Close to the Ground Page 9
Inside, there was a waist-high counter. Behind it, two clerks, a man and a woman, were working at computer terminals.
The man looked up at Cordelia.
“Help you?” he asked in a pleasant voice.
“Maybe I have the wrong place,” Cordelia said. “This is Room 213, Fairbanks Building?”
“That’s right. Did you have an appointment?”
“Yes. My name is Cordelia Chase.”
The man flipped through a stack of file folders. “Okay, gotcha right here.” He rose from his chair, approached the counter with his hand out. Cordelia took it and gave it a shake. “Welcome to Monument Pictures, Ms. Chase. I’m sure you’ll have a terrific experience working here.”
Cordelia felt her heart falling. This doesn’t look like a star’s office, she thought. Or much of anything I’m interested in. “Just what is it I’m supposed to be doing?” she asked.
The man looked back at the file in his hands. “Says here you’re the new tour guide for lot tours. It’s a great job — I started there, too, and look where I am today!”
Great, Cordelia thought. Maybe someday I, too, can be a Human Resources clerk.
“Hey,” Doyle said. “Your boss is in the trades.”
Angel looked up from his desk, where he was still going over some of the magazines Cordy had brought from the library. He’d slept for most of the day, since dropping Karinna off at her house, knowing that he’d be out with her again tonight. Now it was early evening. “Since when do you read the trades?”
“Cordy got me in the habit. You learn all kinds of interesting things. Look here — ‘Chix Flix Sell Nix Tix.’ You don’t get that kind of reporting from the New York Times, I’ll tell you that.”
“So what’s new with Jack Willits?”
“Did you know what kind of trouble he was in?”
“Besides having to live with Karinna, you mean? No.”
“According to this, Monument Pictures was bleeding cash. Heads were gonna roll, and Jack’s was gonna be first. But it looks like he saved the day — he’s signed Blake Alten to do a picture this year.”
“Blake Alten’s that actor who . . .” Angel searched. He knew he’d heard the name.
“The one who can open any movie, no matter how bad the script is. Biggest action star in the world today, they’re saying. He usually earns twenty-five million for a movie, but he’s agreed to do this one for nine because he loves the script so much. He’s gonna make Monument Pictures profitable again all by himself. Looks like Jack Willits’s lucky day.”
“Again, not counting having that terror Karinna for a daughter.”
“Yeah, not counting that.”
“So in the course of a single day, Monument goes from losing money to being the hottest studio in the business. And Jack saves the day, and his own neck. I guess he’s a happy man today.”
The front door swung open. “I’m glad someone’s happy,” Cordelia railed. “But if I hear the words ‘Monument Pictures’ again today, I’m going to scream.”
Angel and Doyle looked at her, Angel surprised by the frustration and anger that showed on her face. “First day didn’t go so well?” he asked.
“You have no idea,” she said indignantly. “Your friend Jack Willits tricked me.”
“Tricked you? How?”
“Didn’t you hear him say that I was going to be a star? Or at the very least, an actress?”
Angel thought a moment. “Actually, no. I seem to remember him offering you a job. But I don’t think any details were discussed.”
“You think I imagined it? Well, okay, maybe I did. But even so, I didn’t think he was offering me a job guiding tours on the lot!”
“Tours?” Doyle said, suppressing a laugh. “You? Don’t tour guides have to be cheerful and answer obnoxious tourists’ questions with a smile?”
“You think this is funny, Doyle?” Cordelia said. Her hands unconsciously balled into fists.
Doyle held out his hands. “No, nothing funny about it, Cordy.”
“I had to lead four tours today,” she said. “My feet are killing me. I thought the exhaust fumes from those trams would suffocate me. Smell me — I still stink from it.” Doyle leaned in and took a big whiff, but Cordelia waved him away and went on with her rant. “First I had to sit through hours of pointless training, including watching a video so boring I thought my brain was going to ice over. Then I had to point out the house from My Hero and the fort from Wagons West to people from seventeen countries and twenty different states, and I had to take pictures of people in front of it with forty different cameras. Do you know how hard it is to understand all those different accents?”
