Eats to Die For! (5 page)

“Absolutely not.”

“Could her disappearance mean that she's simply gone deeper undercover?”

“You're never undercover to your editor,” Zarian snapped. “What are you thinking?”

“Am I thinking?”

Not from where I sit
, Robert Mitchum said. Who invited you into this meeting, Mitch?

“You look like you're thinking.”

“It's just that if you didn't take her off the story, and she doesn't quit on a story, and she never fails to check in, then that leaves only one conclusion.”

“You're saying she was abducted?”

“Believe me, I hope I'm wrong. I hope there's a perfectly innocent explanation for her disappearance.”

“Shit,” Zarian muttered, “I don't like this. Hey, did she offer you money?”

“We didn't really have the chance to get into details, but she said she'd pay whatever it took for me to get the evidence.”

“
She'd
pay it, sure. Whenever Sandoval treats, I end up writing the check. What do you charge?”

“My usual rate is fifty dollars an hour.”

“Shit! I'm in the wrong business!”

“But it doesn't always take a lot of hours,” I added.

“I guess it would be worth it if you find out what happened to Sandoval.”

“Would you happen to have her address?”

“Yeah, hold on.” Opening a drawer, he pulled out an old-fashioned Rolodex and flipped through it until he found the proper card, then transferred the information onto a sheet of paper.

“That's not very high-tech,” I said, eyeing the phone headset that was still plugged into his pocket.

“Index cards can't be hacked.”

He handed the paper to me. The address was in the Palms area of L.A. abutting Culver City, which some seventy years ago was a concentrated center of film production within the city, housing the MGM, Selznick and Hal Roach studio lots. I tucked the paper into my pocket.

“I suppose you want some money now,” Zarian said.

“Is that a problem?” I asked.

“A little, yeah.”

Since I was, at least for the time being, flush (my definition of such being that I could actually afford new clothes instead of coloring in the threadbare seams on everything in my closet with Sharpies), I decided not to push it.

“Tell you what,” I said, getting up from the chair, “I'll keep track of my hours and bill you when I have something to report.”

“Great. Oh, and Beauchamp? While you're out there looking for Sandoval, keep trying to get one of those hamburgers and bring it back here. I'd rather have that than your invoice.”

Taking the address that Zarian had given me, I headed out for Palms, which wasn't all that far away from the
Independent Journal
offices by L.A. standards. Louie's apartment was on Lawless Street, which sounded like the perfect place for a Western shoot out.

Sign me…up
, Gary Cooper requested inside my head, but I ignored him.

Lawless was right off of Motor Avenue, one of the main drags through the Palms area, and a thoroughfare of particular interest for film buffs, since it starts at Twentieth Century-Fox studios on the north end, and runs straight into what was once MGM at the south end, passing through Hillcrest Country Club on the way.

Hillcrest was almost as important to the history of Golden Age Hollywood as the studios themselves, since in an era when most country clubs were exclusive Gentile, Hillcrest was exclusively Jewish, and boasted as members practically all of the major studio moguls as well as the town's top film and radio comedians, who formed their own “Round Table.”

But judging from the looks of the apartment building that I pulled up in front of on Lawless, the building in which Luisa Sandoval lived, few, if any, of the residents had the status to join Hillcrest.

Louie's apartment number was 216, but when I punched the button on the front directory and waited the allotted time, I got no response or buzzing to let me into the building. I tried again with the same result.

It was pretense time.

Pretense
is basically creative lying, or maybe acting, done on the part of the investigator to gain information.

Usually it's done over the phone, such as the old, “Hi, I'm from UPS and I have a package to deliver, and I have to verify your address,” gag. Pretense in person is usually reserved for the movies, like when Bogie as Philip Marlowe turns effeminate and goes into Geiger's book shop in
The Big Sleep
, pretending to be looking for a rare first edition.

Or like your doll pretending to be a tomato to get information
, Bogie reminded me.
And I wasn't doing a swish act, kid. I was being eccentric.

