A Savage Place (9 page)

“You’re a man,” she said.

I had been leaning forward with my elbows on the table. I sat back and put my hands in my lap. “Jesus Christ,” I said.

“I was alone in there with five men, four of them actively hostile. It’s very hard. You don’t know what that’s like. He dismissed me like I was a beetle. A bug. Nothing. `Get out,‘ he said, `I’m going to speak to your boss.’ ”

“Jesus.”

“And my boss will say, `Sure, Pete, old pal, she’s a pushy broad. I’ll let her go.”‘

I took one hand out of my lap and rubbed the lower part of my face with it. The nacho supremes came. We ordered two bottles of Dos Equis beer.

“Okay,” I said. “You’re afraid for your job.”

Her eyes were filling again. “The only woman,” she said.

“Only woman is true,” I said. “Alone is not true.”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

Suze, where are you when I need you. “Talk a little more,” I said.

“Maybe I will.”

“You weren’t with me. You were there to protect me.”

“Ah-hah,” I said.

She looked at me. There was no humor in her look. Her eyes were wet and her face was somber. “What’s that mean?” she asked.

“It means, loosely, oh-oh. It means that since I’ve been with you, you’ve been between ScyIla and Charybdis. You need me to protect you, but the need compromises your sense of self.”

“It underscores female dependency.”

“And in the office up there, you were scared. And being scared, you were glad I was with you, and that underscored the female dependency even more.”

She shrugged.

“And when you told me you could get information from an agent you used to sleep with, you weren’t showing off your liberation, you were being bitter. You were trying to make light of your feeling that to get what you needed, you had to go to a man and get an I.O.U. in return for sexual favors, or something like that.”

She poked at her food with her fork, and ate a small bite. The nacho was about the size of a bluefin tuna. When they said supreme, they meant supreme.

“Something like that. You misunderstood.”

“Yes, I did. Now I don’t.”

“Maybe.”

I finished my beer.

Candy smiled at me a little. “Look,” she said. “You’re a good guy. I know you care about me, but you’re a white male, you can’t understand a minority situation. It’s not your fault.”

I gestured at the waitress for another beer. Candy hadn’t touched hers. Appalling.

While I waited for the beer, I worked on the nacho. When the beer came, I drank about a quarter of it and said to Candy, “Extend that logic, and we eventually have to decide that no one can understand anyone. Maybe the matter of understanding has been overrated. Maybe I don’t have to understand your situation to sympathize with it, to help you alter it, to be on your side. I’ve never experienced starvation either, but I’m opposed to it. When I encounter it, I try to alleviate it. I sympathize with its victims. The question of whether I understand it doesn’t arise.”

She shook her head. “That’s different,” she said.

“Maybe it isn’t. Maybe civilization is possible, if at all, only because people can care about conditions they haven’t experienced. Maybe you need understanding like a fish needs a bicycle.”

“You’re quite thoughtful,” she said, “for a man your size.”

“You never been my size,” I said. “You wouldn’t understand.”

THE COPS FOUND Mickey Rafferty lying in the open door of his room at the Marmont with his feet sticking out into the hall and three bullets in his chest. Someone had heard shots and called the cops. but no one had seen anything and no one knew anything.

Candy and I got this from a cop named Samuelson in the empty studio where, mornings from nine to ten, a talk show called New Day L.A. bubbled and frothed. It was four fifty in the afternoon. Candy had some news to read at six.

“We found him this morning,” Samuelson said, “about twelve hours ago. We talked to some people at the studio. They said he was close to you.”

Candy’s face was pale and blank. She sat on a sofa on the set, her legs crossed, her hands in her lap. She nodded.

“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you,” Samuelson said.

Candy nodded again. Samuelson was sitting on one corner of the anchor desk, his arms folded. He was square-faced and nearly bald, with a large drooping mustache and tinted glasses in gold frames.

“Way I figure it happened,” he said, “someone knocked on the door, and when he opened it, they shot him in the chest.”

Candy shook her head with little rapid movements, almost as if she were shivering.

“You got anything else?” I said.

