Stalking the Angel

  Ellis said, “You like that?”

  “I think it’s lousy.” More disapproval. The down-turned mouth. The posture. That kind of thing.

  Ellis said, “I’ll bring in my night people. That’ll be enough to cover the Angeles Room, where they’re gonna be, follow him in and out, watch the kitchen and the hallways.” There was a pause. “He didn’t tell the cops, huh?”

  “Bad for business. Also, too many unsightly cops might ruin the banquet.” Jillian Becker put the Cross pen down and looked at me with the cool eyes.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “That’s right.”

  I hung up and looked at Jillian Becker looking at me. I smiled. “Want to hear my Mel Gibson imitation?”

  She said, “If you knew more about Bradley, you wouldn’t dislike him the way you do.”

  “I don’t know. I sort of like disliking him.”

  “That’s obvious. Either way, as long as you’re in his employ, you might be more circumspect in sharing your feelings with fellow employees. It breeds discontent.”

  “Discontent. How Upper Management.”

  The nostrils tightened.

  I said, “I think he’s behaving like a self-absorbed ass, and so do you.”

  Her left eyebrow arched. “However he’s behaving, he’s still my employer. I will treat him accordingly. So should you.” My country right or wrong.

  Pretty soon Joe Pike came back, scrubbed and fresh and bright-eyed. It’s never easy to tell if someone is bright-eyed when they’re wearing sunglasses, but one makes certain assumptions.

  He put his gym bag on the floor, then leaned with his back against the bar and his elbows up on the bar rail and stared out at infinity. “You really know how to pick’m,” he said.

  A little bit after that Bradley Warren came back resplendent in different shoes, and Sheila Warren came back smelling fresh and clean, and Mimi Warren came back looking and smelling pretty much the same, and we were all together. One big happy family. We trooped out to the limo, Bradley and Jillian and Sheila and me and Mimi and Pike, all single file. I broke into “Whistle While You Work,” but no one got it. Pike might’ve got it, but he never tells. Bradley and Jillian took the forward-facing seat and Mimi and Sheila and I got the seat facing the rear, Sheila and Mimi on either side of me, Sheila sitting so that her leg was pressed against mine. Sheila said, “Don’t they have a bar in these damn things?” Everyone ignored her. Pike said something to the limo driver, then went over to his Jeep. Sheila Warren said, “He’s not coming with us?”

  “Nope.”

  “Mother fuck.”

  Traffic was light. We went down Beverly Glen to Wilshire, then east. We stayed on Wilshire through Beverly Hills and past the La Brea tar pits with the full-sized models of the mammoths they have there and past MacArthur Park and into downtown L.A. until Wilshire ended at Grand. We went up to Seventh, then over on Broadway, and pulled up under the entrance of the New Nippon Hotel.

  One thing you could say about Bradley Warren, he built a helluva hotel. The New Nippon was a thirty-two-story cylindrical column of metallic blue glass and snow-white concrete midway between Little Tokyo, Chinatown, and downtown L.A. There were dozens of limos and taxis and MBs and Jaguars. Suitcases were going in and out and doormen in red uniforms were whistling for the next taxi in line and guys I took to be tourists who looked like they made a lot of money were with tall slender women who looked like they cost a lot of money to keep up. None of them looked like gunsels or thugs or art thief-maniacs, but you can never be sure.

  “You got a McDonald’s in there?” I said.

  Bradley Warren smiled at me.

  Sheila Warren murmured, “Piece of shit.”

  We pulled to a stop by a clump of men and women who smiled as they watched the limo drive up. Two doormen trotted over, one with a lot of braid who was probably the boss, and opened the doors. Pike pulled up behind us, gave his keys to a parking attendant, and moved to stand by the lobby entrance twenty feet away.

  The group of smiling people gathered around Bradley and congratulated him and said it was long deserved and didn’t Sheila look lovely and wasn’t Mimi getting pretty. Somebody took a photo. Sheila gave everyone an arc-light smile and draped herself on her husband’s arm and looked adoring and proud and was everything he could have wanted her to be. She didn’t look like she hated it or hated him or hated the goddamned building. Nancy Reagan would’ve been proud.

