Stalking the Angel (12 page)

On a heavy gray security door that led onto a service drive beneath the hotel, someone had written
WE WARNED YOU
in red spray paint. Beneath it they had drawn a rising sun.

When the first wave of cops and FBI got there, they sealed off the Blue Corridor and herded all the principals into the Blue Room and sealed that off, too. An FBI agent named Reese put the arm on me and Ellis and brought us outside and walked us past the restrooms and down the stairs. Reese was about fifty, with very long arms and pool player’s hands. He was about the color of fine French roast coffee, and he looked like he hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in twenty years.

He said, “How long this guy Davis been working for you, Ellis?”

“Two years. He’s an ex-cop. All my guys are ex-cops. So am I.” He said it nervous.

Reese nodded. “Davis says he’s standing down the hall back up by the bathrooms grabbing a smoke when the girl comes by, goes into the women’s room. Says the next thing he knows this gook dude is coming out the women’s room and gives him one on the head and
that’s it.” Reese squinted at us. Maybe doing his impression of a gook dude. “That sound good to you?”

Jack Ellis chewed the inside of his mouth and said, “Uh-huh.”

In the laundry there were cops and feds taking pictures of the paint job and talking to Chicano guys in green coveralls with
NEW NIPPON HOTEL
on the back. Reese ignored them. “Didn’t anybody tell the girl not to go off alone?” He squatted down to look at something on the floor as he said it. Maybe a clue.

Ellis looked at me. I said, “She was told.”

Reese got up, maybe saw another clue, squatted again in a different place. “But she went anyway. And when she went, nobody went with her.”

I said, “That’s it.”

He stood up again and looked at us. “Little girl gotta go potty. That’s no big deal. Happens every day. Nothing to worry about, right?” A little smile hit at the corner of his mouth and went away. “Only when you got serious criminals out there, and they’re saying things, maybe going potty, maybe that’s something to think about. Maybe calling the police when the threats are made, maybe that’s something to think about, too.” He looked from Ellis to me and back to Ellis. “Maybe the cops are here, maybe the little girl does her diddle and comes back and this never happens.”

Ellis didn’t say anything.

Reese looked at me. “I talked to a dick named Poitras about you. He said you know the moves. What happened, this one get outta hand?”

Ellis said, “Look, Mr. Warren signs the checks, right? He says jump, I say which side of my ass you want me to land on?”

Reese’s eyes went back to Ellis and flagged to
half-mast. I think it was his disdainful look. “How long were you a cop?”

Ellis chewed harder at his mouth.

I said, “You gonna bust our ass about this all day or we gonna try to get something done?”

Reese put the look on me.

I said, “We shoulda brought you guys in. We wanted to bring you guys in. But Ellis is right. It’s Warren’s ticket and he said no. That’s half-assed, but there it is. So this is what we’re left with. We can stand here and you can work out on us or we can move past it.”

Reese’s eyes went to half-mast again, then he turned to look at the door with the paint. He sucked at a tooth while he looked. “Poitras said you got Joe Pike for a partner. That true?”

“Yeah.”

Reese shook his head. “Ain’t that some shit.” He finished sucking on the tooth and turned back to me. “Tell me what you got, from the beginning.”

I gave it to him from the beginning. I had told it so many times to so many cops I thought about making mimeographed copies and handing them out. When I told the part about Nobu Ishida, Jack Ellis said, “Holy shit.”

We went back up the stairs to the Blue Room. There were cops talking to Bradley Warren and Sheila Warren and the hotel manager and the people who organized the Pacific Men’s Club luncheon. Reese stopped in the door and said, “Which one’s Pike?”

Pike was standing in a corner, out of the way. “Him.”

Reese nodded and sucked the tooth again. “Do tell,” he said softly.

“You want to meet him?”

Reese gave me flat eyes, then went over and stood by two dicks who were talking to Bradley Warren. Sheila was sitting on the couch, leaning forward into the detective who was interviewing her, touching his thigh every once in a while for emphasis. Jillian Becker stood by the bar. Her eyes were puffy and her mascara had run.

When Bradley saw me, he glared, and said, “What happened to my daughter?” His face was flushed.

Jillian said, “Brad.”

He snapped his eyes to her. “I asked him an appropriate question. Should I have you research his answer?”

Jillian went very red.

I said, “They knew you were going to be here. They had someone come up through the laundry. Maybe he waited in the restroom or maybe he walked around and was in here with us. We won’t know that until we find him.”

“I don’t like these ‘maybes.’ Maybe is a weak word.”

Reese said, “Maybe somebody shoulda brought the cops in.”

Bradley ignored him. “I paid for security and I got nothing.” He stabbed a finger at Jack Ellis. “You’re fired.”

Ellis really worked at the inside of his mouth. Bradley Warren looked at me. “And you? What did you do?” He looked at Jillian Becker again. “The one you insisted I hire. What did you say about him?”

I said, “Be careful, Bradley.”

Warren pointed at me. “You’re fired, too.” He looked at Pike. “You, too. Get out. Get out. All of you.”

Everyone in the small tight room was staring at us.
Even the cops had stopped doing cop things. Jack Ellis swallowed hard, started to say something, but finally just nodded and walked out. I looked at Sheila Warren. There was something bright and anxious in her eyes. Her hand was on the arm of the big cop, frozen there. Jillian Becker stared at the floor.

Reese said, “Take it easy, Mr. Warren. I got a few questions.”

Bradley Warren sucked in some air, let it out, then glanced at his watch. “I hope it won’t take too long,” he said. “Maybe they can still make the presentation.”

