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  “I don’t know, Frank. I’m not through with the case yet. I can tell you this much—I haven’t come across anything that would compromise United’s image yet. At least, nothing relating directly to Dover.”

  “That’s wonderful,” he said with relief, although I wasn’t sure if he was relieved for United or for Quentin. Probably a little of each.

  I told him I’d see him the following day and hung up.

  ******

  I watched myself pack my overnighter in the bedroom mirrors. I’d gotten used to all those reflected versions of me by that point. When I was fully packed, I saluted myself one last time, put my bag outside in the corridor, and closed the door on that snazzy room full of telephones and shiny mirrors. I caught an elevator down to the lobby and checked out. As I was waiting for them to tally the bill, I took a look at the newspaper rack by the front desk and found a map of L.A. It had sounded silly when Seymour suggested it on the phone, but I decided that there was no harm in drawing a couple of circles with a compass. Anyway, it was a souvenir of an odd August week.

  Once I’d paid my bill, I walked out to the smoked-glass elevator on the top landing. This time I couldn’t resist. I stepped into it, feeling like an oversized parcel of mail in a pneumatic tube, pressed a button, and was lowered twelve feet to the sidewalk.

  “Now you gettin’ the spirit,” the black doorman said with a grin.

  I laughed.

  The doorman flagged down a cab. I got in, carrying my suitcase in my hand.

  “We be seein’ you again, sir?” the doorman asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Via con dios.” He patted the door and the cab pulled out into traffic.

  It was a sunny day—a little warmer than it had been earlier in the week. I hadn’t noticed the heat before, even though it had been running in the low eighties. That Friday there was more moisture in the air and suddenly it felt hot. I took off my sports-coat and draped it over my arm.

  “You goin’ to the airport?” the cabbie said.

  “Eventually. Right now I want to go to the Belle Vista Hotel.”

  We drove up Hilgard to Sunset. Bel-Air ran up the canyonside, north of Sunset. A maze of walls and gates and flowering trees and brief glimpses of white masonry, like glimpses of bare, beautiful flesh seen through a hedgerow.

  The driver turned left on Sunset Boulevard and then right on Green Canyon. We coasted under the towering oaks up to the walled compound of the hotel. I had the cabbie drive past the gate in the south quadrangle before letting me out in the lot. I was pretty sure that was how Quentin Dover had slipped away on Friday night—through the gate—unless he’d sneaked past the front desk or hiked across the gully of flowers that separated the lobby from the parking lot. There was no other exit.

  I got out of the cab—suitcase in one hand, coat in the other—and walked up to the bridge. Jerry was leaning against a strut, staring at his reflection in one of his glossy patent leather shoes.

  “Hi,” I said to him.

  “Hi,” he said dolefully.

  “Sorry about yesterday. I had a long afternoon.”

  “Oh, that’s O.K.,” he said. “It happens to everyone.” He looked at my bag. “You leavin’ us?”

  “Yes. Back to Cincinnati.”

  “Yeah? Is that where you’re from? WKRP-land? They got a good football team.”

  “That’s one thing that can be said for it.” I put my bag down on the pavement. “You want to make another quick twenty bucks?”

  He grinned. “Do you need to ask? What is it? More questions about the guy who croaked?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Shoot,” he said.

  “What time did you say you got off Friday night—the night that Dover took the car out?”

  “About eleven-thirty, quarter of twelve,” the boy said.

  “And what time did you go back on duty the next day?”

  “Nine-thirty in the morning.”

  “Where was the car parked when you came in?”

  “Over there,” he said, pointing to the south end of the lot.

  “That’s a long way from the bridge,” I said.

  “He probably didn’t have much of a choice. All the good spots get snatched up by midnight or one.”

  “So you figure he came back after one?”

  “It’s possible,” the boy said. “Maybe he just parked down there ‘cause he wanted to stretch his legs.”

  “He had a heart condition.”

  “Oh, yeah. That’s right. I read that in the papers.”

  “What time did he leave on Friday?”

