Blood Grove Page 12

  “The man who told you,” Suggs said, “what’s his name?”

  “Said it was Tom.”

  “Tom what?”

  I shrugged and Melvin snorted.

  “White guy?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “How do I get in touch with this woman, this Charlotte Nell?”

  “She said she’d come by the next day. . . . She didn’t.”

  “You got a number?”

  I shook my head and said, “I figured that with Griggs dead the daughter came back on her own.”

  “Maybe the mother killed him,” Suggs suggested.

  “If she did I wasn’t the one who told her where to find him.”

  Melvin knew when he was being played. He also knew that when he once lost Mary I brought her back home.

  “Sounds pretty slim,” he said after a bit.

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “The coroner says that he’d been dead for two days. That means you were asking about him after the killing.”

  “I guess I could’a been creating an alibi. But why would I do that when I could just let someone else find the body on their own?”

  “If I had that answer,” Suggs said, “you’d be in cuffs right now.”

  “You want I should give you a description of the client?”

  I made up some features and he jotted down a few notes. Charlotte Nell had nothing in common with Lola except her age and race. When I told Melvin that was all I remembered, he stood straight up from the visitor’s chair, told me that unless they found the killer someone would be back to ask more. I said that my door was always open and he left through it.

  By noon I had migrated up to Niska’s desk. I’d spent an hour or two trying to think of how the LAPD could charge me with the pornographer’s death. It seemed unlikely and so I traded in Einstein for the Herald Examiner.

  21

  Somewhere just after 1:00 I heard the door downstairs slam shut. This gave me time to take the .38-caliber snub-nose from my pocket, place it on Niska’s blue blotter, and cover it with the newspaper. Some seconds passed and there came a knock on the upper door.

  Someone might think that this friendly request represented a more sophisticated kind of visitor rather than some shell-shocked vet or hard-bitten cop. But I knew that the safest way to enter a room was to knock first—so as not to get shot.

  “Come on in,” I called.

  The man who pushed the door open was remarkable; maybe an inch taller than I and white like aged ivory. The one and only descriptive adjective that defined him was blunt. From the extra-broad shoulders to his helmetlike bald head, from his hammer hands to the hairless and protruding eyebrows. Even the color of his suit, a waxy crayon blue, made you think of some bad guy who just walked out of Dick Tracy in the funny papers.

  “You Rawlins?” he commanded.

  “And to whom am I speaking?”

  “You Rawlins?”

  “I’d like to hear your name before I answer that question.”

  Mr. Blunt’s eyes were the color of pond scum, wavering between dark mud and coagulated algae. He took a bellows breath to keep from jumping across the receptionist’s desk and said, “Eddie Brock.”

  He was as much an Eddie as I was a bee-size Helena hummingbird that sometimes inhabited the southern swamps of Louisiana.

  “Have a seat, Mr. Brock. I’m Rawlins.”

  It took a moment for Eddie to tamp down his rage. The request for civility was not a common event in his life. Brock lifted a heavy oak chair and then dropped it back down in the same place. Then he sat, heavily of course.

  “I wanna hire you,” he said. It was less a request and more a fait accompli.

  “To do what?”

  “On retainer.”

  “Retainer for what?”

  Eddie Brock was definitely not a man used to being questioned.

  “For whatever I need done,” he said.

  “I don’t provide that kind of service, Mr. Brock. People come to me to find out if their spouse is cheating. They want to know if their employees or clients are stealing from them. I’m not a bodyguard, bouncer, or leg breaker. Operators like that don’t have offices with front doors.”

  Eddie could make his eyes very small. I imagined that I looked like a distant marksman’s target. The stare lasted no longer than four seconds but they dragged by like an anvil being hauled by a rusty chain through half-dry cement. Then, suddenly, he broke out into a grin.

  “Let’s start over,” he said. “My name is Eddie Brock and I need a detective to do some work for me.”

  I smiled, showing no teeth, and nodded.

  “The first thing I need,” the big man continued, “is for you to find a woman I’m looking for.”

  “She have a name?”

  “Donata Delphine. I have her picture right here.”

  “Why do you want her found?”

  This question actually made Mr. Brock blink.

  “Excuse me?”

  “What is your interest in Miss Delphine?”

  “Your job is to find her,” he said. “Mine is to talk to her once you’ve done that.”

  “Your job,” I stated. “Who pays you?”

  “Don’t you want a job, soul brother?” The waters were getting choppy. “I mean here you are sittin’ on your ass in this big place all alone. Looks like you could use gettin’ paid.”

  “What I can use is not trying to find some woman for an angry boyfriend intends to do her harm.” I was beginning to enjoy the banter. For some time I had been practicing grabbing my .38 and pulling the trigger. I figured that, if it came down to brass tacks, I had the edge.

  Brock grinned again. If a smile had a sound his would have been a death knell.

  “Who said anything about hurtin’ her?” he growled. “I just want to talk.”

  “About what?”

  “That’s personal.”

