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Page 12


  She made a grunting sound and expelled a cloud of sweet, white smoke. “That ain’t what I’m gonna tell you, man. I just throw that in, you know? Por nada.”

  “What are you going to tell me?”

  She rubbed her thumb and forefinger together. “Is about what I see in his room. When I go in on Saturday.”

  “I thought no one had gone into his room until Monday.”

  Maria just smiled.

  Somewhere in the dark house something made a creaking noise. The sound made me jump. But Maria didn’t move.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “Nothin’,” she said. “Is just my kid, you know?”

  I wasn’t sure I believed that, but I didn’t know what I was going to do about it. I glanced through one of the dark archways leading to the back of the house. Then I pulled my wallet from my jacket and took two hundred-dollar bills out. Maria’s eyes gleamed in the candlelight.

  “All right!” she said softly. She reached tentatively for the money, as if she were almost afraid to touch it, afraid that it might vanish if she did. I held it back from her.

  “Let’s hear the story first.”

  She looked at me uncertainly. “You ain’t gonna stiff me, are you, man?”

  “Let’s hear it, Maria.”

  She stared at the money for a moment then nodded. “O.K. But don’ try no tricks, you know?” She wet her fingers and pinched the lit end of the joint a couple of times. When it went out, she stuck the roach behind her ear like a stubby yellow pencil.

  “When Dover checks in on Friday,” she said, “I’m off duty. So I don’ get the word about how he don’ want no company. On Saturday morning I go see him—change the sheets, see if maybe he wants a little head. I could use the bread. Ain’t got no electricity, you know? Anyway, I knock on the door and when nobody answers, I unlock it with my key and go in. There wasn’t nobody there, man.”

  “You mean he’d gone out?”

  “I mean there wasn’t nobody there. There never was. I clean enough rooms to know when somebody been there at night. And nobody been in that room.”

  I stared at her. “Are you sure, Maria?”

  “Sure, I’m sure. The bed ain’t messed up. There ain’t no luggage, neither. It freak’d me out some. I go up to the desk and ask about him, ‘cause I think maybe Jerry’s been playin’ one of his dumbass jokes on me, you know, when he say he seen Dover check in. But Louise, she tell me he check’d in on Friday afternoon and say he don’ wanna be disturbed.”

  “Did you tell her what you saw?”

  “No, man. I don’ tell nobody. I got a good job, and I don’ say nothin’ gonna fuck it up.”

  “You didn’t tell Jerry?”

  “No, man. I didn’ tell nobody.”

  “Why didn’t you tell the cops?”

  “Nobody ask me about Saturday,” she said. “Besides, I don’ give nothing to them cabrons for free. Is just askin’ for trouble, you know?”

  I thought about it for a minute. “So he wasn’t there on Friday night or on Saturday.”

  “That’s what I been tellin’ you, man.”

  “What about Monday? How did the room look then?”

  “It still don’ look like nobody’d lived in it, you know? I mean, the clothes, they been put away. But his suitcase was still sittin’ on the bed and the sheets ain’t messed up or nothing.”

  “Like he’d just come in?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Of course, I don’ get no real good look. Once I smell the bathroom...I just run.”

  “Did you see his body?”

  “I don’ have to,” Maria said. “I know what that smell is.”

  “According to the cops, he’d been there since early Sunday morning. How come it took so long for someone to complain?”

  “Man, that’s the south quadrangle. It cost big bread to move in down there. I don’ think there’s nobody around ‘til Monday morning.”

  “The place was empty? Both buildings?”

  “Almost. August is a slow time, man.”

  “O.K., Maria.” I handed her the two hundred dollars.

  She held the money close to her breasts, moving her lips as if she were saying a bedtime prayer.

  19

  AS I got up to leave, I heard another noise coming from the hall. I looked into the dark archway leading to the back of the house and saw a pair of eyes glistening faintly in the candlelight.

  “What’s going on?” I said uneasily.

  Before Maria could answer me, a small brown boy came running into the light.

