"Big bucks," I said.
"Five or six million dollars. As you would say, big bucks."
A waiter we'd never seen before put some food down in front of us. Harker waved his glass ineffectually at the waiter's retreating back and then glanced down at my plate. "See?" he said, by way of revenge, "no onion at all. You have to be more precise."
"Who gave you my name?" I asked.
The blue eyes came up to meet mine. "What's the difference?" he said.
"I like to know who my friends are. Or my acquaintances, at any rate. Why? Is that a hard question?"
"Sally Oldfield, that's your only business." His eyes wrestled mine to the mat, won, and came up for more.
"Not until I say it is," I said without looking away. "And while we're at it, why don't you go to low beams?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"It's considered polite to dim your headlights when approaching an oncoming vehicle. Anyway, if you want me to remember anything you're saying, you've got to stop trying to outstare me. It makes me feel like I'm arm-wrestling."
The waiter reappeared with a plate covered by a silver dome. He put it down on my right and whisked the dome off to reveal about seventy-five slices of onion.
"Hah," Harker said in a vindicated voice.
The waiter winked at me and ignored Harker's waving hand.
"You," Harker said. "You. Waiter. Goddammit, I'm trying to get another Perrier. Perrier, don't you understand English? Perrier, Perrier, Perrier," he said three times in French. He hit the table with the knife every time he said it, three amplified whacks. It even cut through the disc jockeys' egos; some of them actually looked at us.
The waiter looked down at my beer and then at me. I nodded and he headed for the bar.
"You sure know how to handle help," I said.
"Nobody speaks English anymore. This goddamned city is full of immigrants."
"America is full of immigrants," I said. "I'm an immigrant. You're an immigrant. Now, why don't you tell me who recommended me?"
"Skippy Miller," he said sulkily, taking a browser's bite of his salad.
"Why is that such a big deal?"
"You're for hire, right? That's what you do. Hire yourself out. Why should you care who gave me your name?"
"Listen. You may have two last names to my one, but that doesn't mean I'm going to go all buttery just because you offer me a job. I like to know what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, and who I'm doing it for. What did Skippy tell you about me?"
"He said that you'd helped him out when his series was in its first year and one of the scandal papers had gotten something on him that could have ruined everything. He didn't tell me what it was."
"He wouldn't," I said. Skippy was a big, fat, middle-aged actor with an extremely sloppy private life. Not a bad guy, but a messy one. "What else did he say?"
"That you were bright."
"How dangerous is this going to be?"
"Dangerous? She's a girl."
"So are black widows."
He was looking around the room, trying to catch the waiter's eye. He snapped his fingers and gestured impatiently at the table. "She's not a spider," he said.
I sighed and palmed his card. "Enjoy your salad, but try not to get too festive," I said, sliding across the seat of the booth. "People might think you're a disc jockey."
"Where are you going?"
"I'd say I want to wash my hands, but you might misunderstand. I have to go to the john, okay? You can catch up on your nails while I'm gone."
The telephone was in the men's room. I wanted to make sure that Harker was really Harker. First I called Skippy and got a woman on his service who knew me. Skippy, she said, was on a one-week retreat someplace near Big Sur and wouldn't be back for six days. Then I called the private number Harker had given me. No one else ever answered it, he said. It rang eleven times before I hung up and called the main number of Monument Records, which he'd said I was never to call.
I asked for Ambrose Harker's office and was put through. Mr. Harker, I was told, was at lunch.
"This is Clyde Barrows," I said, trying for a drawl. "I'm Mrs. Harker's brother. Do you know where he's eating?"
"Does Mr. Harker know you're in town, Mr. Barrows?"
"Ackshully, me and Bonnie, that's the little woman, just got in from Oklahoma. We're going to Singapore on a four-o'clock plane. So we'll either say hi at lunch or not at all. Be a shame to miss old Ambrose."
"I've never heard anyone call him old Ambrose," she said in a pleased voice.
"Hell, honey, we all call him that. Man was thirty-nine when he was born."
"If he was born," she said. "Don't tell him I said that."
"Your lips to God's ears."
"Thanks. The reservation was for twelve-thirty at Nickodell's on Melrose. Do you know where that is?"
"Honey, even the French, may they all go to heaven and never throughout all eternity meet anyone who isn't French, know where Melrose is. Think there'd be room for us at the table?"
"I don't know," she said thoughtfully. "The reservation was for two."
"Well, we'll just pull up some chairs and squat for a while. If you can't eat squattin', the food ain't no good, as Bonnie always says." I had a feeling I'd gone too far.
I was wrong. "Order the chicken salad," she said. "And have a nice squat."
I hung up and went back into the restaurant. Even from fifteen feet away, Ambrose Harker looked mad. On the table in front of him were three full glasses of Perrier. With lime.
Chapter 3
On the second day of my surveillance, I burglarized her car.
It couldn't have been much easier. The security guard watching over Monument Records' underground parking lot was a dozing fat man. Sleepy eyelids flicked in my direction as I walked by, and for a moment I thought he was going to establish a personal best by getting up three times in a single day. I jingled my keys over my head and grinned at him, and he settled back into a torpor that would have made a giant sloth look like Ralph Nader.
I already knew what the car looked like, an Oldsmobile Cutlass in an institutional shade of gray, not at all what I would have expected after her rainbow wardrobe. It opened as gratefully as a Catholic at her final confession.
The car was as spotless as a martyr's conscience: the Immaculate Conception by General Motors. For the first time, I got suspicious of Sarah Marie Theresa Oldfield. In L.A., most people's cars are full of junk: wads of used Kleenex, bills they haven't paid yet, McDonald's coupons, the detritus of a life spent largely on wheels. If this Oldsmobile had been a time capsule, archaeologists would have concluded that no one lived there. It was a cipher.
The rain was threatening a return engagement, so I went back to Alice and endured the radio. People told me I could consolidate my bills with a quick and easy loan and I laughed. Other people invited me to stash my parents in various rest homes; elderly parents are an awkward intrusion into the Southern California life-style. I thought about dragging my profane and politically radical parents, kicking, screaming, and cursing me inventively, into a rest home, and laughed again. About the only thing that wasn't funny, if you didn't count the disc jockeys, was the music. It had all the verve and variety of a sheet of stamps.
Sally came out at precisely one-twenty. The rain had given up on L.A. and gone east to give the desert a hard time. Traffic was flowing. I managed to muscle my way into it in time to watch the light at Gower and Fountain turn red just as she jumped once again into the white Corvette.
I looked left. I looked right. Then I stopped looking at anything but the stoplight. An LAPD black-and-white cruised in a stately manner through the intersection, heading east on Fountain. The hell with it. I knew where Oldfield and friend were going anyway.