I buzzed the manager's button and waited. It took two more buzzes before a man's voice came on. “Yah?”

“Hi, I'm here to pick something up from Luisa Sandoval in 216,” I lied. “I'm from the
Independent Journal
.”

“Then buzz Luisa Sandoval in 216,” the voice slurred.

“She's not there,” I replied. “She's on assignment, but she left a file with her story for this week's edition outside her apartment. He phoned me and told me to come and get it.”

“Come and get it!” the guy shouted, then laughed. He was definitely drunk, and it was barely mid-afternoon.

“Please, we're on deadline.”

“Aw, Chrise…”

The door then buzzed and I entered. A few moments later a man lurched out. He was about sixty, grey, unshaven, with a bushy moustache and glasses, and was dressed in sweatpants and a muscle shirt so old he might still have had muscles when he bought.

“Hi, thanks for coming out,” I said.

“Coming out, bullshit. I'm straight as a goddamn arrow.”

“What I mean is, thanks for letting me in so I can get Louie's story.”

“Who the hell's Louie?”

Apparently not
everyone
called her that. “Luisa Sandoval, in 216.”

“You said she was gone.”

“She is, but I need to go up to her apartment so I can get her copy for the story she's working on. She told me it was in an envelope labeled Burger Heaven.”

The truth was, of course, I had no idea what kind of file she might have left or in what format.

“I don' know anything about what she does,” the manager drawled. “Burger Heaven, huh? Owned by the damned church.”

Sure, whatever.

Since I knew Louie had not actually left an envelope outside her apartment, at least I'd be extremely surprised to find that she had, I had to get inside her place. It was time for phase two of the pretense.

“Hey, my cell phone's vibrating,” I told the manager.

“Lucky you.”

I pretended to take a call: “Beauchamp…Louie, hi! Yeah, I'm at your place. Oh, okay. Yeah, he's right here. Yeah, sure, I'll ask him. Great. Okay, thanks.” Turning back to the drunken manager I said, “That was Louie. She forgot to put the envelope in the hallway, so she asked if you could let me in to her place. It's on her dining table.”

He leveled a bleary look at me. “You really think I'd open up the apartment of a tenant for some asshole I never met?”

“But I've already introduced myself,” I countered, even though I hadn't, fully. “So how about it?”

“Depends.”

“On?”

“On whether you're willing to make it worth my while.”

I sighed and reached for my wallet, and found that Andrew Jackson made the case much better than I could have.

Even he's a better lawyer than you
, Mitchum said in my head.

The manager led me to the elevator and once confined inside with the guy the booze fumes were nearly overpowering. By the time we got off on the building's second floor, I was practically gasping for clean air.

Taking me to apartment 216, he managed to open the door with his passkey on the third try. Before pushing the door open, though, he turned to me and attempted to give me the Robert DeNiro “I'm watchin' you” gesture, but managed instead to give himself a Three Stooges eye poke with his own fingers. I tried not to laugh.

“I'll only be a second,” I told him, entering the room and turning on the light.

At first I thought that Luisa Sandoval, for all her personal charm, must be an unmitigated slob, because the place was not simply a mess, it was a catastrophe. Then I realized that I wasn't looking at a messy apartment, I was looking at one that had been tossed. Just like my office had been broken into.

Except the person or persons here had clearly been searching for something.

Was it the same person or persons?

“Gonna be all day?” the manager called from hallway.

I didn't reply, just in case there was a bug planted in here, too. Instead I scooped up a bunch of papers that were strewn all over the floor and neatened them into a stack. I had no idea what they might be, but the fact that they were still here strongly implied they were expendable.

Finding a large envelope in the pile, I stuck the papers inside and quickly scrawled “Burger Heaven” on the outside. I then rejoined the manager in the hallway. “Got it,” I said, waiving the envelope in front of him.

“'Bout damn time,” he said, closing the door and locking it.

