Sunset Express

  Anna Sherman got out of the car, closed the door, then looked in at me. She said, “This conversation never happened. If you say it did, and if you say I gave you Worley, I’ll deny it and sue you for slander. Is that clear?”

  “Clear.”

  She walked away without another word. I opened the glove box and found a plain white sheet of notepaper with Lucas Worley’s address written in anonymous block letters.

  27

  I stopped for roses. I bought a dozen red long-stems, plus a single daisy, then went to a wine shop I know for a bottle of Dom Perignon and an ounce of Beluga caviar. While the clerk was bagging the champagne I used their phone to make a reservation at Musso & Frank for eight o’clock. When I was off the phone, the clerk grinned at me. “Special date?”

  “Very special.”

  He laughed. “Are there any other kind?” Cynic.

  I drove home hard, hoping that I would get there before Lucy and Ben. I did. I put the flowers in the refrigerator and the Dom Perignon and three flute glasses in the freezer. The Dom Perignon was cold, but I wanted it colder. I hard-boiled an egg, minced an onion, then minced the egg. I put the egg, the onion, and some capers in three little Japanese serving plates, covered them with Saran Wrap, then arranged the plates on a matching tray with the caviar and put the tray in the refrigerator next to the flowers. I put out Carr’s Table Water Crackers, then phoned Joe Pike and told him about Lucas Worley. Pike said, “You think he might know something?”

  “I think he might, or, if he doesn’t, he might be able to help us find someone who does.”

  “How do you want to play it?”

  I told him.

  Joe was silent for a time, then said, “How about we bring in Ray Depente? Ray would be effective on a guy like Worley.”

  “You think?”

  “Ray could get a corpse to talk.”

  I told him that would be fine. I told him that I would meet them outside Worley’s place early tomorrow, and when I was done, Joe said, “Is it going any better with Lucy?”

  “Not yet, but soon. I’m about to turn on the charm.”

  “Why don’t you try working it out, instead.” Mr. Sensitive.

  I hung up, then ran upstairs to finish getting ready. I shaved, showered, put on a jacket and tie, then ran downstairs and took the Dom Perignon out of the freezer. I wanted it cold, not frozen.

  When Lucy and Ben pulled into the carport I was waiting at the door when they came through with shopping bags from Saks and Bottega Veneta and Giorgio and Pierre Deux. Lucy looked tired until she saw me, and then she looked surprised. I held out the flowers. “My God, you’re beautiful.”

  Ben smiled so wide I thought his face would turn inside out.

  Lucy looked at the flowers. She glanced at me and then the flowers again, and then back to me. Her hands were still full of shopping bags. “Oh, a daisy.”

  I put the shopping bags on the dining room table, then opened the Dom Perignon. I poured apple juice for Ben. “We have champagne. We have caviar. Then we will have dinner at Musso & Frank.”

  She said, “The restaurant in Hollywood?”

  “Dashiell Hammett fell in love with Lillian Hellman there.” I gave her a glass of the Dom Perignon. “It was a love that changed their lives, and endured for as long as they lived.”

  Lucy seemed embarrassed. “You’re being so nice.”

  I said, “Ben. Would you give your mother and me a moment alone, please?”

  Ben giggled. “You want me to amscray?”

  “Yes, Ben, I want you to amscray.”

  Ben amscrayed into the living room. When the TV came on and Agent Mulder started talking about something that are five human livers every thirty years, I took the flowers from Lucy and put them aside. I put aside her champagne glass, too, and held her upper arms and looked into her eyes. “You have two more nights in Los Angeles. I want those nights to be easy for you. It’s okay with me if you’d like to move to a hotel.”

  Lucy stared at me for ten heartbeats, then shook her head. “I’m exactly where I want to be.”

  “I know that you’re having trouble with your ex-husband. I know that he has a problem with you and Ben staying here. I want you to know that I’ll support you in anything you want to do.”

  Lucy sighed, and glanced toward the living room. “Ben.”

  “Don’t blame Ben. I am a detective, Lucille. I know all and see all.”