  A square-faced guy in gray slacks and a blue blazer and a gold and yellow rep tie moved up to Jillian’s elbow, said something, then the two of them moved over to me. He put out his hand. “Jack Ellis. You Cole?”

  “Yeah. Where’d you do your time?” Ellis wore ex-cop like a bad coat.

  “You can tell, huh?”

  “Sure.”

  “Detroit.”

  “Rough beat.”

  Ellis nodded, pleased. “Murder City, brother. Murder City.” Murder City. These cops.

  We moved into the lobby and up an escalator to the mezzanine floor. The lower three floors were boutiques and travel agencies and bookstores and art galleries surrounding a lobby interior big enough to park the Goodyear blimp. There was a sign at the top of the escalator that read PACIFIC MEN’S CLUB LUNCHEON with ANGELES ROOM beneath it and an arrow pointing down a short corridor. People who looked like guests milled around and two overweight guys dressed like Ellis stood off to the side, looking like security. Ellis said, “I’ve got eight people in for this. Two up here on the mezzanine, two more in the Angeles Room, two in the lobby, and two in the kitchen entrance behind the podium.”

  Bradley and his knot of admirers continued along the corridor, passing the Angeles Room. I thought about saying something, but after all, it was their hotel. They should know where we were going.

  I said, “There any other halls or entrances off the Angeles Room besides the kitchen entrance?”

  “The Blue Corridor. I got no people there because that’s where we’ll be. We wait in there and when they’re ready for the show to start we can get into the Angeles Room from a side door.”

  I nodded and looked at Jillian Becker. “What’s on the program?”

  “It shouldn’t take more than an hour and a half. First, lunch is served, then the president of the association makes a few introductory remarks, and then Bradley speaks for about fifteen minutes and we go home.”

  We went through an unmarked door and along a sterile tile corridor and through another unmarked door and then we were in the Blue Corridor and then the Blue Room. Both the corridor and the room were blue. Four successful-looking Asian-American men were there, along with a tall black man and an older white guy with glasses and the mayor of Los Angeles. Everybody smiled and kissed Sheila’s cheek and shook Bradley’s hand. There was back-slapping and more photographs and everybody ignored Mimi. She stood to the side with her head down as if she were looking for lint on her dress.

  I leaned close to her and whispered, “How you doin’?”

  She looked up at me the way you look at someone when they’ve said something that surprises you. I patted her shoulder and said softly, “Stay close, kid. I’ll take care of you.”

  She gave me the serious goldfish face, then went back to staring at her dress.

  “Hey, Mimi.”

  She looked at me again.

  “I think the dress looks great.”

  Her mouth tightened and bent. A smile.

  Jillian Becker came up behind me and tapped at her wrist. “Ten minutes.”

  “Maybe we should synchronize watches.”

  She frowned.

  “I’m going to take a look outside. I’ll be back in five.” I told Ellis to stay with Bradley and told both Mimi and Sheila to stay put. Mimi made the crooked mouth again. Sheila told me she was horny, and asked wouldn’t I like to do something about it. Nothing like cooperation.

  I went along the Blue Corridor and out into what a little sign said was the Angeles Room and thought, nope, maybe the sign was wro
ng. Maybe this was really the UN. Maybe a king was about to be crowned. Maybe aliens had landed and this was where they were going to make their address. Then I saw Joe Pike. It was the Angeles Room, all right.

  Eighty tables, eight people per table. Video cams set up on a little platform at the rear of a place that might be called a grand ballroom if you thought small. Press people. A dais with seating for twenty-four. Pacific Men’s Club Man of the Month. Who would’ve thought it. About sixty percent of the faces were Asian. The rest were black and white and brown and nobody looked too concerned about making the next Mercedes payment. I recognized five city council members and a red-haired television newswoman I’d had a crush on for about three years and the Tashiros. Maybe the Pacific Men’s Club was the hot ticket in town. Maybe Steven Spielberg had tried to get in and been turned away. Maybe I could get the newswoman’s phone number.