“Faith and begorra, I wouldn’a have a clue,” Doyle said, pouring on the brogue.
“I’m not even talking to you,” Cordelia snapped.
“Hey, I’m not the one who got you — well, actually, a paying job. That’s not so bad. And if you get stock options, you got in just in time.”
“Yeah, yeah, Blake Alten, blah blah blah, heard all about it a hundred times.”
“Maybe you’ll get to meet him,” Angel offered.
“That’s the only saving grace I can find,” Cordelia replied. “As long as I’m on the lot, maybe I’ll meet casting directors or producers who can give me actual work.”
“There you go,” Doyle put in. “That’s lookin’ at the bright side.”
“And that’s so what I’m known for,” Cordelia said miserably.
“The Willits family is driving us all a little crazy, I’m afraid,” Angel said, trying to change the subject. “I had to put up with Karinna last night. Have you heard of Hi-Gloss?”
“Heard of it? I’ve been turned away twice. She got in? You got in?”
“I got in because I was with her, I think. Maybe they knew she’d dance with every guy in the place and let them all think they were taking her home.”
“Well, of course. That’s the way to have a good time, right?”
“Is that how it works these days?”
“I guess you haven’t been a teenage girl recently, Angel. Or ever, come to think of it. But yes, that’s pretty much how it goes. You never know which one will end up being the right one, so why not test them all until you find him?”
“That’s . . . one way to look at it, I suppose,” Angel said.
“If you want to look at it through her eyes, that’s the only way.”
“Maybe I was too hard on her,” Angel said. “It just seemed a little dishonest to me. Or at least, disingenuous.”
“And then there was the part where she ditched you,” Doyle added.
“She ditched you?”
“Just for a minute,” Angel said.
Cordelia snorted. “Some bodyguard.”
“I got her home alive, didn’t I?” Angel shot back.
Cordelia took a long look at Angel, sitting behind his desk. “A little defensive, are we?” she asked. “What’s up with you, Angel? You seem to be taking this case a little personally.”
Angel shook his head. “It isn’t like that,” he argued. “She’s just a kid.”
“Down, boy,” Cordelia chided. “I didn’t mean romantically.”
“But maybe Cordy has a point, Angel,” Doyle said.
“Not you, too,” Angel responded.
“Just that, I don’t know, maybe you are taking this one too much to heart,” Doyle explained.
Angel thought about the young lady in Rumania, the one Karinna reminded him of. The one he hadn’t been able to save.
“Is that bad?” he asked.
“It could be, that’s all I’m sayin’,” Doyle offered. “You know what happens when an angel flies too close to the ground.”
Kate Lockley knew that a lot of detective work was about knowing the right people and asking the right questions. The drawback was, when the job was about catching criminals, the “right people” were often not the kind that she might have wanted to socialize with, if she’d had her choice.
The caller had asked to meet her on a street corner outside a liquor store. She knew him only as Chuey. He’d been an informant for a couple of years, after she cut him a break on a small-time burglary charge in order to get him to turn over the fence who was moving large volumes of stolen merchandise. He didn’t call her often, and he hated it when she came to him. But when he did give her something, more often than not it turned out to be valuable. So she grabbed a young detective named Weston — mostly to watch the car when she was away from it — got into her car, and drove into central L.A. She parked between a pawnshop and a bar that opened at six in the morning, and was pulling in the serious drinkers by seven. It was now eight at night, and Kate knew the place would be silent except for the sounds of liquid pouring, muttered conversations and despair.
She told Weston to wait in the car. “He doesn’t like strangers,” she explained. “I’ll be back in a few.”
Weston nodded his assent. He’d brought along coffee in a paper cup, and he was sipping from it when she left him.