  “Darlene.”

  “Does it matter?”

  She sighed again, then leaned forward to rest her forehead against my chest. “Oh, Studly, there is so much going on right now. I’m sorry.”

  I put my arms around her and held her. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”

  She looked up and her eyes were rimmed red and wet. “I feel like I’ve ruined our time together.”

  “You haven’t.”

  “I’ve let him intrude, and that’s not fair to you or to me. I didn’t tell you, and that is not the quality of honesty that I want in our relationship.”

  “You were trying to protect me.”

  She stepped back and looked into my eyes as if she were searching for something faraway and hard to see, something that she feared might change even as she saw it. “There’s so much going on right now. You just don’t know.” She took a breath, then let it out. “I really need to talk about this.”

  “Then let’s talk.”

  She took my hand and led me out onto the deck into the cooling night air, with the last breath of day fading in the west. She held my right hand in both of hers and said, “There are things you need to know.”

  “I don’t need to know anything about you, Lucille.”

  “I’m not going to tell you deep dark secrets about myself. I don’t have any secrets.”

  “Shucks.” Trying to lighten the moment with a little humor.

  Lucy frowned and looked away. “These are things I need to say as much to help me get them straight as for you to be aware of what’s going on. Do you see that?”

  “Okay.”

  She looked back. “There are things happening between me and my ex-husband that I should’ve told you about, but didn’t.”

  I nodded, letting her talk.

  “Not because they’re secret or because I wanted to keep anything from you, but because I resent the intrusion and did not want these things to impact upon our time together. I did not want him to share this time with us.” The other presence. “But I let him get to me, and he has intruded and that is not fair to either me or to you and I apologize.”

  I started to tell her that she didn’t have to apologize, but she raised a hand, stopping me.

  I sighed. “Okay. I accept.”

  “I’m not asking for advice. I’m an adult, I’m an attorney, and I will handle this. Okay?”

  I nodded.

  “I mean, God, I’m paid to advise other people, am I not?”

  I nodded again. Getting a lot of nod practice tonight.

  She said, “Richard has moved back to Baton Rouge.” Richard was her ex-husband. He’d been living in Shreveport for the past three years, and, in the time that I’d known Lucy, she’d mentioned him exactly twice. He, too, was an attorney. “I’ve encouraged Ben to develop a relationship with his father, but Richard has taken it beyond that. He phones me at my office; he drops around my house unannounced; he invites himself to outings that I’ve planned with Ben; he’s resurrected his friendship with a lot of the people at my firm. He has systematically reinserted himself into my life, and I do not like it.”

  “You feel invaded.”

  She made a brief, flickering smile. “Studly, I feel like Normandy Beach.”

  I said, “Joe likes you. Joe would probably fly down and have a talk with him.”

  The smile flickered again and, for just a moment, Lucy laughed. The tension was easing. “Perhaps it will come to that.” The laugh and the smile faded then, and she said, “When he found out that Ben and I were going to stay here, with yo
u, instead of a hotel, he became abusive. He criticized my judgment and told me that I was setting a bad example for Ben and demanded that I leave Ben with him.”

  I said, “Luce?”

  She looked at me.

  I opened my mouth but did not speak. My mouth felt dry and there was a kind of faraway ringing and my fingers and legs suddenly went cold. There are those times when intellect fails us. There are those moments when the modern man fades to a shadow and something from the brain stem reasserts itself, and in that moment the joking is gone and we frighten ourselves with our dark potential. I said, quite normally, quite conversationally, “What do you mean, abusive? Did he touch you?”

  She shook her head, and then she placed both palms on my chest. “Oh, no. No, Elvis. And if he had I promise you fully that I would’ve had him arrested so fast he would’ve had whiplash.”

  I nodded again, but now the nods weren’t funny. My fingers and legs began to tingle with returning blood.

  She said, “I thought it was past, but it isn’t. That’s why Darlene called. He’s been phoning the office and leaving messages on my machine at home, and then I got upset even more that I had let him get me upset in the first place. Do you see?”

