Flesh And Blood

Keep out, Stupid.

And, for the life of me, I saw no way in.

CHAPTER 32

L.A.’S FIRST COMMANDMENT: When in doubt, drive.

Years ago – ages ago – when I arrived in the city as a college freshman, the first thing that hit me was: The streets are asphalt rivers. In high school I’d played guitar in a wedding band and filed paper at an architect’s office in order to scrape up enough cash for a puke-colored, emphysemic Chevy Nova that my father, a Ford man, despised. (Quoth Harry Delaware: “It’s crap, but at least you earned it – nothing you don’t earn is worth half a crap.”) That Bondoed, duct-taped chariot whisked me from Missouri to California and, when it reached my dorm, promptly sputtered and died. For most of the first year I was left to the mercies of L.A.’s afterthought bus system – house imprisonment. The following summer a series of late-night jobs had earned me a moribund Plymouth Valiant, chronic insomnia, and the habit of stumbling out of bed before dawn, cruising dark, empty boulevards, and wondering about my future.

Now I sleep later, but the urge to escape on wheels has never died. It’s a different L.A. from my college days, traffic all bunched up and angry and irrevocable, less and less open space until you get up in the Santa Monica Mountains or out on some old stretch of blacktop made redundant by the freeways, but I still love to drive for the sake of driving. It’s a trait I share with a certain subsample of psychopaths, but so what – introspection can be a sucker game.

After Milo hung up I sat at my desk listening to the empty house. Wondering if Robin’s increasing absences had to do with more than her work. Wondering how I could’ve been so wrong about Rene Maccaferri (“He sure doesn’t look like a brain surgeon”) and what else I’d screwed up. I got into the Seville. Tony Duke sick, maybe seriously so, amid Malibu splendor. I switched on the tape deck, listened to the Fabulous Thunderbirds being tough enough at way too high a decibel level. Tooling up the glen to Mulholland, turning east into the Hollywood Hills, playing with turns and twists, zoned out, wanting to empty my head.

Without intending to, I ended up in the heart of Hollywood and back at Sunset Boulevard. No more relaxed, still plagued with supposition. About Lauren’s pathway from rebellious kid to garment center hooker to… whatever she’d been when the bullet had bounced around in her brain.

I remembered the paper she’d written for Gene Dalby’s social psych class. “Iconography in the Fashion Industry.”

Women as Meat.

Bitter about the trade-offs she’d made? Had that played a part in fueling a blackmail scheme, or had she just been greedy?

It took a long time to crawl through Beverly Hills and the eastern fringe of Bel Air – two of the “Three B’s” to which Shawna Yeager had aspired – and when I reached the glen I got caught in the jam and crawled, feeling strangely at home, like a member of some vast, inertial conspiracy.

No stress from the automotive stalemate; the chrome clog was no worse than the neural traffic in my head. I was trying to figure out what to do with the rest of the day when I realized I’d inched toward Justin LeMoyne’s house. As I passed the white bungalow, a flash of movement caught my eye.

The garage door closing. Just a foot of opening at the bottom as the wooden sheet slid into place. At the first side street I managed to hang a left across both lanes, hooked a three-point turn, pulled to the corner, and waited. Seven minutes later the garage door opened and a red Mercedes convertible, its top up, nosed out with its left turn signal blinking. Whoever was at the wheel was trying to swing across and head south.

Letting the Mercedes in wouldn’t have ruined anyone’s day, but human kindness was at an ebb and the red car just sat there for a long time, blinking. Finally, a gardener’s truck relented, and the convertible was allowed to join the go-nowhere-fast club. Ten car lengths later, so was I.

Trying not to dwell on the ludicrousness of my tail job of Ben Dugger and Dr. Maccaferri, I tagged along, struggling to keep the Mercedes in view. No mean challenge, because the red car squeaked through the light at Sunset and left me in a queue of five cars. I kept my eye on its rectangular taillights. Right turn. By the time I followed suit, no sign of the red car, and I rolled along with all the other automatons, at a bracing fifteen miles per. Then brake lights flashed in series, and the congestion that anticipated the 405 freeway put the Mercedes back in my sights.

Thirty yards up, in the left-hand lane. I managed a few less-than-courteous lane changes, and when the Mercedes chose the Sepulveda alternate to the southbound freeway, I’d narrowed the gap and was able to make out the cloudy outline of a solitary driver through the convertible’s plastic rear window.

He stayed on Sepulveda, crossed Wilshire and Santa Monica and Olympic, driving as quickly as traffic would permit. Past the spot where Lauren’s body had been dumped. Across Pico and Venice, into Culver City, then a right turn at Washington, a quarter-mile zip, and a quick swing into the parking lot of a small hotel called the Palm Court.

North side of Washington, two-story mock colonial wedged between an ARCO station and a flower shop, auto club badge of approval tacked above the door. Clean, white clapboard façade that I couldn’t help comparing to Jane and Mel Abbot’s house. The parking lot was sun-grayed, one-third full. The Mercedes pulled to the far left side, well away from other vehicles, and came to a short stop.

A man got out and hurried toward the motel’s glass doors. Forties, tall, slim, and sunken-chested, with long, stringy arms and kinky, graying hair. He wore a snug yellow polo shirt over pressed khakis, brown loafers, no socks, tiny eyeglasses. Carried a cardboard file case in his hands. Justin LeMoyne making a quick trip back home for paperwork? He shot a worried look over his shoulder as he shoved the doors and stepped in.

The phone booth at the ARCO station smelled of too-old burrito, but the dial tone was clear. I called Milo at the station, and before he could speak said, “Finally, something real.”

“Yeah, they’re both in there,” he said, returning to the Seville and leaning in the driver’s window. “Room two fifteen. They checked in yesterday under LeMoyne’s name.”

It had taken him a quarter hour to arrive. He’d left the unmarked on the opposite side of the lot, conferred for a couple of minutes with the desk clerk, emerged nodding.

“Cooperative fellow?” I said.

“Ethiopian fellow studying for the citizenship exam, very yessir, nosir. I promised not to bring in a SWAT army if he didn’t fuss or notify LeMoyne and Salander. He seemed duly impressed by the badge – Why should he know that justifying a warrant, let alone a G.I. Joe ground assault, is about as likely as Ghaddafi marrying Streisand.”

“Let’s hear it for TV.”

“And here I was thinking it was my commanding aura. He also volunteered that Salander just called down and asked where he could order a pizza. He directed them to Papa Pomodoro on Overland, told me they’ve got a guaranteed half hour delivery or it’s a freebie. So I’m go

“And when the real delivery boy shows up?” I said.

“We’ll have a party – Thanks for noticing LeMoyne’s car, Alex.”

“Hard not to, I was right there.”

“And they say no one in L.A.’s neighborly.”

“If he checked in under his own name, LeMoyne wasn’t exactly being cagey,” I said. “Driving up to his house in broad daylight, staying this close to home? Doesn’t smell like a frantic rabbit.”

“Then what’re they doing here? Vacationing in Culver City?”