She kept taking her time fishing around for words. Her voice stayed soft when she turned the next few loose: “It is not something I am proud of, Mister Mitchell.”

  And maybe that was true, and maybe she was in it with Sebestyen up to her well-turned thighs. “Now that I do know, shouldn’t you maybe level with me?”

  Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t expect her to. The racket I’m in, they lie to you as natural as they breathe … if they breathe. But you gotta try. And sometimes you can pull stuff you can use even out of the lies. It’s like pulling double eagles out of dog turds, but you can do it. Sometimes. If you put up with the stink and steam clean your fingers afterwards.

  “I am sorry,” she said. Another lie, unless she meant she was sorry I’d caught her out. “I did not believe—I do not believe—that has anything to do with his current absence.”

  “You’re paying me to worry about that,” I said. “Which blood bank is it?”

  “The one at County General.” Dora Urban sounded as happy admitting it as a debutante would admitting she had a social disease.

  “Jes—!” I bit that off sharp. Vampires and holy names don’t mix. “Jeepers!” Which didn’t do as much for me as the other would have, but I had more consideration for her than I figured she ever would for me. “Sebestyen, he doesn’t think small, does he?”

  “Anything worth doing is worth doing properly,” she said. That wasn’t the exact word I would’ve used. County General is the shining hospital that is set on a hill, and cannot be hid. Well, it damn well is. It’s a big white building northeast of City Hall. You can see it for miles and miles. You can when the smog lets you, anyhow. They even light it up at night.

  “Who was helping him with this little scheme?” I asked. The next obvious question, sure, but you gotta ask ’em even when they’re obvious. Sometimes especially when they’re obvious. The answers aren’t always.

  “That, I cannot tell you.”

  “Can’t tell me or don’t know?” I asked. She didn’t say anything, so I drew my own conclusions—drew ’em and didn’t like ’em. I said, “How am I supposed to help you if you don’t help me?”

  “I am paying you for your services, Mister Mitchell. As long as you accept my payment, I expect you to provide them. If you fail to do so, I will take whatever steps seem fitting. Good night.” She hung up on me.

  I put the handset back in the cradle and shook my head. “You’re right,” I told Old Man Mose. “She is a bitch.”

  Mose was biting his toenails, one more thing people aren’t equipped for but not one I particularly miss, even asleep. He kept at it for a while. He’s a cat. Annoying me is part of his job. Then he said, “What are you going to do now?”

  “If the folks who don’t like Sebestyen haven’t finished him, I ought to let him pull it off,” I said. “Robbing a blood bank! If that doesn’t send people charging into Vampire Village with stakes and torches, nothing ever will.” But I knew I was lying. I’ve seen folk riots, pogroms, call ’em whatever you please. You don’t want to wish anything like that on the town where you live, even when it’s as rotten a town as this one.

  “Go ahead,” Mose said. They don’t issue consciences to cats, either.

  “Nah.” I took another slug of bourbon, then held up my index finger as if I were a genius. Uh-huh. As if. “Other thing I’ll do is stay away from Al Harris for a while.”

  “Good. Whenever you come back from that place, you always stink like a dog,” Old Man Mose said.

  “Anything else to complain about?” I asked. The cat, for a wonder, kept quiet. “Okey-doke,” I went on. “I’m going home.” I turned out the light and shut off the fan, and I did.

  Next morning, after three aspirins, I chose a different joint for breakfast: El Toro Verde. I don’t go there all the time, but often enough so the waiter nodded when I walked in. He was a short, stocky guy with copper skin, a coffin-shaped head, and cheekbones to be proud of. He raised a bristly black eyebrow in a silent question.

  “Coffee, José,” I said. “Black coffee and menudo.” Menudo is tripe soup. Mexicans swear it cures hangovers. I’m no Mexican, but I’ve tried it a few times, and it works … as well as anything else. Or as badly.

  “Sí, Señor,” he said. I sat down at the counter. Three stools over from me, a swarthy fellow with greasy black hair and a lounge-lizard mustache was plowing through his own bowl. By the red veins in his eyes, he’d hurt himself worse the night before than I had.

