turned a page of the newspaper. "Everyone in this town claims to have valuables stolen from their car. Usually it's cameras … five- and six-hundred-dollar cameras." She looked up. "Can you imagine people that can afford to drive thirty- and forty-thousand-dollar cars chiseling an insurance company for five hundred bucks?"
"Yes."
The woman shook her head, turned another page.
Carr returned to his sedan and wrote the name D. Piper in his notebook. He put a question mark after the name and drove off.
It took him less than half an hour to drive to Jack Kelly's tract-style home in Orange County. As usual, he made a wrong turn or two on identical cul-de-sacs before he found it … even the curbside mailboxes in front of the newly built stucco row houses were the same. He parked and, because it was still early, headed straight for the garage, hoisting its heavy door. The lawn mower was in the corner where he'd left it a week earlier. He rolled it along the driveway and onto the lawn, first mowing a strip of grass along the sidewalk.
Rose Kelly waved at him from the front window, then hurried out the front door. She wore a blue housecoat. "There's no need to do that," she said. "Jack's coming home from the hospital today. He gave me strict orders not to let you mow the lawn. He said he was perfectly well enough to do it himself. You know how he is."
Carr nodded and mowed another strip of turf.
"Breakfast will be ready when you're done," she said before returning to the house.
"No thanks, Rose," Carr called after her, though he was starving. "I'm in a hurry."
About an hour later Carr washed his hands at the kitchen sink before he sat down at the kitchen table in front of a platter of four eggs and what must have been half a pound of bacon. "I won't be able to eat all this."
"I'm so used to cooking for Jack…" she said as she washed out a frying pan. "I'm so excited about Jack coming home … and the boys… I'm glad they had a soccer game this morning. They'd be tearing the house apart in anticipation."
Carr smiled. He made it through half of the eggs and a sizable portion of the bacon.
Rose Kelly bustled around the kitchen, turning things on and off on the stove. She washed out another pan at the sink. "Jack told me that he's going to retire," she said. "Did he tell you?"
"He mentioned something about it."
Rose Kelly refilled his coffee cup. She returned the coffee pot to the stove and stood facing it. "He's doing it for us."
"What do you think of the idea?"
She turned towards him. "I think it's a great idea … if it's what Jack really wants. I'd love to have him home at a decent hour every night. But I know Jack. He's not suited very well for other kinds of work. He's too … I don't know what the word is … aggressive. He won't be happy doing anything else. I know that."
Carr sipped coffee. "Will you tell him that?"
"God spared Jack's life. The doctor said that he was lucky to have survived. I don't think the Lord saved him to spend the rest of his life just taking it easy. I don't think that." She stirred something on the stove for a while. "But on the other hand, I'm not going to encourage him to stay in law enforcement if he doesn't want to."