Denise Hamilton - Los Angeles Noir 2

Saddest to him could be translated into English as least lucrative. A chauffeured Rolls-Royce pulled up in front of the shop and an elegantly dressed couple headed for his doorway. I held the door open for them and went up my stairs to sit again.

I typed it all down in chronological order, the history of my first case in my own office, from the time Mrs. Whitney Bishop had walked in to my uncle’s refusal to talk about the Kerman.

There had to be a pattern in there somewhere to a discerning eye. Either my eye was not discerning or there was no pattern.

Cheryl had called it right; my larder was low. I heated a package of frozen peas and ate them with two baloney sandwiches and the cream cheese left over from lunch.

There was, as usual, nothing worth watching on the tube. I went back to read again the magic of the man my father had introduced me to when I was in my formative years, the sadly funny short stories of William Saroyan.

Where would I go tomorrow? What avenues of investigation were still unexplored? Unless the unlikely happened, a call from Ismet Bey, all I had left was a probably fruitless repeat of yesterday’s surveillance of the Santa Monica beach.

I went to bed at nine o’clock, but couldn’t sleep. I got up, poured three ounces of Tennessee whiskey into a tumbler, added a cube of ice, and sat and sipped. It was eleven o’clock before I was tired enough to sleep.

I drank what was left of the milk in the morning and decided to have breakfast in Santa Monica. I didn’t take my swimming trunks; the day was not that warm.

Scrambled eggs and pork sausages, orange juice, toast, and coffee at Barney’s Breakfast Bar fortified me for the gray day ahead.

Only the hardy were populating the beach. The others would come out if the overcast went away. I sat again on the bench next to the refreshment stand and reread Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man . It had seemed appropriate reading for the occasion.

I had been doing a lot of sitting on this case. I could understand now why my boss at Arden had piles.

Ten o’clock passed. So did eleven. About fifteen minutes after that a tall, thin figure appeared in the murky air at the far end of the beach. It was a man and he was heading this way.

Closer and clearer he came. He was wearing khaki trousers, a red-and-tan-checked flannel shirt, and a red nylon windbreaker. He nodded and smiled as he passed me. He bought a Coke at the stand and sat down at the other end of the bench.

I laid down my book.

“Ralph Ellison?” he said. “I had no idea he was still in print.”

He was thin, he was haggard, and his eyes were dull. But skeleton had been too harsh a word. “He probably isn’t,” I said. “This is an old Signet paperback reprint. My father gave it to me when I was still in high school.”

“I see. We picked a bad day for sun, didn’t we?”

“That’s not why I’m here,” I told him. “I’m looking for a girl, a runaway girl. Do you come here often?”

He nodded. “Quite often.”

I handed him the photograph of Janice. “Have you ever seen her here?”

He took a pair of wire-rimmed glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on to study the picture. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Was it yesterday? No—Wednesday.” He took a deep breath. “There are so many of them who come here. I talked with her. She told me she had come down from Oxnard and didn’t have the fare to go home. I bought her a malt and a hot dog. She told me the fare to Oxnard was eight dollars and some cents. I’ve forgotten the exact amount. Anyway, I gave her a ten-dollar bill and made her promise that she would use it for the fare home.”

“Do you do that often?”

“Not often enough. When I can afford it.”

“She’s not from Oxnard,” I told him. “She’s from Beverly Hills.”

He stared at me. “She couldn’t be! She was wearing a pair of patched jeans and a cheap, flimsy T-shirt.”

“She’s from Beverly Hills,” I repeated. “Her parents are rich.”

He smiled. “That little liar! She conned me. And what a sweet young thing she was.”

“I hope ‘was’ isn’t the definitive word,” I said.

He closed his eyes and took another deep breath. He opened them and stared out at the sea.

I handed him my card. “If you see her again, would you phone me?”

“Of course. My name is Gerald Hopkins. I live at the Uphan Hotel. It’s a—a place for what are currently called senior citizens.”

“I know the place,” I told him. “Let’s hold our thumbs.”

“Dear God, yes!” he said.

From there I drove to the store of the tawdry Turk. He was not there but his wife was, a short, thin, and dark-skinned woman. I told her my name.

She nodded. “Ismet told me you were here yesterday.” Her smile was sad. “That man and his dreams! What cock-and-bull story did he tell you?”

“Some of it made sense. He tried to sell me an Ispahan.”

“He didn’t tell me that!”

“He also told me about some rumors he heard.”

“Oh, yes! Rumors he has. Customers is what we need. Tell me, Mr. Stein, how can a man get so fat on rumors?”

“He’s probably married to a good cook.”

“ That he is. Take my advice, and a grain of salt, when you listen to the rumors of my husband, Mr. Stein. He is a dreamer. It is the reason I married him. I, too, in my youth, was a dreamer. It is why we came to America many years ago.”

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door …

I smiled at her. “Keep the faith!” I went out.

My next stop was the bank, where I deposited the checks from Mrs. Bishop and Arden and cashed a check for two hundred dollars.

From there to Vons in Santa Monica, where I stocked up on groceries, meat, and booze. Grocery markups in Beverly Hills, my mother had warned me, were absurd. Only the vulgar rich could afford them.

Mrs. Bey might believe that all the rumors her husband heard were bogus. But the rumor he had voiced to me was too close to the truth to qualify as bogus. It was logical to assume that there were shenanigans he indulged in in the practice of his trade that he would not reveal to her. To a man of his ilk the golden door meant gold, and he was still looking for the door.

I put the groceries away when I got home and went out to check the answering machine. Zilch. I typed the happenings of the morning into the record. Nothing had changed; no pattern showed.

There was a remote chance that Bey might learn where the rug was now. That was what I was being paid to find. But, as I had told Les Denton, the girl was my major concern.

It wasn’t likely that she was staying at the home of any of her classmates. Their parents certainly would have phoned Mrs. Bishop by now if she hadn’t phoned them.

Which reminded me that I had something to report. I phoned the Bishop house and the lady was home. I told her Janice had been seen on the Santa Monica beach on Wednesday and that a man there had told me this morning that he had talked with her. She had lied to him, telling him that she lived in Oxnard.

“She’s very adept at lying. Did you learn anything else?”

“Well, there was a rug dealer in Santa Monica who told me he had heard rumors about a three-by-five Kerman that had been stolen. I have no idea where he heard them.”

“There could be a number of sources. My husband has been asking several dealers we know if they have seen it. And, of course, many of my friends know about the loss.”

“Isn’t it possible they might inform the police?”

“Not if they want to remain my friends. And the dealers, too, have been warned. If Janice has been seen on the Santa Monica beach, the rug could also be in the area. I think that is where you should concentrate your search.”