“Elmer … Jackson.” The name rang a bell. I hadn’t run across him myself, but he’d been in the papers. “Wasn’t he the guy they said was screwing that fancy madam up in Hollywood?”

  In our lovely City of Angles, the cops who go after whores and gamblers and drugs are dirtier than most, and that’s saying something. They rub up against a lot of pussy and loot and dope, and sometimes they don’t just rub up against it. Sometimes it sticks. You get in right with ’em, you can do damn near anything you want. You don’t …

  “Wouldn’t surprise me,” Al said. “First time he showed up, I told him he could grow like an onion, with his head in the ground. I’ve been paying this other Vice cop for years. He’s okay—he stays bought. I even write him off my taxes, call him an incidental expense. So Jackson went away. But he came back. Said the old deal didn’t include suspicion of selling drugs.”

  “You don’t, though.” I would’ve known if he did. He’s had the same kind of stuff in his shop as long as I’ve known him. If somebody’d walked out of there with reefers or coke instead of filthy pictures, I would have noticed.

  “Tell me about it,” Al answered. “He said I was dealing in—” He stopped. He printed VEPRATOGA on a scrap of paper, turned it around so I could read it, then crumpled it up, dropped it in an ashtray, lit a match, and burned it up. “That’s a bunch of crap, but proving it’s a bunch of crap wouldn’t be easy or cheap. So I gave him a hundred bucks an’ he went away.”

  “Interesting,” I said. “Interesting he showed up right after we were talking about it, too.” Al had held up a pudgy hand as soon as he saw which way my sentence was heading. He didn’t need to, though. I’d noticed how he handled that name, so I wasn’t gonna come out with it myself.

  “Uh-huh.” He nodded, smiling at the way I finessed that. “I made the connection my very own self, ’cause I sure as hell haven’t talked about it with anybody else. I mean, why would I?”

  “Don’t ask me. I don’t even know what it does.” Me, I was wondering how the LAPD knew we’d been talking about vepratoga. I figured they had to; otherwise, the coincidence was just too big. Some kind of spell over all of downtown—or maybe over the whole city—that made a light go off inside a crystal ball when somebody said the magic word?

  It might happen. You couldn’t run a spell like that to listen for talk about broads or dice or even mary jane. Too much of it. All the lights’d go on all the time. But for something as specialized as that? Possible. Or I thought so, though I’m a long way from a wizard.

  Al, meanwhile, screwed up his face so he looked like a bad-tempered baby. A bad-tempered baby who needed a shave, I should say. “With that garbage, you don’t want to know,” he said.

  Did he know for himself? Or had he just heard this and that? Had he heard it here in the bookstore? If he had, why hadn’t the Vice cops given him a hard time about it before?

  I tried to ask him. He waved me away. “You came for that, you can get lost,” he said. “I talked too much once, and look what it got me. I ain’t got nothin’ more to tell nobody about the shit. Beat it.”

  Beat it I did. I went down to Central Avenue, down past Vernon. Central bops day and night, but it’s a different place when the sun’s up. It’s more like the rest of LA. I found the boardwalk off of Central that takes you to Deacon’s. In the daytime, I was the only cat on it. That sure felt different. So did not paying a cover charge. I rang the bell by the door.

  I didn’t hear anything inside, but it opened soon enough. There stood Acolyte Adams. He looked sleepy, and less neat than usual. He also looked unhappy to see me. “What do you want at this time of day?” he growled.

  “I need to talk to the Deacon. About this.” I wrote VEPRATOGA on the back of a card, the way Al Harris had on his bit of paper, and gave it to the Acolyte.

  He eyed it. “I don’t even know what this is,” he said sourly.

  I looked at him. “That’s how come I need to talk to the Deacon.”

  His expression said he wanted to spit in my eye, but he didn’t. He turned around and went inside. He shut the door but didn’t slam it. I lit an Old Gold. My thought was, if I finished it before the Deacon showed up, I’d leave, ’cause he wasn’t coming.

