Catwell got to the door before he stopped. He faced the door, unmoving, for a full ten seconds, then finally turned, and said to Anna, ‘‘So you used to, like, party down with Jason and Sean.’’
Anna, confused by the tone of his voice, said, ‘‘What?’’
Harper asked, ‘‘Sean? MacAllister?’’
Catwell shifted his gaze to Harper: ‘‘You know him?’’
‘‘Yeah, I saw him last night,’’ Harper said. To Anna, he said, ‘‘The late Sean MacAllister.’’
Anna was closing in on Catwell. ‘‘When you said I partied down with them, what’d you mean?’’
Catwell’s eyes slid away, and he made a ‘‘you know’’ bob of his head: ‘‘You know . . .’’
‘‘No, I don’t; but I’ve got a bad feeling about what you think.’’
‘‘Well, maybe it’s not true,’’ Catwell said.
‘‘That I was sleeping with them?’’
‘‘Yeah, I guess.’’
‘‘Where’d you hear that?’’
‘‘Listen, if it’s not true . . .’’
‘‘I don’t care about that, ’cause for one thing, they’re both dead.’’
‘‘Sean?’’ Now Catwell was scared. ‘‘They killed Sean, too?’’
‘‘Yes.’’ Anna nodded. ‘‘Same guy, but with a knife. Now where’d you hear I was sleeping with them?’’
‘‘Uh, you came to a party one night, off Sunset? To get Jason, but he was really wrecked? So you left without him?’’
She remembered: ‘‘At BJ’s. Upstairs.’’
‘‘Yeah.’’
‘‘What’s BJ’s?’’ Harper asked.
‘‘Club,’’ Anna said. To Catwell: ‘‘So what’d they tell you?’’
‘‘That, uh, you know . . .’’
‘‘What?’’
‘‘Slept with them. At, uh, the same time . . . like in a pile.’’
‘‘Ah, jeez,’’ Anna said. ‘‘They told everybody that?’’
‘‘Sure. I mean, like it wasn’t any big secret.’’
‘‘I didn’t even
know
MacAllister,’’ Anna said.
‘‘He and Jason had an apartment together, over by BJ’s, down the hill from there,’’ Catwell said.
Anna looked at Harper and walked in a circle around the parking lot, ran her hand back through her hair: ‘‘Jeez.’’
‘‘What?’’
She looked at him: ‘‘He’s not trying to kill me. I’m perfectly safe,’’ she said.
‘‘Say that again.’’
‘‘I’m not in trouble—
you’re
in trouble,’’ Anna said.
‘‘What’re you . . .’’
‘‘He’s not gonna kill me. He’s gonna kill you, Jake. Somebody already said it. Pam? I think Pam did—he’s killing the guys he sees around me. Ah, God: he only shot Creek because Creek was with me. If we’d seen it . . .’’
‘‘Huh.’’ Harper thought it over. ‘‘Like he’s eliminating the competition.’’
‘‘Yeah. So I’ve got no problem.’’
Now Harper shook his head: ‘‘Don’t think that. If he gets to you . . . I don’t think you’d enjoy the date.’’ And to Catwell: ‘‘Who all was at that party? High-school kids?’’
‘‘I don’t know. People coming and going. Street kids, for sure. I don’t think they were in high school no more. But I was loaded, man, I can barely remember . . . but I remember the story about Anna.’’
‘‘Good memory,’’ Anna said.
Catwell said, ‘‘No, man. I mean, it was like a
hot
story— what you guys done. They said they were gonna send it in to
Penthouse.’’
‘‘Aw, man, that damn Jason,’’ Anna said. ‘‘Uh, you didn’t tell anybody you’d been sleeping with me?’’
‘‘No. Jesus.’’
‘‘So give us a name, Bob,’’ said Anna.
He was weakening. ‘‘Goddammit, if I do, you can’t tell anyone.’’
‘‘We’re not interested in you,’’ Harper said. ‘‘We just need a name. The guy who sold to Jason.’’
‘‘Tarpatkin,’’ Catwell said softly. ‘‘He works out of the Philadelphia Grill on Westwood. He’s a Russian, he’d be there by now, probably. Later, for sure.’’
‘‘Does he sell wizards?’’
‘‘What? Wizards?’’
