I waited until he was through the glass doors of the building before I got out of the car and followed. By the time I got to the mailboxes, he was on the other side of the pool, disappearing through a door into the building. The door opened into a corridor and he was standing in front of a door halfway down it. He glanced at me as I went past him, pretending to be looking at apartment numbers, and then Rhonda Anixter’s door opened and he went inside.
I hurried back outside. The Corvette was locked, so I contented myself with taking down the plate number, and went back to my car. At two-fifteen, I was rudely awakened by the sound of an engine starting. I slouched down while the Corvette flipped a U and roared up the block toward Overland. I pulled out with my lights off and drove that way until we picked up some traffic. He got on the freeway at Overland and headed north to the Wilshire exit, where he got off. At Barrington he made a right and half a dozen blocks up, turned into the driveway of a single-roofed, ranch-style house with a lot of trees in the front yard.
He had taken off his shades and was locking up the Corvette when I drove past. The house was dark and there was a yellow compact of some sort parked in front of the Vette. Up the block, I stopped and jotted down the address, counted to one thousand, then went back on foot
At the neighbor’s hedge, I crouched down and peeked into the front yard of the house. There was no sign of Mr. Cool, and I assumed from the faint glow behind the curtains of the living room window that he had gone inside. I stood up and sauntered by as if it were perfectly normal to be out for a casual stroll at three in the morning, then went into a crouch on the other side of the driveway and used the body of the Corvette as a cover to reach the yellow car.
It was a Nissan. I took down the plate number, then duck-walked to the door on the passenger side. It was locked, of course. My flash located the registration attached to the sun visor in a leather-framed case. I leaned close to the window to get a look.
Barbara Phalen. Arnie Phalen’s wife? Maybe Phalen was making a comeback, now that Chip was out of the picture. Maybe he had never left.
I snapped off the flash and something hard and small and cold pressed against the back of my head. The hammer clicking back sounded like a sonic boom.
“Just straighten up nice and easy, asshole,” a voice said quietly.
I did as I was told. I didn’t know what caliber the gun was, but at that range, a pellet gun would have muddled some of my fondest memories.
“If you’re thinking of getting cute,” the voice said, “you’ll never think again.” A hand slammed me into the car and the gun moved down to poke me in the kidney.
“Easy.” I said, the pain straightening me up.
“Fuck you. Stand back and spread your feet and put your hands on the top of the car.”
I did it and his free hand patted me down. It brushed my wallet and plucked it from my inside pocket. The pressure of the gun went away as he stepped back to inspect it. “Turn around,” he said after a moment.
Without the shades he lost some of his weaselly look. He was not bad looking, in fact, in a greasy kind of way. His eyes were dark and deeply set. In the dim light from the house, they were devoid of any emotion except for a mildly contemptuous curiosity. “All right, peeper, what the hell are you doing sneaking around here?” The corner of his mouth twitched.
“I’m on a case.”
“What case?”
I considered that for a moment. “A little girl hired me to track down her lost Lhasa Apso. Named ‘Button, as in ‘cute as a?’ Maybe you’ve seen him. About a foot tall, blond hair, brown eyes—”
The twitch stopped and tightened into an angry line. He pointed the gun at my head again. “You know who you’re fucking with, asshole? I could have you made into an ashtray if I wanted to. Now, I’m gonna ask you again: What case?”
I pointed at the gun. “Why don’t you put that thing down? I have trouble talking when I’m nervous.” I was sweating; he seemed to like that.
One side of his mouth lifted into a lopsided, self-confident sneer. “You’ll find a way.”
I had nothing to lose, so I threw out a guess. “Your wife hired me to find out where you go when you’re supposed to be watching tits bounce up and down. I wonder what she’s going to say when I tell her you’re watching them okay, but the wrong set?”
The confidence on his face dried up and flaked off like a month-old Christmas tree. “You’re a liar.”
It was my turn to smile. “Let’s get her out here and ask her.”
He shot a troubled look at the house, then back at me.
“Of course, I’m always open for a better offer.”
“What kind of an offer?” he asked in a clipped voice.
“That’s open for discussion.”
The porch light above the front door went on and his head snapped around. A woman’s voice called out from the crack in the door: “Arnie?”
I looked at Phalen’s panicked face. He was the one who was sweating now. “Well?”
“Get out of here,” he whispered, his voice thick with hate.
I held out my hand. “My wallet.”
He hesitated, and Barbara Phalen called out again: “Arnie?”
“Coming, hon,” he called back, and tossed the wallet at me. In a hoarse whisper, he said: “Move your ass out of here. Quick.”
“I’ll be in touch,” I told him, and hurried down the driveway. At the sidewalk, I turned left and used the other side of the street to circle back to my car so she wouldn’t see me.
All the way home, I chewed myself out for my carelessness. But it was more than just the fact that Phalen and Rhonda now knew they were being watched that bothered me; it was Phalen himself. The man was bad news, I could feel it. Maybe it was the comfortable way he handled a .38 or the dead eyes and the hard sneer, or the silent, deadly way he’d pounced on me. And now he knew who I was. I figured I’d better find out who he was before he made good on his threat and I wound up a receptacle for some Mustache Pete’s cigar.
I got up at nine, not wanting to. I’d spent a fitful night being pursued by various people and things, and although I didn’t remember exactly who they were or why they were pursuing me, there had been a lot of running and jumping done, and I woke up exhausted. Figuring that if I was going to be chased around in my sleep I should probably know by whom, I went into the kitchen and made a pot of coffee and drank half of it before calling Sheriff’s Homicide.
Al Herrera sounded chipper when he picked up the phone. I was glad to hear that; the last few times we’d talked he had sounded as if he were ripe for a stress disability.
Al and I went way back to my reporting days at the Chronicle, and if I had changed a lot since then, he hadn’t. He was still the same thick-skinned, straight-shooting, 100 percent cop, which was probably to his detriment. He took the job too seriously and had nearly suffered a couple of emotional and marital breakdowns because of it. “Jake boy, where you been keeping yourself?”
“On my knees, Al, looking through keyholes. How are things with you?”
“Great, if you like being up to your ass in dead bodies.”
After the obligatory small talk — how’s the wife and kids, that sort of thing — I sprung it. “Al, I need a favor—”
“Of course. Why else would you call?”
I told him that for a Mexican, he did a passable imitation of a Jewish mother, then gave him all the information I had on Phalen and Rhonda Anixter and asked him to run them for priors.