  Jerry scrunched up his face. “About eight o’clock. Yeah, that’s it. It was eight o’clock, ‘cause he asked me what time it was.”

  “Like he had someplace to go?”

  He shrugged. “Like he wanted to know the time, mostly.”

  “He’s gone four and a half, five hours, at least. Right?”

  “Eight to one. Yeah, that’s five hours.”

  “And how many miles did he put on the car?”

  “Sixty-two,” the boy said. “The cops made me check it out.”

  “What speed would you have to be traveling at to go sixty miles in five hours?”

  Jerry laughed. “Pretty damn slow.”

  “So he went someplace,” I said. “Got out of the car, spent three or four hours there. Then came back.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “And wherever it was, it had to be within thirty miles of the hotel.”

  “Thirty-one miles,” Jerry corrected.

  “Got any ideas?” I asked him.

  “He could have gone to the ocean—that’s nice at night. Watch the surf at the Palisades.”

  I thought of Mack’s beach house. “Pacific Palisades is about thirty miles from here, isn’t it?”

  “Depends on what part you’re talking about. Some of it’s closer.”

  I made a mental note to check the mileage between the Belle Vista and Mack’s home, although Walt didn’t really fit into my scenario. “Where else could he have gone?”

  “Up into the canyon,” Jerry said. “Look out at the city. Nice view up there on a clear night.”

  “Was it a clear night?”

  “Yeah. Now you mention it. It was real nice. No smog, you know?”

  “Who lives in the canyon?”

  “Who do you think?” Jerry said. “The big bucks live in the canyon.”

  “The big TV bucks?”

  “Yeah, and movies, too. They got homes all over the valley. Some of them got more than one, you know? A town house and a ranch—that kind of setup.”

  That was more like what I’d wanted to hear. Some TV or movie mogul might have asked Dover to spend the night at the ranch—take a dip in the pool, breakfast by the tennis courts, spend the day talking shop. So Quentin comes back to pick up his togs and his pills. But if that were the scenario, then I wondered why he’d bothered to check into the Belle Vista at all. Unless it had been a last-moment invitation or an uncertain one. And if so, then Quentin couldn’t have counted on getting in and out of the hotel through the lobby. That route depended on split-second timing. Which left the gates.

  “The gates in the walls,” I said to the kid. “Do they leave them unlocked?”

  “You mean here at the hotel?”

  I nodded.

  “Yeah, sometimes they do. During the day.”

  “How about at night? Late at night?”

  “No,” he said. “They lock ‘em at night. You gotta have a key.”

  “Did Dover have a key?”

  “How should I know?” the kid said.

  He hadn’t liked that question. I could hear it in his voice. It made me wonder if I’d found Quentin’s concierge.

  “Did you get him a key, Jerry?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “I didn’t get him a key.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Wha’d ya’ mean, am I sure? Of course I’m sure.” He wiped his
brow with the flat of his hand. “You expect a lot for twenty bucks. I shoulda warned Maria.”

  “Did she get him a key?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “No. She didn’t get him a key. What the fuck’s all this crap about a key, anyway? What sort of shit has that greaser been feeding you?”

  I got twenty bucks out of my wallet and handed it to him.

  “She’s got a big fucking mouth,” Jerry said disgustedly and stuck the twenty in his shirt pocket. “She should stick to sucking dicks with it. You know?”

  “See you around, Jerry,” I said, picking up my bag.

  “Yeah, see you,” he said dully.

  21

  THE BELLE Vista’s cocktail lounge was crowded that Friday afternoon. I edged my way among tables, where tan men in optical gray sunglasses and open-collared Italian sports shirts sat beside women who looked as if they’d just stepped off tennis courts, bronze, sun-bleached, and fit. I held my suitcase at my side, hoping they’d think I was some kind of doctor. When I found Jack Moon, sitting in a booth by the tinted window, I squeezed in quickly beside him.

  He looked at my suitcase and sighed. “So, you’re going to make me fend for myself, huh?”

  “You seem to have done all right on your own up ‘til now,” I said.

