Authors: Thomas Perry
13
“Captain Racine, please,” said Porterfield. He could hear the young policeman set the receiver down on something hard and walk away calling “Captain, phone,” into a large space filled with other noises.
“Racine.”
“Hello, John. It’s Ben Porterfield. What time can you meet me?”
“Dinner is on you at Musso and Frank’s. Seven-thirty.”
T
HE POLISHED WOOD WALLS
didn’t seem to end in a ceiling at all, just in a dimness somewhere above the level of the lights. Porterfield sat alone in his booth, thinking about how much Musso and Frank’s reminded him of railroads. The waiters in their bright red jackets moving up the aisle at almost a run, their trays piled high with covered dishes, gave the impression that the whole long, narrow room was on its way to some destination, but there was an unmistakable feeling that when the passengers got there it would be another time, probably around 1925. It wasn’t as though the restaurant stimulated the imagination or evoked the past. There was nothing archaic or antique about it. There was just the simple, unarguable fact of continuity. Each day for the past sixty years the stoves got lit and the tables set and the waiters put on their red jackets and somebody unlocked the door. When the red leather on the seats wore out, the upholsterers came and replaced it, exactly as it had been, as it always would be, taking care to be ready for the next day, the next customer, paying no attention to what year it might be outside the front door on Hollywood Boulevard.
Out there it had been a steadily evolving stream of people walking past the windows, first orange growers and next film people from the directors and actors to the grips and gaffers and then almost instantly the multitude who grew up around the studios, the film processors and advertisers and rental agents and drivers and the people who sold them all clothes and food and houses and cars and insurance, and next the ones who were there to sell sex or drugs and finally, for the past few years, ones who weren’t even on the boulevard to do that, people who were here because there were bright lights that made it look warm, or maybe a parking ramp nearby where you could sleep most of the night if you still had enough of your brain left to memorize the schedule of the patrol cars.
Inside the door it was still 1925, and the lineal heirs, if not the original clients, were still ordering the big salad and the side of oysters, and one of the fat men at the booth across the aisle from Porterfield’s was saying, “My lawyer can piss rings around his lawyer,” and another answered, “Yeah, but his accountant can make an elephant disappear up its own ass.”
Racine followed a red-coated waiter up the aisle and slipped into the booth before the next waiter overtook him. “Well, Benjamin,” he said, leaning on the table with both elbows, “I read one time that William Faulkner went behind the bar here to show them how to make a mint julep. Want to see if they wrote it down?”
“No, thanks,” said Porterfield. “He was probably the last person to order one. Scotch.”
Racine shrugged. “Martini.” The waiter disappeared. “How did you get stuck with this one?”
Porterfield watched a waiter pass by with a tray of what looked like five identical steaks and felt a dull longing. He still wasn’t used to the three-hour time difference. “Oh, proximity. I had already been scheduled to take on the project before it fell apart, so I guess that made me the only adult male with no way to say he was too busy.”
“Take on the project? Have you read any of that guy’s stuff?”
Porterfield nodded. “I suppose they’d have eased him out. They’d already gotten him off the public payroll, and eventually they’d have taken him off the foundation’s list too. If not this director, the next one.”
“It’s too bad they didn’t get around to it sooner.”
“What have you got so far?”
Racine’s voice dropped until it was barely audible above the steady hum of activity. “Not a hell of a lot. There’s no question that whoever got the cocaine also has whatever was in that clown’s office. We have no leads on who it was, just that it was three dark-skinned male Caucasians in a van who were pretending to be air-conditioner repairmen. The coke isn’t enough to depress prices notably in a market this size, even if it’s all sold the same day, so we won’t know anything about it unless they take it to East Jesus, Kentucky.”
“What about the explosion? What was it?”
“Hell, that’s the best part. You’ll love it. It wasn’t an explosion at all, at least not one explosion. This isn’t going to be in the papers, so we can savor it all by ourselves for now. It was caused by HEI rounds from a twenty-millimeter automatic cannon.”
“You’re joking.”