  “Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Brock. I like money just as much as the next guy, but I don’t know you. I don’t know you and you want me to find a woman that might not want to be found. If a crime comes from that I could be charged as an accessory. At the very least they might pull my license.”

  Eddie reached into his too-blue jacket’s breast pocket. The fingers of my right hand twitched an inch closer to the Herald. He noticed the movement, smiled again, and took out a three-by-five photograph.

  “This is her,” he said while handing me the picture and staring into the depths of my eyes from the swamp of his.

  Between the gun I wanted to draw, the picture I didn’t want to see, and the man-boulder’s smirk, I was nearly frozen . . . almost so.

  With my left hand I reached for the proffered photograph, plucking it from his forefinger and thumb. I held it far enough away not to lose sight of where my pistol lay.

  That’s when everything changed.

  Donata Delphine was a natural redhead wearing just the right amount of makeup and hardly any clothes at all. She was sitting on a high stool that her legs curled around like two golden snakes mated for life. Her smile was alluring and her eyes managed to connect even from out of that two-dimensional medium.

  She was gorgeous and she was also the woman in the photograph I found in Alonzo Griggs’s wallet, the photograph of the woman Craig Kilian purported not to know.

  “She looks like a whore. I know that,” Brock apologized. “But a man can’t help who he falls in love with. We dated a couple of times when I paid for it. And a few more times just like friends. Then something happened. I think it was the people she worked for. They moved her to another location and told me they didn’t know where she was.”

  I nodded at the lie and began to wonder about the steps that had brought me to this crossroads. There was the German soldier I didn’t kill and a dozen others I had. There was Craig Kilian, who was either the unluckiest white boy I’d ever met or, more likely, a client who was playing me.

  Deceitful clients are nothing new in detective work. A
PI can’t afford to be too picky. But a man like Eddie Brock was beyond the range of, excuse the term, a few little white lies. If I had known the trouble I was getting into, I’d have turned Kilian away—I might have thrown him out a window.

  But the time to cut bait was gone. Taking Craig’s case brought this great white into my office and so I had to assess the damage.

  “These people know where she is but won’t tell you?” I asked, reasonably.

  “Believe me when I tell you, Mr. Rawlins, these are not people you want to question.”

  “If you tell me I can’t talk to them, then why should I believe you?” I said after rejecting two or three more civil replies.

  “What?” Eddie managed to pack a good deal of threat into the word.

  “I’m a damn good detective, Mr. Brock. I find people, stolen property, and the perpetrators of crimes that the police are too lazy to chase down. You’d be a fool to hire me if I didn’t ask any questions.”

  He bristled at the word fool but I had to make a point—before I changed it.

  Eddie hunched his shoulders and held out his hands—palms up. He was the kind of dangerous that made police shoot first.

  “I don’t get it, Rawlins. It’s like you’re interviewing me for the job.”

  “What if I were to say that I’d find this girl, this Donata, but before I told you where she was I’d ask her if she wanted to see you?”

  “I could have made up my name,” he said, finally falling into the false banter of our two-sided interrogation.

  “You couldn’t make up the way you look, man.”

  Once again his eyes turned into pellets. I was reminded that even if he looked blunt that didn’t mean he was stupid.

  After a moment his visage softened and Eddie Brock told me this: “I just wanna talk to the girl. She has information I need, that I have to have. If you can get her on a phone with me I’ll pay you a hundred dollars.”

  “Five hundred and you have a deal.”

  I didn’t want his money. I doubted that he’d pay me even if I could get the good-time girl on a call. No, I didn’t want his money, but he had to think I did.

  “No more questions, then?” Brock inquired.

  “Not about what I’m gonna do but maybe a little about her,” I said. “I mean the name doesn’t sound real and the picture’s great but I don’t think it’ll help that much. With that I could range around the exotic clubs, but that’ll take time.”

  “Go to the Dragon’s Eye,” he said, and then he rose, an impossibly white hippopotamus from an opaque and stagnant pond. “Go to the Dragon’s Eye. Someone there might know something.”

  “If you know where to look, what do you need me for?”

  “She doesn’t work there anymore and people start to act kinda squirrelly when I come around asking questions.”

  “You?”

  “No one likes a smartass, Rawlins.”

  “How do I get in touch with you?”

  This simple question stymied Eddie. He frowned a moment and then said, “I’ll get back to you on that.”

  22

  Eddie was gone but he left a sour resonance in the room; like a low-frequency hum putting pressure on the inner ear. Craig claimed to have stabbed a man, sent me to follow after the man’s name, where I found a man who was dead—but shot, not stabbed. That man was a pornographer and a robber. And then there was Eddie Brock, whose middle name might have been Murder. There was a girl who didn’t mind getting naked in public who all three men had some relationship to.

  And then there was Lola.

  She showed up at a few minutes before 3:00. I didn’t hear her footsteps until just before the door opened. The .38 was back in its pocket. I looked up wondering if maybe Niska’s desk was the place I was destined to die.