  The door opened pretty fast, though. The Deacon loomed over me. I’m not small, but Deacon Washington looms over everybody, near enough. “First you, then the Vice Squad, now you again,” he rumbled in a voice like a rockslide. “You part of their games, or what?”

  “No, but you’re the second fella who’s told me that in the past hour,” I answered. “How much did Jackson pry out of you?” I was guessing, but it felt like a good guess.

  “Elmer? Two-fifty. I still don’t know jack diddly about—”

  Now I was the one who held up my hand. “Don’t name it,” I said quickly.

  He hoisted an eyebrow like a signal flag. “Like that, is it?” I nodded. The Deacon went on, “Okay, that clears up some things. I don’t know anything about that stuff, but he could’ve written me up for all kinds of other things, too, so I gave him the money. Hope to God he doesn’t get greedy and start showing up twice a week. He’s got that look, you know?”

  “I never set eyes on him, but it doesn’t surprise me. He got his name in the papers not so long ago, remember?”

  Washington shook his big head. “No. About what?”

  “Keeping the cops off his girlfriend in exchange for a cut from what she made off the string of fancy hookers she was running.”

  “Oh. I do remember that. Same guy? Jackson’s such an ordinary name, it didn’t register with me.”

  “Same guy. And now he’s buzzing around this stuff. I’ve got no idea what it means, but I don’t think it’s good news, either,” I said.

  “I know all kinds of folks, but I’m not sure I know folks with enough mojo to go up against a police sergeant,” Deacon Washington said.

  He understood how the deck was stacked. You’d best believe he did. Cops are supposed to put crooks away, not to be crooks. When they go bad, juries hardly ever want to see it.

  “Be careful how you talk about the stuff from now on. Don’t use the word. I’m pretty sure saying it isn’t safe. They focus in on people who do,” I said.

  “How about that?” Deacon Washington sketched a salute. Any Army top sergeant who saw it would’ve wanted to kill himself. It didn’t bother me. I got the message he wanted to send.

  I did some thinking of my own on the way back to the office. Whatever vepratoga was, some high-powered people were interested in it. Not nice people, not if Elmer V. Jackson was one of them, but people with connections that had to run way high up. The mayor always brags about how he’s kept the rackets out of LA. That bragging got him elected. It keeps getting him reelected, too. Which doesn’t mean it’s true.

  The zombie sweeper was pushing his broom in the alley behind the building. He didn’t pay any attention to me. If I’d stood in his path, he would have kept pushing the broom till it bumped up against my shoes. Then he would’ve tried to shove me out of the way. He might have gone around me eventually, or he might not. If shoving me took an hour, a week, a year …. None of that mattered to him. He had all the time in the world. Yeah, some people think zombies are funny. Not me. They scare me—not to death, but past death. Vampires aren’t alive, but you can understand why they do what they do. Zombies do it because somebody with authority orders them to. They don’t care themselves. Not caring, that’s the essence. It’s an emptying out of everything that makes people human. No, thanks.

  Old Man Mose wasn’t curled up on the couch when I walked into that little place I call mine. Doing cat things, I guess. If cats had thumbs, they’d be the ones with offices, and we’d yowl on fencetops.

  I picked up the phone and called my answering service. “Anything interesting, Hilda?” I asked.

  “You have a message from a law firm. Dewey, Beagle, & Howe. They want you to call ’em back.” She gave me the number. “What kind of trouble are you in now?”

  “Beats me. I guess I’ll find out.” I hung up and called the number she’d given me.

  One ring, two …. “Dewey, Beagle, & Howe,” a woman said. Most actresses would have envied her diction. It was almost as good as the Deacon’s.

  “My name is Jack Mitchell. I’m returning a call from your firm.”

  “Oh, yes, Mister Mitchell. I’ll put you through to Mister Howe.”

  Only she didn’t put me through to Mr. Howe, of course. She put me through to Mr. Howe’s secretary. That exalted personage put me through to Howe himself. “This is Victor Howe,” he said. “You are Jack Mitchell?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “What’s this all about?”

  Well, he told me. “This firm, of which I have the honor to be a senior partner, has the privilege of representing, among others, the US Rubber Company. I am given to understand that you are looking into the alleged disappearance of Frank Jethroe, a US Rubber employee.”