“Not so far,” Samuelson said. He was chewing gum and occasionally cracked it. “Hoping maybe Miss Sloan would be able to help us.”

Candy shook her head. “I don’t know anything,” she said. “I don’t have any idea why someone would want to kill Mickey.”

“How about you, Boston?” Samuelson popped his gum at me.

“No,” I said, “I only met him once.”

“I know this is a tough time to talk about it, Miss Sloan,” Samuelson said. “But I would like to talk some more when you can. Maybe tomorrow?”

Candy nodded.

“Maybe you could come downtown,” Samuelson said. “Tomorrow, maybe around two in the afternoon, say.” He took his wallet out, slipped a card from it, and gave it to Candy. “If you can’t make it then, give us a call, and we’ll arrange a better time.”

Candy took the card.

Samuelson looked at me. “Wouldn’t it be a coincidence if Rafferty getting burned had something to do with this investigation you’re helping with, Boston.” I shrugged.

“If it turned out that way, you’d get in touch with us right away, wouldn’t you, Boston.” He gave me a card too.

“It’s every citizen’s duty,” I said.

“Yeah, okay.” Samuelson unfolded from the anchor desk. He was tall and looked in shape, not heavy, but like a tennis player or a swimmer. He moved smoothly.

“I’ll be looking for you tomorrow, Miss Sloan. You come too, Boston,” he said.

Candy said yes, not very loud. And Samuelson went out of the studio. It was dead quiet. The weighted studio door swung shut. Candy got up from the couch and walked over to it and looked out through the small double-glass window. Then she walked back over and stood beside me.

“They killed him,” she said.

“I gather we’re not telling the cops everything we know?” I said.

“They killed Mickey,” Candy said. “Doesn’t that-” She spread her hands.

“There are all kinds of things it does,” I said. “But trying to talk about it is inadequate. If they did kill him and they are the same people that had you beat up, then it says they are in earnest.”

“You mean they might try to kill me?”

“They might. But I won’t let them.”

Candy turned and walked away, across the empty studio, stepping carefully over the lash of cables on the floors, and on the far side of the studio, she stopped, turned back, leaned her arms on a camera, and put one foot up on the bumper ring that went around the lower end of the dolly.

“You think you are very tough, don’t you. People die, people are hurt. You’re matter-of-fact about it, aren’t you. `They might try to kill you, girlie, but don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of you. Big strong me.‘ Well, what if they kill you. You ever think of that?”

“No more than I have to,” I said.

“Wouldn’t be manly, would it.”

“Wouldn’t do any good,” I said.

She stared at me over the body of the camera. “What’ll we do, Spenser?” she said. “What in hell will we do?”

“Some of it you have to decide,” I said. “Maybe you have already. For instance what do we tell Samuelson and how much? A few minutes ago you told him nothing. You going to stick with that?”

“Should I?”

“Not my decision,” I said.

“I’m afraid, if they know, they’ll get involved in the whole deal and everyone will shut up and I won’t get a story.”

“Or they might dig it out and clean it up,” I said. “They can do that sometimes.”

“But it would be them, not me. I want this. I don’t want a bunch of cops getting it.”

“If the cops are involved, there’s not much reason for the bad guys to harm you anymore,” I said. “Their whole point is to keep you from the cops.”

“I need this story,” she said.

“Okay,” I said, “but don’t think Samuelson is going to be easy. Cops hate coincidence. You’ve employed a detective from Boston for an unspecified investigation, and then your boyfriend gets killed.”

“He’s not my boyfriend. Wasn’t.”

“That’s not the point. He was perceived as such. Samuelson isn’t going to be happy with the hypothesis that there’s no connection.”

“That’s his problem,” Candy said. She was resting her chin on her folded arms, staring across the barrel of the camera, past me, at the blank off-white curtain that backdropped part of the set.

“He’s being nice with you, and careful, because you’re in the media, and he knows you can cause him aggravation. But cops have a high aggravation tolerance, and if he has to, he’ll take the weight, as the saying goes. Then he can become your problem… and mine.”