  Pike drifted up to me. “This sucks.”

  That Joe.

  “I could off anybody in this place five times over.”

  “Could you off someone and get away with you here?”

  Head shake. “I’m too good even for me.”

  I said, “It starts in ten minutes. Door I came from is off the Blue Corridor. They’re in a room down the corridor. We come out that room, along the corridor, through the door, and up to the dais.” I told him where Ellis had put his men. “You take the right side of the dais. I’ll come out with them and take the left.”

  Pike nodded and drifted away, head slowly swiveling as he scanned the crowd from behind the sunglasses.

  I went back to the Blue Room. Bradley Warren was seated on a nice leather couch, smiling with four or five new arrivals, probably people who would sit on the dais. The little room was getting crowded and smoky and I didn’t like it. Jack Ellis looked nervous. Bradley laughed at something somebody said, then got up and went to a little table where someone had put out white wine and San Pellegrino water. I edged up to him and said, “Do you know all these people?”

  “Of course.”

  “Any way to clear them out?”

  “Don’t be absurd, Cole. Does everything look all right?”

  “You’re asking my opinion, I say blow this off and go home.”

  “Don’t be absurd.” I guess he liked the sound of it.

  “All right.”

  “You’re being paid to protect us. Do that.”

  If he kept it up, he was going to have to pay someone to protect him from me.

  More people squeezed into the little room. Jack Ellis went out and then came back. There were maybe twenty-five people in the room now, more coming in and some going out, and then Jillian Becker went over to Bradley and said, “It’s time,” loud enough for me to hear. I looked around, figuring to get Sheila and Mimi and Bradley into a group. Sheila was nodding at a very heavy white guy who smiled a great deal. I said, “Where’s Mimi?”

  Sheila looked confused. “Mimi?”

  I went out into the hall. There were more people coming along the corridor and others going into the Angeles Room but there was no Mimi. Jack Ellis came out and then Jillian Becker. Ellis said, “She asked one of the busboys for the bathroom.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Just around the corner to the left. I got a man down there.” We were trotting as he said it, picking up speed, Ellis breathing hard after twenty feet. We went around one corner then around another and into a dirty white hall with an exit sign at the far end. There was a men’s room door and a women’s room door halfway down its length. Jack Ellis’s man was lying facedown in front of the women’s room door with one leg crossed over the other and his right hand behind his back. Ellis said, “Christ, Davis,” and puffed forward. Davis groaned and rolled over as he said it.

  I pulled my gun and pushed first into the women’s room and then into the men’s. Empty. I ran down to the exit door and kicked through it and ran down two flights of stairs and through another door into the hotel’s laundry. There were huge commercial washers and steam-circulating systems and dryers that could handle a hundred sheets at a crack. But there was no Mimi.

  In Vietnam I had learned that the worst parts of life and death are not where you look for them. Like the sniper’s bullet that takes off a buddy’s head as you stand side by side at a latrine griping about foot sores, the worst parts hover softly in the shadows and happen when you are not looking. The worst of life stays hidden until death.

  On a heavy gray security door that led onto a service drive beneath the hotel, someone had written WE WARNED YOU in red spray paint. Beneath it they had drawn a rising sun.

  13

  When the first wave of cops and FBI got there, they sealed off the Blue Corridor and herded all the principals into the Blue Room and sealed that off, too. An FBI agent named Reese put the arm on me and Ellis and brought us outside and walked us past the restrooms and down the stairs. Reese was about fifty, with very long arms and pool player’s hands. He was about the color of fine French roast coffee, and he looked like he hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in twenty years.

  He said, “How long this guy Davis been working for you, Ellis?”

  “Two years. He’s an ex-cop. All my guys are ex-cops. So am I.” He said it nervous.

  Reese nodded. “Davis says he’s standing down the hall back up by the bathrooms grabbing a smoke when the girl comes by, goes into the women’s room. Says the next thing he knows this gook dude is coming out the women’s room and gives him one on the head and that’s it.” Reese squinted at us. Maybe doing his impression of a gook dude. “That sound good to you?”