  “It’s not alleged. He’s missing, all right. I’m trying to find out what happened to him, yes.”

  “Very well. You are hereby informed that neither the US Rubber Company nor anyone affiliated with it in any capacity is involved in the alleged Jethroe disappearance. Any further encroachments on US Rubber property will be construed as trespassing and illegal entry, and will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Is that clear, Mister Mitchell?”

  “I understand what you’re saying, if that’s what you mean. But you can ‘inform’ me of anything you want, Mister Howe.” Staying polite when you’re threatening or insulting somebody is an art. Victor Howe was good at it. I worked to keep up. “Until you inform me about what evidence you have to back up what you’re saying, though, I’m not going to take you seriously.”

  I could hear him breathing out through his nose. I’d irked him. “I had hoped you might be persuaded to take a more reasonable attitude.”

  “Oh, yeah, that seems fair. Right. I’d hoped the US Rubber Company might care about what happened to somebody who works for it. Frank Jethroe’s got a wife and two little girls who love him. You can replace him. You probably have. They can’t.”

  “The US Rubber Company does care. It is simply unconnected to this alleged incident.” Howe wasn’t about to admit anything. People paid him stacks of dough not to admit things.

  “If it cares, if it’s not involved, why are you telling me you’ll have me arrested if I walk into the lobby?”

  “If you need to ask, Mister Mitchell …. What did the old geometry books say? ‘The proof is left to the student,’ that’s it. Good afternoon.” He hung up on me.

  I fumed for a minute or two. Then I had a wicked thought. I walked a few blocks before I ducked into a telephone booth. From there, I called Dewey, Beagle, & Howe again. This time, Victor Howe’s secretary said, “I’m sorry, sir, but he doesn’t care to speak with you at this time.”

  “Tell him it’s important, please,” I said—I’d expected that.

  “Hold on,” she said doubtfully. I did. I had to throw in another dime before she came back on the line: “I’m putting you through.”

  After switchboard noises, I heard Howe’s gruff voice: “Had some second thoughts, Mister Mitchell?”

  “As a matter of fact, I have,” I answered. “There’s talk on the street that US Rubber is messing around with vepratoga. Do you want your outfit associated with anything like that?”

  Of course I was bluffing, bluffing without even a pair of deuces. I didn’t know what vepratoga was, or whether the US Rubber Company had ever heard of it. If Howe had gone What the hell is vepratoga?, that would’ve been the end of that and I would’ve been out some pocket change.

  He didn’t say anything at all for fifteen or twenty seconds. Then he breathed, “Where did you hear that?” in tones nothing like the ones he’d used before.

  “I told you, it’s on the street. Why haven’t you heard about it yourself?”

  “You’ve just slandered our client. If you think we’ll let that pass unchallenged—” He blustered, but without any power behind it.

  I’d hit him harder than I’d guessed I could. “Oh, crap,” I answered. “I didn’t even say I believed it. I just said it was out there. And it is. I don’t think you’re surprised, either. So long.” I hung up on him this time.

  I half turned to open the booth’s door. Then I stopped. I grabbed my handkerchief and wiped prints off the phone and the door handles, inside and out-. That done, I walked down the street and pretended to be fascinated by the hats in a haberdasher’s window.

  Not a minute after I left the phone booth, a woman stepped into it. I smiled; some fingerprints would be there after all. Then I walked over to the next shop down. Like those places I’d seen in Vampire Village, it sold secondhand books. I’d spent money in there a few times.

  Had things been different, I might’ve stepped in. But I was waiting for something to happen. I didn’t know whether anything would, or exactly what it would be. But I had a pretty good notion I’d recognize it when I saw it.

  That woman kept feeding money into the phone every three minutes. I don’t know if she was talking to her mama or to some company that didn’t want to give her what she thought she deserved. Her back was to me, so I couldn’t see her expression.

