“More than that. He knows the people who put ’em in the ground. Odds are he’s put some there himself. You want to be careful yours isn’t one of ’em.”

  Slowly, Berkowitz got to his feet and pushed his chair under the rickety table. I did the same. We went outside. It was gray and gloomy, about the way I felt. As we headed back to the blood bank, he said, “County General isn’t a small outfit, you know.”

  “Is it bigger than the LAPD? Is it bigger than City Hall? Is it bigger than the gangsters who run things behind the scenes? You need to make sure you know what you’re playing with.”

  He looked at me the way I’d looked at him when he made his horrible pun. “We don’t see things the same way, do we?” he said after a few steps.

  “I was thinking that a little while ago.”

  “Which of us sees the truth?”

  “What is truth?” I asked, just like Pilate. Like Pilate, I knew the question was easier to ask than to answer.

  ​X

  There was a fog upon LA the next time I went down to the US Rubber factory. I know, I know, San Francisco has the reputation for fog, but we get it here, too. Every once in a while, we get a really thick one, so people who live in neighborhoods without streetlights (more of those than the city fathers want you to know, believe me) come home late from work because they literally can’t see where they’re going.

  The Red Cars I took south and east had their lights on and their bells clanging. Even so, they went slower than usual because the motorman saw through a glass, foggily. We passed a car that had run up on the curb, and two more that had smashed together. I got a glimpse of cops through swirling mist. That was the kind of thing cops were supposed to take care of. All the same, I wasn’t sorry when I couldn’t see them any more. Too often, they protected and served … themselves.

  It had thinned out some by the time I got where I was going. The day had worn along, and I was farther inland. I still breathed damply, but I didn’t feel as if I had a wet cotton veil over my face as I walked along.

  Now, I didn’t try to go right into the plant. Howe of Dewey, Beagle, & had warned me I’d get arrested if I did. I believed him. The way the god-things eyed me made me believe him.

  No, I went to the diner on the other side of Scrying Crystal Road. I figured I’d nurse some coffee till the lunch crowd came in.

  I figured wrong. The counterman looked up from whatever not much he was doing and jerked as if he’d got stung by a yellowjacket. “You!” he said.

  “Me,” I agreed. “How about some joe?”

  He shook his head. “I can’t. It’s worth my ass if I do. They told me they’d make this place off-limits if I let you snoop around here. That’s most o’ the business we do. We’d go bust without it. So get lost.”

  “They? Who’s they?”

  “You know damn well who. The big boys across the street. I ain’t gonna piss them off, not for nothin’. Beat it. Amscray. I’ll call the sheriffs if you try an’ stick around.”

  So I left. What was I gonna do? He meant what he was saying. I don’t know how they found out I’d been there. Squeezed it out of Babs or her friends? Sicced a sorcerer on me? However they’d done it, they’d done it.

  Scrying Crystal Road runs from northwest to southeast. I crossed over to the northerly side, the one where the castle, uh, factory sits. I didn’t try to go in, mind you. I just mooched along the sidewalk, then turned around and mooched back the other way. My vague thought was that I might spot somebody I knew and take him to an eatery whose owner wouldn’t get in trouble for letting me sit down.

  Every time I went by, I felt the Assyrian god-things’ eyes on me. They knew who I was, and they didn’t like me one damn bit. Whenever I looked back at ’em, they were nothing but carved stone. When I wasn’t looking at them, though, I swear they were looking at me.

  You can call that nerves or runaway imagination or whatever you want. But tell me what you call this. Not ten minutes after I started going back and forth in front of the US Rubber plant, a couple of big guys who’d been around the block a few times came out of the place and made for me. In a bar or a Central Avenue club, they would’ve been bouncers. I don’t know what the US Rubber job title is.

  “You want to move along now, pal,” one of them told me.

  “Don’t you?” the other one added.

  “I dunno,” I said. “It’s a public sidewalk. I’m not on private property or anything. As long as I don’t make trouble, I’ve got as much right to be here as you do.”

  “You bein’ here, that’s trouble,” the first one said. He wore an old Army jacket. One hand was in a pocket. Whatever he pulled out, I probably wouldn’t like it.

