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I overslept the next morning. I hadn’t left a wake-up call but I still felt guilty and stupid about sleeping so late. I dragged myself out of bed and into the shower without running. I felt like a weight was hanging from the back of my head and a family of mice was camping out in my mouth.
It was nearly nine o’clock when I got downs
tairs to the coffee shop. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I ordered French toast. I took the first bite, and all I could think was that if I walked back into the kitchen I could finally discover how yesterday’s doughnuts had been made.
I decided I wasn’t hungry anyway. I drank my water and left the sugar-heaped, fat-fried cardboard on my plate. I went back up to my room.
I was already having the kind of morning where you can’t figure out why you bother. It must be blood sugar. Or maybe it was geographical. Whatever it was, I sat on my bed for a half hour or so and tried to figure out what I should do and why.
The whole shape of the day was just adding to the feeling of stupid futility I had about tailing Tanner yesterday. One day of surveillance doesn’t generally tell you anything, but my gut was insisting that Tanner was exactly what he seemed: a hardworking, ordinary family man. Clean, decent, God-fearing—he probably had season tickets for a local church.
He was a typical police administrator, no more. He had the swivel-chair spread to prove it. I had watched him all day, and the idea of this agreeable family man flinging Spider off the roof with one hand was laughable.
That’s what my gut said. But Tanner could have had help. He might be the point man for a racist conspiracy. And listening to my gut made me think I was wimping out, whining about futility when I should just stick with it, no matter how long it took.
Should I stick with Tanner? Tail one of the others? Or do something else—like get on a plane and go home?
I turned it over in my head a few times, but I couldn’t decide. I could feel myself slipping backwards again, back into the dim, clenched-stomach place where nothing mattered and everything was gray. I missed my boat. I missed Nicky and Captain Art and the smell of the cat under my house. I wanted to feel the water moving me again, the fresh salty tang of it on my face. I didn’t want to be here.
But I was here. And if I let myself start thinking about that, it was going to lead me down again.
For my own sake, and for the sake of solving a couple of murders that seemed to matter more than a lot of others, I had to keep moving. What I did wasn’t important; I just had to do something. Anything.
That took some of the pressure off. Surprisingly, I felt a little better. I felt so much better I was hungry again. I went downstairs, got in my car and drove to Norm’s down on Sunset. I had a ham and cheese omelette, whole-wheat toast, and orange juice. It tasted pretty much like it was supposed to taste. I decided that was a good omen.
I used the phone book outside the restaurant to look up Doyle and Chismond. Most of the book was missing, ripped out by people with no pencils and short memories. The page that would have listed Chismond was gone, but I found Doyle’s address.
Okay, I thought. Another sign. This was my day.
I drove over to Hancock Park, where Doyle had one of the beautiful Tudor homes they grow there. It sat behind a high hedge, with a couple of big trees in the yard. I could just see the top of a tree house sticking up. Doyle wasn’t married; maybe it was from a previous owner.
I pulled in under a tree across the street and looked at the house for a minute.
It was a very quiet neighborhood. All the lawns were neatly mown. There was no litter in the gutters. No traffic passed through on the way to somewhere else. In fact, about all I could see or hear was one mockingbird, sitting on a wire a half-block away and warbling with measured dignity.
Doyle was almost certainly at work. I wasn’t sure what I could expect to get from looking at his house, but in a way it was out of my hands. I had been led here by a good breakfast and a savaged telephone book.
So I looked at the house. I had been looking at it for about five minutes when my car door was snatched open and something cold pushed into my ear.
“Neighborhood Watch,” a soft voice said. “Can I help you with something?”
Out of the corner of my eyes I could see the gunman. He was in his thirties, big, with short dirty-blond hair and a Hawaiian shirt. He looked very fit. He’d moved up on me quietly and smoothly and I was caught.
I was more pissed-off than scared. I hadn’t heard a thing. I was supposed to be street-smart and I had let this goon into my lap without noticing anything.
And now he was leaning his weight on the top of the car door and moving the tip of his gun against my ear with a nasty grin.
So I did something stupid. I jerked my hands up in front of my face, as if I was scared. I mumbled, “Oh, please—” while I half-turned and got my foot on the door. Then I kicked at the door as hard as I could.
It was a bad idea. If somebody has a gun in your ear it’s generally good form to ask politely what they’d like you to do, and then do it.
But I was mad. This was supposed to be my lucky day. Things were supposed to go my way this morning. If you can get a decent breakfast in L.A., anything can happen. So I moved without really thinking.
What happened was that when I kicked the car door it caught him squarely on the chin and the Neighborhood Watch clown went sprawling on his butt. I was out of the car as he fell back and clunked his head on the pavement.
He lay there for a moment, dazed. I moved to him quickly, plucking the gun from his fingers. I shook my head in surprise when I saw the weapon. It was a Glock 9mm with a fifteen-shot magazine and something that looked an awful lot like an illegal silencer on the end.
If this guy was Neighborhood Watch, what was in this neighborhood? The Corleone family’s summerhouse?
