Toting the phone outside, I first called Dexter. He sounded bleary and whiskey-bogged, but he brightened marginally when I gave him Tiffle's address.
“The white guy?”
“The very man.”
“And do what?”
“Watch,” I said. “Take notes. I want to know especially about young Chinese women going in and out.”
“Follow them?”
“No. Just stay there and keep track. I want descriptions, okay?”
“I the guy,” he said again before he hung up.
I needed a boat, and I knew only one boat jock. Before I called him, I tiptoed inside, started some coffee, and went into the living room to kiss the smooth skin of Eleanor's wrist. She emitted a sound that was an entirely new combination of consonants, heavy on h and s, and I headed back outside, trailing the phone, and called Norman Stillman at home.
I’d worked for Stillman once. He produced the kinds of shows that gave American television a bad name throughout the first, second, and third worlds and used the proceeds from the shows to buy yachts, no less, but he had one redeeming quality: He was greedy.
“Norman,” I said, after giving him a moment to pant into the phone while he got his bearings. Norman was rich. Norman got up when Norman wanted to get up. “Norman, this is Simeon Grist. I need a boat.”
“The Queen Mary,” he said grumpily. “She's just sitting there.”
“I need it tonight,” I said.
“Something in it for me?”
“Um, the grunion,” I said. Norman didn't believe in anything he got easily. “They'll make a great show. Why do they run when they're scheduled to run? I mean, how do fish-fish, Norman, develop such a keen sense of time? Not to mention-are you listening, Norman-how do fish run?”
“Fuck you,” Norman Stillman grumbled. “The grunion won't run for weeks.”
“You got me, Norman. Okay, so it's not the grunion. How do you feel about slavery?”
“Great,” Norman said, sitting up and going mumph with the effort. “Always a hot topic. You mean, white slavery?”
“Not exactly.”
“Aaahh,” he said, losing interest. Norman still thought everybody was white.
“And millions of dollar,” I added.
“Better,” he said. “But I don't know.”
“Prostitutes,” I said.
“This is exclusive, right?”
'I’ll have to tell the cops," I said. “And maybe the radio guys.” They could get on the air immediately. Norman's daily show, a national confessional for the sins of the middle class, taped a week in advance of its air date.
“Radio,” Norman said scornfully. “Who cares? But no TV, right?”
“The boat.”
He figured for a long moment, probably doing subtraction on his bedsheet. “It's not going to get bullet holes in it or anything, is it?”
“Not a chance,” I said with wholly spurious conviction. “It's a milk run.”
“Pick me up a quart,” Norman said, and then wheezed into the phone. “Nobody delivers these days.” He wheezed again, and I recognized it as a laugh. I'd never heard Norman make a joke before, and it made me wonder briefly whether I'd misjudged him. Maybe he was human.
“I'll need a driver for the boat,” I said.
A new wheeze. “A skipper, not a driver. Boats got skippers. Gonna cost a thousand. Who pays?”
“If you decide you don't want the story, I do.”
“What if you get killed?”
“For Christ's sake, Norman, take a chance.” He didn't leap at it. “Would I be doing this if I were going to get killed?”
“You get killed,” Norman said, “the thousand'll be on your conscience.”
“How do I get the boat?”
He thought about it. “Around two or three, call my girl.”
He hung up. I went back inside and kissed Eleanor awake.
For the next four hours Eleanor and I scoured Chinatown looking for Horace while Tran sat home and baby-sat Everett. We checked all of Horace's favorite restaurants, Eleanor using her Cantonese on the owners, and both of us dropping in on his friends. No Horace. One of the friends, a shopkeeper, thought Horace might have narrowly missed running him over on Hill Street the previous night, but when he'd jumped out of the car's way and shouted Horace's name, the driver had accelerated away.
“He was looking for Lo,” I said to Eleanor when we left the shop.
“Horace always drives that way,” Eleanor said. “All Chinese do. They've usually got a grandmother in the backseat, and all they care about is finding a parking space so the ancestor shouldn't have to walk. Chinese people hit fire hydrants all the time. Anyway, even if it was Horace, what good does that do us now?”
We picked up a sandwich for Dexter, who'd been watching Tiffle's cottage from his big Lincoln.
“People in and out,” he said, chewing. “Mostly Orientals, mostly girls. How you doin, Eleanor?”
“Why is a better question,” Eleanor said. “Sense of family, I suppose.”
“They's family,” Dexter said comfortably, picking a tomato slice out of the sandwich and dropping it out the window, “and then they's everybody else.”
“Keeping score, Dexter?” I asked.
“All in the little black book,” he said, waving something at me. It actually was a little black book.
“I thought those went out with Hugh Hefner,” I said.
Dexter gave me the big eyes. “Somethin happen to Hugh Hefner?”
Back home at three I called Norman's “girl,” whose name was Deirdre and who was older than Norman, and was told that the boat and skipper were in place.
“Two little things,” I said. I'd always liked Deirdre. Like thousands of low-paid women in Hollywood, she did the work that the men put their names on.
“Only two?”
“I want to be picked up in Santa Monica, not in San Pedro. And the skipper has to know how to find a specific boat in the harbor.”
“Where in Santa Monica?” That was one of the things I liked about Deirdre; she didn't say, “Can't do.” She said, “Where?”
“Someplace we can wade.”
“Skip it,” she said. “Too much attention. Get the boat in Marina Del Rey; that's where it docks anyway.”
“Where? I mean, do boats have an address?”
Papers got rifled through. “Pier, um, three, slip twenty-nine.”
I'd been to Marina Del Rey before, and it was security-happy. “Is someone going to ask me what I'm doing there?”
“You're looking for Pat Snow's boat.”
“Pat Snow.”
“Captain Pat Snow, if you want to sound nautical. What ship are you after?”
I paused. “I don't want you to tell Norman,” I said.
“Welllll,” Deirdre offered.
“This is dangerous.”
“Norman doesn't want to know,” she said promptly, “until you bring the boat back. And Captain Snow used to run dope. That's how Norman knows about the boat. Did you see the show? High Seas it was called.”
“Loved it,” I lied. “Investigative journalism at its best. The boat-pardon me, the ship, I mean-is called Caroline B.”
“I'll get on the horn with Captain Snow,” she said. “Nine o'clock okay?”
“Nine is fine,” I said. The line went dead.
The rest of the day was just waiting. Tran and I re-blindfolded Everett while Eleanor looked at the fork hole in his thigh and pronounced it nothing to worry about.
“Didn't happen to you,” Everett said sulkily.
“Do you get seasick?” I asked him.
“No,” he said. Then he said, “Why? I mean, why?”
“High seas,” I said. “The Caroline B.”
We closed the bedroom door on his wails of panic and drank more coffee while the sun fought its way through the afternoon fog. When it got strong enough to warm the skin, we went out onto the roof of the room downstairs and drank more coffee and watched hawks cut slices out of the sky. A few fat and dirty seagulls, disoriented and driven inland by the fog, landed on the deck and cast nervous glances at the hawks.