  “Are you sure? Have you checked with Sergeant Jackson?” I said.

  He spat on the sidewalk, not quite straight at me but pretty close. “This is the county, not the city. Elmer, he don’t got no clout here.” He knew who I was talking about, but he didn’t care.

  His sidekick did, though. He set a hand on the first bruiser’s arm. “Maybe we better find out, Louie,” he said.

  “Go find out if you want to.” Louie lumbered toward me.

  And I trotted toward him. That made him slow up. He thought I’d run away. You don’t want to do what they expect. He had a wrench in that pocket. I’d guessed a shiv, but a wrench would be easier to explain to cops. By the way he drew his arm back, he was gonna rearrange my phrenology with it.

  I kicked him in the balls. Anybody who wastes time fighting fair never saw combat, and that’s a natural fact. He folded up like an accordion, clutching at himself. The wrench hit the cement with a clank. After I kicked him in the head, he quit wriggling.

  I looked at his chum. “You want some, too?” I asked pleasantly.

  His eyes were as big as gumdrops. “I told him not to mess with you. Honest to God, I did,” he said.

  And he had. But …. “You told me I couldn’t walk on the sidewalk here,” I said.

  He hopped off the sidewalk and onto US Rubber property as if standing there were some sorcerous charm. “Go on, beat it,” he said. “I don’t want no trouble.”

  I could have done for him. We both understood that. He didn’t even have Louie’s stupid tough-guy confidence. What was the point, though? “Whatever you want, sweetheart,” I said, and turned and headed for the bus stop. I didn’t waste time telling him not to come after me. He wasn’t going to.

  On the way back up to my usual part of town, I did some thinking. They could try to tag me with a battery rap, though they wouldn’t have a happy time telling their story under oath and truth geas. We went out there to beat him up, only he got one of us instead, was what it amounted to.

  But I’d made a mistake mentioning Elmer V. Jackson. I’d told them some of what I knew. You never want to show a card when you don’t have to. Word would get back to him, which might not be so good.

  Once you’ve done something, you can’t undo it. Old Omar Khayyam and his moving finger got that right. Whatever happened because I opened my big fat mouth, I’d have to deal with it.

  When I walked into the office, a dead rat lay on my desk. It was giving the blotter some new stains. Old Man Mose had been sleeping on the sofa. He looked up at me and said, “I got another spy.”

  “I never would have guessed.” I picked the rat up by the tail and dropped it in the wastebasket. Then I took the wastebasket out to the alley behind the place and dumped it into one of the big galvanized-iron trash cans there. And then I scrubbed my hands in the tiny little bathroom.

  “Eating it would have been simpler. That’s why I left it there for you,” the cat said after I finished all that. He had the feline humans-are-so-stupid tone down pat.

  I didn’t feel like arguing with him. Life is too short sometimes. Instead, I asked, “Who was this one snooping for?”

  “Somebody called Lappid,” Old Man Mose said. “Whoever that is.” His attitude was, if he didn’t know, it wasn’t worth knowing.

  I’d never run across anyone called Lappid, either, so I was inclined to agree with him. For about a minute, I was. But I’m not always a jerk, only most of the time. “Do you mean LAPD?” I asked.

  “That’s what I said. Lappid.” He yawned to show how interested he wasn’t.

  Well, he would have got it from the rat. Who can say how much rats really understand? Too much, sometimes. Not nearly enough, more often. “You know what the police are, don’t you?” I said.

  “Humans. Noisy humans.” Mose yawned again. No, he didn’t care much. Not that he was wrong. I remembered the squad cars screaming up to that phone booth. And cats have better ears than we do. They must love sirens to pieces.

  If the LAPD was spying on me, I had a problem, all right. “Did you catch the rat in the office?” I asked.

  “No, out in the alley. Couldn’t you smell that?”

  “Sorry, old boy. My nose wasn’t all that great to begin with, and then I started doing this to it.” I lit an Old Gold.

  Old Man Mose showed his teeth. “Don’t you know doing that makes you smell like a trash fire?”

