Stalking the Angel (23 page)

She nodded and looked toward the house. Big changes coming. She said, “I was thinking of what Carol said about people who hurt themselves, about how what they’re really doing is looking for someone who loves them enough to make the pain stop.”

I didn’t say anything.

Jillian Becker started the BMW and put it in gear and looked at me.

After a while she drove away.

When I got home I called Carol Hillegas and told her that I had spoken with Bradley and Sheila and that they were expecting her call. After Carol hung up, I called Kira Asano’s place and asked for Mimi. Bobby came on and said, “Who’s this?”

“The Shell Answer Man.”

“Eat shit.”

Frank came on and said, “Are the cops on the way here?”

“No.”

“She’s in the back. Wait.”

In a little while Mimi said, “Uh-huh?” She sounded like she maybe expected that her parents were really on the other end of the line and about to start yelling at her.

I said, “It’s Elvis.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I spoke with your parents. They’re not going to
make you go home. You’re going to have to leave Asano’s, but you can stay at a halfway house Carol Hillegas owns. If that doesn’t work out, you can go home and your father will move out, whichever you prefer.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Mimi?”

“I don’t want to go home.” Dull. I wondered if she was loaded on something.

“I’ll come get you tomorrow morning. If you want we can have breakfast and then I’ll take you to Carol’s place, and I’ll stay with you there for as long as you need me to, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Put Frank on.”

There were noises and voices and then Frank came on. “What’s up?”

“I’m going to come get her tomorrow. I’m going to get the book, too.”

“Are you going to be able to keep Mr. Asano out of it?”

“I don’t know. I’m not going to bring him into it, but I don’t know what Mimi is going to tell the cops when they talk with her. You live up to your end and help me with the kid and I’ll see that the parents don’t try to press you if the cops come in. I’ll tell them that you guys cooperated with me and wanted the best for the girl.”

“That oughta cut a lot of ice.”

“It’s what I can do.”

“Yeah.” Frank hung up.

I put down the phone and went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of apple juice and drank it. I went back into the living room and turned on the
evening news. I put my hands in my pockets and shook my head and thought, sonofagun, this thing is coming together. I went back to the phone and called Joe Pike but he wasn’t home. I dug through my wallet and found Jillian Becker’s home number and gave her a call. Nope. She was out, too. The cat door clacked in the kitchen and hard food crunched. I went back into the kitchen and looked at him eating and said, “Well, I guess it’s just you and me.”

He didn’t bother to look up.

I got us a couple of Falstaff out of the refrigerator and put on some music and after a while I went to bed.

At five minutes after eight the next morning my phone rang. I picked it up and said, “Elvis Cole Detective Agency. Let us get on your case!”

Jillian Becker said, “What’s going on?”

I said, “What do you mean, what’s going on?” This sort of thing is covered in Advanced Interrogation at the Private Eye Academy.

“Mimi called Bradley fifteen minutes ago. She told him she wanted to give the Hagakure back and asked him to meet her. I thought you were supposed to pick up Mimi and bring her to Carol Hillegas.”

“Did Bradley go?”

“Two minutes ago. I told him he shouldn’t. I told him he should wait.”

“Are you in your office?”

“Yes.”

I told her I’d call her back, then I hung up and dialed Kira Asano’s. I dialed the four numbers I had and each of the four rang but no one answered. I didn’t like that. I called Jillian. “I couldn’t get anyone at Asano’s. Did Bradley say where he was going to meet Mimi?”

“She wanted to see him at a construction site on Mulholland just east of Coldwater. He said he told her that was silly, that she should come to the office or that he would go to where she was staying but she said she would feel safe there and that’s where she wanted to do it. Why would Mimi want to give back the book like this? Why would she want to be alone with him?”

There were a couple of reasons but I didn’t like them much. I said, “I’m on my way now. Call the North Hollywood PD and ask for Poitras or Griggs or Baishe. Tell them you’re calling because I told you to and have them send a car. Tell them to hurry.”

Mulholland was five minutes away down Woodrow Wilson, then a single broken-backed sprint west toward Coldwater. Just past Laurel, Mulholland is woodsy and the houses have been there forever, but farther west more and more ridges were being cut and scraped and developed for homesites. A mile short of Coldwater, Mulholland flattened out and signs said
HEAVY EQUIPMENT AHEAD
. I slowed down. A large ridge grew away to the north, rising off the road toward the San Fernando Valley. The ridge was big and white and had been graded clean. A fresh tarmac road had been cut up to the ridge top and clean white sidewalks paralleling the road had been poured and cement drains set. When all this was finished there would probably be guards and ornate street lamps and no trees and no coyotes and no deer. Just what the locals had in mind when they bought up here ten years ago.

There was a chain link fence running the perimeter of the site. A sign on the wire and pipe gate that should have blocked the road said
S&S CONSTRUCTION—KEEP OUT
. The gate was open. I turned through the gate, and followed the road up.

The top of the ridge had been sliced off to make a broad flat plateau with a jetliner’s view of the valley. On the plateau, the road made a wide circle so that view homes that sold for eight hundred thousand dollars could be built along the rim of the circle. Luxury living. There was a sixty-yard dumpster and two Cat bulldozers and a Ryan backhoe parked on the far side of the circle. Bradley Warren’s brown Corniche convertible and a beat-up green Pontiac Firebird were by the dumpster, and Mimi and Bradley were standing by the Firebird. Mimi saw me first. She was wearing a loose red and white cotton shirt over blue jeans and black, high-top shoes. There was a pink leather purse slung over her shoulder and her face looked pale and wild and blotchy from crying. She reached into the purse and took out a small black revolver and pointed it toward her father and I yelled and she shot him. There was one sharp
POP
. Bradley looked down at himself, then looked back at his daughter, then went forward onto his hands and knees.