Chuey was talking on the pay phone that hung from the wall outside the liquor store. He was short, just over five feet, but he was a constant bundle of energy. Even as he talked on the phone, one hand was tapping on the leg of his jeans while the other tugged at his baseball cap, his foot was moving as if keeping a beat, and his head swiveled this way and that as he kept an eye on everything that happened on the street. He saw her approach, gave a sign with his eyes. She didn’t go any nearer, and after a moment he replaced the receiver on the hook. He came toward her, already talking as he did. He didn’t slow as he reached her, but she turned and walked in the same direction he was.
“Let’s walk,” he said.
“Anywhere in particular?”
“Around the block. We’ll be done by then.”
He was moving at a fast clip, and she found herself taking long strides to keep up with him. “What’ve you got for me, Chuey? I’m pretty busy these days.”
“I know, huh? Those bank robbers. That’s what I’m talking about.”
“You’ve got something on these tunnel rats? Spill it, Chuey. They’re bad news.”
“I know, man, you don’t have to tell me.”
“So what do you have?”
Something seemed wrong about the whole thing, to Kate. Chuey was strictly small time. The bank robbers, on the other hand, were major felons. They used sophisticated weapons, they planned their crimes carefully, they took large amounts of easy-to-move cash rather than electronics and junk jewelry like Chuey. These people ran in different circles, and she didn’t see where Chuey would have come into contact with them.
But she was willing to listen. That’s what cops did. That’s how crimes were solved.
“Listen, man, I don’t want to get jammed up over this or nothing, you know?”
“Have I ever lied to you, Chuey?” Kate asked, carefully not answering his question.
“Okay, let’s just say this guy I know, he was at this place. This night spot, but not exactly one that has an ad in the Yellow Pages, you know?”
“A private party, a card game, something like that?” She stepped around a guy sleeping against the wall, legs wrapped in a thin plaid blanket, bottle in a paper bag near his head. She had to take a second look to be sure he was breathing.
“Yeah, something like that, close enough,” Chuey agreed. “So this guy was talking to these people there, and one of them said there was this gas station, you know, one that was closed or something. And he used to go there to get in out of the cold, you know, drink some wine, catch some sleep.”
“Okay,” Kate said, trying to follow along. “An abandoned gas station he used as a squat sometimes.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Only a couple of nights ago this dude said he tried to go there, he raised some dough for a bottle and he took it there, and when he tried to go in through these boards they got over the back door, a guy stuck a gun in his face and told him to beat it.”
“A gun?”
“That’s what the dude said. He was so scared he dropped the bottle and ran away.”
“And this connects to my bank robbers how, Chuey?”
Chuey stopped and faced Kate, in a rare moment of stillness. From a second-story window she could hear the indistinct mutterings of a TV game show. Someone who wanted to be a millionaire was answering easy questions in front of the world, and down here on the street Chuey was just trying to get by.
“This guy, he said when the other dude, the one with the gun, stuck his head out through the boards, he could see inside a little bit. There was some kind of light on in there, like a lantern or something, you know? And in the light from the lantern, he saw like a bunch of shovels.”
“Shovels, Chuey? Is he sure?”
“If you talked to this dude like — like my friend did, you’d know he was straight when he saw this. Even if he was drinking, that gun would have scared him straight, man. So if he says he saw shovels, I believe him.”
“Okay, Chuey. I believe him, too. Where’s this gas station?”
“That’s the thing, man,” Chuey said. “He didn’t say exactly.”
“He didn’t? Then what good does this do me?”
“I don’t think he’s a guy who pays a lot of attention to street signs, you know what I mean?” Chuey asked. He started walking again, without warning, and Kate hurried to keep up. “He don’t have a car, he don’t drive anywhere.”
“Where does he usually hang out?”
“He never goes north of the ten,” Chuey said, naming one of the major east-west freeways in the city. “I’d look around Avalon, maybe, someplace like that. Avalon and Vernon, or Slauson, maybe, okay?”
“I’ll check it out, Chuey, thanks.”