Harper described them and Catwell shook his head: ‘‘ Tarpatkin’s been around a while. He only sells to people he knows and he only sells coke, heroin and high-priced hash. He doesn’t fuck around with that other shit.’’
They got a description: Tarpatkin was tall, gaunt, pale, with long frizzy black hair and a goatee. ‘‘He looks like the
devil,’’ Catwell said. ‘‘And Jesus, please don’t let him find out who you talked to.’’
‘‘Got time to swing by the hospital again,’’ Anna said, looking at her watch. ‘‘He says the guy’s at the grill all night.’’
‘‘All right.’’ Harper had a remote key entry for the car, unlocked her door from twenty feet, then opened it for her, touched her back as she got in. Almost courtly, she thought. Old-fashioned. Not unpleasant. ‘‘Sorry about that sleepingaround thing . . . bunch of kids bullshitting. Nobody pays any attention to it.’’
‘‘Somebody did,’’ Anna said. ‘‘Still: I’m a little shocked.’’
‘‘So we’ve got to check this BJ’s place. Our guy must be hanging out there, if he heard that story.’’
‘‘Yeah, but that doesn’t get going until late.’’
‘‘So we look up this Tarpatkin first,’’ Harper said. ‘‘I’m looking forward to that.’’
In the car, headed back, she asked casually, ‘‘What kind of women do you go out with? Lawyers? Golfers? Countryclubbers?’’
He thought for a long moment, guided the car through a knot of curb cruisers, and said, finally, ‘‘I don’t go out much any more.’’
She looked at him curiously. ‘‘You don’t seem shy.’’
‘‘I’m not. I’m just . . . tired. I mostly want to work, play golf and mess around at my house. I used to go over and see Jacob a couple of times a week. Maybe we’d go out to eat.’’
‘‘You’re gonna miss him.’’
‘‘I can’t even believe he’s gone,’’ Harper said, hunching down over the steering wheel, holding on with both hands.
‘‘So maybe I’m being nosy.’’
He grinned. ‘‘Maybe you are.’’
‘‘Well. That’s what I do,’’ she said.
Then she shut up, because sooner or later, she thought, he’d have a little more to say. He wasn’t glib. He wasn’t exactly taciturn, but he didn’t have much of a line of bullshit.
And after a while he said, ‘‘Going out with women . . . is just a lot of trouble. Most of them you meet, you know nothing’s going to happen—but you’ve got to spend a few hours with them anyway, being nice. I guess I’m too busy for that. When it’s obvious that nothing’s going to happen, I’d like to say, ‘Well, that’s that. I’ll get you a cab and we can all go home.’ ’’
Anna pretended to be horrified: ‘‘Have you ever done that?’’
‘‘Of course not. I’m too polite.’’
‘‘I’d think you’d have a lot of women coming around. You look okay, you’ve got a lot of hair, guys like you make some money.’’
‘‘You’d be surprised how many women don’t care about money,’’ he said. But then he shrugged and added, ‘‘But, yeah. There were quite a few women around for a while. Now I’m getting a reputation as a nasty old curmudgeon, so it’s not quite as intense as when I was . . . on the market.’’
‘‘No girlfriends at all?’’
‘‘Not right now—not for a while, really. I’d like to . . .’’
He stopped. ‘‘What?’’ she pressed. ‘‘Like to what?’’
‘‘We don’t know each other well enough,’’ he said, ‘‘for me to tell you what I’d like to do.’’
A parking place appeared a half-block from the hospital’s emergency entrance; Harper dove into it, chortling, fed the meter. But as they started down toward the hospital, a man in a suit in the dimly lit glassed-in entry half-turned toward them, saw them and then suddenly and hurriedly turned back to the hospital doors and disappeared inside.
‘‘Did you see that?’’ Anna said.
‘‘Yeah.’’ Harper broke into a trot, Anna running beside him. ‘‘Somebody who doesn’t want to talk to us. You know him?’’
‘‘Couldn’t see his face,’’ she said.
‘‘White hair,’’ Harper said. They were moving fast now, hit the doors to the entry, burst into the reception area. No white-haired men. A guard was looking at them, quizzically. Harper hurried toward him, Anna a half-step behind.
