Питер Робинсон - No Cure for Love

All the text said was, “Sarah Sally Sarah Sally Sarah Sally Sarah... ” over and over again in a variety of fonts. Pretty unimaginative, Arvo thought. You’d think the bastard could at least have written her a poem or two. Wasn’t he supposed to be creative? When Arvo put the magazine down he felt like washing his hands.

“Come and have a look at this, Arvo,” Maria said, and he walked over to join her in the other corner.

It was an altar. At least that was what it looked like to Arvo, and he had seen such things before. Cameron had erected his homage to Sarah, including his favorite framed photograph. Sarah was looking over her naked shoulder, butterfly tattoo in clear sight, directly into the camera, an enigmatic expression on her face. Cameron had surrounded the photograph with red candles, most of them half burned.

Lying on the square of black velvet beside the photograph were a wallet and a small spoon. Trophies, most likely. Carefully, holding it between his thumb and forefinger, he flipped the wallet open. John Heimar. He put it back for the crime-scene experts to deal with. There was nothing else in the room except a single bed with a red quilt and a bedside table. The sooner they got out of the place and sealed it, Arvo thought, the less likely they would be to spoil any evidence. Besides, the room was starting to give him the creeps.

Back in the living room, Joe bent over the coffee table. Next to the ashtray stood a yogurt carton full of matchbooks. All of them were from a club called Ten Forward, on Melrose.

“What do you think?” Joe asked, holding up one of the books so Arvo and Maria could see.

“Make it so,” said Arvo.

La Cienega seemed to take forever. Every light a red one. Still, Arvo told himself, Sarah Broughton was safe at the hotel, and if Cameron were working at the club, he’d be there until the early hours. There was no hurry. They certainly didn’t want to announce their arrival in a blaze of lights and cacophony of sirens, any more than they had at the house. But still he felt anxious. It wouldn’t be over until they had Mitchell Cameron in custody.

Between Pico and Olympic, Arvo radioed in to arrange for patrol cars to secure the area around the club, then he used the car phone to call Sarah. She sounded bored and irritable but said she was okay. Arvo told her to hang in there and keep her fingers crossed, they were getting close.

On Melrose, Arvo pulled up by the curb right outside Ten Forward, ignoring the No Parking signs. A group of kids hung around the entrance, arguing with a tall man with a shaved head and a black T-shirt who towered head and shoulders over them. The T-shirt must have been XXXL, if such a size existed, Arvo thought, and it was still tight over his biceps and pecs. He wouldn’t have stood there arguing with the guy. But kids always do think they’re immortal, and with the designer drugs they take these days, they think they’re omnipotent, too.

Finally, the doorman managed to shoo the teenagers away. When he saw Arvo, Joe and Maria approach, he made a disgusted sound and said, in an unexpectedly high-pitched and raspy voice, “Fucking kids, huh. Underage. Cops?”

“That obvious?” said Joe.

The man grinned, showing a gaping black hole in an otherwise seamless band of white where one of his upper front teeth was missing. “I don’t want no trouble,” he said.

“Hey, man, you won’t get any from us,” said Joe. “Guy named Mitchell Cameron work here?”

“Mitch Cameron? Sure.”

“He inside now?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Since when?”

“Started at nine.”

“Back entrance?”

“Uh-huh. Round the alley.”

“And no one gets past you, right?”

“You’re the boss.”

“Okay. We’re going in.”

The man gave a little bow and extended his arm toward the door. “Be my guests.”

Joe said he would take the rear entrance while Arvo and Maria went into the club to smoke Cameron out. They might look a bit less like cops than he did, he added with a grin. At about six-four, wearing a dark suit, white shirt and low-key tie, he was probably right.

Arvo and Maria found themselves in the bar area. Modeled closely on the Star Trek: The Next Generation Ten Forward, but darker and bigger, it featured molded plastic, futuristic tables and chairs, and even a starscape backdrop on screens that were supposed to represent the large windows of the starship. Galaxies whirled by, the stars all a little blurred. Must be traveling at warp speed, Arvo thought.

It was also a hell of a lot noisier than the TV bar. Hot, too. Kids milled around, some of them looking hardly any older than the ones the doorman had sent away, and waitresses dressed in tight-fitting Trekkie-character costumes held trays of drinks aloft. One of them looked like Deanna Troi, another like Tasha Yar. Conversation competed with loud music, all of it merging in a deafening wall of noise.

The music itself was hard to describe. Part raw rock, part disco beat, part synthesizer funk, it seemed to exist solely for the sake of the dancers, who jumped, bobbed, weaved and swayed on the vast floor under yet more swirling galaxies. Arvo noticed a few glazed eyes. Drugs. Ecstasy, probably.

The clientele was an odd mix of cyberpunk — all studded leather and torn T-shirts, shaved or spiky hair, tight black pants or leggings, with a lot of earrings and a more than average percentage of nose-rings — and an occasional computer nerd looking to get laid, badly dressed, with greasy hair, acne and glasses.

It was almost impossible to spot any single individual in such a heaving, throbbing mass of people. Arvo pushed his way to the bar and asked the bartender if he knew where Mitch Cameron was. The bartender just shook his head and went to serve a customer. Either he hadn’t heard through the noise or he didn’t know any Mitch Cameron. Most likely he just didn’t care.

Arvo and Maria were already drawing strange looks from some of the kids, a few of whom quite wisely slunk away from them, maybe to sell their illegal substances elsewhere or flush them down the toilet. No matter what Joe had said, in this crowd they did look like cops.

Had Mitch Cameron been the same size as the man on the door, it would have been easy to spot him, but according to all Arvo’s information he was of average height and rather stocky, muscular. Just because he had had a dyed blond brush-cut a year ago, it didn’t mean he had one now, though dyed blond hairs had been found at the scene of Jack Marillo’s murder.

Arvo and Maria stood by the bar looking over the dancers. The music changed, though not much, and the overhead galaxy started spinning the other way. Searchlights danced over the crowd. A Federation starship passed by on an overhead screen and some of the dancers stopped and cheered.

Then Arvo noticed, over to his left at the far side of the dance floor, a couple of kids facing off. Others were moving away, clearing a space around them. They looked to be fighting over a girl who was standing with them. She seemed to be exhorting one of the kids to mop up the floor with the other, and the more she yelled — though Arvo couldn’t hear what she said over the music and general din — the closer the guys came to throwing punches. Before they got that far, however, the bouncer appeared.

Arvo nudged Maria, who had been scanning the other side of the club.

“That Cameron?” Maria yelled in his ear.

“Could be. Let’s go ask him.”

The bouncer was too busy keeping the two kids apart to notice Arvo and Maria heading toward him. He was about the right size, Arvo estimated, and his hair could have been blond, though it seemed to be plastered down with some kind of gel that made it look darker. He wore it combed straight back, with a greasy ponytail hanging down over his collar.