  Not quite fifteen minutes after I left the telephone booth, two Newton Division police cars roared up, the lights on top blazing red, the tires screeching as drivers slammed on the brakes. Two cops jumped out of each car. Newton Division rides herd on what the LAPD frankly calls the Negro Belt. When those cops do anything, they do it in force. They’ve made themselves so loved, they know what’s liable to happen to them if they don’t.

  One of them yanked the phone-booth door open. Another one grabbed the woman in there and hauled her out. “What the hell you doin’?” she shouted. “I didn’t do nothin’!” They took no notice. All four of them hustled her into the back of one of the cars. “I didn’t do nothin’, damn you!” she yelled again. A cop slammed the door—not on her leg, but almost. They all piled in and zoomed away.

  They couldn’t have been there longer than a minute. If they’d hung around, odds were good they would have had trouble on their hands. The bastards understood that. Bastards, yeah, but bastards who knew what they were doing.

  The next shop down, the Madras Trading Company, sold thaumaturgical supplies. I don’t suppose an uptown wizard would have had any idea what to do with half of them, but nobody ever said Central Avenue was uptown. I pretended vials of dried chicken blood and goofer dust and mummified rat tails fascinated me.

  Twenty minutes later, another car stopped by the booth. Two men in suits got out, one white, the other a Negro. They started giving the booth and especially the telephone a going over. Detectives? Forensic sorcerers? I didn’t know. I didn’t stick around to find out, either. I was glad I’d cleaned up after myself, though, and hoped like hell I’d done a good job.

  I must have. They didn’t come for me. I knew I’d been stupid calling Howe again, but I’d learned something doing it. I’d really have to watch myself from then on.

  And I hoped they’d turn that poor woman loose when they figured out she didn’t have anything to do with vepratoga.

  When I went back up to the top of Bunker Hill, I had two cameras with me. Terence had told me he didn’t have film fast enough for shooting in a pitch-black room, which I was liable to have to do. So they were both loaded with flashbulbs. I wouldn’t have time to change bulbs. I might not have time for a second shot, either, but you never know. If I did, I’d use it.

  A couple of punks appraised me as I walked to the place where Jonas Schmitt lived. They decided against it. I’m good sized, and the way I walked said I’d come across worse things than punks. I had, too.

  I knocked on the door. Carlotta Parrott opened it as if she’d been standing by it waiting for me to show up. She probably had. “Here. I got this for you,” she said in a low voice, and pressed a key into my hand. “Now you won’t make a racket gettin’ in, an’ I won’t hafta pay for fixin’ the door if you smash it.”

  “Thanks,” I said, sure the second counted more with her than the first. But it was a help. This way, I’d have a better chance of catching Schmitt and Marianne in the act, as it were.

  She led me to the broom closet. When she closed the door, it was as black as Victor Howe’s heart in there, and even dustier. I’m glad I don’t get the horrors in tight spaces, let me tell you.

  It was really dusty in there. I hoped I didn’t pick the moment when Marianne was walking down the hall toward Schmitt’s arms to sneeze. That wouldn’t be so good. Along with the dust, the closet smelled faintly of floor wax. Faintly, I guess, because Mrs. Parrott didn’t do all the cleaning she might have.

  As my eyes got used to blackness, I noticed a tiny bit of light leaking in from around the door—and, eventually, an even tinier glow from my watch dial. I’m hardly ever anywhere dark enough to notice that; I’d almost forgotten the watch had a glowing dial. If I raised my wrist in front of my face, I could see what time it was.

  I didn’t. I just stood there, as quietly as I could. For all the moving I did, I might as well have been the zombie janitor who swept up the alley. The only difference between us was, I knew I was standing there and where there was. The zombie didn’t know; he wouldn’t have given a damn if he did. Not knowing. Not caring. That’s what being a zombie is all about. Ever so slightly, I shook my head. Nope.

  I stood there and stood there. Not looking at my watch turned into a game. I tried to guess how much time was passing outside this black little stuffy chamber where nothing had ever happened or ever would. Then I heard footsteps in the hallway. They weren’t Carlotta Parrott’s; she’d worn soft-soled slippers. With these, I could hear heel and toe thumping on the floorboards.