Bowing her head, Mai June withdrew.
As Bernie Rose chomped egg rolls and five-flavor shrimp, Driver was approaching the Lexus where it sat in the empty lot next door. Thing had an onboard alarm system that hadn’t been activated.
A black-and-white swung by, slowed momentarily. Driver leaned back against the hood as if it were his own ride, heard the crackle of the radio. The cruiser went on.
Driver straightened and moved to the window of the Lexus.
Steering wheel crossed with a Club-but Driver had no use for the car, and it took him less than a minute to slimjim the door. The interior was spotless. Seats clean and empty. Nothing on the floorboards. A scant handful of refuse, drink cup, tissues, ballpoint pen, tucked neatly into a leatherette pocket hanging off the dash.
Registration in the glove compartment gave him what he wanted.
Bernard Wolfe Rosenwald.
Residing at one of those woodland names out in Culver City, probably some apartment complex with a half-assed security gate.
Driver taped one of the pizza coupons to the steering wheel. He’d drawn a happy face on it.
Chapter Twenty-eight
His eyes went up, to plastic IV bags hanging on trees above the bed, six of them. Below those a battery of pumps. They’d need to be reset every hour or so. One beeped in alarm already.
“What, another goddamn visitor?”
Driver had spoken with the charge nurse, who told him there’d been no other visitors. She also told him his friend was dying.
Doc raised a hand to point shakily to the IVs.
“See I’ve reached the magic number.”
“What?”
“Back in med school we always said you have six chest tubes, six IVs, it’s all over. You got to that point, all the rest’s just dancing.”
“You’re going to be fine.”
“Fine’s a town I don’t even visit anymore.”
“Is there anyone I can call?” Driver asked.
Doc made scribbling motions on air. There was a clipboard on the table. Driver handed it to him.
“This is an L.A. number, right?”
Doc nodded. “My daughter.”
At a bank of pay phones in the lobby, Driver dialed the number.
Thank you for calling. Your call is important to us. Please leave a message.
He said that he was calling from Phoenix, that her father was seriously ill. He left the name of the hospital and his own phone number.
When he got back, a Spanish-language soap opera was playing. A handsome, shirtless young man came struggling up out of swampland, plucking leeches off well-muscled legs.
“No answer,” Driver said. “I left a message.”
“She won’t call back.”
“Maybe she will.”
“Why should she?”
“Because she’s your daughter?”
Doc shook his head.
“How’d you find me?”
“I went by your place. Miss Dickinson was outside, and when I opened the door she rushed in. You two had a routine. If she was there, then you should be. I started knocking on doors, asking around. A kid across the street told me paramedics had come and taken you away.”
“You feed Miss Dickinson?”
“I did.”
“Bitch has us all well trained.”
“Is there anything I can do for you, Doc?”
His eyes went to the window. He shook his head.
“I figured you could use this,” Driver said, handing him a flask. “I’ll try your daughter again.”
“No reason to.”
“Okay if I come back to see you?”
Doc tilted the flask to drink, then lowered it.
“Won’t be much reason for that, either.”
Driver was almost to the door when Doc called out: “How’s that arm?”
“The arm’s good.”
“So was I,” Doc said. “So was I.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
This son of a bitch was beginning to piss him off.
Bernie Rose came out of China Belle picking his teeth. He tossed the fortune cookie in the Dumpster. Even if the damn thing held the gospel truth, who in his right mind would want to know?
Ripping the coupon off his steering wheel, he balled it up and sent it after the fortune cookie.
Pizza. Right.
Bernie drove home, to Culver City, not far from the old MGM studios, now Sony-Columbia. Jesus, one hand wrapped around a hamburger, held two fingers of the other up to his head in greeting, then hit the button to open the gate. Bernie gave him a thumbs-up in reply, wondering if Jesus knew he’d just passed a good facsimile of the Boy Scout salute.
Someone had shoved over a dozen pizza ads under his door. Pizza Hut, Mother’s, Papa John’s, Joe’s Chicago Style, Pizza Inn, Rome Village, Hunky-Dory Quick Ital, The Pie Place. Son of a bitch probably went around pulling them off doors all over the neighborhood. On every one of them he’d circled Free Delivery.
Bernie poured a scotch and sank into the swayback sofa. Right alongside was a chair he’d paid over a thousand dollars for, supposed to correct all your back problems, but he couldn’t stand the damn thing, felt like he was sitting in a catcher’s mitt. So, though he’d had it almost a year, it still smelled like new car. The smell, he liked.
Suddenly he felt tired.
And the couple next door were at it again. He sat listening and had another scotch before he went and knocked at 2-D.
“Yeah?”
Lenny was a short, red-faced man who’d carry his baby fat with him to the grave.
“Bernie Rose, next apartment over.”
“I know, I know. What’s up? I’m kind of busy here.”
“I heard.”
His eyes changed. He tried to close the door but Bernie had reached up and grasped the edge, forearm flat against it. Guy got even more red-faced trying to shove it closed, but Bernie held it easily. Muscles on his arm stood out like cables.
After a moment he swept it open.
“What the-”
“You all right, Shonda?” Bernie asked.
She nodded without meeting his eyes. At least it hadn’t gotten to the physical stage this time. Not yet.
“You can’t-”
Bernie clamped a hand on his neighbor’s throat.
“I’m a patient man, Lenny, not much for getting in other people’s way. What I figure is, we’ve all got our own lives, right? And the right to be left alone. So I sit over there for almost a year now listening to what goes down in here and I keep thinking, Hey, he’s a mensch, he’ll work it out. You gonna work it out, Lenny?”
Bernie rocked his hand at the wrist, causing his neighbor’s head to nod.
“Shonda’s a good woman. You’re lucky to have her, lucky she’s put up with you this long. Lucky I’ve put up with you. She has good reason: she loves you. I don’t have any reason at all.”
Well, that was stupid, Bernie thought as he returned to his own apartment and poured another scotch.
It was quiet next door. The swayback couch welcomed him, as it always did.
Had he left the TV on? He didn’t recall ever turning it on at all, but there it was, unspooling one of those court shows currently fashionable, Judge Somebody-or-another, judges reduced to caricature (brusque, sarcastic New Yorker, Texan with accent thick as cake icing), participants either so stupid they jumped at the chance to broadcast their stupidity nationwide or so oblivious they had no idea that’s what they were doing.
Yet another thing that made Bernie tired.
He didn’t know. Had he changed, or had the world changed around him? Some days he barely recognized it. Like he’d been dropped off in a spaceship and was only going through the motions, trying to fit in, doing his best imitation of someone who belonged down here. Everything had gone so cheap and gaudy and hollow. Buy a table these days, what you got was an eighth of an inch of pine pressed onto plywood. Spend $1200 for a chair, you couldn’t sit in the damn thing.
Bernie’d known his share of burnouts, guys who started wondering just what it was they were doing and why any of it mattered. Mostly they disappeared not long after. Got sent up for lifetime hauls, got sloppy and killed by someone they’d braced, got taken down by their own people. Bernie didn’t think he was a burnout. This driver for damn sure wasn’t.