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  It felt like I was getting closer. Closer to what? Was I trying to trick myself into believing I was onto something? Trying to avoid being the fuckup of my dad’s mind? My mind. Ramon had told us nothing. I thought he knew, but if he wouldn’t talk then what? The Jack method? Brace him? Beat the shit out of him? The Craylock method? Ply him with candy? Liquor? Drugs?

  Ramon knew where Pilar was. I was sure of that. She was hiding. But why? From who? I figured I’d contact him again—maybe—but it couldn’t be at the bar. We—I—couldn’t risk it again. We’d been lucky that first time. Might not work out so well again.

  What was the connection between Pilar and Teddie? Teddie wasn’t here to tell. Pilar was. Somewhere. I had to find her. Without her there were nothing but dead ends.

  They were both actresses. Both women of color. Was that it? The acting thing seemed more likely. Someone liked actresses. Thought they liked him back. Was rejected. That made sense. It was in the letters. Had to be. A beam of light spread across the floor, a favorite spot of Baron’s. For a moment I saw him there, then nothing.

  I spent the rest of the day scouring the letters again. The only connecting points were the two “sparks” notes. Had both been attached to a teddy bear? I only had one bear. Should I do the movie thing and see where the teddy bear was made and sold? Track it that way. That seemed as useless as tracking down Panasonic laser printers.

  Should I go back to the Perlman’s? See if the old lady had forgotten something? See if there was anything I could glean in Teddie’s apartment? What about going back to Mrs. Matson’s? Not much there, I figured. Except maybe Rita. That would be worth a trip to South Central. What about Ben Cruz? No, he didn’t know anything. Back to the motel where the Weasel had stayed. I could ask Tom Bond to look at mug books. I made a note to do that.

  Something was missing. The keystone. What the hell was it? The only thing that made any sense was going back to Ramon. He wasn’t the keystone. But he could tell me where to find it.

  My eyes were glazed over. Too much reading. Too much thinking. The phone rang again.

  CHAPTER 24

  Laurie read the words from “Got to Get You into My Life” unemotionally, without any of the rhythm of the song. Things weren’t going so well for her either—only I didn’t know it at the time. Craylock had sent her a note with these Beatle lyrics. The same note I’d seen in his house.

  He didn’t give a damn. He’d get her into his life whether she wanted it or not.

  “He sent me another note.”

  “Craylock?”

  “Who else?”

  I saw her point. It was a stupid question. I had a good excuse. Dazed and glazed. I didn’t bother explaining.

  “He doesn’t take a hint,” I said. The line was silent. I could hear breathing at the other end. Slight. Even.

  “I thought about buying a gun, but they have a moratorium on gun sales.” Her voice twisted like two braided power lines turning around each other, sparking off each other. She was pissed.

  “I’ll lend you one of mine.”

  “I don’t know, I’ve never used a gun before, I’m scared.”

  “I can take you to a range. Teach you to shoot.”

  “I don’t know. I guess I probably wouldn’t be able to hit the target.”

  “All the more reason to learn.”

  “God, I don’t believe this. Me, the person who can’t stand to watch violence even in a Saturday morning cartoon, and here I am discussing guns with a detective.” There was a sob at the other end of the line. “Do you believe how I’m talking? I used to be for gun control, till I realized through painful experience that it only controls the good guys. The bad guys’ll always have their weapons.”

  “You oughta meet my friend Jack.” I was serious.

  “I don’t think I’m ready for another man right now. Jeez, what am I saying, another man. I don’t have a man now. Just one who thinks he’s mine and I’m his. This is a crazy world.”

  I picked her up and we drove out to the range in Tujunga. I liked it ’cause it was an outdoor range and I could fire my Ruger Mini 30 rifle there without a problem. We continued our conversation from earlier.

  “And it’s gonna get crazier.” I found myself sounding like Jack again.

  “I think I know what you mean. I’m starting to see things differently. I used to think that the police would protect us and that if you lived in a nice neighborhood you’d be safe. Maybe that sounds naive, but I always felt pretty secure. I mean, to look at Craylock you’d never think he was capable of doing anyone harm. Now I guess I don’t trust anyone.”