‘‘A white-haired guy just came through here,’’ Harper said. ‘‘Did you see where he went?’’
The guard said, ‘‘Yeah, he . . . hey, who are you guys?’’
But he’d started to point, down the hall: the elevators were just around the corner.
‘‘Elevators,’’ Anna said to Harper. And she said to the guard, ‘‘Call the intensive care unit on the third floor. If a white-haired guy shows up, watch him . . . he may have a gun.’’
Harper was already hurrying toward the elevators, Anna catching up as the guard said, ‘‘Yes, ma’am,’’ and picked up a phone.
They turned the corner. Three elevators, one with the door open, waiting. Of the other two, one was on eight, coming down. The other was on two, stopping at three.
‘‘Damn it,’’ Harper said. He looked around and Anna said, ‘‘Stairs’d be faster,’’ and they went left and up the stairs, around two flights; as they got to the third floor, Anna heard a door shut below them, the hollow tunnel sound of metal on concrete. She stopped, looked down. ‘‘You hear that?’’
‘‘Yeah,’’ Harper grunted, but he went on past, into the corridor on three. Two nurses were talking at a work station, one with a phone in her hand, and looked up at them.
‘‘Did a white-haired man . . .’’
‘‘No. Nobody came here. The guard just called . . .’’
‘‘Is Pam Glass still down in intensive care, the police officer?’’
‘‘I think so . . .’’
They went that way, and Anna blurted, ‘‘Maybe he went down. You heard that door close, he couldn’t have been too far ahead of us.’’
‘‘Yeah.’’ They turned the corner into the intensive care unit. Glass was standing next to Creek’s bed; Creek’s eyes were closed. No white-haired man.
‘‘Nobody just came through here?’’ Anna asked.
Glass shook her head. ‘‘No. What . . . ?’’
Harper said, ‘‘Tell them,’’ and ran back toward the stairs. Anna asked Glass, ‘‘You got your gun?’’
‘‘Yes.’’
‘‘Keep a hand on it, there’s a guy,’’ and turned and ran after Harper. She caught him on the stairs and Harper glanced back at her, grunted, shook his head and kept circling down. They came out in a sub-basement, looked both ways, finally turned left, a shorter hall and an exit sign.
The exit led to an underground parking ramp: they hurried along the ramp, and Harper said, ‘‘Get the gun out.’’
Anna took the gun out of her jacket pocket, feeling a little silly—and a little dangerous—and held it by her pants leg as they turned up the ramp toward a pay booth. A Latino was running out an adding machine in the booth, and Harper said, ‘‘Did a man just run by here?’’
‘‘Yes,
si
, he went that way, one minute.’’ He pointed up the ramp to the street. They ran up the ramp and found . . . traffic.
Harper looked both ways, down at Anna and said, ‘‘He’s gone.’’
She shoved the gun back into her jacket and said, ‘‘Yeah.’’
• • •
Creek had been awake for a few minutes, had maybe recognized Glass, but maybe not: ‘‘He was drifting,’’ Glass said. ‘‘He thought he was on his boat.’’
Anna told Glass about the white-haired man, and finished with, ‘‘It’s possible that it was nothing.’’
‘‘No.’’ Harper disagreed. ‘‘That move he made—I saw that two hundred times when I was a cop. Especially working dope. Someone sees you, figures you for the cops, and he turns and splits. Runs in the front door, runs out the back. Just like that: and that’s what he was doing.’’
‘‘I see it all the time,’’ Glass said.
‘‘That’s what it felt like,’’ Anna admitted. She kept looking at Creek, then glancing away: his figure disturbed her. He looked hollow, tired. Old, with lines in his face that she hadn’t noticed before. He’d always been the opposite of those things, a guy who’d go on forever.
Now he lay there, little of him visible other than his hair and oddly pale eyelids, breathing through a plastic mask, his breath so shallow, his life bumping along on the monitors overhead, like a slow day on a stock-market ticker.
thirteen
They left Glass and Creek—Glass said she’d try to get Creek moved again, in case the white-haired man was a real threat—and went back into the night, heading for the Philadelphia Grill.
‘‘The guy was probably a doper,’’ Harper said, ‘‘ ’cause he moved so fast. Like a guy who’s holding. He didn’t stop to look us over, he didn’t stop to see if we were coming after him—he just took off. And the way he went out, he must’ve already been in the hospital, because he knew about the parking ramp exit and how to get there in a hurry.’’