  “That’s what’s going on, man,” Maria said. “Come here, pachuco.”

  The little boy ran over to his mother and hid his face in her robe. He looked at me once—all brown eyes and brown shiny hair.

  “Say hello,” his mother said to him.

  The boy hid his face again and shook his head. Maria brushed the hair from his forehead. “He’s shy, you know?”

  I nodded at her. “Thanks for the help.”

  She rubbed the two hundred-dollar bills together. “Is what it’s all about. No bread, no electricity. No bread, no nothing.”

  I opened the door and stepped out onto the stoop. The cab was still sitting on the dark street corner, idling in a cloud of exhaust. I walked under the palm tree, down to the curb, and looked back at Maria’s tired cottage. Then I got in the cab and told the driver to take me to the Marquis.

  ******

  It was about two o’clock when I got to the hotel. I went straight up to my room and sat down at the desk by the bed. It was too late to call Jack, although I wanted to talk to him about what Maria had said. I figured I could get in touch with him in the morning at the Belle Vista. I wanted to do a little more snooping around there, anyway, to see if I could figure out precisely how Quentin Dover had managed to slip away unnoticed late Friday night.

  If Maria could be trusted, that was apparently what he’d done. Gone out after supper in the rented car, returned after twelve, picked up his bags, then left again without anyone seeing him come or go. If he’d returned between 12:30 and 12:45, when the night clerk was on break, I could get him into the hotel. But it was a little tougher to get him back out. Fifteen minutes wasn’t much time to return to the room through that dark garden, pack a bag, go back out through the garden, and catch a ride with someone waiting in another car. It could have been done, I supposed, if he’d known precisely when the clerk was going on break. But it would have had to have been run like clockwork. Moreover, it would have had to have been planned in advance.

  Whether he’d come in and gone out through the lobby or whether he’d found some other way to enter and exit—through one of the gates—it did look as if the thing had been planned out. Or, at least, as if Dover hadn’t wanted anyone to know where he was going. He’d made a special trip to L.A. three days earlier than usual. He hadn’t contacted anyone on the ‘Phoenix’ team. He hadn’t even called his agent, who claimed that they were long-time friends. He had told the desk clerk that he didn’t want to be disturbed by visitors. And he had entered and left the hotel grounds with his luggage, unseen, in the middle of the night, leaving his own car parked prominently in the Belle Vista lot. Then he’d returned, surreptitiously, early Sunday morning. That sounded very much like a man who didn’t want other people to know what he was up to.

  As to which “other people,” it occurred to me that if Quentin had been going behind his agent’s and his producer’s backs—if he had, in fact, been meeting with someone on Saturday about a TV deal that neither Sugarman nor Helen Rose knew about—he would have had a very good reason to keep his whereabouts secret. And given the situation on ‘Phoenix,’ he might have been desperate enough to risk anything in order to land another job. The fact that he’d come to California at all pointed to some sort of television connection. But I didn’t really know how to confirm it, short of canvassing every agent and producer in town. And even then the chances of being told the truth were probably nil.

 
He had made those telephone calls when he’d arrived. Several local ones, according to Sy Goldblum a.k.a. Seymour Wattle, and one long-distance one to his mother in Cincinnati. He had also driven the rental car some sixty miles. If I could have found out whom he’d called in L.A. or whom he’d gone to see on Friday night (if he’d done anything more than drive around), I’d have been better able to answer the central question of where he’d been on Saturday. But the calls were untraceable; so was the car ride. And I was beginning to feel like I’d worn out my welcome in L.A. Quentin’s friends and associates claimed that he hadn’t been in touch with them—period. That left me with the one person I knew he’d been in contact with—Connie Dover. I’d barely scratched the surface with her and hadn’t even gotten that far with Marsha. There was a fair chance, I figured, that one or both of them knew something that I wanted to know. In fact, Marsha Dover had claimed to know “things,” compromising things. Although it might have been the liquor talking, it was worth a shot. Plus, Dover’s lawyer was in Cincinnati; so was Frank Glendora. And I had questions I wanted to ask each of them.