Mimi dropped the gun and climbed into the Firebird and screeched away. I jumped the curve and revved the Corvette across the island’s rough ground. Bradley stayed on his hands and knees for the time it took me to cross the ridge top and get out of the car, then he keeled sideways onto his side and began to make flapping movements with his arms, trying to get up. “She shot me,” he said. “My God, she shot me.”

“Stop trying to get up. Let me see it.”

“It hurts!”

I put him on his back and looked at him. There was pink froth at the corner of his mouth and when he spoke his voice was wet the way it gets when you’ve a bad cold and the mucus fills your throat and sputters
when you try to breathe. There was a red spot about as big around as a medium-sized orange just to the right of the center of his chest. It was growing.

I took out my handkerchief and put it on the spot and pressed hard. “I have to get you to a hospital,” I said.

Bradley nodded, then blew a large red bubble and threw up blood. His eyes rolled back in his head and he shuddered violently and then his heart stopped.

“God damn you, Bradley!” I was yelling.

I pulled off my shirt and his belt. I bundled my shirt, put it over the red spot, then wrapped the belt around his chest to maintain some pressure. When there is arterial bleeding you are not supposed to use CPR, but when there is no pulse, there’s not much choice. I cleared his throat and breathed into his mouth and then pressed hard on his chest twice. I repeated the sequence five times and then I checked for a pulse but there was none.

A single hawk floated high above, looking for mice or other small living things. Out on Mulholland cars passed. None of them saw, and none stopped to help. Somewhere a motorcycle with no muffler made sounds that echoed through the canyons.

I breathed and pressed and breathed and pressed and breathed and pressed, and that’s what I did until the cops that Lou Poitras sent found us and pulled me off. All the breathing and pressing hadn’t done any good. Bradley Warren was dead.

Six copmobiles came and two wagons from the Crime Scene Unit and a van from the coroner’s office and a couple of Staties and a woman from the district attorney’s office. The Crime Scene people outlined the body and the gun and measured a lot of tire tracks. The coroner’s people took pictures and examined the body and pronounced Bradley Warren officially dead. Bradley was probably glad to hear that. Being unofficially dead must be a drag.

The woman from the DA’s office and a tall blond detective I didn’t know talked to the Crime Scene guys and then came over and talked to me. The detective had sculptured, air-blown hair that was out of style ten years ago. The woman was short with a big nose and big eyes. I was looking good with blood on my pants and my hands and my shirt and my face. The blond said, “What happened?”

I told it for the millionth time. I told them where
Bradley Warren had stood and where Mimi had stood and where Mimi’s car had been parked and how she had taken the gun from her purse and fired one shot point-blank and killed her father.

The blond dick said, “She drops the gun after she pulls the trigger?”

“Yeah.”

“A sixteen-year-old kid with no gun and you couldn’t stop her.”

“I was busy trying to keep her father alive.” Asshole.

A dark cop with a cookie-duster mustache came over with the gun in a plastic bag. He showed it to the woman. “Gun’s a Ruger Blackhawk. Twenty-two caliber revolver. Loaded with twenty-two long rifle ammo. One shot fired.”

The woman looked at the gun, gave it back, and said, “Okay.” The dark cop left and took the blond cop with him. The woman said, “What kind of car was she driving?”

“Dark green Pontiac Firebird. Couple of years old. I didn’t get the plate.”

“Anyone else in the car?”

“No.”

The woman took out her handkerchief and gave it to me. “Wipe your face,” she said. “You look like hell.”

Just before ten, Poitras and Griggs and Terry Ito pulled up in a blue sedan. Griggs was in the back seat. They talked to the woman from the DA’s office and then the Crime Scene people and then they got to me. Nobody looked happy. Lou Poitras said, “Half the cops and Feds in L.A. looking for this kid, Hound Dog, how’d you happen to be up here with her and her old man?”

I told him. As I said it, Ito’s face darkened and you
could tell he wasn’t liking it. Hard to blame him. I wasn’t liking it, either. Midway through the telling Jillian Becker’s white BMW nosed up to the ridge top and stopped by one of the coroner’s vans. Jillian Becker and a short man in a tweed sport coat got out. One of the dicks and the woman from the district attorney’s office went over to them. Jillian Becker looked at me. Her face was drawn. Terry Ito said, “You found the girl, and followed her to Kira Asano’s and you decided not to tell anyone.”

“Yeah.”

“Even though you knew the police and the Feds were searching for her.”

I said, “She looked safe at Asano’s so I let her sit until I knew what was going on and then I talked with her. She was a mess, Ito. She had run away and couldn’t go home because her father was sexually molesting her.”

Poitras said, “Jesus Christ.”

Ito took a breath, let it out, and shook his head. He looked out off the ridge toward the valley. The hawk was gone.

I said, “I wanted to get the kid some help before she’d have to deal with you people.”

Across the ridge top, the woman from the district attorney’s office opened the coroner’s van and showed Jillian Becker and the short man what was inside. Jillian stood stiff and nodded, then turned and quickly walked back to her BMW. The short man went with her. VP from the company, no doubt.