“No, I’m not.” Racine’s face was suddenly old and tired. “I wish to God I were, but the ballistics people found the remains of a dud pumped through one of the bricks in the rubble. It also explains why it looked so strange to the parking man. He said the kiosk sort of tore itself apart and blew backward.”
“So they’re driving around with the gun from a fighter plane mounted in a truck.” Porterfield shook his head. “Any way of telling who the original owner was?”
“They had to weigh and fluoroscope the dud to figure out what it was, and there were no brass casings lying around. They’d have to rig something in the truck to catch them, or they’d be beaten to death with hot brass and pieces of stripped belt.”
“Anything at all on the ammunition?”
“They’re working on it, but nothing so far. Everybody with an air force has been using it since about 1950, a hell of a lot of wars ago. If we had a live round, Goldschmidt’s people might at least guess what country manufactured it. Even that might not help, since I’m told that we make most of it and sell it or give it away, and the rest is a pretty close copy. No telling how much the Russians make or who has it.”
Porterfield’s face was expressionless as they gave the waiter their orders and returned to their drinks. He wondered about the strange familiarity of it. It had been Costa Rica, the late fifties, when he’d been assigned to Special Operations. That time it had been Porterfield teaching a small group of dark young men, so earnest and serious that at least two of them would have passed for insane. He’d decided a truck was too conspicuous in a country where the cost of a five-year-old truck would have bought a village, so he’d settled for a series of fixed mountings in strategic places, then spent more time training the young men in breaking down the antitank gun into pieces small enough to carry on bicycles than in firing it. The man with the barrel had been a special problem in selection. He had to be so brave that his only human emotion was hatred. There was no way that Esteban Cabazon or any other man could have hidden the four feet of metal tubing on a bicycle. He’d lived a charmed life, at least for long enough. The police and Guardia Nacionale had been armed with old Enfield rifles. The terror on their faces as the vintage 1944 Jeeps seemed to jump backward and crumple—“Has the word gotten out to the police who are looking for these people?”
Racine sighed. “Probably. The ones on the scene were sworn to secrecy. National security and all that stuff, but you know how that works. Your buddy is out there in a squad car looking for a van he thinks has three Mexican drug dealers and maybe a stick of dynamite in it—”
“Sure. Tell me—”
“No, Ben. Wait. I’ve got to get out of here in a minute, and I’ve got to know what you want me to do about the absentheaded professor.”
“What do you mean?”
He leaned forward so far his tie lay on the table in a coil. “When do you want us to find the body?”
C
HINESE
G
ORDON WATCHED
M
ARGARET
arch her back and then rock her hips slightly to get comfortable on the bed. She was definitely losing her suntan, the peculiar demarcation that seemed to intensify certain parts of her with a white light as though they glowed with an energy of their own, or as though some principle of evolution had caused them to be marked as areas of special interest, in the absurdly literal way that nature did things.
She plucked her glasses from the nightstand and opened the
Los Angeles Times
. He watched her peering down at the paper, leaning on her elbows, her long hair hanging down to veil the side of her face. “I think we should get married,” he said quietly.
“That’s sweet,” she said to the newspaper. “I do too.”
“No, I mean now. If you put things off when it’s time to do them, then you get better and better at thinking of reasons to put them off, and—”
“Wait, Chinese. There’s something here.”
“A colossal once-in-a-lifetime sale at I. Magnin’s,” he said.
“Read this.” She tossed a section of the paper on the bed and rolled onto her side to face him.
“You mean, ‘Spoiled Little Smartass Ignores Marriage Proposal’?”
“I’m serious, you idiot. About the professor.”
He picked up the paper. “‘Body of Missing Professor Found. In the second violent incident on the ULA campus within a week, the body of Professor Ian Donahue was found last evening in an overgrown drainage ditch within a few blocks of his office. The Los Angeles County coroner’s office has issued a statement that the cause of death was suffocation due to a crushed trachea brought on by a blow to the throat. Police spokesmen declined to comment on whether Donahue’s death was linked to the recent dramatic theft of cocaine valued at over a million dollars from the ULA Social Sciences Building but admitted that his office was near the one where the cocaine was kept. Captain John Racine of the LAPD told reporters that Donahue had not been listed as a witness to the theft, nor had his name been connected in any way with the ongoing investigation.’”