Joe Pike said, “Fuck you.”

We left.

Pike took me back to the Warren house, dropped me off, and drove away without saying anything. I got into the Corvette, went down Beverly Glen into Westwood, and stopped at a little Vietnamese place I know. Ten tables, most of them doubles, cleanly done in pale pinks and pastel blues and run by a Vietnamese man and his wife and their two daughters. The daughters are in their twenties and quite pretty. At the back of the restaurant, where they have the cash register, there’s a little color snapshot of the man wearing a South Vietnamese Regular Army uniform. Major. He looked a lot younger then. I spent eleven months in Vietnam, but I’ve never told the man. I often eat in his restaurant.

The man smiled when he saw me. “The usual?”

I gave him one of my best smiles. “Sure. To go.”

I sat at the little table for two they have in the window of the place and waited and watched the people moving past along Westwood Boulevard and felt hollow.
There were college kids and general-issue pedestrians and two cops walking a beat, one of them smiling at a girl in a gauzy cotton halter and white and black tiger-striped aerobic tights. The tights started just above her navel and stopped just below her knees. Her calves were tanned. I wondered if the cop would be smiling as much if he had just gotten fired from a job because a kid he had been hired to protect had gotten snatched anyway. Probably not. I wondered if the girl in the white and black tights would smile back quite so brightly. Probably not.

The oldest daughter brought my food from the kitchen while her father rang up the bill. She put the bag on the table and said, “Squid with garlic and pepper, and a double order of vegetable rice.” I wondered if she could see it on my forehead:
Elvis Cole, Failed Protector
. She gave me a warm smile and said, “I put a container of chili sauce in the bag, like always.” Nope. Probably couldn’t see it.

I went down to Santa Monica and east to my office. At any number of traffic lights and intersections I waited for people to look my way and point and say nasty things, but no one did. Word was still under wraps.

I put the Corvette in its spot in the parking garage and rode up in the elevator and went into my office and closed the door. There was a message on my answering machine from someone looking for Bob, but that was probably a wrong number. Or maybe it wasn’t a wrong number. Maybe I was in the wrong office. Maybe I was in the wrong life.

I put the food on my desk and took off my jacket and put it on a wooden coat hanger and hung it on the back of the door. I took the Dan Wesson out of its holster and put it in my top right drawer, then slipped
out of the rig and tossed it onto one of the director’s chairs across from my desk, then went over to the little refrigerator and got out a bottle of Negra Modelo beer and opened it and went back to my desk and sat and listened to the quiet. It was peaceful in the office. I liked that. No worries. No sense of loss or unfulfilled obligations. No guilt. I thought about a song a little friend of mine sings:
I’m a big brown mouse, I go marching through the house, and I’m not afraid of anything!
I sang it softly to myself and sipped the Modelo. Modelo is ideal for soothing that hollow feeling. I think that’s why they make it.

After a while I opened the bag and took out the container of squid and the larger container of rice and the little plastic cup of bright red chili paste and the napkins and the chopsticks. I had to move the little figures of Jiminy Cricket and Mickey Mouse to make room for the food. What was it Jiminy Cricket said?
Little man, you’ve had a busy night
. I put some of the chili paste on the squid and some on the rice and mixed it and ate and drank the beer.
I’m a big brown mouse, I go marching through the house, and I’m noooot afraid of anything!

The sun was low above Catalina, pushing bright yellow rectangles up my eastern wall when the door opened and Joe Pike walked in. I tipped what was maybe the second or third Modelo bottle at him. “Life in the fast lane,” I said. Maybe it was the fourth.

“Uh-huh.”

He came over to the desk, looked in what was left of the carton of squid, then the carton of rice. “Any meat in this?”

I shook my head. Pike had turned vegetarian about four months ago.

He dumped what was left of the squid into the rice, took a set of chopsticks, sat in one of the director’s chairs, and ate. Southeast Asians almost never use chopsticks. If you go to Vietnam or Thailand or Cambodia, you never see a chopstick. Even in the boonies. They use forks and large spoons but when they come here and open a little restaurant they put out chopsticks because that’s what Americans expect. Ain’t life a bitch?

I said, “There’s chili paste.”

Pike shook what was left of the chili paste into the rice, stirred it, continued to eat.

“There’s another Modelo in the box.”

He shook his head.

“How long since you’ve come to the office?”

Shrug.

“Must be four, five months.” There was a door to an adjoining office that belonged to Pike. He never used it and didn’t bother to glance at it now. He shoveled in rice and broccoli and peas, chewed, swallowed.

I sipped the last of the Modelo, then dropped the empty into the waste basket. “I was just kidding,” I said. “That’s really pork-fried rice.”

Pike said, “I don’t like losing the girl.”

I took a deep breath and leaned back in the chair. The office was quiet and still. Only the eyes in the Pinocchio clock moved. “Maybe, whatever reason, Warren wanted the Hagakure stolen and wants people to know and also wants them to know that he’s had a child kidnapped because of his efforts to recover it. Maybe he’s looking for a certain image here, figuring he can make a big deal out of recovering the book and his daughter. That sound like Bradley to you?”

Pike got up, went to the little refrigerator, and took out a can of tomato juice. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe
it’s the other way. Maybe somebody wants Warren to look bad and they don’t give a damn about the book just so they stir up as much publicity as they can. Maybe what they want is to make the big Japanese connections lose interest. Or maybe they just want to hurt him. Maybe he owes money.”