  “Most people smell the same way, so it doesn’t bother us. We don’t even notice.”

  “If I could work a can opener, I wouldn’t come around here any more,” the cat said.

  “Nice to know I’m loved for myself alone.”

  “Wish for the moon while you’re at it.” Mose snarled again. “And if you think that doesn’t go double for the refugee from a graveyard you’re spearing, you’d better think again.”

  He was trying to make me mad. He did it, too. I made as if to throw a paperweight at him. He beat it, even if he knew I wouldn’t really pitch the thing. That suited me fine. I knew he’d come back. He always did. That suited me, too, even if I didn’t care to admit it to myself.

  The night after I threw out the dirty rat Mose had assassinated, I was getting ready to give it up and go home when somebody knocked on my door. “Come in,” I said, hoping it was Dora.

  But it wasn’t. It was Clarice Jethroe, looking tired and worried. “Hello, Mister Mitchell,” she said, “What can you tell me about Frank?”

  “Not a whole lot,” I answered, waving her to the sofa. I gave her what little I knew. Then I went on, “I hit a nerve, anyway. US Rubber won’t let me into the factory any more, or even into the diner where people who worked with your husband eat lunch.”

  “That doesn’t do me any good. I want to know what happened to him,” she said. In the books and the movies, the detective always works out exactly what happened, and inside two hundred pages or two hours, too. I wish real life were that neat.

  Then I remembered how Victor Howe had hung up on me. I wrote VEPRATOGA on a scrap of paper and handed it to her. “Did your husband ever mention this stuff? Don’t name it, but did he? Naming it’s dangerous for you and for me.”

  “He sure did,” she said, sounding surprised. “He said he’d heard they had some in the plant, and they shouldn’t ought to. It didn’t mean anything to me. It still doesn’t. What is it, anyways? Some kind of dope?”

  “Something like that. When did he talk about it? How long before he disappeared?”

  “Just a few days.” Mrs. Jethroe had a lot on her mind wearing her down, but she was nobody’s fool. “You reckon it had something to do with whatever happened to him?”

  “That’s what I’m looking at right now,” I said, in place of screaming Yes! as loud as I could.

  “All right.” By the way she said it, it wasn’t. She wanted answers, she wanted them yesterday, and who could blame her for that? After a sigh, she went on, “Well, I’m sure you’re doing the best you can. Do you need more money?”

  “No, ma’am,” I answered.

  “You aren’t tryin’ to leech off me. That’s somethin’.” Not much, her tone implied. She rose to her feet and tried to get cat hair off her dress. People who sat on the sofa did that a lot.

  I stood up, too. “I’m doing what I can. There’s only one of me, and I can’t do things the police can. Have you talked to them again?”

  “Those people!” She rolled her eyes and shook her head at the same time. “They don’t give a damn. They don’t even hardly pretend to give a damn. What’s Frank to them? Just another stinkin’ ….” She didn’t say it, or need to. I knew what she meant.

  “Remember, don’t name the stuff. You can talk about it, the way we were, but don’t call it by its name. You do, you’ll see how fast trouble comes down on your head. If it takes even half an hour, I’d be amazed.”

  “You aren’t kidding, are you?” she said.

  “Not even a little bit.”

  “Okay. I won’t forget. I already got me plenty o’ trouble. Don’t need more.” Out she went, heading off to take care of whatever she needed to take care of next. People like that, the ones who carry on no matter what lands on them, never get any credit. There aren’t enough of them, either.

  I thought about going home. I thought about eating my own cooking or something out of a can. I can cook a little, but only a little. Everything I make ends up tasting like K-rations. You can live on K-rations a long time. Pretty soon, though, you wonder why you want to.

  So I went to a hamburger stand around the corner. K-rats would’ve been better for me. Sid’s burger and french fries tasted good. That counted for more. If he sold beer to wash down the grease, he’d be a millionaire.

  I still didn’t go home after I ate. I could’ve read a book. I could’ve listened to the radio. I could’ve sat there wishing I had the dough to buy a TV set. The wild, exciting life of a bachelor on the town. The same way detectives are smarter in the movies, bachelors have more fun.