“I suppose it could be trouble for you.”

“Suppressing evidence. Cops-and D.A.‘s and judges -disapprove of it generally.”

“You can go back to Boston.”

“While you do what?”

“I need this story.” She wasn’t gazing at the offwhite backdrop now. She was looking at me.

“Like the cops,” I said, “the bad guys walk a little more carefully around you than they might someone else. Killing a reporter makes a lot of waves. Remember the reporter that got blown up in Arizona?”

She nodded.

“So do they, and maybe they won’t kill you if they don’t have to. But if you’re running around making more waves than you’d make dead, then the logic seems inescapable.”

“That means you think I should tell the police?”

“No,” I said. “That means I’ll stay.”

THAT NIGHT THERE was no dancing on the balcony. We ate a room-service dinner, in near perfect silence and went to bed early. What a difference a day makes. I lay on the bed in my room and watched an Angels game on television until I got tired. Then I switched everything off and went to bed. Sleep. Death’s second self.

In the morning we went to Candy’s apartment to check her mail and listen to her phone-answering machine and get some clean clothes. The sun was bright off the pool and filled the room. There was a breeze. The faint movement of the pool made the light glance and quiver. Candy stood by her desk in the living room sorting through her mail. She had on a dark blue suit with gold piping. She punched on the phone recorder as she looked at the Mail, and Mickey Rafterty’s voice came up.

“Candy,” it said, “where the hell are you? I’ve been trying to get you all day. I braced Felton and I know he’s scared. All we have to do is keep on the pressure, and he’ll crack. I’ll keep calling till I get you… I love you, babe.”

Candy dropped the mail and slowly sank to her knees and put her arms around herself and began to rock slightly back and forth, sitting on her heels, her head hanging. I stepped over and shut off the recorder. Candy murmured something.

I said, “What?” and bent over to hear her.

She said, “A voice from the grave,” and gave a little snicker. “From the other side, through the magic of machines.” She snickered again. And then she was still and rocked.

I squatted beside her on the floor and said, “Would you care for a hug or a comforting pat, or would that make it worse?”

She shook her head, but I didn’t know if she was saying no to the hug or no, it wouldn’t make it worse. So I stayed where I was and did nothing, which I probably ought to do more of, and after a while she stopped rocking and put a hand on my thigh to steady herself and then stood up. I stood with her.

“Poor little Mickey,” she said. “He acted so tough.”

“He was tough,” I said. “He was just small.”

“Big or small,” she said, “bullets would have killed him anyway.”

The rest of the phone recordings had to be listened to. I was thinking how to go about it.

“If I’d been a weathergirl,” Candy said, “Mickey’d be alive.”

“You’ve had a bad time. You’re entitled to be silly,” I said. “But don’t do it too much. You know his dying wasn’t your fault.”

“Whose fault was it?”

“I guess most of the blame resides with the guy who burned him. I’d guess old fat Franco. A little of the blame is Mickey’s. He screwed around with stuff he didn’t know about. It’s a way to get hurt.”

“Franco?”

“Yeah, the fat guy that beat you up. His name’s Franco.”

“How do you know that?”

“Learned from the blond guy I talked with at the Farmers Market.”

“And you think he killed Mickey?”

“You talked to Felton and got beat up by Franco. Mickey talked to Felton and got shot. Wouldn’t you guess Franco?”

“Yes.”

“That would seem the handle to all of this,” I said. “Old Franco.”

“Handle?”

“Yeah. We’ve spent all this time talking to people on whom we have nothing. We’ve already got Franco for kidnapping and assault. He’s probably hired help. So he has no reason to cover up for his employers if it costs him.”

“I guess that’s so. But he’s not the one I want,” Candy said. She was starting to concentrate. The shock was receding.

“Not finally,” I said. “But to get any tangle straightened out you have to find one end of the rope. Franco’s one end.”

“Okay.” Candy was frowning with interest. “Okay. I’ll buy that. Now the problem is to find him.” She was drumming her fingers softly against her thigh. “You have any thoughts on that?”

“How did you find him?” I said.