The Baker Street Letters (8 page)

Then he found a cab in front of the terminal. He showed the letter writer's address to the driver, and in a few moments they were moving east on the Santa Monica Freeway, toward the center of a ring of dirty haze.

It was late morning, not rush hour, but they had traveled only about five miles before traffic slowed to a crawl. The driver did not seem surprised.

“Wanna know the worst jam I ever seen?”

Reggie guessed that he really had no choice and said nothing.

“It was that big fire in the new subway dig on Lankershim. Somebody left a blowtorch on or something. Closed down the Ventura Freeway, the Hollywood, killed a guy—it was a mess. It was all over the news, even CNN. I'll bet they showed it even where you're from.”

“Missed it somehow,” said Reggie. “I didn't know you even had an underground in Los Angeles.”

“A what?”

“A subway.”

“Didn't used to. Got one now from downtown all the way to the Valley, and pretty soon they'll head east.”

“Clever idea,” said Reggie, eyeing the lanes of stalled traffic. “We built ours a century ago.”

“Whoops,” said the driver. Three major motorways were converging, and the lane they were traveling in ended abruptly The driver swerved radically into a right-hand lane that was still moving.

“Almost there,” he said.

Less than a mile but ten minutes later, the driver exited the motorway. Within a few blocks, they entered a modest residential neighborhood, with narrow streets, skinny palm trees, and small front lawns drying in the sun.

The driver slowed and came to a stop in front of a faded yellow wood-frame house.

“You looking to buy?” said the driver.

Reggie checked the address. It was correct—but the house was vacant, with a lockbox on the door and a
FOR SALE
sign staked in the lawn, bearing the name of a local real estate agent.

“What a bleeding idiot I am,” said Reggie. “The address is from twenty years ago. Of course she isn't here now.”

But at least he had her name. He called directory assistance, and the operator told him the only Mara Ramirez in Los Angeles was on Cawley Street. Reggie gave the new address to the driver.

They got back on the motorway, the driver took the Alameda off-ramp, and now they were on surface streets in downtown Los Angeles. They passed the county jail, the train, and a bus depot.

Then the driver made two more turns, and they were on an empty frontage road running parallel to the Los Angeles River—a dry-looking flood control channel cut through the heart of the city, its concrete sides covered in graffiti that glinted red and gold in the sun.

They were driving not on asphalt now, but over metal sheets and heavy plywood that covered a trench cut down the center of the street. The plywood rattled and stirred up powdery dust on the edges as they drove.

“All this construction is for the new extension from downtown,” announced the driver.

The taxi drove another block, then began to slow.

On the right-hand side of the road was a row of sooted brick buildings—warehouses, obviously abandoned now, with faded block letters identifying what had been toy and clothing wholesalers.

On the left was the fenced end of the subway construction that they had just passed; adjacent to that were rail lines, bracketed by pillars supporting a bridge across the river channel and by ramps of intersecting downtown motorways.

“This is it,” said the driver. He turned the corner onto a cross street that ended at the frontage road, and brought the cab to a stop.

Reggie was skeptical. The cross street had been thoroughly
torn up for the subway trench. There was no traffic and only a few parked cars.

He looked at the street sign and asked the driver if there was another Cawley Street in the city. The driver shook his head.

“Not with those numbers,” he said.

“Wait for me,” said Reggie.

“Pay me,” said the driver.

Reggie paid him, then got out and stood on the corner to get his bearings.

Behind him was a brick building that housed a soup kitchen, apparently closed at this hour. Black-stenciled letters identified the structure as the EAST CITY RESCUE MISSION.

To Reggie's left was the frontage road.

To his right on Cawley Street were several small, brave businesses that had struggled to stay open for any customer who could negotiate the construction obstacles and find their entrances.