  He smiled wistfully. “Yeah, but it was nice having someone around to talk to.”

  A waitress came by to take our orders. After she’d gone, Jack asked me when I’d be coming back to L.A.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess that depends on how things go in Cincinnati.”

  “You’re going to talk to Connie and Marsha?”

  I nodded. “And to Quentin’s lawyer, too. Maybe I can figure out exactly what he was up to.”

  “You know I’ve been thinking about that.” Jack folded his hands on the tabletop and tapped his thumbs together. “Maybe he was trying to land another job in television. Maybe he thought it was the right time for a change, before things got so out of hand on ‘Phoenix’ that his reputation, such as it was, was completely ruined. Nobody had been badmouthing him publicly. All the talk was in-house. So he still had some credit in the industry, although a soap with a thirteen share doesn’t give you much pull. But it might have been enough. God knows people have been hired for big money with much worse track records.”

  “What made you change your mind about him?” I asked.

  Jack stopped twiddling his thumbs and looked at me. “Yesterday, when I was talking to you about Quentin, I realized with a sinking feeling that I was mad at him because he hadn’t turned out to be the man I’d expected him to be—not because he’d fucked up on the job, but because he’d fooled me into thinking he was someone he wasn’t and I was hoping for the best. Then this morning, when I found out that Walt was playing the same kind of games that Quentin had been playing, hoping for the best suddenly seemed like a ridiculous waste of time. Hoping for the best wasn’t going to put the bacon on my table or help me make it through the day. So I said to myself, ‘Sure, Quentin might have been angling for another job. Whatever made you think that he had enough loyalty left in him to do otherwise? Whatever made you think that he had any principles at all? It’s time to quit kicking against the pricks, Jack, and start going with the flow.’”

  “Then you’ve decided to stay in the business?”

  “I guess so,” Jack said with mild surprise, as if that conclusion hadn’t occurred to him. “Hell, I’m thirty-five years old. Too old to try to remake the world or to keep hoping it’s going to get better. I’m in a relatively safe spot. I guess I’ll just have to learn to adapt to it.”

  “I wish you luck, Jack—whatever you do.”

  The girl came with our drinks. We picked them up and clicked glasses.

  “We made a pretty good team, didn’t we?” Jack Moon said.

  “Not bad,” I said to him.

  I swallowed the rest of the Scotch and got up. “I’d better get to the airport.”

  Jack looked mournfully into his glass of whiskey. “Give me a call sometime, will you? If we don’t see each other out here again?”

  “Sure, I will.”

  “And I’ll ask around for you. See if I can find out what Quentin was doing—whether he really did have a deal going on the side.”

  “I’d appreciate it.” I pulled the suitcase out from under the table. “So long, Jack.”

  “So long, Harry,” he said.

  ******

  I stopped at the Belle Vista’s front desk to clear up a few final questions. The prim woman with the aristocratic face wasn’t very helpful, but I did manage to confirm that the night clerk did not take a regular break between twelve-thirty and twelve-forty-five and that the bridge between the lot and the lobby was the only way in or out, aside from the gates. Which meant that Quentin had, indeed, secured a key of his own. Probably from Jerry.

  I looked for Jerry when I got to the lot. But he wasn’t around. Another kid, just as slick and venal looking, told me that Jerry had gone home for the day. That was all right. Jerry’s uneasiness about the key was almost as good as a confession. And I figured I could always hire Sy Goldblum to scare the truth out of him, if things reached that point.

  I tipped the new kid a dollar to get me a cab. And when it pulled up, I got in and settled back for the long drive to the airport.

  It took us about thirty minutes on the San Diego Freeway to get to LAX. The cabbie dropped me off at the American building, and I walked down the long, glassed-in corridor to my boarding gate. I was a little surprised at the number of people sitting in the waiting area. Children, nuns, straw-hatted tourists. It looked as if the plane was going to be full. I took that as a bad omen. They always went down when they were full of children, nuns, and happy tourists. Probably some cause-and-effect relationship having to do with the weight of expectations and the buoyancy of fate.