  Jack Ellis chewed the inside of his mouth and said, “Uh-huh.”

  In the laundry there were cops and feds taking pictures of the paint job and talking to Chicano guys in green coveralls with NEW NIPPON HOTEL on the back. Reese ignored them. “Didn’t anybody tell the girl not to go off alone?” He squatted down to look at something on the floor as he said it. Maybe a clue.

  Ellis looked at me. I said, “She was told.”

  Reese got up, maybe saw another clue, squatted again in a different place. “But she went anyway. And when she went, nobody went with her.”

  I said, “That’s it.”

  He stood up again and looked at us. “Little girl gotta go potty. That’s no big deal. Happens every day. Nothing to worry about, right?” A little smile hit at the corner of his mouth and went away. “Only when you got serious criminals out there, and they’re saying things, maybe going potty, maybe that’s something to think about. Maybe calling the police when the threats are made, maybe that’s something to think about, too.” He looked from Ellis to me and back to Ellis. “Maybe the cops are here, maybe the little girl does her diddle and comes back and this never happens.”

  Ellis didn’t say anything.

  Reese looked at me. “I talked to a dick named Poitras about you. He said you know the moves. What happened, this one get outta hand?”

  Ellis said, “Look, Mr. Warren signs the checks, right? He says jump, I say which side of my ass you want me to land on?”

  Reese’s eyes went back to Ellis and flagged to half-mast. I think it was his disdainful look. “How long were you a cop?”

  Ellis chewed harder at his mouth.

  I said, “You gonna bust our ass about this all day or we gonna try to get something done?”

  Reese put the look on me.

  I said, “We shoulda brought you guys in. We wanted to bring you guys in. But Ellis is right. It’s Warren’s ticket and he said no. That’s half-assed, but there it is. So this is what we’re left with. We can stand here and you can work out on us or we can move past it.”

  Reese’s eyes went to half-mast again, then he turned to look at the door with the paint. He sucked at a tooth while he looked. “Poitras said you got Joe Pike for a partner. That true?”

  “Yeah.”

  Reese shook his head. “Ain’t that some shit.” He finished sucking on the tooth and turned back to me. “Tell me what you got, from the beg
inning.”

  I gave it to him from the beginning. I had told it so many times to so many cops I thought about making mimeographed copies and handing them out. When I told the part about Nobu Ishida, Jack Ellis said, “Holy shit.”

  We went back up the stairs to the Blue Room. There were cops talking to Bradley Warren and Sheila Warren and the hotel manager and the people who organized the Pacific Men’s Club luncheon. Reese stopped in the door and said, “Which one’s Pike?”

  Pike was standing in a corner, out of the way. “Him.”

  Reese nodded and sucked the tooth again. “Do tell,” he said softly.

  “You want to meet him?”

  Reese gave me flat eyes, then went over and stood by two dicks who were talking to Bradley Warren. Sheila was sitting on the couch, leaning forward into the detective who was interviewing her, touching his thigh every once in a while for emphasis. Jillian Becker stood by the bar. Her eyes were puffy and her mascara had run.

  When Bradley saw me, he glared, and said, “What happened to my daughter?” His face was flushed.

  Jillian said, “Brad.”

  He snapped his eyes to her. “I asked him an appropriate question. Should I have you research his answer?”

  Jillian went very red.

  I said, “They knew you were going to be here. They had someone come up through the laundry. Maybe he waited in the restroom or maybe he walked around and was in here with us. We won’t know that until we find him.”

  “I don’t like these ‘maybes.’ Maybe is a weak word.”

  Reese said, “Maybe somebody shoulda brought the cops in.”

  Bradley ignored him. “I paid for security and I got nothing.” He stabbed a finger at Jack Ellis. “You’re fired.”

  Ellis really worked at the inside of his mouth. Bradley Warren looked at me. “And you? What did you do?” He looked at Jillian Becker again. “The one you insisted I hire. What did you say about him?”

  I said, “Be careful, Bradley.”