“Well?”
“It’s the same one. Interesting.”
“Is that all you can say?”
“It is interesting. A chop to the throat, and all that. It’s not that hard to do, but the average person doesn’t think to do it that way. Unless you’re trained for it and have a little practice, it seems kind of chancy and inefficient. Of course, these days every little weasel with a big mouth who’s ever been decked in a bar spends the next seven years going for a black belt, so—”
“Stop lying, Chinese. It’s not a coincidence and you know it.”
“Coincidence?” Chinese Gordon walked out to the kitchen and shook some coffee into the pot, then started boiling water. “No, it’s probably not a coincidence. That doesn’t mean I’m going to let it ruin my day.”
She stayed with him, staring up at him in amazement. “Who do you think killed him?”
“I’d say there are three major possibilities. One is that somebody read the papers and got the idea there was something valuable to steal in every office on campus, and the other is that Donahue was planning to do something about the cocaine himself, and his partners thought he’d cut them out.” He hummed a few bars of “I Went to the Animal Fair” and poured the boiling water into the coffee filter.
“You said three.”
“Oh, the third we can ignore, just like the first two. It’s not our problem. I’d say our problem now is how to invest a hell of a lot of cash without attracting too much attention.”
“The third one is the only real one, Chinese. I read part of that report, so I know what it is. He was killed by somebody in the government. You, as usual, will lie to me and do what? Drop out of sight for a year?”
Chinese Gordon shrugged. “I’d miss you.”
“Oh, Chinese. You’re such a fool. They’ve just killed that man. If you get arrested they’ll pin it on you, so there’s no going back. There’s probably no going forward either, because if what’s in the rest of those papers is bad enough to murder him for, they’ll never stop looking for you. So here you are, walking around like the village idiot making coffee. You think because I’m a woman I don’t know anything and can’t even learn it, but you’re the one who never learns.”
Chinese Gordon chuckled. “Do you have a better idea?”
“Of course I do.”
“‘I
N THE FIELD STUDIES
done under the ULTRA program, 1955–1970, in Oaxaca State (Mexico), Tennessee (U.S.), and elsewhere (see appendices I through IX), it was established that a battery of sociometric methodologies yielded surprisingly high indices of correlation.’”
“Where’s the footnote page?” said Margaret, crawling across the bed to leaf through the box of papers. “Here it is.”
“The coefficient of dullness is right up there.” Chinese Gordon scratched his belly. “I’m not surprised somebody punched the little bastard in the throat.”
Margaret knelt on the bed and read,
In the early tests it was found that traditional participant-observer methodologies yielded low interrater reliability figures. Beginning in the Tennessee studies of 1958, a system of statistical demographics was applied in which the number of displaced persons was recorded at each stage of the stimulation period. A team of interviewers was placed in the field stations where those who left the area went to apply for temporary shelter, food, and other necessities. Subjects were told that the questions were intended to establish their eligibility for federal assistance. The reasons the subjects gave for their actions were used to validate the hypothesis that a specific stimulus had been the independent variable, causing them to panic. It was found that a sampling of as low as one percent yielded correlation coefficients well within the acceptable range (.65–.9) if the sample was at least one hundred subjects.
“We’re getting nowhere,” said Chinese Gordon. “He waited for a flood and went down and asked people if it bothered them.”
“No. He calls it a ‘stimulation period’ in a ‘target area.’ Maybe he explains it in an appendix. Where’d you put the appendices?”
“They’re in the box.” He crawled to the foot of the bed and stared into the box. Doctor Henry Metzger was curled up on the thick stack of papers, already asleep, his nose touching the toes of his hind feet, his tail fluttering slightly as he stalked some luscious prey whose only habitat was Doctor Henry Metzger’s dreams. “Come on, you worthless pelt,” said Chinese Gordon. “Pile your flea-bitten ass on something else.” He reached into the box to lift the cat. Doctor Henry Metzger gave an annoyed little cry, and Chinese Gordon froze.