  Lola’s two-piece dress suit was the color of scarlet roses and overripe Meyer lemons. I figured that she’d spent two hours or more preparing for this visit. She was both ravishing and devastated.

  “What’s wrong, Lola?” I asked, rising to my feet.

  She glanced at me, saw nothing it seemed, took a single step, and then crumpled to the floor. For a moment it felt as if I was in one of those forties movies when the one important witness walks in and then falls dead from a knife in the back.

  But Lola had only stumbled. I rushed to her side, helped her up and into the chair Eddie Brock last sat in.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Are you hurt?” I pulled another chair up next to hers.

  “I, I need your help, Mr. Rawlins.”

  “What kind of help?”

  She looked into my eyes as if maybe the answer to the question was there. That search brought her to the edge of a deep and dark abyss. Questions alone would not get to her fears. And so I took her right hand with both of mine. The fingers were cold.

  I think it was my warmth that gave her courage.

  “I haven’t heard from Craig in two days,” she said. “I’ve called him a dozen times. He’s talked to me at least every other day since he got out of the army. Something’s wrong.”

  “Did you go to his apartment?”

  “I, I, I . . .”

  If she could have found the words she would have told me that what I asked was a man’s job and, for lack of anyone else, I was that man.

  “You could have just called me to tell me that, Lola,” I said, trying to slow the locomotive I felt bearing down on me.

  She looked into my eyes, wondering at the statement like a cat might when you give it a name. It occurred to me that Lola had been performing for an audience for so long that her life had become that ritual.

  “I need you,” she said.

  It would have been the easiest thing in the world to say no; no, you do not need me and furthermore I wash my hands of you and your son. That’s what any sensible modern man or woman would have done. But I’m anything but modern and she knew it.

  “How did you get here?” I asked.

  “Taxi. It cost nine seventy-five.”

  I gave Lola a double shot of whiskey, called her a taxi from a nearby service, and sent her home promising that I’d call as soon as I found her son.

  “Security,” Edmund Lewis said on the first ring.

  I told Edmund to tell Christmas I’d be picking him up at the office, that we were going to check on my client.

  “When?” the war hero/receptionist asked.

  “As soon as I can get there,” I said and hung up.

  I shouldn’t have been rude to Lewis. He was just doing his job the best way he knew how. But my problems were piling up while the solutions side of the scale stayed empty. Christmas Black was sounding a wee bit unstable, but I’d need him if Craig was going through another of his episodes.

  By the time I got to P9 it was almost 5:00. I couldn’t have explained why I stopped by Asiette’s office on the way; now I think that I was looking for a moment of respite before heading off to war.

  She was just disengaging from a gentle kiss delivered by a quite handsome and well-dressed olive-skinned gentleman who might have been European.

  “Excuse me,” I said, making to back away from the door, which, in my defense, had been open.

  “No, no, Easy,” Asiette said. She rushed toward me and touched my hand. “This is my friend Stefano Lombardi. Stefano, this is Easy Rawlins.”

  Stefano had wavy black hair and an angular face that exuded extreme confidence.

  He looked down his Roman nose at me and then smiled, reminding me a bit of Eddie Brock.

  “You are the janitor?” he asked.

  I was dressed in black jeans and a gray T-shirt. My shoes were cotton topped and rubber soled. He might have thought that I was the cleanup man. But to think something is not the same as saying it.

  The Italian’s rudeness would have bothered me if I hadn’t had so many other issues to deal with. Asiette, on the other hand, turned her head toward him as if she had just been slapped.

&nbs
p; “You got a connect to Christmas Black’s private line, baby?” I said.

  “Three six seven,” she answered, still looking at the man who shared her kisses.

  I went behind her desk, sat down, and pressed the numbers.

  “Hello,” Christmas said on the second ring.

  “I’ll be down at the entrance on the Wilshire side,” I said and hung up.

  “You let him sit at your desk?” Stefano asked Asiette.

  “I got to go,” I said to the Frenchwoman.

  “I’m sorry,” she replied. “I will call you later.”

  I drove.

  Christmas wore a military-like dark blue suit with a tan dress shirt that was underscored by a tight red ascot nestled behind the open top button.

  “What’s up?” he asked after we’d gone a block.

  I told him about Lola’s visit but not Eddie Brock. Compartmentalization is one of the indispensable bulwarks of the detective game.

  “Jackson Blue told me that you talked to him about me. What do you think of him?” I asked the question because I didn’t want to speculate about the job at hand. Sometimes you just have to wait until you get there.

  Christmas seemed not to have heard the question. He stared out the windshield, scowling at the world.

  “It’s like Kirkland,” he said after a minute or two.

  “What is?”

  “Your friend Blue. Really he’s worse. He’s a coward, scared of his own shadow. I looked up his record. Do you know that he’s been arrested thirty-two times—in Los Angeles alone?”

  “For half that number he went to trial,” I bragged, “and every time he was his own lawyer. He’s seen the inside of the county jail often enough but he’s never gone to prison.”