  I sat down on a hard blue plastic chair and parked my overnight bag at my side. Through the picture windows I could see jets gliding effortlessly down runways, their tail fins glistening in the sun. Up they went, into the yellowish Los Angeles sky. And with each successful takeoff, I saw my own chances of survival diminishing. A sign at the American booth said that the flight to Cincinnati wouldn’t be boarding for another half hour. I tried closing my eyes, but the turbine roar of the jets and the faint chatter of the other passengers kept me from relaxing. A boarding area in an airport is a little like a waiting room in a dentist’s office. Everyone tries to look unconcerned, but there’s really only one thing on their minds. It was certainly on my mind. And I kept thinking that, this time, I wouldn’t have Jack Moon along to hold my hand.

  When I couldn’t take it any longer, I picked up my bag and walked down some steps to a bar beneath the boarding gate. They were asking a buck and a half for beer, but I didn’t care. I drank two. And when that didn’t cut the tension, I ordered a double Scotch. The bartender grinned at me.

  “First time in the air?”

  “It’s always the first time for me,” I said miserably.

  “Why don’t you buy yourself a magazine?” he said. “There’s a newsstand across the way.”

  He put the Scotch down on a paper coaster with airplane jokes printed on it.

  I didn’t feel like buying a magazine, and the idea of reading the airplane jokes horrified me. But I was going to have to do something to distract myself—besides drink. So I unzipped a pocket on the overnighter and took out the map of L.A. that I’d bought at the Marquis. I unfolded one page of it and tried to locate the Belle Vista Hotel—the center of my circle.

  “What are you looking for?” the bartender asked me.

  “The Belle Vista Hotel,” I said.

  He turned the map around, rattled it to straighten the page, studied it for a moment, and pointed to a tiny spot.

  “There she is,” he said. He rotated the map back toward me and lifted his finger from the paper.

  “You got a pencil?” I asked.

  He pulled one out from
beneath the bar and handed it to me. I made a little ‘X’ on Green Canyon and looked at the legend at the top of the map. It was scaled one-tenth of an inch to a mile. Thirty miles made a three-inch radius. That was a lot of ground—some of it pretty damn expensive. As I was conducting my survey, the bartender leaned over and said, “I think your flight is boarding.”

  I looked up at him.

  “You know they used to execute people for delivering news like that.”

  He grinned. “What were you looking for on the map?”

  “What does it matter—I’m about to die.” I folded the map up and stuck it back in the bag. “A hiding place,” I said to the bartender. “Some spot that’s about thirty miles from the Belle Vista.”

  “Which direction?”

  “You got me.”

  He gave me a puzzled look. “Just any place?”

  “Nope. Someplace special.”

  He shook his head, as if he thought I was plastered. “Well, we’re about thirty miles from the Belle Vista,” he said, as he walked away, “if that’s any help.”

  I picked up my bag, walked up to the boarding platform, and got in line to meet my doom.

  It wasn’t until we were well off the ground, somewhere over New Mexico or Texas, that I began to think again. And one of the first things that came to mind was what the bartender had said about LAX. Maybe Dover had gone to the airport, I thought, to see somebody off or to meet somebody who was coming in. Or maybe he’d gone to Pacific Palisades. Or up into the canyons. Or to Pacoima, even—it was about thirty miles away, too. There was no point in speculating about it until I knew why he’d gone to L.A. in the first place.

  22

  MIDWAY ACROSS America, I got drunk on airline booze and flew drunk—and relatively happy—all the way home. It is, in my opinion, the only way to fly.

  The 727 touched down at Cincinnati International at a quarter of ten—fifteen minutes behind schedule. Under different circumstances that would have been cause for hysteria. But with three or four little bottles of Dewar’s in me, I didn’t even mind the bumpy landing. As we were coming in over Indianapolis, the plane made one of its odd, hydraulic hiccoughs, and the woman sitting beside me tensed up as if she’d seen her own death. I turned to her and actually said, “Don’t worry, it’s just the ailerons being lowered.” She seemed unimpressed, in a polite way.