“Great!” I said.
That gave him a three-year career total of four commercials. If he worked her in, it would be her second.
“Why don’t you like him?”
“Honey, I only met him twice and I don’t dislike him. Could we drop the subject?”
“Aagh!” she said. “You and Vartan, you two deserve each other. Bull-heads!”
“People who live in glass houses,” I pointed out, “should undress in the cellar.”
She shook her head again. “You and Papa, you know all the corny old ones, don’t you?”
“Guilty,” I admitted. “Are you bringing Ronnie to dinner on Sunday?”
“Not this Sunday. We’re going to a party at his agent’s house. Ronnie wants me to meet him.”
“I hope it works out. I’ll hold my thumbs. I love you, sis.”
“It’s mutual,” she said.
I kissed the top of her head and went out to my ancient Camaro. On the way to the apartment I stopped in Santa Monica and talked with my former boss at Arden.
I had served him well; he promised that if they ever had any commercial reason to invade my new bailiwick, and were shorthanded, I would be their first choice for associate action.
The apartment I shared with two others in Pacific Palisades was on the crest of the road just before Sunset Boulevard curves and dips down to the sea.
My parents had bought a tract house here in the fifties for an exorbitant twenty-one thousand dollars. It was now worth enough to permit both of them to retire. But they enjoyed their work too much to consider that.
I will not immortalize my roomies’ names in print. One of them was addicted to prime-time soap operas, the other changed his underwear and socks once a week, on Saturday, after his weekly shower.
When I told them, over our oven-warmed frozen TV dinners, that I would be leaving at the end of the month, they took it graciously. Dirty Underwear was currently courting a lunch-counter waitress who had been hoping to share an apartment. She would inherit my rollout bed—when she wasn’t in his.
On Thursday morning my former boss phoned to tell me he had several credit investigations that needed immediate action and two operatives home with the flu. Was I available? I was.
Uncle Sarkis and I went shopping on Saturday for office and apartment furniture. Wholesale, of course. “Retail” is an obscene word to my Uncle Sarkis.
The clan was gathered on Sunday at my parents’ house, all but Adele. Uncle Vartan and my father played tavlu (backgammon to you). My mother, Uncle Sarkis, his three sons, and I played twenty-five-cent-limit poker out on the patio. My mother won, as usual. I broke even; the others lost. I have often suspected that the Sunday gatherings my mother hosts are more financially motivated than familial.
My roommates told me Monday morning that I didn’t have to wait until the end of the month; I could move anytime my place was ready. The waitress was aching to move in.
The remodeling was finished at noon on Tuesday, the furniture delivered in the afternoon. I moved in the next morning. All who passed on the street below would now be informed by the gilt letters on the new wide front window that the Pierre Apoyan Investigative Service was now open and ready to serve them.
There were many who passed on the street below in the next three hours, but not one came up the steps. There was no reason to expect that anyone would. Referrals and advertising were what brought the clients in. Arden was my only doubtful source for the first; my decision to open this office had come too late to make the deadline for an ad in the phone book yellow pages.
I consoled myself with the knowledge that there was no odor of sour socks in the room and I would not be subjected to the idiocies of prime-time soap opera. I read the L.A. Times all the way through to the classified pages.
It had been a tiring two days; I went into my small bedroom to nap around ten o’clock. It was noon when I came back to the here and now. I turned on my answering machine and went down to ask Vartan if I could take him to lunch.
He shook his head. “Not today. After your first case, you may buy. Today, lunch is on me.”
He had not spent enough time in the old country to develop a taste for Armenian food. He had spent his formative years in New York and become addicted to Italian cuisine. We ate at La Famiglia on North Canon Drive.
He had whitefish poached in white wine, topped with capers and small bay shrimp. I had a Caesar salad.
Over our coffee, he asked, “Dull morning?”
I nodded. “There are bound to be a lot of them for a one-man office. I got in two days at Arden last week. I might get more when they’re short-handed.”
He studied me for a few seconds. Then, “I wasn’t going to mention this. I don’t want to get your hopes up. But I have a—a customer who might drop in this afternoon. It’s about a rug I sold her. It has been stolen. For some reason, which she wouldn’t tell me, she doesn’t want to go to the police. I gave her your name.”
He had hesitated before he called her a customer. With his history, she could have been more than that. “Was it an expensive rug?” I asked.
“I got three thousand for it eight years ago. Only God knows what it’s worth now. That was a sad day for me. It’s an antique Kerman.”
“Wasn’t it insured?”
“Probably. But if she reported the loss to her insurance company they would insist she go to the police.”
“Was anything else stolen?”
“Apparently not. The rug was all she mentioned.”
That didn’t make sense. A woman who could afford my uncle’s antique Oriental rugs must have some jewelry. That would be easier and safer to haul out of a house than a rug.
“I’d better get back to the office,” I said.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” he warned me again. “I probably shouldn’t have told you.”
I checked my answering machine when I got back to the office. Nothing. I took out my contract forms and laid them on top of my desk and sat where I could watch the street below.
I decided, an hour later, that was sophomoric. The ghost of Sam Spade must have been sneering down at me.
She opened the door about twenty minutes later, a fairly tall, slim woman with jet-black hair, wearing black slacks and a white cashmere sweater. She could have been sixty or thirty; she had those high cheekbones which keep a face taut.
“Mr. Apoyan?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Your uncle recommended you to me.”
“He told me. But he didn’t tell me your name.”
“I asked him not to.” She came over to sit in my client’s chair. “It’s Bishop, Mrs. Whitney Bishop. Did he tell you that I prefer not to have the police involved?”
“Yes. Was anything else stolen?”
She shook her head.
“That seems strange to me,” I said. “Burglars don’t usually carry out anything big, anything suspicious enough to alert the neighbors.”
“Our neighbors are well screened from view,” she told me, “and I’m sure this was not a burglar.” She paused. “I am almost certain it was my daughter. And that is why I don’t want the police involved.”
“It wasn’t a rug too big for a woman to carry?”
She shook her head. “A three-by-five-foot antique Kerman.”
I winced. “For three thousand dollars—?”
Her smile was dim. “You obviously don’t have your uncle’s knowledge of rugs. I was offered more than I care to mention for it only two months ago. My daughter is—adopted. She has been in trouble before. I have almost given up on her. We had a squabble the day my husband and I went down to visit friends in Rancho Santa Fe. When we came home the rug was gone and so was she.”
I wondered if it was her daughter she wanted back or the rug. I decided that would be a cynical question to ask.