  She had planned to buy a short barreled .38 Colt revolver. Not a bad choice for someone unfamiliar with guns. A revolver is good since it’s easier to use and clean than a semi-auto. .38’s not a bad-sized bullet, especially if you go with a Plus-P. If she’d asked me, I would have recommended a .357 and maybe a little longer barrel. Short barrel’s good for concealability, which she wanted. But less accurate. Everything’s a tradeoff.

  The flat hard pops of guns being fired startled her at first. She stood well back from the firing line. I didn’t like the looks of some of the folks at the end of the range nearest the parking lot. Backwards baseball hats. Lowrider pants. Tats up and down their arms. Looked like bangers. They were firing everything imaginable. Including AKs. I wondered if they were registered. I thought I knew the answer. We moved upwind.

  We started with the targets at twenty-five feet. “But,” I told her, “you’ll most likely be firing at even closer range.” She nervously picked up my .38 Smith & Wesson. It was an older gun that had belonged to my dad. I showed her how to load the gun. She tentatively took it, tried for herself. Hefting it first. Then deliberately inserting each bullet. I’d teach her how to use speed-loaders later. She raised it to the target, hands shaking.

  “Go ahead. Pull the trigger. Gently. Squeeze.”

  She fired the first shot. Winced at the kick. Backed up.

  “Steady. Both hands now.”

  She went back to the firing line, capped off the other five shots. Jerked the gun wildly. I took it from her. Showed her how to hold it. How to position herself properly. She reloaded, fired six more times, shaking less with each shot.

  “Now imagine that the target’s Craylock. He’s broken into your house. He’s coming toward you.”

  She tensed the muscles of her face. Clenched her jaw. She fired. One. Two. Three. No bullseyes. Better than before, though. Four. Five. Six. Not bad. She looked at me. I nodded approval.

  She reloaded, spun the cylinder like she’d seen in the movies. Giggled.

  I let her run through a Firestar magazine. Four out of seven hit the target.

  We played for about two hours. She got a little better. Not much. The biggest improvement came when we switched from bullseye targets to man-silhouette targets. She started hitting about seventy percent. She didn’t want to try the Mini 30.

  “After I get comfortable with a handgun I might try it,” she said. “It’s, it’s so ugly.”

  “Looks are only skin deep. I’ll loan you my .38 till the moratorium is over,” I said as we pulled up to the curb in front of her house.

  “I’d appreciate that.” She started to get out of the car. “Why don’t you come in? I’ll fix you something to eat.” Her voice was taut, a stringed instrument tuned too tight.

  I wanted to get home, get back on the Teddie and Pilar letters or something. She sounded upset. I agreed to come in for a late lunch-early dinner.

  The sun was still up. It was dark inside. All the curtains drawn, the blinds closed tight. A lonely shaft of golden hour sunlight slithered in here and there giving the room an eerie glow. Particles of dust floated on the slivers of light like so many tiny angels pirouetting along the vector.

  She grilled hamburgers on the Char-Glo. I made a salad. There wasn’t much dialogue during the meal. We watched the sun set through the cracks in the blinds and with it her feelings of security and well-being. As I rins
ed dishes and put them in the dishwasher, I could see her pupils expanding with fear. The fear of the hunted animal. Night was falling. She was the prey. Craylock the hunter.

  Dishes done, I reached for my windbreaker.

  “Do you have to go?”

  I knew what she was getting at. I didn’t bite. Maybe I should have. I wasn’t trying to make it hard for her. There were other things I wanted to be doing. Rationalizations floated through my head: If you help Laurie you can make amends for Teddie. Didn’t work. Nothing would make amends for Teddie. Perhaps I could help avert another tragedy. But I couldn’t be with her all the time.

  “Maybe I should pay Craylock another visit on my way home.”

  “Can’t you stay a while? We could rent a movie.” Her voice was breathy. Desperate.

  “If I stay a while, you’ll ask me to stay a while longer.”

  “Won’t you stay the night? I haven’t slept in days. I’m not trying to blackmail you or make you feel guilty. I’ll pay you for your time. I—”

  “He hasn’t done anything violent yet, probably won’t.”

