The Night Crew

'What?' he asked without preamble, when Anna picked up the phone.

'I just got to Jason's apartment and there was somebody here. He jumped me.'

'You hurt?' He sounded cautious, nervous. Why?

'No, he just tripped me and held me down and then he pushed me on the couch and then he left. I thought he might be a cop, but he said he wasn't.'

'White guy?' The odd tone still in his voice.

'Yeah. Hey, you know him?'

'Probably another doper.' But he was lying; and he wasn't good at it. 'As long as you're not hurt.'

'The door was locked and he was inside. How'd he do that?'

'He's probably a friend of O'Brien,' Wyatt said. 'Look, do you want a car to come around? I can call Inglewood.'

She thought about it for a moment. 'No, I guess not. I mean, unless you wanted to look for fingerprints. You know, detect something.'

Wyatt sighed and said, 'We got thirty sets of fingerprints out of the ShotShop, and we could probably get thirty more.'

Anna said, 'Tell me the truth about something. You know, instead of lying.'

'Sure.'

'Do you think Jason might be connected to the jumper we filmed?'

Wyatt hesitated before he answered, and Anna read it: 'You do!' she said. 'So'd the guy here. Tell me why.'

'Look MissAnnagoddammit, you're not a police officer, okay? Just clean up the apartment, pack up his stuff and get out of there.'

'Maybe you better call Inglewood,' she said. 'I better file a complaint: the guy was trying to rape me.'

Silence.

'Okay, I'll do the call,' Anna said. 'I know where his prints are, too. They're all over my purse and billfold. I'll mention to the Inglewood cops that you might have some idea about who it is.'

'Jesus, you're a hardass. You're just like Pam, bustin' my balls all day, now I gotta deal with you. I'm tired of it.'

'Life sucks and then you die,' Anna said.

More silence. Then: 'The kid who jumped off the building was tripping on wizards.'

'I don't know that brand,' Anna said, breaking in.

'Acid and speed. Maybe a lick of PCP.'

'Okay. Like rattlers.'

'Rattlers were last year,' he said. 'But yeahlike that. A little heavier on the acid. Anyway, he popped a couple and decided the ledge was a runway and that he could fly.'

'So.'

'So the wizards are little pink extruded dots on strips of wax paper.'

'I've seen them,' Anna said.

'When you buy them, the dealer just rips off however many dots you can pay for,' Wyatt explained. 'So the kid had a strip of dots in his jacket pocket. When we rolled your friend over, so did he; what was left of them, anyway, coming out of the water.'

'Huh. That's weird.'

'That'snot weird,' Wyatt said. 'That's just a coincidence: these fuckin' wizards are all over the place. But I get this wild idea, and put the two strips together, and guess what? The two papers matched up. Your friend's strip had been ripped off the jumper's.'

'What?'

'Yeah. Now that'sweird.'

Anna made a quick connection: 'So how'd the guy here know about it?'

Wyatt sighed again, and said, 'Look, you seem like an okay. person. Huh?'

'Yeah, I'm an okay person.' Okaymeant that a cop could trust herpersonexpressed a belief that she was some kind of wacko feminist to be doing what she was doing, and he didn't want to argue about it.

'He's an ex-cop,' Wyatt said. 'He's a decent guy.'

'He's a jerk, he scared my brains out,' Anna said, angry at Wyatt's defense. 'What'd he want?'

'He's interested in the case,' Wyatt said.

'Interested? Is that all it takes?'

Wyatt cut her off: 'His name is Jake Harper,' he said. 'The jumper was Jacob Harper, Junior. His son. His only kid.'

'Ah.' What had Harper said? Ghouls making a buck off snuff films.

She let it go. I'm okay, she thought, when Wyatt hung up.

Jason's apartment was a sad clutter of heavily used clothing, cheap film gear, books on directing and movie-making, portfolio tapes, cans of Campbell 's soup: all the hopes a kid might have in Hollywood, California. Bundled up and sent back to Peru, Indiana, it wouldn't mean a thing.

Anna did a quick survey, separating the potentially salable stuff from the useless, stacked the salable stuff, and then found the apartment rental office and talked to the sleepy manager.

'. not worth much, but we'll be taking it out in the next few days. Until then, it's under police seal,' Anna said. 'They still need to process some fingerprints, so if you could keep your eye on the place, we'd all appreciate it.'

'If it ain't too torn up, he's got some deposit money coming back,' the manager said.

'Nice of you to mention it,' Anna said.

The manager was a chunky square-faced Iranian with a black beard and an accent that combined Detroit and Esfahan: 'Ain't my building. And the owner's an asshole. Why should he get the kid's cash?'

'Right on, brother,' Anna said.

Chapter 7

Along bad day, and still not over.

On the way home, Anna stopped at a traffic light on Santa Monica, and her eyes drifted to a Mobil station on the corner.

A man was washing the windshield on a Volvo station wagon, at a self-serve pump. He was wearing jeans and a loose, wide-sleeved white cotton shirt, such as might be advertised in The New YorkerSea Island cotton, like that.

The instant she saw himhis hair thinner, maybe lighter, maybe speckled with white, a few pounds heavier, but the way his hands connected to his body, something almost indefinablethe very instant she saw him, she thought: Clark.

She slid down in her seat, but couldn't tear her eyes from him. He finished with the squeegee, turned and deftly flipped the squeegee stick back toward a water can hung on the side of the gas pump. The sponge end of the stick hit and slipped perfectly through the hole in the water can: exactly as she'd seen him do it fifty times before.

'Oh my God,' she said aloud.

A car behind her honked, and her eyes snapped up to the rearview mirror, then down to the traffic light. Green. She automatically sent the car through the intersection, then pulled over and turned.

The Volvo was still there, but Clark had gone inside. A moment later, he came back out, slipping his wallet into his pocket, climbed in the car, turned on the lights, eased into the cross street, then zipped across Santa Monica and headed the other way.

She thought about following him.

Thought too long, and he was gone.

Clark.

She drove home on autopilot, random thoughts, images and memories scrambling over each other like rats. She stuck the car in the narrow garage, slipped sideways past the front fender into the house and, without turning on the lights, went to the phone.

She had messages waiting on the answering service: she ignored them, and dialed Cheryl Burns in Eugene, Oregon. She mumbled the number to herself as she poked it into the handset, praying that Cheryl would be in her shop. She was: she answered on the first ring. 'Hello, Pacifica Pottery.'

'Cheryl? This is Anna.'

'Anna!' Pleasure at the other end. They got together every year or so, when Cheryl and her husband brought a load of their wood-fired pots from Oregon down to the L.A. basin. In between visits, they talked on the phone, once every two or three months. Anna and Cheryl shared one of the close connections that time and distance didn't seem to affect. 'How are you? How is everything?'

'Sort of messy right now,' Anna said, thinking about Clark. 'A guy I work with. was murdered.'