“Hey, these bank guys, they’re bad news, right?”
“Yes, Chuey, they are.”
“So something like this gotta be worth a little something, ain’t it? Not for me, but for my friend, you know?”
She dug a couple of twenties out of her pocket that she’d had ready for this moment, and slipped them into his waiting hand.
“The city of Los Angeles thanks you,” she said.
“The city’s welcome,” Chuey said with a smile. “Adios, man.”
He crossed the street swiftly and disappeared around a corner. Kate kept going, back to the corner with the liquor store, then around and back to her car. The bar was still there. A neon drinking glass sputtered in the night, but otherwise there was no sign of life. Kate climbed into her car, nodded to Weston, and drove away.
CHAPTER TEN
Tony Chen moved briskly through his shop, dusting the bottles with an ostrich-feather duster. The shop was simply called “Chen’s.” It fronted onto an alley instead of a street, off North Main, just at the edge of L.A.’s Chinatown district. A block away a trickle of water ran down the cement canal that was called the Los Angeles River
The shop had been in the family since his grandparents had come to California from the mainland. His parents had worked it for their whole lives, and now it was his turn. If one knew what it was, and where, one could find it, but it wasn’t the kind of place that was advertised in the Yellow Pages, or the backs of bus stop benches. Much of his stock was, after all, illegal in the U.S. — things like powdered rhino horn, tiger claws, and the like. And then there were the items that weren’t quite what they were represented as: the dragon’s teeth that were really shipped to him by an alligator farm outside New Iberia, Louisiana, for instance.
Chen’s was a magic shop, but not the kind that sold parlor tricks and illusions. When he was feeling philosophical, Tony liked to think he was selling dreams. When he was in a more prosaic mood, he considered himself to be selling power.
He was on his way behind the counter to put the duster away when the door opened with a tinkle of chimes. He turned around, laying the duster on top of the counter. A man had come in, E
uropean, tall and white-haired, his face as lined as a roadmap. Piercing blue eyes drew Tony’s gaze.
“Help you find something?” he asked.
“I am in need of the eyelash of a two-headed ewe,” the man said. His tone betrayed no sense that the request was at all strange.
“An interesting curiosity,” Tony replied.
“Your level of interest could not be of less importance to me. Do you have it or not?” the man demanded.
“Could be,” Tony offered. “Let me look.” He turned to an array of tiny jars stacked on shelves behind the counter. As he did so, he let his thoughts drift toward the stranger’s. He had picked up a trick or two in his time, and this man’s mind was something he wanted a closer look at. Ewe’s lashes were a pretty specialized item.
Reading most minds, at least on the most superficial level, was not particularly difficult for someone practiced at it. People tended to keep their dominant thoughts at the front of their minds, and for most people, the dominant thoughts were nearly all they had. They wanted money, material things, women, fame, power.
This man was different. It was as if he had better control over the workings of his own brain. Tony had to dig for a while — a process he visualized as probing, as if with a dentist’s tool. But finally, just as he closed his hands on a bottle of two-headed ewe’s lashes, a particular image came into his head with a suddenness and clarity that he felt like a spike of pain behind his eyes.
He couldn’t contain the word.
“Balor,” he muttered. He put the bottle down on the countertop.
“Looking around where you’re not wanted?” the man asked.
“No, I —” Tony started. But it was too late. The man moved forward more quickly than Tony would have believed, and caught Tony’s wrist in his bony fingers.
“All right, then,” the man said angrily. “You might as well look more closely.” His blue eyes bored into Tony’s. Tony tried to throw up a mental defense, but he felt the man’s thoughts push past it as if it were the merest gauze curtain.
And then he was out of his shop, on a rocky windswept plain. Leaning against one of the rocks, his single eye closed in slumber, was Balor. Tony had never seen Balor, even in a drawing — his tradition was Asian, and he hadn’t studied much Celtic magic — but he knew at a glance who it was, probably because this man had implanted the image in his mind.