  “How do I know he won’t? He’s obsessed. I’m scared.”

  There wasn’t really a choice. I agreed to stay the night. She would sleep on the floor in her bedroom on the far side of the bed from the window. I would sleep on the couch in the living room, weapons at the ready. There was already a pillow and blanket on the couch. She brought fresh ones. I thought of Rita and felt a twinge of guilt, but there was no real attraction between Laurie and me.

  “It’s awfully quiet in here,” I said.

  “The bell on the phone’s turned off. Answering machine in my office picks it up.”

  We checked the machine. The tape had run out. Fear ate at her eyes, the corners of her mouth. Craylock’s voice wasn’t on the tape. Only music. Semi-modern torch songs from The Beatles’ Love Songs album. We knew who it was. It wasn’t enough for the police and he obviously knew that.

  “Is there a tap on your phone?”

  “No.”

  “You might think about getting one.”

  “The phone company tells me I need to go to the police. The police tell me I need to talk to the phone company. Nobody wants to help.”

  “It’s not easy, I know. But it can be done.”

  She said goodnight. Went to bed. I sat on the couch, thumbing through her magazines. Seems she subscribed to just about everything there was, from Omni to Essence, Atlantic to Spy. Lonely? One hand flipped pages. The other curled around the Firestar. The safety was on. Good thing. The way I was hugging that piece of metal with my fingers it might have exploded from the pressure. I hardly realized what I was doing, till I cut myself on the trigger guard, something I would have thought impossible. At that moment, I could have started a fire just by rubbing my two fingers together. I wanted Craylock. Wanted him bad. Bad enough to go outside the law? Bad enough to risk jail? Bad enough to live with myself after I’d done it?

  I checked the bedroom. Laurie was curled up in a pile of blankets on the floor. Her breath came in short bursts. At least she was sleeping. I sat back on the living room couch, hoping Craylock would show. If I knew how to pray I would have prayed for his arrival. I wanted the son-of-a-bitch. I wanted an excuse to vent all the anger and rage I’d been storing up since the Weasel did his deed. Since my dad had done his deeds.

  I used her phone to check my answering machine. No messages. No Ramon. No Rita. The room was stifling, everything shut up as it was. I pulled the blinds up a few inches at each window, opened the windows. A gentle cross breeze made the room tolerable. I sat back on the couch, the Firestar in hand, and drifted off to sleep in a few minutes. My senses were acute enough that I would have wakened at anyone tramping about outside the house. I slept through the night.

  CHAPTER 25

  Laurie would have preferred I stay with her the next day. It wasn’t a horrible proposition. If I didn’t have other things to do, I might have. Guilt and wanting to do penance had made me stay the night. I didn’t think Craylock would come at her during the day. Roaches like him hide from the light. I could have been wrong. Nonetheless I couldn’t stay with her twenty-four hours a day. I wasn’t a bodyguard. Was this a rationalization? Justification for my leaving.

  I went home, showered. Didn’t know how I would spend the day. I felt Teddie slipping farther and farther away. Or was it Rita? I hadn’t heard from her in a couple days. Of course, she hadn’t heard from me either. Why? I put it out of my head.

  The phone rang.

  “Duke, Tommy here.”

  “I take it the South Central Olympics are over. You sound tired, man.”

  “Haven’t slept in days. And I’m on duty again. At least the riot’s over and things are settling down, sort of. Just don’t believe what you see on the news. It’s a hell of a lot worse out there. They’re trying to make it like everything’s back to normal. Ain’t so. At least tonight I’ll get to go home and sleep.”

  “Sweet dreams.”

  “Thanks, bud. I’m back at West Hollywood station. C’mon down. I’ll look up the stuff you want.”

  I was just about in my rental car before he hung up. West Hollywood station wasn’t far from my house. Would take me ten or fifteen minutes to get there. Traffic was still light. Lots of people staying home behind locked doors.

  The station was guarded more like a military installation than a sheriff’s station that day. It was hell getting through the heightened security. When I finally did, Tommy could barely raise a smile.

  “Glad to see you, bud,” he said. Dark circles engulfed his eyes. His uniform looked like it’d been run over by a truck, not the usual crisp look. He pulled out several thick mug books, dumped them unceremoniously on a desk.