  My breathing had evened out and the ringing was gone. I nodded. “He pushed your buttons.”

  “Yes.”

  “He exerted a kind of power over you that you thought was behind you.”

  She said, “I’m so sorry you thought it was you, or that you had something to do with this. Oh, sweetie, it wasn’t you at all. It was me.”

  “It’s okay, Luce. It’s really okay.”

  She rubbed my chest again and stared up at me because there was more. “Everything is complicated because I haven’t been happy at the firm or with where I am in my life, and I don’t know what I’m going to do about it.”

  I looked at her, and my heart began to thud.

  “It started before I met you. It started even before Richard moved back.”

  I looked at her some more, and the night air was suddenly sparkling with a kind of expectant electricity.

  “I don’t know if I want to stay at the firm. I don’t even know if I want to stay in Baton Rouge.” She shook her head, glancing past me at Ben, glancing out at the warm house lights in the canyon. She finally looked back at me. “Do you know what I’m saying?”

  “Would you consider coming out here?” My heart was thudding so loudly I wondered if the people across the canyon could hear it.

  “I don’t know.” She took a deep breath and rubbed my chest again. “I guess I just needed to tell you that I don’t know.” She tried to make a joke. “Damn, and I thought I was too young for menopause.”

  I nodded.

  “I’m feeling kind of stupid right now. It just seemed important to tell you.”

  I touched her lips. I kissed her, with the center of my heart. “I love you, Lucille. Rotten ex-husband or no. Long distance relationship or no. Do you know that?”

  Her eyes grew wet again, and she ran her hand along the line of my shoulder. She touched my tie. “You look so nice.”

  I smiled.

  “You went to so much trouble with the champagne and caviar.”

  I said, “Would you like to go eat? We still have time.” They would hold the reservation. I was sure I could talk them into holding the reservation.

  She took a breath, then let it out and carefully looked up at me. “What I would like to do is stay home with my two guys. What I would like is to order a pizza and drink your wonderful champagne and play Clue.”

  I grinned. “You want to play Clue?”

  She was suddenly very serious. “I just want to be with you, Elvis. I just want to relax and enjoy being here. Do you know?”

  I kissed her fingers. “I know.”

  I took off my jacket and tie, and we ordered Domino’s pizza. We made a large Italian salad with pepperocinis and garbanzo beans and fresh garlic while we waited for the pie. When the pizza came, we drank the Dom Perignon and ate the pizza between bites of Beluga caviar mixed with capers and minced onion, and played Clue. There was a smile on Lucy’s face that did not leave, and made the room feel light and warm and explosive with energy. Ben laughed so hard that he blew soda through his nose.

  It was as if the other presence was no longer with us, as if by exposing the other it vanished the way a shadow will when exposed to light.

  We played until very late, and when Ben went to bed, Lucy and I finished the last of the champagne, and then she followed me upstairs into a night filled with warmth and love and laughter.

  28

  The next morning I left the house as the eastern sky bloomed with the onrushing sun and drove to Lucas Worley’s condominium on a one-way street just off Gretna Green Way in Brentwood. Gretna Green is a connecting street between Sunset Boulevard and San Vicente, lined with apartment houses and condominium complexes and some very nice single-family homes, but in the dim time just before sunrise the traffic was sparse and the neighborhood still. It was a wonderful time of the day for lurking.

  Worley’s condo was set between the street and a service alley in a lush green setting. They were nice condos, large and airy and stylishly ideal for former on-the-rise young attorneys turned dope dealers. I slow-cruised the street first, then turned down the alley and idled past the rear. Each condominium had a double carport at its back protected by an overhead wrought-iron door, and Worley’s was filled with a gunmetal blue Porsche 911 sporting a vanity plate. The vanity plate read EZLIVN. Guess the loss of his day job hadn’t inhibited his lifestyle.

  When I reached the end of the alley, Joe Pike and Ray Depente materialized out of the murk and drifted silently to my car. Ray was wearing a black suit over a white shirt with a thin black bow tie. I said, “When did you go Muslim?”

