It was a sincere request for ideas, devoid of sarcasm,
and it threw her off guard.
“Uh, no,” she admitted, “I can’t think of anything. I
just hope you find him.”
“I hope so, too—can I call you Beverly?”
“Oh, sure.”
“I don’t have any brilliant theories about this,
Beverly, but I promise to give it a lot of thought. And, if
you
think of
anything, call
me.”
He gave her a card. “Anything at all, okay? Now, can
I have one of the men give you a lift home?”
“Alex could—”
He flashed her a wide, loose-lipped smile. “I’m going
to be needing to talk to Alex for a while. I’ll get you a ride.” He went out to
the six patrolmen, selected the best-looking of the bunch, a trim six-footer
with curly black hair and shiny teeth, and brought him back to the office.
“Ms. Lucas, this is Officer Fierro.”
“Where to, ma’am?” Fierro tipped his hat. She gave him
an address in Westwood and he guided her to his squad car.
Just as she was getting in, Milo rummaged in his shirt
pocket and called out, “Hey, Brian, hold on.”
Fierro stopped and Milo bounded over to the car. I
jogged along with him.
“This mean anything to you, Beverly?” He handed her a
match-book.
She examined it. “Adam and Eve Messenger Service?
Yeah. One of the nurses told me Nona Swope had gotten a job as a messenger. I
remember thinking it was strange—why would she get a job when they were only in
town temporarily?” She looked at the matchbook more closely. “What is this, a
hooker service or something like that?”
“Something like that.”
“I knew she was a wild one,” she said angrily, and
gave him back the matchbook. “Is that all?”
“Uh huh.”
“Then I’d like to go home.”
Milo gave the signal and Fierro got behind the wheel
and started up the engine.
“Uptight lady,” said Milo after they drove away.
“She used to be a sweet young thing,” I said. “Too
much time on the cancer ward can do things to you.”
He frowned.
“Quite a mess in there,” he said.
“Looks bad, doesn’t it?”
“You want me to speculate? Maybe, maybe not. The room
was tossed by someone who was
angry.
But couldn’t it have been one of
the parents, furious at having a sick kid, all scared and confused about
pulling him out? You worked with people in that situation. Ever see anyone
freak like that?”
I reeled back a few years.
“There was always anger,” I told him. “Most of the
time people talked it out. But sometimes it got physical. I can recall at least
one intern getting slugged by a father. Plenty of threats. One guy who’d lost
his leg in a hunting accident three weeks before his daughter came down with
kidney tumors carried a couple of pistols into the hospital the day after she
died. It was usually the ones who denied it and held it in and didn’t
communicate with anyone who were the most explosive.” Which fit the description
Beverly had given me of Garland Swope. I told him so.
“So that could be it,” he said uneasily.
“But you don’t think so.”
The heavy shoulders shrugged.
“I don’t think anything at this point. Because this is
a crazy city, pal. More homicides each year and folks are getting wasted for
the weirdest reasons. Last week, some old character jammed a steak knife in his
neighbor’s chest because he was
sure
the guy was killing his tomato
plants with evil rays from his navel. Deranged assholes walk into fast-food
joints and mow down kids eating
burgers
, for chrissake. When I first
went into Homicide things seemed relatively logical, pretty simple, really.
Most of the stuff we used to catch was due to love or jealousy or money, family
feuds—your basic human conflicts. Not now,
compadre.
Too many holes in
the Swiss cheese? Ice the deli man. Looney Tunes.”
“And this looks like the work of a crazy?”
“Who the hell knows, Alex? We’re not talking hard
science. Most probably we’ll find it was what I said before. One of them—probably
the father—got a good look at the shitty cards he’d been dealt and tossed the
room. They left the car behind so it’s probably temporary.
“On the other hand, I can’t guarantee they didn’t happen
to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, didn’t collide with a nutcase who
thought they were Pluto Vampires out to take over his liver.” He held the
matchbook between thumb and forefinger and waved it like a miniature flag.
“Right now,” he said, “all we’ve got is this. It’s not
in my ballpark but I’ll pay the place a visit and follow it up for you, okay?”
“Thanks, Milo. Getting to the bottom of it would calm
a few people down. Want company?”
“Sure, why not? Haven’t seen you in a good while. If missing
the lovely Ms. Castagna hasn’t made you unbearably morose, you might even turn
out to be
good
company.”
THERE W AS a phone number on the matchbook but no
address, so Milo called Vice and got one, along with some background on the
Adam and Eve Messenger Service.
“They know the operation,” he said, tooling onto Pico
and heading east. “Owned by a sweetheart named Jan Rambo, has her finger in a
little bit of everything. Daddy’s a mob biggie in Frisco. Little Jan’s his
pride and joy.”
“What is it, a cover for an outcall service?”
“That and a few other things. Vice thinks sometimes
the messengers transport dope, but that’s only a sideline—impromptu, when
someone needs a favor. They do some relatively legit stuff—party gags, like
when it’s the boss’s birthday and a nubile young thing shows up at the office
party, strips and rubs herself all over him. Mostly it’s sex for sale, one way
or another.”
“Which sheds new light on Nona Swope,” I said.
“Maybe. You said she was good looking?”
“Gorgeous, Milo. Unusually so.”
“So she knows what she’s got and decides to profit
from it—it might be relevant, but what the hell, when you get right down to it,
this town was built on the buying and selling of bodies, right? Small town girl
hits glitter-city, gets her head turned. Happens every day.”
“That has got to be the most hackneyed soliloquy you’ve
ever delivered.”
He broke out laughing and slapped the dashboard with
glee, then realized he’d been squinting into the sun and put on a pair of
mirrored shades.
“Oka-ay, time to play cop. What do you think?”
“Very intimidating.”
