I thought briefly about calling her to report my total lack of progress, looking back at the phone booth while the bum mumbled mutinously over my shoulder, and decided I wasn't up to it. I waded back across Sunset to the car.
The rain stopped while I sat in Alice, looking up at room 207. Across the street the bum huddled in the phone booth and looked at me. I was checking the street to see if anybody was looking at the bum when the door to room 207 opened and the man came out. He came down the stairs alone, gave me an incurious glance, and climbed into his car. He was in his middle thirties, Germanic-looking, with sharp features and a long needle nose that looked like it ran a lot. He wiped it once on his elegant coat sleeve, smoothed his hair in the mirror, and scooted the little car out into traffic.
Five minutes later a Courtesy Cab pulled into the parking lot and honked twice. Sally Oldfield came down the stairs, looking buoyant, and hopped in the back. She'd been inside thirty-eight minutes. I took it on faith that they'd be going back to Monument Records, but I followed anyway. Faith carried the day, as it so infrequently does. I called Harker, gave him a riveting description of Sally's boyfriend, and settled in to wait for quitting time.
I got my second surprise at six-twenty-three that evening, after I followed Sally Oldfield home. When her electric garage door opened, there wasn't another car there, just stacks of boxes that looked like they were filled with papers of some sort, a bicycle, and some dumpy-looking furniture. I drove casually past as she pulled into the garage, and then I tore around the block and parked a few houses down.
Maybe her husband didn't drive, I thought. There must be someone in L.A. who doesn't drive. Maybe he parked on the street. Except that the lights in the house were out. She'd stopped at a Ralphs' supermarket to pick up dinner or something, so she had to unload the car before she went to the door, and the house was darker than Monaco's Olympic hopes when she finally got up to the door. She flipped on the porch light, fumbled around with her keys, brushed a wisp of hair away from her face, and pushed the door open with her foot. One of the grocery bags slipped from her grasp and hit the porch. She looked down at it for a few seconds and then laughed and left it there. I watched lights come on as she made her way to the kitchen to stash the groceries. A few minutes later she retrieved the bag she'd dropped and went back inside. Then the living-room light came on.
Maybe Mr. Oldfield got home late. I'd been told to watch until nine, but I sat there sacrificing my eardrums to L.A. radio until ten-forty, when the house went dark. There was a new disc jockey at the top of my lengthy list of most-hated disc jockeys, but there was no Mr. Oldfield. So it wasn't an earth-shaking point. Maybe the man traveled. All I knew was that I'd have been home if I'd been Mr. Oldfield, even if Mrs. Oldfield did have a boyfriend.
I was already beginning to like her.
Chapter 2
On the evening two days before I started to fall in love with Sally Oldfield, a young lady named Roxanne and I had indulged in a foolish amount of red wine, unleavened by a loaf of bread but accompanied by plenty of thou. We had reached the delicate point at which our relationship was about to change gears when the phone rang. That was the first time I'd ever talked to Ambrose Harker. In my eagerness to get back to the clutch, I'd made a few perfunctory notes and promised to meet him in a Hollywood restaurant the next day.
The headache that accompanied me into Nickodell's at about one the following day was not improved by the sight of several of L.A.'s best-known disc jockeys sucking up the suds on their break from the radio station next door. There was one man who, I knew from one of his ex-girlfriends, was a permanently vitalized speed-freak whose idea of a black-tie evening was drinking fourteen quarts of beer and then urinating on her in the bathtub. Another one, a guy whose hair looked like something you'd pay, but not much, to gawk at on the grounds of Lion Country Safari, was on my D.J. hate-list without the benefit of personal details: he dropped G's like they weighed three pounds each to make him sound folksy and emitted wolf howls at calculated intervals. Just a regular, everyday, white-loafered werewolf to whom some misguided radio executive had given a microphone and a forty-thousand-watt signal. In Hollywood he made ninety thousand a year. In my neighborhood he'd have been wearing his tongue for a necktie.
"Mr. Ambrose," I'd said to the sour-looking man who flipped fastidiously through the reservation book. Upon receiving a stare of well-paid incomprehension, I'd given the memory an energetic toss or two and come up with another name. "Mr. Harker. Twelve-thirty. Table for two, or something."
The maitre d' gave me a reproving look. "He's been here for quite a while," he said. It was only twelve-fifty.
"Lucky him," I said. "All this atmosphere. You want to take me to the table, or do you want me to wander around with my hand out?"
He looked at my clothes. Up to then, I'd felt well-dressed. Then the schmuck snapped his fingers. A waiter materialized at his side. "Table twelve," the schmuck said.
"Are you sure you weren't a disc jockey in a former life?" I asked him as I followed the waiter.
"Don' worry, sir," the waiter said in the best uptown Spanglish. "Him, he's like that wi' everyone."
"God, I'm glad," I said. "I thought it was my breath."
"You breath is okay," he said graciously, giving me another reason to be thankful for Hispanics. "His breath, is-it's… like the message from the grave, you know? El dia de los muertos."
"Es verdad. Como se llama usted?"
"Roberto. You' Spanish is very good."
"Hangover Spanish," I said. "And this must be Mr. Ambrose."
"Harker," he said, without getting up. "And you're late."
"That's already been brought home to me in two languages," I said. "Whatever happened to L.A. time? It was such a comfortable convention."
He toyed with the glass in front of him. He'd made a number of rings on the table with it already, linking some of them into watery Olympic symbols. "Los Angeles time is an excuse for imprecise behavior."
"I'd love to sit down," I said. "Thanks for asking. Muchas gracias, Roberto."
"De nada, senor." He went back toward the door.
"Greasers," Ambrose Harker said, pulling a complicated Swiss Army knife out of his jacket pocket and paring his nails with it. "You want to know what's wrong with this city? Greasers."
"It's been a terrific lunch," I said, getting up again. "I'll send you a bill for the mileage."
"Sit down," Harker said, still working on his nails.
I stood above him. "I didn't like you on the phone," I said. "I don't like you in person. Why on God's green earth would I want to eat lunch with you?"
"Money," Harker said, dangling the Swiss Army knife back and forth like a hypnotist. "Money, money, money."
I didn't sit down, but I didn't leave either. One of the reasons I was pretending to look for Mrs. Yount's cat was that I was uncomfortably short on the rent. "How much money?"
"Enough to overcome your scruples."
"Scruple you," I said. "It's going to be a nice sunset if the clouds clear."
"They won't. You've driven all the way from Topadoa or wherever the hell it is. It's going to rain on you going back. You've got a hangover. Wouldn't you like a beer?"