  ******

  First thing Friday morning, I called Seymour Wattle at the LAPD, Hollywood Division. I asked him if they’d had any further word on the autopsy findings, and he said no. Then I asked him about the phone calls Dover had made from the Belle Vista. The long-distance one had been made at seven P.M. Pacific time and had lasted for two minutes. The last local one had been made at approximately seven-thirty on Friday night. Dover had rented the car—a Dodge Diplomat—at seven forty-five, picked it up at seven fifty, and had driven off immediately after signing the rental agreement in the lobby.

  When I asked Seymour if there was any possibility of tracing the local calls, especially the last one, he said, “Not a chance. The hotel phones are direct-dial within Los Angeles county. All you gotta do is punch ‘9’ and make the call.”

  “How about the car ride?” I asked. “Any idea where he went?”

  “Tell you what you do,” he said. “Go downstairs, buy yourself a map of L.A. Get a compass. Set the point on the Belle Vista Hotel. Then draw a circle with a thirty-mile radius. That’s where he went, man. Somewhere in that circle.”

  “Thanks for the help,” I said.

  “Don’t mention it,” Wattle said.

  “I may have another job for you, Sy.”

  “Great. I could use the bread.”

  “Hit a losing streak at the ballpark?”

  “Hell, no,” Seymour said. “The track. Lost a bundle on a gray horse. I’m a sucker for a gray.”

  “Well, I’ve got a sure thing for you.”

  “I hear you,” Wattle said.

  “Ask around. See if you can find anyone who’s done business with our boy in the last few weeks.”

  “What kind of business?” Wattle said.

  “The TV kind. A new soap opera, maybe. A nighttime show. Maybe even a movie.”

  “That’s a lot of asking around.”

  “There’s two bills in it for you. And if you come up with anything I’ll see to it that you get a fat bonus.”

  “How fat?”

  “Something in the four-figure range.”

  “Get right on it, man,” Seymour Wattle said.

  After I got done with Seymour, I called Jack Moon’s room. There wasn’t any answer, so I called Helen Rose’s suite at the Belle Vista. Moon picked up the phone.

  “Black hole of Calcutta,” he said.

  “I take it things are not going so well.”

  “You take it correctly.” He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Sally Jackson’s here. From the network. She and Helen just had a little spat.”

  “What about?”

  “This’ll amuse you—Walt’s document. You know, the one that he wrote all by himself?”

  “What about it?”

  “Sally claims he stole it from another show. She used to work with Russ and Walt on ‘Young and Restless,’ and she claims it’s Leonard’s work. Can you beat that with a pair of leather thongs?”

  I started to laugh. “Where and when does it stop, Jack?”

  “It never stops, Harry. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Or something like that.” He laughed himself. “Can you believe that little putz? Jacking us up about a document he didn’t even write? Bluffing Helen and Quentin and me, too? God Almighty, what a world!”

  “What does Walt say?”

  “He says—and I quote—‘It may bear a superficial resemblance to Russ’s work. So what? It’s still good, solid material.’ What the hell, he’s probably right. They all steal from one another anyway. Quentin did it. And Russ did it, too. It’s like running a foundling home for plagiarists.”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “What do you think?” Jack said. “Nothing. Oh, Helen will have a little talk with Walt, slap his hand. But it’s too late to back out of the deal. The show just couldn’t stand another writer change at this point. The brands are already nervous, and the network is just hanging on by their nails. Anyway, Walt’s been on the team from the start, so we couldn’t do without him in any case. And he knows it.”

  “Son-of-a-bitch,” I said. “Do you think Dover knew what Walt was planning?”

  “Naw,” Jack said. “Actually, it’s the kind of stunt that Quentin himself would have pulled—in his heyday. But he was too much of an egotist to think anyone else could bring it off. There is a kind of poetic justice about it, though.”

  He sounded pleased.

  “So Walt didn’t have a document of his own, after all?”