But there were no apparent customers—just an elderly woman who slowly pushed a rusty shopping cart filled with ragged possessions that were probably everything she owned. A bent and dangling orange-and-white sign on the front of the cart, identifying a grocery market, rocked back and forth as she struggled to push the cart up over a curb.

McKenzie's Shoe Repair was boarded up but displayed a banner for its new location.

Angel's Used Books apparently could not relocate. It displayed a sign that said it was closed after twenty-five years and, in bold letters,
“Thank the Silver Line!”

A dry cleaner was simply shuttered and displayed no sign at all.

Joe's Deli was the only business that seemed still to be hanging
on. In the window was a roughly lettered sign proclaiming that the deli was still open during construction and boasting the best Philly sandwich in the West.

Not content just with the sign, Joe's Deli had tacked a box of flyers, with menus and directions to the deli, against plywood construction fencing on the frontage road. But—predictably—wind and other random forces of the city had scattered the flyers from their box, trampled them under foot, and now they skittered across the frontage road and along the dusty walkway on Cawley Street, until the wind plastered them against the walls of the rescue mission, and against Reggie's pants leg.

Now Reggie looked across the street from Joe's Deli, and he saw the address—it was a small block of flats, and the numbers on the building matched what Reggie had for the letter writer.

The structure looked to be at least fifty years old, and at first Reggie had assumed it to be abandoned. But as he approached he saw that it was indeed residential and occupied—with curtains, potted geraniums, and drying clothing in the windows. There was an open, arched entryway.

He stopped some yards off and hesitated.

He knew that contact with this letter writer would put his chambers lease at risk, if Dorset National should learn of it. But presumably Nigel had come here, and that was the only lead Reggie had.

Besides, how would Dorset National likely learn of it?

Now Reggie was distracted by motion on the boarded walkway adjacent to the building—he saw brown legs against a white cotton sundress and long dark hair falling over a young woman's bare shoulders as she approached the entrance to the building.

She stopped at the post box just outside the entryway. Reggie watched her pick up her letters and then go up an inside stairwell.

Reggie detached the Joe's Deli flyer from his leg. He crossed the street, went up the same stairs, and found the apartment address he was looking for.

He went inside and knocked on the apartment door.

After a short moment, the tiny latch window in the center of the door opened, and Reggie saw, just for an instant, a pair of soft and worried brown eyes. Then the window closed.

“I have a dog,” the young woman announced loudly from the other side of the door. “He's really big.” Then she added, as if it were an afterthought, “You can't hear him barking because he's asleep right now, but if I woke him, he'd rip your arm off.”

“Then kindly let him sleep,” replied Reggie, though the dog sounded like a ruse. “My name is Reggie Heath. I believe you have met my brother.” Reggie had a sense he had said these words before, though he couldn't immediately recall where.

The woman behind the door was hesitating. Then the shutter opened, and there were those brown eyes again.

“His incisors,” she said tentatively, “are at least an inch and a half.”

“I believe my brother, Nigel, was here,” said Reggie. “But I know he left a phone message. About a letter to Sherlock Holmes.”

“No,” she said. “I've had no message like that.”

“But you did write a letter to Sherlock Holmes? A letter about your missing father?”

The shutter closed abruptly.

“Mookie! Wake up!” shouted the young woman.

There was a vibration in the floor and then a sharp and heavy scuttling across a hard surface. Then the door opened wide, and Reggie had just enough instinct to step back as 150 pounds of what was apparently Mookie charged through. It was the largest Saint Bernard he had ever seen.

Mookie displayed a remarkably narrow turning radius, and although Reggie initially made an adept dodge, he was obliged to retreat down the stairs as rapidly as possible. He took the first two steps backward, and then, turning to continue the rout face first, saw that he was not the only person on the stairs.

A man in a two-tone suede leather jacket was standing only a few steps below Reggie. The man had flattened himself as much as possible against the wall, but what Reggie saw in his face was more a look of hostility than any fear of the slobbering presence close behind Reggie.

