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After a minute Behn said, “Look, I realize it’s your dime but I’ve got a few things to do besides sit here with a dead phone on my ear.”
“Sorry,” I said. “What was he wearing?”
“Aiello? Sport shirt, trousers and belt, slippers. No socks. Deceased had a handkerchief and some loose change in his pockets. No wallet, no keys. If it means anything, he usually wore a toupee and he didn’t have it on.”
“Dentures?”
“He had his own teeth.” I heard Behn hawk and spit—I could picture him aiming into the green metal wastebasket beside the cluttered desk. He would sit back now, phone hooked between shoulder and tilted head, going through papers and tossing them on various piles as he spoke to me. Behn was a freckled bony redhead with an undershot chin and a huge Adam’s apple.
I said carefully, “You’ve been over his house by now.”
“Yeah. Nothing out of the ordinary. The place is empty, nobody home, but no sign it was messed up any.”
So, I thought, somebody cleaned it up before the cops arrived. I said, “Was the bed slept in?”
“Can’t tell. It was made up, but not with clean sheets. We got to the housekeeper an hour ago and she said she always makes the bed with hospital corners. Whoever made it up this time didn’t use them. So maybe he spent part of the night in bed and got up and somebody made the bed after he left.”
“Any bloodstains in the house?”
“Not so far. We’ve still got the crew out there.”
I said, “Okay, thanks. I’ll—”
“Not so fast. I’ve been patient and polite—now it’s your turn. How much do you know about this?”
“Less than you do, evidently.”
He grunted. “No. Won’t wash. You said the Farrell girl may be involved, and we’ve got a flyer here that says her exhusband got sprang from the state penitentiary yesterday. Too many coincidences, Simon.”
“It sure looks that way,” I said agreeably. “Any line on Mike Farrell?”
“Half the force is looking for him. So far, nothing. We checked the girl’s house but she hasn’t turned up.” And no doubt he had a stakeout on Joa
I said, “I talked to somebody who saw him last night. He was driving a station wagon.”
He pounced: “How’d you get that? Who told you? Simon, where are you right now? Maybe you’d better come in and we’ll have a little talk—”
“Maybe later,” I said. “Right now I haven’t got anything that could possibly help. We’d waste each other’s dime. I’ll be in touch.”
I hung up before he could protest; crossed the lobby, dropped two dimes on the desk, pointed a thumb at the phones, got the cashier’s nod and went outside into the broil.
Joa
A weedy lot stretched to the back fence, beyond which half a mile of empty land separated the place from the near boundary of the Air Force base. The flayed, sunbeaten, baking pan of the desert reflected a shimmering heat mist into the air.
There was no one in sight. She unlocked the door and we went in. It was one of those interchangeable rooms, furnished in cheap modern pine with plastic tops and vinyl upholstery, watercolor prints on the walls. The full blast air conditioning had chilled the room to an inhospitable temperature; it had a vaguely antiseptic smell. Everything was very new: you could live forty years in a room like that and it would never be home. The aura of loneliness held ghosts of solitary salesmen, teenage assignations, conventioneering drunks, yapping vacationing kids.
Joa
“Sure,” I said. “Look, there’s no such thing as a perfectly safe place for anybody. Nobody’s immune—there’s always random chance to mock you. But this ought to be as safe as anyplace for a few hours or even a few days. I’m pretty sure nobody followed us, and it would be a blind million-to-one shot if anybody saw us who’d recognize us and know what to do with the information.”
“All right,” she declared, “I’m safe. Until tonight or next week or whenever they find me. What happens in the meantime?”
“I’m going to try to take the heat off.”
“How?”
“There are a few things I can try,” I said, and let it ride like that; she didn’t press it. I said, “We’re Mr. and Mrs. Chittenden from Sherman Oaks if anybody asks. Do you know how to use a gun?”
I tugged the .38 out of my hip pocket and she looked at it without feeling. “I suppose so,” she said. “But if you’re thinking of bearding Mado
I put the gun on the bed beside her. “If that was what I had in mind,” I said with a little grin, “I wouldn’t get within a mile of him with a gun.”
She didn’t smile. “You’re a sweet, generous son of a bitch, Simon. I wish—”
Whatever she had meant to say, she didn’t finish it. I tried to dismiss it with an airy gesture and a casual voice: “The one born every minute, I’m him.” I bent down and gave her a quick brushing kiss, without force; she didn’t draw back, and I straightened quickly and went to the door. “Stay put until I call you. They’ve got a lunch counter in the lobby—room service might be better. Watch TV and don’t think about things, all right?”
“Sure,” she muttered. “Sure. I’ll be all right. Simon … be careful.” She sounded miserable.
I made a face and went. Got in the Jeep and pointed it out of the lot. As I stopped at the stop sign, I heard a car rushing forward from the left and turned in time to see a green sedan speed by—glimpse of a thick, red-nosed man, squinting and hard-jawed behind the wheel—then it was gone beyond the freeway overpass, the wind rush and dopplering-down engine roar fading. Nobody I knew. I chastised myself with profanity for being a jumpy fool and chugged onto the road, headed for the foothills east of the city.
As the Jeep surged along the eastbound boulevards I reviewed what I knew about Vincent Mado
Mado
The foothill suburban ghetto which Mado