Robert Crais - The Monkey

I peeled out of the parking lot and laid a strip of Goodyear rubber halfway down the street.

Ten minutes later I was parked across from the Burbank Studios and walking back toward Garrett Rice’s office. The backhoe and the bulldozer were tearing up the little parking lot and kicking up a lot of dust that I had to walk through to get to the stairs. Rice’s door was closed and locked. I knocked and looked through the glass panel next to the door. The outer office was dark, Rice’s inner office darker still. I went to the next office.

The door was propped open, and an almost-pretty blonde in a green LaCoste shirt was fanning herself with a Daily Variety behind the desk. She raised her eyebrows at me, something my mother had done quite a bit. I said, “Has Mr. Rice been in?”

“I don’t think so, today. Sheila left about a half hour ago.”

“Sheila the secretary?”

“Unh-huh. You an actor?”

“Look sorta like John Cassavetes, right?”

She stuck her lips out and shook her head. “No, you just have the look, that’s all. I know the look. Hungry.”

“A man is defined by his appetites.”

Her eyes smiled. “Unh-huh.”

I gave her one of my better smiles and walked loudly back to the stairs, waited a few seconds to see if she’d stir, then eased back to Rice’s door, picked the lock, and let myself in.

Nothing much had changed since the last time I was there. The furnishings were still cheap, the dead mouse stain still marked the couch, the plants still clung to life. There were crumbs beneath the couch cushions, along with three pennies, a nickel, two dimes, and a Winston cigarette. The top three drawers of the file cabinet held yellowing scripts and news clippings, and articles and short stories that had been snipped from magazines. The bottom drawer was actors’ resumes and correspondence and interoffice memos. More than one of the memos warned Rice against any further evidence of copyright infringement.

Behind the memos there was a mason jar of marijuana, two packs of Zig Zag papers, and three porno magazines. One titled Lesbian Delight , another Women in Pain, and the last Little Lovers. Little Lovers was kids.

I took a deep breath and stood up and felt tired. You feel tired a lot in this business.

I shredded Little Lovers into a metal waste can and brought the can over to the window looking out at the water tower. There was a book of matches in the top drawer of the desk. I put the can beneath the window and burned away the images of the children and what some animal had made those children do. If Rice walked in, maybe I’d burn him, too.

When I finished with that I went through the rest of the desk. There was no cocaine. No clues to Garrett Rice’s whereabouts. No unexpected or surprising evidence. In the middle drawer on the right side of his desk there was a small yellowed envelope postmarked June 1958. It was a handwritten note from Jane Fonda, saying how much she had enjoyed working with Garrett during a recent summer stock production and that Garrett was one of the most professional stage managers it had been her pleasure to meet. It was signed, Love, Jane. The edges of the note and the envelope were smudged and gray, as if Rice took it out and read it often.

I went out to the secretary’s office and checked her calendar. There weren’t any special notes or appointments scheduled for Mr. Rice. There weren’t even any unspecial ones. I looked up Garrett Rice in her rolodex and pulled the card. It had his home phone, which I already had, but it also had his home address, which I didn’t. I gave him a call, let it ring twenty-two times, then hung up. Maybe he was taking an early lunch.

I called my office and had the answer machine play back the messages. There weren’t any. I didn’t like that. After last night, the Eskimo should’ve called. I punched another line and dialed my house.

One ring. “Pike.”

“There’s an address book upstairs on the left side of the phone. I need Cleon Tyner’s home number.”

“Wait.”

In a few moments the upstairs extension lifted and Pike gave me the number.

“Ellen okay?” I said.

“She likes to wait on people.”

“It’s all she knows how to do.”

“She’s cleaning the house. If you came back now, she’d probably wash your car.”

“Have her check the Cherokee. It looked a little dirty on my way out this morning.”

Pike gave me Hard Silence. Then: “How’d it go with the cops?”

I told him.

“Special Operations,” he said. “That’s shit.”

“Close enough to smell bad.”

“Poitras is good. Poitras won’t shit you.”

“Poitras doesn’t like it any more than me. Someone up the line yanks the deal from Poitras, this asshole O’Bannon tells me to back away. Nobody knows anything. If it’s a buy-out then they’re selling the kid to let Duran handle us himself.”

“What’s Cleon got to do with this?”

“He was working for Garrett Rice. Only I can’t see Cleon on the other side. I can’t see him selling muscle to take down a dope deal. You know Cleon.”

“People change.”

“You haven’t changed since 1975.”

“Other people.”

I hung up, then dialed Cleon Tyner. A woman with a hoarse bar singers voice answered.

I said, “I was trying to get Eartha Kitt for the Sands, but everybody says Betty Tyner is sexier.”

She laughed. “Oh? And how would everybody know?”

“Her walk, her talk-”

“The way she crawls on her belly like a reptile?”

I said, “Now you’re embarrassing me.”

She laughed louder, the strong healthy laugh of a woman at ease with herself. We spent a few minutes bringing each other up to date and trading friendly insults before she said, “Well, since you ain’t asked me to marry you yet, I’ll bet you’re calling for that shiftless brother of mine.”

“Amazing. The woman not only is fantastic in bed, but she mind-reads, too.”

“How you think I got to be so fantastic?”

“Practice?”

She suggested an anatomical impossibility. “Cleon’s working. He ain’t been here for a couple of days.”

“He go out of town?”

“I don’t know, babe. He just said something about staying with the client. Said the man was walking sideways he was so scared.”

We shot the breeze another few minutes, with me promising to give a call soon, and her saying I’d better, then we hung up. The door in the next office closed, and the blonde secretary walked by, carrying a large blue purse. She didn’t glance in and she didn’t see me sitting in the dark at Sheila’s desk, staring at Garrett Rice’s address.

I opened the door enough to see that no one was on the walk, then let myself out and drove to Garrett Rice’s house in the hills above the Sunset Strip.

Rice lived in a low-slung white stucco modern on a little cul-de-sac off Sunset Plaza Drive. It was the sort of place that went for half a million plus today, but if you were lucky enough to be working in the sixties it didn’t cost you more than eighty or ninety thou. I drove into the cul-de-sac, circled, then parked at the curb in front of Rice’s house. Each house was set back enough to have some sort of gate and some sort of motor court and some sort of lush greenery, mostly ivy and banana trees and giant ferns. There were walls between each house and tall skinny cyprus so you wouldn’t have to see the next guy’s roofline, and none of the houses had very much in the way of windows looking out toward the street. Easier to forget the world if you didn’t have to see it. They probably gave great block parties, though.

I walked up through the little motor court to Garrett Rice’s door. There was a little white form envelope from the LAPD thumbtacked to the jamb. Inside there would be a little white form note informing ( Mr. Garrett Rice) that (officer’s name written in) wished to speak with him and requesting that (Mr. Garrett Rice) call (officer’s phone number) at his earliest opportunity. I had seen these notes before. I wondered if Elliot Ness ever saw them. Probably what killed him.