In the next instant, a heavy weight struck Reggie in the back, pitching him forward into the stairwell.

He had time to get one forearm beneath him, but it was not enough.

He came to at the bottom of the stairs. His forehead was throbbing, and when he touched it, his hand came away wet with blood.

As his senses began to clear and he got to his feet, he heard their voices.

“Is he all right?”

That was the young woman's voice. Reggie saw her standing halfway up the stairwell. The Saint Bernard was pressing its considerable bulk against her legs, slobbering and grinning.

Between the young woman and Reggie was the man with the two-tone jacket, and he answered her.

“He'll live, Mara. Did he bother you?”

Mara shook her head, then she turned, and without waiting for more of a response from either Reggie or the man in the jacket, she started back up the stairs.

Reggie stumbled out to the street, looking for his cab. Thank God, it was still there. And there was the driver, already looking in Reggie's direction and getting out to help, and—No, now
seeing Reggie's condition, he was tossing Reggie's carry-on out of the boot and driving away.

Bloody hell.

Reggie pressed a handkerchief against his forehead, staggered over to the one bag he'd brought from London, and took out his mobile to call another taxi.

No signal. He'd forgotten the damn thing wouldn't work here.

He looked about. There was not a public phone in sight, and given the location and condition of the street, he knew he could wait forever and not see another cab.

But three blocks up the street was a red neon sign for the Roosevelt Arms—a hotel with peeling pink stucco and rusty window air conditioners.

It was the only option. He picked up his carry-on bag and trudged toward it.

Several head-throbbing minutes later, he entered the dimly lit lobby.

He surveyed the floral-print carpeting, the five-dollar prints of waves crashing at sunset, and the purple simulated-leather chairs and concluded that if the cost of the place was like its decor, it had to be the cheapest lodging around.

Reggie considered that fact for a moment.

If Nigel was in the area, this would be his affordable choice.

Reggie approached the bored desk clerk and asked for Nigel Heath.

“Yeah. He was here. Checked out.”

“When?”

The clerk shrugged. “Not long, I guess. Do you want a room or what?”

“Thank you, no,” said Reggie. “Did he say where he was going next?”

“No. Promised to write, though.”

“Has the room been cleaned?”

“You want a room, I got one available on the third floor. Clean as a baby's bottom.”

“No doubt. But what about the room where my brother stayed?”

“I don't know if my staff has gotten to it yet,” said the clerk.

This was sarcasm. Reggie recognized the tone from weekend holidays in Paris.

“May I see it?”

“You can rent it.”

“Of course,” said Reggie. He paid the full day's rent with his American dollars and climbed the stairs carrying his bag with him.

In Reggie's experience, American hotel rooms typically smelled too much of bleached linen and antiseptic cleaners. Unfortunately, the rooms of this hotel did not have that fault; the corridor smelled instead of mildew and substances best left unidentified.

Reggie found Nigel's room. For reasons he did not understand, he knocked first. There was no response. Of course there wasn't. He opened the door.

He realized now he had half expected that Nigel would still be there, despite the clerk's assurances that the occupant had checked out.

But there was no one.

The bed, small by American standards, apparently had not been slept in. There was nothing lying about on the faded carpeting to prove Nigel had been there, though Reggie supposed the absence of empty beer cans and whiskey bottles might in itself indicate that the most recent tenant had not been of the usual clientele.

The closet was empty; there were no toiletries left behind
in the bathroom. Some loose stationery in the desk drawer bore the logo of a local car rental agency. But nothing was jotted down. No pressure markings on anything. And still no positive trace of Nigel.

Reggie looked at the wastebasket at the side of the desk. It had not been emptied, and he removed the contents: one empty tube of chocolate Smarties.

Nigel had been here.

Reggie returned to the front desk and spoke again with the helpful clerk.

“Do you have a record of outgoing calls?”

“Sure. It's in the billing.”

“I'd like to see the billing for my brother's stay.”