‘‘That worries me; he was scouting the place,’’ Anna said. ‘‘What surprises me is, he was old. Or older.’’
‘‘Maybe not—could’ve been blond, could’ve been the light on his hair.’’
‘‘No. He was older. Fifties, anyway. The way he moved, I’m thinking . . .’’ She closed her eyes, letting the scene run through her mind. ‘‘He saw us, he turned, he sort of groped for the door, he pulled it open, almost hit himself with it. He was a little creaky. Maybe even a little heavy. He wasn’t a kid, though. He just moved like an older guy.’’
‘‘That doesn’t fit the profile of any psycho I ever heard of,’’ Harper said thoughtfully. ‘‘Maybe the guy in Chicago— Gacey. He was sorta porky, and a little older than most of them. I think.’’
‘‘He’s not what I expected,’’ Anna said. ‘‘The prowler was fast, and the guy who shot Creek,
he
was fast. Really fast. He had to be a young guy.’’
‘‘So we’ve got
two
people giving us a hard time?’’ He looked at her with thin amusement. ‘‘And we can’t find either one of them?’’
The Philadelphia Grill was a baked-meatloaf-andpowderedpotatoes place on Westwood, jammed into the lower corner of a colored-concrete building; it had a wraparound glass window, but the window was blocked with blinds pulled nearly shut.
Inside, the clientele seemed to hover over their coffee, arms circling the cups, as though somebody might try to take the coffee away from them; and they tended to look up whenever the door opened. The blinds, which blocked the view in, were open just enough that, from the inside, they could see out.
‘‘There he is,’’ Anna muttered.
Tarpatkin looked like her idea of a crazy killer: his pitchblack hair, six inches long, streamed away from his narrow face, as though an electric current were running through it. He had thin black eyebrows over a long, bony nose; his lips were narrow, tight, and too pink, the only color in his face. He was dressed all in black, and was reading a tabloid-sized real-estate newspaper. He had one hand on a cup of tea, showing a tea-bag string and tag under his hand. He was wearing a heavy gold wedding band, but on his middle finger. An empty cup sat across the table from him. ‘‘What if he’s the guy?’’
‘‘Do you know him? Ever met him?’’ Harper asked.
‘‘No. I’d remember the face.’’
‘‘Then he’s not the guy, because you know the killer, at least a little bit,’’ Harper said. ‘‘Slide into the booth across from him; I’ll get a chair.’’
Tarpatkin watched them coming, eyes just over the top of the paper. His expression didn’t change when Anna slid into the booth: ‘‘Hi,’’ she said, smiling. Harper hooked a chair from an empty table across from the booth, turned it backward and sat down, just blocking Tarpatkin’s route out of the booth.
‘‘Mr. Tarpatkin—name’s Harper, and my friend here is Anna.’’
‘‘Hello, Anna,’’ Tarpatkin said. ‘‘Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?’’
‘‘No, no, it’s a gun,’’ Anna said pleasantly.
‘‘We’d show it to you, but in here’’—Harper looked around—‘‘somebody might get excited and we’d all start shooting.’’
‘‘What do you want?’’ Tarpatkin asked.
‘‘Just need to talk,’’ Harper said.
‘‘That’s all you guys ever want,’’ Tarpatkin said. ‘‘Talk. Then your ass winds up in jail.’’
‘‘What?’’ Anna’s eyebrows went up and she glanced uncertainly at Harper.
Tarpatkin caught it, and clouded up: ‘‘If you assholes ain’t cops, you can get the fuck out of my booth.’’
‘‘We’re not cops, but I used to be, and I still know a lot of deputies,’’ Harper said. ‘‘The thing is, you’re caught right in the middle of a major murder case and the cops are freaking out. You can talk to us, off the record, or talk to them, on the record.’’
‘‘You’re talking bullshit, man, I don’t know any murder mysteries.’’ His language veered from formal, almost scholarly,
to the street, and then back again; he might have been two people. Tarpatkin shook out the newspaper, as though he were about to resume reading.