  “Nope,” Jack said. “He just buffaloed Quentin into thinking that he did. And fooled all the rest of us, too. Some sweet guy, huh?”

  “A slice of marzipan,” I said. “I’ve got some news.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Quentin wasn’t in his hotel room on Friday night or Saturday morning.”

  “Yeah?” Jack said with interest. “How in hell did you find that out?”

  “From a maid at the Belle Vista. She went into his room on Saturday—to clean up. And there was nobody there. No luggage, either.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Jack said. “Where was he?”

  “Out trying to hustle himself up another job, I think.”

  This time he didn’t try to talk me out of it. “Maybe, he was. I mean, if our new head writer can foist a four-year-old document off on us as his own work, then anything’s possible.”

  “Where would he have looked, Jack?”

  “Not at United,” Moon said dryly. “Hell, at any of our competitors, P&G, General Foods, ABC. Or maybe at some freelance production company. The possibilities are endless.”

  “He was apparently going behind his agent’s back, as well as behind yours. Could he have gotten away with it?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose he could have slipped out of the United contract on the grounds of poor health. And a lot of writers have more than one agent, although I’m pretty sure that Quentin dealt strictly with Sugarman.”

  “Why would he bypass his agent?”

  “Why do you think?” Jack said. “Money. If he was dealing on his own, he’d have saved himself ten percent.”

  “Was he that hard up for cash?”

  “I don’t know. It’s something to look into.”

  It was, indeed.

  “I think I’m going to catch a flight back to Cincy this afternoon,” I said. “I’d like to talk to Quentin’s mother again. And to his wife.”

  “I’m sorry to hear you’re leaving,” Jack said with regret. “It’s been fun, with you around.”

  “I’ll stop over at the Belle Vista before I leave. Maybe we can have a drink together.”

  “Just name the time.”

  I took a look at the clock on the nightstand. “It’s ten-thirty now. I’ll meet you at noon. O.K.?”

  “See you then,” he said.

  20

  I CALLED LAX and made a reservation for a two o’clock flight that would g
et me into Cincinnati International at nine-thirty P.M. Eastern time. Then I called Glendora.

  I’d been holding off making the call for two days—primarily because I didn’t have anything to tell him. Now I did. And I had a few questions to ask, too. Hearing that measured voice again reminded me of his sad-eyed preacher’s face.

  “I was beginning to wonder what had happened to you, Harry,” he said. He didn’t sound angry, exactly—which is what I’d expected after I’d ignored his calls—more bemused, the way he’d sounded when he’d been talking about the ‘Clean & Fluffy’ snafu. “Is everything coming along all right?”

  “I’ve uncovered a couple of things. If you want to wait until tomorrow, I’ll tell you about them in person.”

  “You’re returning to Cincinnati?”

  “Tonight. I want to talk to the Dovers again. And maybe to Quentin’s lawyer. You wouldn’t happen to know his name, would you?”

  “As a matter of fact I do. Seth Murdock. He’s my lawyer, too. Quentin kept singing his praises so highly that I decided to try him out.”

  Frank Glendora was probably the last person on earth whom Quentin Dover could still bamboozle. It was almost touching.

  “I’ll call Seth for you, if you’d like. Clear the way.”

  “Great,” I said. “There are a few matters I’d like to talk over with you. Maybe we could meet for lunch tomorrow.”

  “I think I could take a lunch on Saturday,” Glendora said, paging through a calendar. “Yes, I’m free. Shall we say twelve-thirty at the Maisonette?”

  That would make the second time I’d been to the Maisonette in less than a week. The second time in ten years. “Sounds fine,” I said.

  “I’m sorry about that Russ Leonard thing. Jack told me that you were rather upset with him. And with me, too. It just didn’t occur to either of us to mention it, what with Quentin so newly dead.” Glendora sighed. “The family buried him on Thursday afternoon, by the way. I wish to God that we could bury this whole saddening business with him.”

  I didn’t realize it at first, but he was asking me a question.

  “Can we bury it, Harry?” he said straight out.