  “Stalkers. Let me know when you’re done with them and I’ll get you some more.”

  I flipped through the dog-eared pages. Black faces. White faces. Brown and yellow faces. No discrimination here. No Weasel either. I wasn’t really looking for Craylock, but I kept an eye out for him too. Didn’t expect to find him. And didn’t. Tommy came back.

  “Hey, Tom, how ’bout we look up some stuff on the computer?”

  “I shouldn’t be doing this for a civilian.”

  “Aw shut up. You’ve been watching too many crummy TV shows.”

  He flicked a button on a keyboard. A computer monitor lit up. He punched some keys. “All right, whadda you want?”

  “Check out a guy named Jim Talbot or James Talbot, J. Talbot. Even Talbot James.” Hell, the Weasel might have been stupid enough to give me his real name or a variation of it. Several histories, even computerized photos, popped up. None looked like my Weasel.

  “Doesn’t mean he ain’t done nothing. Only that he’s not in our system. He local?”

  “Yeah. Now anyway. I don’t know his background.”

  “Well, he ain’t done nothing in California.”

  On a whim, I also had him punch up Gary Craylock. He hit more keys. A simple message popped up: “Unknown.”

  “What a bust,” I said.

  “Now you know what we go through. Day in. Day out. Hell, even when we find the bastards our hands are tied. Gotta treat ’em real nice. Especially now.”

  He then ran Talbot and Craylock through the FBI computer. Nothing there either. A couple of ciphers.

  “Late bloomers,” Tom kidded. It was his way of saying sorry he couldn’t be of more help. We promised to go out to dinner soon. He and his wife. Me and my flavor of the month.

  Before leaving, I called Martin Luther King Hospital to check on Tiny. He was in X-ray a nurse told me. I left a message of well wishes.

  Instead of heading home, I drove Laurel Canyon to Mulholland. Mulholland to Coldwater. The arroyo was crowded with the forensic crew. Same cop as the first time. He recognized me, passed me through. Mary was crawling on her hands and knees in a trough three feet deep. She was pawing at the dirt with a small mesh screen. She found the carcass of a rat. Picked it up in her gloved hands.
Examined it. Bagged it. She looked up, a sparkle in her eyes, happy to see me. I gave her a hand up and helped her out of the trough.

  She went to a red and white Igloo cooler, pulled a wrinkled brown paper bag out and two Orange Crushes. She handed me a drink. Opened the bag, handed me a sandwich as we headed to a low berm to sit on. She bit into her sandwich with ferocity. Washed it down with the sweet orange soda. I hesitated. Even though the sandwich had been in a plastic bag she touched it with her gloved hands.

  “Go ahead. Eat the damn thing. It won’t bite you.”

  “That’s not what I’m afraid of.”

  “Look, I’ve been doing this how many years now. Haven’t got sick once.” She ripped another bite out of her sandwich.

  “I don’t want to take your lunch from you.”

  “Chicken.”

  It was a challenge no macho male could ignore. I clamped my teeth on the whole wheat bread, bit off a chunk. Roast beef with mayo. I hated mayo, rat-flavored or not. Couldn’t put the sandwich down though. She wouldn’t believe me about the mayo being the only reason. She would lay it off to the rat. I forced the thing down quickly, washed it all down with Orange Crush and wished for something hot and spicy. The mayo left a pasty taste in my mouth.

  “I don’t have anything new to report,” she said.

  “I didn’t think you would. Just wanted to run some things by you.” I told her about looking for Teddie Matson’s killer without the part about my involvement. Told her about Pilar Cruz, possible connections there. “I brought the notes. Can you examine the handwriting?” She took them from me.

  “I’m no handwriting expert. I could show them to someone though.”

  “Yeah.”

  “They do both say something about ‘sparks.’ Sparks flying and the like. That makes me think there’s something connected with them. You could also call Teddie’s family. Maybe they know if she got a teddy bear.”

  I had thought about calling them. And had avoided it. I didn’t want to impose on Mrs. Matson again. I didn’t want Warren to impose on me. And if Rita was there, what would I say to her?