‘‘One of your clients, Jason O’Brien, got taken off in a really bad way a couple of days ago. Beat to death, carved up with a knife.’’ When Harper said it, Anna was watching Tarpatkin’s eyes: they flickered when Jason’s name was mentioned. ‘‘And maybe you know a guy named Sean MacAllister?’’
Another flicker: ‘‘He knows them both,’’ Anna said to Harper, not taking her eyes off Tarpatkin.
Tarpatkin didn’t deny it: this was news he could use. ‘‘Carved up?’’
‘‘You know a guy who likes knives?’’ Harper asked.
Tarpatkin thought for a second, then said, ‘‘I know a couple of them, but they don’t know those two. When did this happen? I haven’t seen anything about it in the paper.’’
Anna told him, briefly, and then said, ‘‘We’re looking for a guy selling wizards. We understand you don’t, but we’re hoping that you might know who does. Right around here— the university neighborhood.’’
Tarpatkin looked her over for a moment, then said, ‘‘Honey, I don’t know what kind of mission you’re on, but you really don’t want to mess around with those people. They’re amateurs—they’re crazy and they’ll kill you for a nickel.’’
‘‘Somebody might be trying to kill me for free,’’ Anna said. ‘‘We’re trying to get him to stop.’’
‘‘Huh.’’ He pulled at his goatee, then said, ‘‘Let me give you fifteen seconds on how the smart part of this business works—and for the tape recorder, if you’re wearing one, you’ll notice that this is all hypothetical.’’
He pulled a napkin out of a chrome napkin holder and smoothed it on the tabletop. Anna thought he was going to
write on it, but then he started folding it as he talked: L.A.diner origami. ‘‘Suppose you got a small-time dealer,’’ Tarpatkin said. ‘‘He’s got maybe seventy-five, a hundred regular customers. He only takes new customers from recommendations, and only after looking them over.
‘‘This guy is making, say, ten grand a week after expenses, no taxes. He flies over to the Bahamas a few times a year and makes a deposit, takes a little vacation. In ten years, with some careful investments, he’s got eight or ten million in the bank, and he moves to the Bahamas full time. Or Mexico. Costa Rica. Somewhere . . .
‘‘If he’s smooth, he don’t have to worry too much about the cops, because he’s such a small-timer, and when they come around, he cooperates. The cops always want the big guys—Christ, if they busted everybody like this small-timer, they’d have to build twenty new jails. So, they don’t. I mean, hey, he’s a small businessman. A little better than insurance, maybe not so good as selling stocks and bonds.’’
Anna broke in: ‘‘But these other guys are different.’’
Tarpatkin shook a finger at her, like a schoolmaster making a point. ‘‘I’m coming to that, honey—they’re very different. They go into the dope business, and they think, ‘If I sell a pound of crank, I make ten thousand dollars. If I sell a ton of crank, I make twenty million dollars. So I’ll sell a ton of crank. This year.’
‘‘And since they’ve been to the movies, they know the business is dangerous. So they buy a load of guns and knives and dynamite and chain saws and whatever else they can think of. Then to get their heads right, they get into the product themselves. The next thing you know, you’ve got these drug freaks with guns and dynamite and chain saws, and there’s crank all over the street and everybody’s going crazy looking for them—competitors, cops, DEA. They always find them. Go to jail, don’t get your twenty million. Or wind
up in a bush somewhere, with your head cut off.’’
He shook his head sadly, and asked in his street patois: ‘‘Is this any fuckin’ way to run a fuckin’ business?’’ And then back to the scholar: ‘‘I think not. But these are the people who are selling your wizards.’’
‘‘So can you put us onto somebody?’’
Tarpatkin shook his head. ‘‘No, I can’t. I stay away from those people. However, if one of you has a cell phone—or a regular phone, for that matter—I could ask around and call you.’’
‘‘So you wanna talk to the cops,’’ Harper said.
‘‘No. But I don’t know anything—not what you want. Why would I? I don’t hang with those people. I stay as far away as I can.’’
‘‘That’s bull,’’ Harper said. ‘‘You guys have always got your ears to the ground . . .’’
Tarpatkin shrugged: ‘‘Well, you could drag me out into the street and beat the shit outa me until I tell you what you want . . . except that I don’t know it.’’