  Or I could’ve gone to a bar. I don’t mind drinking. You never would have guessed, would you? I don’t mind seeing who I might meet up with, either, though I seemed to be taken at the moment. I do mind paying those prices when I don’t have to. So I headed back to the office instead.

  Old Man Mose sprawled on the sofa. “Oh, it’s you,” he said, not bothering to roll onto his stomach. As far as he was concerned, what had happened yesterday might’ve been a million years ago. Cats are smarter than people.

  I sat down and pulled out the Wild Turkey. Good for what ails you. Forgetfulness in a bottle. What does the distiller buy that’s half so precious as what he sells? Another one old Omar nailed.

  I took a slug. Fire flowed down my throat and exploded in my stomach like a bursting 105. Bourbon is a Sugar Ray right; it hits hard and fast. That was why I wanted it. The lines needed some blurring.

  Another swig followed hard on the heels of the first. It was almost as if I had nothing to do with the actual drinking. The I in there was just a target for what my gullet sent to my belly. Almost like that, but not quite. I knew how much I wanted the stuff. Most of the time, I’m holding the bottle. It isn’t holding me. Most of the time, but not always. Not that night.

  Two jolts just got me started, of course. The way it looked to me was, I’d spend the night in the desk chair, if I didn’t spend it on the sofa or on the floor. I’d wake up in the morning feeling like hell, too. Not as if I hadn’t done it before. Not as if I wouldn’t do it again.

  But I didn’t do it then, because somebody came in while I was about to pick up the Wild Turkey bottle again. No, nobody knocked. The office door didn’t open. It wasn’t Dora, either. I’d seen her leave that way, but never what it looked like on the other side. I still haven’t.

  What I did see was Old Man Mose all of a sudden sit up and look very alert. I wasn’t sure what that proved. He looked that way when a tiny gnat or moth I’d never spot in a hundred years fluttered around the office.

  A moment later, though, following his gaze, I saw what looked like a patch of curdled air between the door and the desk. It was about the size and shape of a human being—if I wasn’t starting to see things, I mean. A ghost. The LAPD had tried a rat, but that didn’t work so well, thanks to Mose. Were they using a spook to snoop on me now?

  I eyed the ghost as best I could. If I wasn’t imagining things (and I knew there was no guarantee I wasn’t), the beaky-nosed, long-chinned profile I could almost make out looked familiar. “That you, Eb?” I asked.

  The ectoplasm that probably formed the defunct Pinkerton’s head may have bobbed up and down. “Who were you expecting, Rudolf Sebestyen?” he said. I could just about make out his words, even if I wasn’t exactly hearing them.

  “That’d be nice,” I said. Then, remembering my hospitality, I held out the Wild Turkey to him. “Here. Have a snort.”

  He flowed forward. “Don’t mind if I do,” a breeze might have whispered. He didn’t drink. He couldn’t. But something happened. Soaking up essence? Don’t ask me. I’ve never been a ghost, not yet. He sighed a ghostly sigh. Then he said, “That’s a better grade o’ corn-mule than we made in my day, yes it is.” He seemed louder all of a sudden. Maybe he was, maybe not.

  “And what can I do for you?” I asked grandly. “Are you here to lend the grand and glorious Sergeant Elmer V. Jackson a helping hand?”

  He said something about the grand and glorious Sergeant Elmer V. Jackson and an elephant turd. After another sniff at my spirits’ spirituous essence, he added, “You’ve gone and got people mad at you again, Jack. Some of them haven’t twigged yet to its being you they’re mad at, and you’d best hope they don’t.”

  “Including the grand and glorious Sergeant Elmer V. Jackson?” I liked the grand and glorious sound of that, which proved I’d had a bit to drink.

  “He’s a sergeant,” Eb said patiently. “He’s no big thing.” Big thing was Civil War slang, the kind of lingo that would’ve been in Eb’s mouth back in the days when he had a mouth. It meant anything worth paying attention to. A pretty girl could be a big thing. So could the Battle of Gettysburg.

  “Big enough for somebody like me.”