Jan Rambo’s headquarters were on the tenth floor of a
flesh-colored high rise on Wilshire just west of Barrington. The directory in
the lobby listed about a hundred businesses, most with names that told you
nothing about what they did—a free hand had been used with words like
enterprise,
system, communications
, and
network.
A good third of them ended with
Ltd. Jan Rambo had outdone them all, christening her meat market,
Contemporary
Communications Network, Ltd.
If that didn’t convince you it was all very
respectable, the brass letters on the teak door and the matching thunderbolt
logo were sure to do the trick.
The door was locked but Milo pounded it hard enough
for the walls to shake, and it opened. A tall well-built Jamaican in his
midtwenties stuck his head out and started to say something hostile, but Milo
shoved his badge in the mahogany face and he shut his mouth.
“Hi,” said Milo, grinning.
“What can I do for you, Officers?” asked the black,
over-enunciating in a show of arrogance.
“First, you can let us in.” Without waiting for
cooperation, Milo leaned on the door. Taken by surprise, the Jamaican stepped
back and we walked in.
It wasn’t much of a reception room, barely larger than
a closet, but Contemporary Communications probably didn’t do much receiving.
The walls were flat ivory and the only furniture was a chrome and vinyl desk
upon which sat an electric typewriter and a phone, and the steno chair behind
it.
The wall backing the desk was adorned with a
photographic poster of a California surfer couple posing as Adam and Eve,
underscored by the legend “Send that Special Message to that Special person.”
Eve had her tongue in Adam’s ear and though the expression on his face was one
of stuporous boredom, his fig leaf bulged appreciatively.
To the left of the desk was a closed door. The
Jamaican stood in front of it, arms folded, feet apart, a scowling sentry.
“We want to speak with Jan Rambo.”
“You got a warrant?”
“Jesus,” said Milo, disgustedly, “everyone in this
lousy city thinks he’s in the movies. ‘You got a warrant?’” he mimicked. “Strictly
grade B, dude. C’mon, knock on the door and tell her we’re here.”
The Jamaican remained impassive.
“No warrant, no entry.”
“My, my, an assertive one.” Milo whistled. He put his
hands in his pockets, slouched and walked forward until his nose was a
millimeter short of Eskimo-kissing the Jamaican.
“There’s no need to get unpleasant,” he said. “I know
Ms. Rambo is a busy lady and as pure as the freshly driven snow. If she wasn’t,
we might be here to search the premises.
Then
we’d need a warrant. All
we want to do is
talk
with her. Since you obviously haven’t advanced far
enough in your legal studies to know this, let me inform you that no warrant is
necessary when one simply wants to make conversation.”
The Jamaican’s nostrils widened.
“Now,” Milo continued, “you can choose to facilitate
that conversation or continue to be obstructive, in which case I will cause you
grievous bodily injury, not to mention significant pain, and arrest you for
interfering with a police officer in the performance of his duty. Upon arrest,
I will fasten the cuffs tight enough to cause gangrene, see to it that you are
body-searched by a sadist, and make sure you are tossed in a holding cell with
half a dozen charter members of the Aryan Brotherhood.”
The Jamaican pondered his choices. He backed away from
Milo, but the detective bird-dogged him, breathing into his face.
“I’ll see if she’s free,” he muttered, opening the
door a crack and slithering through.
He reappeared momentarily, eyes smoldering with
emasculation, and jerked his head toward the open door.
We followed him into an empty anteroom. He paused
before double doors and punched a code into a pushbutton panel. There was a
low-pitched buzz and he opened one of the doors.
A dark-haired woman sat behind a marble-topped tubular
metal desk in an office as big as a ballroom. The floor was covered with
springy industrial carpeting the color of wet cement. To her back was a wall of
smoked glass offering a muted view of the Santa Monica mountains and the Valley
beyond. One side of the office had been given over to some West Hollywood
decorator’s fantasies—mercilessly contemporary mauve leather chairs, a lucite
coffee table sharp enough to slice bread, an art deco sideboard of rosewood and
shagreen similar to one I’d seen recently in a Sotheby’s catalogue; that piece
had gone for more than Milo took home in a year. Across from this assemblage
was the business area: rosewood conference table, bank of black file cabinets,
two computers, and a corner filled with photographic equipment.
The Jamaican stood with his back to the door and
resumed his sentry pose. He worked at fashioning his face into a war mask but a
rosy flush incandesced beneath the dusky surface of his skin.
“You can go, Leon,” the woman said. She had a whiskey
voice.
The Jamaican hesitated. She hardened her expression
and he left hastily.
She remained behind the desk and didn’t invite us to
sit. Milo sat anyway, stretching out his long legs and yawning. I sat next to
him.
“Leon told me you were very rude,” said the woman. She
was about forty, chunky, with small muddy eyes and short pudgy hands that
drummed the marble. Her hair was cut blunt and short. She wore a tailored black
business suit. The ruffled bodice of her white crepe de chine blouse seemed out
of character.
“Gee,” said Milo, “I’m really sorry, Ms. Rambo. I hope
we didn’t hurt his feelings.”
The woman laughed, an adenoidal growl. “Leon’s a prima
donna. I keep him around for decoration.” She pulled out an extra-long black
cigarette from a box of Shermans and lit it up. Blowing out a cloud of smoke,
she watched it rise to the ceiling. When it had dissipated completely she
spoke.
“The answers to your first three questions are: One:
They’re messengers, not hookers. Two: What they do on their own time is their
own business. Three: Yes, he is my father and we talk on the phone every month
or so.”
“I’m not from Vice,” said Milo, “and I don’t give a
damn if your messengers end up giving fuck shows for horny old men snarfing
nose candy and playing pocket pool.”
“How tolerant of you,” she said coldly.
“I’m known for it. Live and let live.”