Anna and Harper looked at each other, and then Anna dug in her purse, found a pen and wrote her cell phone number on Tarpatkin’s folded napkin. ‘‘Call me anytime,’’ she said.
‘‘I will. You’re a little sweetie.’’
‘‘About your hypothetical dealer sending his hypothetical money to the Bahamas,’’ Anna said. ‘‘How long has he been doing this, hypothetically?’’
‘‘Could be eight years,’’ Tarpatkin said. He bobbed his head and smiled; one of his canine teeth was solid gold, and it winked at her from beneath his ratty mustache.
Outside, Harper said, ‘‘I don’t know what we could do: all we got is threats of siccing the cops on him.’’
‘‘We could drag him out in the alley and beat the shit out of him,’’ Anna said wryly.
‘‘In that place, we’d get about three steps,’’ Harper said. ‘‘I have a feeling they sort of look out for each other . . . In fact . . . just a minute.’’ He walked back to the diner door, pulled it open, looked in, then walked back, shaking his head. ‘‘He’s gone. He’ll be in the Bahamas by dawn.’’
As they were getting into Harper’s BMW, the phone in Anna’s purse rang. She glanced at Harper, then took the phone out and clicked it on: ‘‘Hello?’’
A little girl’s voice, oddly tinny, with an adult’s vocabulary and intonations, said, ‘‘The men you want to see are brothers named Ronnie and Tony and they live . . .’’
‘‘Just a minute, just a minute,’’ Anna said. And to Harper: ‘‘Gimme a paper.’’
She found the pen in her purse and Harper groped in a door bin and finally came up with a road map. ‘‘Write on it,’’ he said. The tinny little girl’s voice recited an address in Malibu, and finished, ‘‘. . . real modern, gray weathered wood, lots of black glass, right on the hill above the highway. You won’t have any trouble finding it.’’
And she—it, Tarpatkin?—was gone.
‘‘Voice-altering phone deal,’’ Harper said, when Anna described the voice. ‘‘Lot of dealers use them. You get like twenty choices of voice.’’
‘‘Why?’’
‘‘So in case we were recording it, he wouldn’t be on the record.’’
‘‘Strange life.’’
‘‘Trying to make it to retirement,’’ Harper said. ‘‘Two years.’’
Anna glanced at her watch: ‘‘We’ve got time to run out to Malibu. Or we could head down to BJ’s.’’
Harper glanced at her: ‘‘The question about BJ’s is this: you’ll see some people you know, but so what? How do we pick out the guy?’’
‘‘If he talks to me, or comes on to me . . .’’
‘‘Somebody’s
gonna come on to you, you go to a party box. That’s what it’s for.’’
Anna thought about it for a minute. Harper was not only right, but he was also on the track of the people who’d fed dope to his son. She’d go with that: ‘‘Malibu,’’ she said.
Harper nodded. ‘‘We spot the house, but we don’t do anything. I want to check with some guys in the sheriff’s department, run these names. Ronnie and Tony . . .’’
Harper had a Thomas Brothers Guide stashed in the back seat. Anna turned on the car’s reading lights as they dropped onto the PCH and made the right turn up toward Malibu, and began paging through the maps.
‘‘If the address is right, it’s just before the turnoff for Corral Canyon,’’ she said after a moment.
‘‘Should be easy to pick out,’’ Harper said.
They sat in companionable silence for a while, not much traffic, just cruising. Then Harper asked, ‘‘How come you’re not going out with anyone?’’
‘‘I don’t know,’’ she said. She looked out her window, away from him: nothing to see but the dirt bluff rising away from the highway into the dark. ‘‘I’ve just had other things.’’
‘‘Been a little lonely?’’
‘‘I’ve been busy,’’ she said. And after a few seconds, ‘‘Yeah, I’ve been a little lonely. Then . . .’’
‘‘What?’’
‘‘Ah, there’s this guy. I went out with him years ago; pretty intense. I thought we were gonna get married, but we didn’t. I saw him the other day, at a gas station. He’s out here on a fellowship, I guess—I called a mutual friend.
Anyway, it all sorta came back on me . . .’’
‘‘What’s he do?’’
‘‘He’s a composer. Modern stuff—the New York Philharmonic
debuted one of his poems, ‘Sketch of Malaga´.’ ’’