Robert Crais - The Monkey

No chance. Maybe Mort had ripped off the dope but there was no way Ellen had known about it. Mort, I hadn’t met, hadn’t touched, hadn’t sat with. Ellen, we’d breathed the same air. If Mort had ripped off the Crown jewels of London, Ellen hadn’t known it. She’d been enduring, going through the necessary chore of shopping for groceries to feed her kids, probably wondering why life had turned so unfair since leaving Kansas when a man or men approached to show her just how unfair life could get. They would take her somewhere and ask her about the dope and maybe hurt her. And she would cry and maybe be angry but mostly be scared. After a while, when the fear wasn’t so new and her head began to work, she’d think of me. Mr. White Knight. Dragons slain. Maidens rescued. She’d say, “Mr. Cole has it,” because that would take the heat off her and maybe bring me into it and I could help. Maybe.

I finished the sandwich and the third Heineken and put the wax paper in the waste basket and the empty bottle beside the other two. Okay, Ellen, I’m your guy. Shield shined and charger shod. I got up and fished around in the little cooler by the file cabinet and found a Miller High Life. The Champagne of Bottled Beers. Domingo Garcia Duran has a couple of thugs deliver me and lays it out like he’s talking to a dog who can’t repeat it or report it or use the information in any way. Not that I had anything to repeat or report. I could tie Mort to Duran’s little party through Kimberly Marsh and Garrett Rice, but Duran had admitted that much and would probably be willing to admit it again. He hadn’t admitted offing Mort or holding Ellen and the boy. All I had for evidence was a phone call from Mort to Kimberly where Mort said he was in trouble with someone named Dom. Big deal. Still, I could run to the cops and let them worry about digging up the evidence. Maybe Duran didn’t care. Maybe he was so connected he could take the heat and shut off or divert an investigation. Maybe if he couldn’t, his friend Rudy Gambino could. Rudy Gambino. Christ. I had seen Rudy Gambino once in Houston before I became an op. He was being led through the lobby of the Whitworth Hotel, surrounded by a swarm of attorneys and state marshals, on his way to face charges of statutory rape, rape, mayhem, assault, and sodomy against a twelve-year-old girl. Quite a guy, that Rudy. The charges were later dropped.

I finished the Miller and put it with the other empties. Saturday during a Dodgers game the pile would look respectable. Midweek during a case made me look like a drunkard. I dialed Lou Poitras. “You ever hear of a guy, Domingo Garcia Duran?”

“Runs a bodywork shop on Alvarado.”

“Different Duran. This guy used to fight bulls. Now he’s rich, has investments, friends, like that.”

“This got anything to do with Lang?”

I ignored him. “This guy, he’s seen around with Rudy Gambino and those guys. Think you could ask around, see what kind of weight he could handle?”

“You mean like, can he get a ticket fixed? Like that?”

“Like that.”

“You didn’t answer me, Hound Dog.”

“No, it doesn’t have anything to do with Lang.”

There was a pause. “Okay,” he said, and hung up. I frowned at the phone. Galahad lying to Percival. It made me feel small.

I brought my typewriter from its little stand in the corner over to the desk and typed up a complete report from the time Ellen Lang hired me three days ago until Kato brought me back to the building. When I finished, it was four single-spaced pages long. I corrected the typos, numbered, dated, and signed each page, then brought them to the insurance office across the hall. The secretary there lets me use their copy machine whenever the boss’ door is closed. It was closed. I made two copies and tried not to breathe in the secretary’s face. I took the copies back to my office, signed and dated each sheet again and wrote in longhand that there should be no erasures or deletions from any page. The original and one copy went into my office file. The other I sealed in an envelope, stamped, and addressed it to my home. Then I went down, put the letter in the drop outside the bank, and went back into the deli. I bought a bottle of aspirin and a large black coffee to go. I chewed four of the aspirin while the blonde watched, then took the steps, two at a time, all the way up. For every sin, there must be penance.

Back in the office I ate two more aspirin, sipped the coffee, and thought about what I might do. Ellen and the boy would be safe as long as Duran thought he could trade them for the dope, only I had no dope to trade. Maybe I could break into his manse at three in the morning, ram a gun in his mouth, and demand their release. Unh-huh. Maybe I could kite some bad checks, score a hundred grand worth of dope, and pull the trade that way. Unh-huh. The problem was that once Duran had the dope, Ellen and Perry had to disappear. Wouldn’t matter how connected he was, he couldn’t buck eyewitness testimony. And that meant Elvis had to disappear, too. I watched Pinocchio’s eyes move back and forth. Portrait of the investigator: young man in search of a plan.

Maybe I could poke around and trip over some heretofore unknown bit of evidence. I dug out the rolodex card with Garrett Rice’s phone numbers and dialed his office. A woman answered, “Mr. Rice’s office,” and told me he’d gone for the day. I asked if Mr. Tyner was about. She said he had gone with Mr. Rice. I dialed Rice’s home number and waited while it rang. Maybe Garrett Rice knew something he wasn’t telling. Maybe I could use some form of nonlethal persuasion to find out. On the fifteenth ring I hung up. Not home. Some plan, all right.

I took out my wallet and looked at the license number that Joe Pike had copied off the Nova, then called a lady at the Department of Motor Vehicles. I identified myself, gave her the number of my PI license, and asked for the Nova’s registration. She told me to wait, then came back with a name and an address. I thanked her, hung up, then finished the coffee. The beer and the aspirin had helped my back. I pulled on the shoulder rig without too much pain, got the Dan Wesson out of my desk, put on the cotton jacket, and went out. It was eight minutes after four.

I still didn’t have a plan. Maybe the guys in the Nova, maybe they had a plan. Maybe I could borrow it.

Forty minutes later I turned down a small residential street in an older part of Los Angeles between Echo Park and Dodger Stadium. The houses were flat-topped stucco bungalows, mostly off-white or sand or yellow in color. Most had porches and most of the porches had tricycles and big potted geraniums and old Chicano women sitting in lawn chairs. You could smell chili sauce and machaca simmering and the doughy scent of fresh, hand-thrown flour tortillas. It was a good, clean smell.

The DMV had said that the dark blue Nova belonged to a man named Arturo Sanchez who lived in the fourth house from the corner on the north side of the street. It was a light brown bungalow with a two-strip drive, a porch, and four ratty rose bushes. The Nova wasn’t in the drive, nor was it parked on the street. I cruised past the house to the end of the block and turned into a little street-corner shopping center. There was a laundromat and a 7-Eleven and a taco stand and a billboard advertising Virginia Slims,?Hiciste mucho progreso, chiquita!

I parked under the Virginia Slims sign, bought a taco and an iced tea, and sat with them at one of the little picnic benches in a place where I could watch Arturo Sanchez’s house. It was a real taco, with chunk beef and chilis, fried in oil and doused with the sort of sauce that would bring a Taco Bell taco to its knees. Heaven. I had finished the first and started on a second when the blue Nova turned down the street and into Sanchez’s drive. The poor man’s Charles Bronson got out, looking sullen, kicked at something on the ground, kicked at it again, then entered the front door. Still tough, all right.