  Ray looked at himself and smiled. “Joe said you wanted scary. You tell me anything a white boy’s more scared of than a Muslim with a hard-on?”

  Ray Depente was an inch taller than Joe, but slimmer, with mocha skin and gray-flecked hair and the ramrod-straight bearing of a career Marine, which he had been. For the better part of twenty-two years Ray Depente had taught unarmed combat at Camp Pendleton, in Oceanside, California, before retiring to open a karate school in South Central Los Angeles. Now, he taught children the art of self-respect for ten cents a lesson, and instructed Hollywood actors how to look tough on screen for five hundred dollars an hour. The one paid for the other.

  Ray extended his hand and we shook as he said, “Haven’t seen you in a while, my friend. Better get your butt down to my place before you get out of shape.”

  “Too many tough guys down there, Ray. Some actor might beat me up.”

  Ray smiled wider. “Way I hear things been going for you, I guess it could happen.” The smile fell away. “We got a plan for Mr. Dope Dealer, or are we just gonna stand around in the dark waitin’ to be discovered?” The eastern sky was cooling from pink to violet to blue. Traffic was picking up out on Gretna, and we could hear garbage trucks and cars pulling out of driveways as people left for work. Pretty soon housekeepers would be trudging past to their day work.

  Joe tilted his head toward the Porsche.“Worley’s been inside since eight-thirty last night.”

  “Is he alone?”

  “Yes.”

  I said, “He’s got to leave sooner or later. When he leaves we’ll go in the house and find his stash. We find the stash, we’ll have some leverage.”

  Ray said, “What if he doesn’t have a stash?”

  I shrugged. “Then we’ll live with him until he scores.”

  Ray stared at the Porsche. “Joe said this guy was a lawyer.”

  “Yep. Until he got caught with the dope.”

  Ray looked at the nice car and the nice condo and shook his head. “Asshole.”

  Joe and Ray vanished back into the thinning shadows, and I pulled out of the alley and down the little street to Gretna Green. I parked beneath a Moroccan gum-ball tree with an e
asy eyes-forward view of Lucas Worley’s street and waited while the air slowly filled with a mist of brightening light and early morning commuter traffic increased and the city began its day.

  At twelve minutes after nine that morning the 911 nosed out onto Gretna and turned south, heading for San Vicente. Worley was a pudgy guy with tight curly hair cut short and close-set eyes and a stud in his left ear. He was wearing a tattered dark gray sweatshirt with no sleeves, and his arms were thin and hairy. Probably just running out for coffee.

  I left the Corvette, trotted across Gretna and down along the little street to Worley’s condo, where Pike and Ray were waiting at the front door. Pike already had the door open.

  Lucas Worley’s condominium was all high-angled ceilings and stark white walls and rented furniture of the too low, too wide, and too ugly variety. A fabric and plastic ficus sat in the L of two full-sized sofas, and a big-screen TV filled one wall. A stack of stereo equipment ran along the adjoining wall with what looked to be a couple of thousand CDs scattered over the floor and the furniture and on top of the big screen. I guess neatness wasn’t one of Lucas Worley’s strengths. Framed movie posters from Easy Rider and To Live and Die in L.A. hung above the fireplace opposite mediocre lithographs of Jimi Hendrix and Madonna, and the effect was sort of like a nebbish’s fantasy of how a high-end life-in-the-fast-lane hipster would live. He even had a lava lamp. Ray said, “Would you look at this?”

  A framed Harvard Law School diploma was leaning against the lava lamp.

  Ray was shaking his head. Incredulous. “The kids I work with down in South Central bust their asses just to get a high school diploma so they can get away from this shit, and here this fool is with a goddamned ticket from Harvard Law.”

  I said, “He won’t be gone long, Ray. We’ve got to find the stash.”

  Ray moved away from the diploma. He glanced back at it twice and sighed as if he’d seen something so incomprehensible that understanding would forever be denied.

  I started for the stairs. “I’ll take the second floor. You guys search down here.”