We were back to the elevator when I heard footsteps running down the hall. A tall, impossibly thin, gawky young man appeared and hollered, “Hold the door, okay?” The manager made no attempt to, but the guy managed to slide in sideways through the narrowing gap of the closing doors. That's how thin he was.

“Thanks,” he said, guilelessly.

Down on the ground level the manager lurched back to his unit, presumably to continue his regimen of emptying bottles and ignoring requests for maintenance, while I headed for the front door.

Halfway there, I noticed Mr. Skinny following me. “Why were you looking in Luisa's apartment?” he asked.

I turned around and faced him, smiling. In my experience, smiling often diffuses a confrontation, except for those rare times when you get punched. “Why do you want to know?”

“Because I'm her neighbor. We're friends. I haven't seen her in a couple days, which is unusual. Do you know where she is?”

“No, not really. I was asked to come here by Louie's boss.”

“Louie?”

“That's what's she's called. You didn't know that?”

“Well, we haven't really talked all that much, outside of hi.”

Suddenly I got the picture. This poor, wormy
naïf
was stuck on Luisa Sandoval, and probably waited in his apartment for the sound of her door opening so he could pop out and say hello. He harbored in his heart the impossible dream that they could someday be a couple, and so was not simply puzzled by her disappearance but distressed by it.

What's more, he now appeared crushed at finding someone who knew something so basic about his precious Luisa, which he did not know.

There but for the grace of Us go you
, Bogie sneered, truthfully, unfortunately.

But since we were on the subject of truth, I decided maybe I'd better come clean to the beanpole. “Look, I'm a private investigator. Louie came to me about a case, and that was the last I saw of her.”

“What were you looking for in her room? What's that stuff you're holding?”

“First things first. What's your name?”

“Avery.”

“Well, Mr. Avery—”

“No that's my first name. My full name is Avery Klemmer.” He stuck out a hand, which I took. It was like weighing a filet at the fish market.

I dropped the damp, dead hand. “Dave Beauchamp, but as to what I'm looking for, I'm afraid that's confidential to the case.”

“Are you going to keep looking?”

“I got your charming building manager to let me in today, but I don't think he's going to do it again.”

“I can get you in if you're brave.”

“Brave?”

“Our apartments have balconies,” he said. “If you're not afraid of heights, you can jump from one to the other. I can let you into my place and you can get to her balcony.”

“And you've done this?”

He looked down at the floor and uttered, “No. I'm afraid of heights.”

“You'd let me into your place?”

“If it will help find Luisa. I mean, Louie.”

“Let's go.”

We went back up the elevator and he opened up his place to me. Avery Klemmer's apartment was the opposite of what I had found in Louie's: it was immaculate. It was also largely empty, with just one thrift-store sofa, a battered table and mismatching chair by way of furniture, but with an enormous plasma television, a gaming console, and a shelf packed with video games shoved against one wall.

“Do you game?” he asked.

“You mean play video games? No, I'm afraid not.”

“It's my job. I review new ones.” He sounded very proud.

“Is this the balcony?” I asked, rather redundantly, because if it wasn't, the wall-sized sliding door led out to a two-storey drop to the ground.

Stepping out, I saw what he was talking about: there was only about a three foot gap between the edge of his narrow stucco balcony and the edge of Louie's, which had a few potted plants scattered around on it.

It looked easy…at least until I climbed up on the ledge. Now it looked terrifying. Those three feet had suddenly turned into a mile. But I knew this was the only way to reenter Louie's apartment and continue snooping.

“Wish me luck,” I called back. Deciding I couldn't actually step over, I tried lunging head first, figuring I could catch the ledge and balance myself on it with my hands, while I vaulted my legs over.

Boy, was I wrong.

CHAPTER FIVE

The good news was that I did not fall two storeys in my attempt to jump from balcony to balcony. The bad news is that I took a direct belly-splat onto the rough stucco surface of its side wall. I managed to pull myself over until I was safely on the balcony of Louie's apartment, and tried to retain my wind, which had been knocked out of me.