  The food and coffee came fast, thank God. A slug of java. A spoonful of menudo (which had enough chilies in it to make me sweat in case I wasn’t already). Another spoonful. More coffee. By the time I finished the tripe soup and two cups of joe, I felt better. Well, the aspirins didn’t hurt, either.

  I’ll tell you how much better I felt. The phone rang right after I stepped into the office, and I didn’t scream. My head didn’t fall off. Progress. And whoever it was, it wouldn’t be Dora Urban. That felt like progress, too.

  “Mitchell Investigating.” I sounded almost like myself.

  “I’d like to speak to Mister Mitchell, please.” A Negro man’s voice, but educated, so you had to think twice to be sure.

  “You’re doing it.” No, I wasn’t at my sunshiny best, or I would have been more polite.

  “Mister Mitchell, my name is Lamont Smalls. I have the honor and the privilege of editing The Los Angeles Lookout,” he said. The Lookout is the biggest Negro newspaper in town. Up along Central, it’s a very loud noise. Nobody in Hollywood or Westwood’s ever seen it, unless a housemaid happens to lose a copy there.

  But I was only a couple of blocks from Central, so I knew damn well who Lamont Smalls was. In that pond, he was one heavyweight frog. “What can I do for you?” I asked, hoping I seemed smoother than I had before.

  “I have some business I would like to talk about with you, but not over the telephone,” he said. “I can be at your establishment in half an hour. Is that all right?”

  “Make it forty-five minutes,” I said. I wanted him to believe I had other daytime clients coming in. I wished I could believe it, too.

  He strode in right on the dot, a parade of one. He was a small, neat, elegant man, nearly as handsome as he thought he was. His pin-striped suit cost as much as I made in a month; the charcoal fedora he hung on my old hat tree added a week. His skin was coffee with cream. Just the first hint of gray frosted his close-cut hair.

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said as we shook hands. I meant it for more than the usual mercenary reasons. The Lookout does more good than otherwise. Too many papers in this burg you can’t say that about. “What’s on your mind?”

  “This stays between us?”

  “Whatever you tell me now, it’ll be in the gossip columns and all over the radio by this time tomorrow.”

  For a split second, he took me seriously. He stiffened, then relaxed. He even grinned, pretty much as if he meant it. “Oh,” he said. “You’re a wise guy.”

  Old Man Mose chose that moment to come out from under the sofa. “You don’t know the half of it,” he said, hopping up.

  Smalls sensibly ignored the cat. He took a gold-plated—or maybe it was solid gold—cigarette case out of his inside jacket pocket. He showed his manners: he eyed me before lighting up. As soon as I nodded, he did. So did I, from my not gold-plated pack of Old Golds.

  After a couple of drags, he said, “It’s the oldest story in the world, Mister Mitchell. I’m afraid my wife is running around on me.”

  He was right. It is the oldest story in the world. Wives run around on husbands, and husbands run around on wives. They keep people in my line of work working, if you know what I mean. “What do you want me to do about it?” I asked carefully. I won’t say I’ve never been a strongarm, but I don’t like it. My price goes up.

  But he said, “Get the goods on her. That way, I can cut her loose without getting skinned. Get me stuff that will hold up in court. If I can show it to her lawyer beforehand, maybe I won’t have to go there.”

  “All right.” That seemed sensible enough. In his Florsheims, I might do the same thing. I got down to brass tacks: “What’s her name? Do you have a picture you can give me? Do you know who she’s running around with?”

  “She’s Marianne Smalls.” He shifted in the chair on the other side of my desk to get at the billfold in his hip pocket. The chair made noise when he moved in it, even if it didn’t for Dora Urban. He pulled out a photo of the two of them and slid it over to me. “Here you are.”

  She was a nice-looking woman, a shade or two lighter than he was. “Thanks,” I said. “I asked you before—do you know who her friend is?”

  “His name is Schmitt, Mister Mitchell, Jonas Schmitt.” He pronounced the J like a Y. He must’ve done Deutsch in college. He sounded as if he wanted to throw up when he said the name, too. “He is in the piano business. He buys them, he sells them, he fixes them, he gives lessons or arranges for lessons. Sometimes he plays at clubs.” He ground out his cigarette as if it were Schmitt’s face on a rough file. Then, in a low, hopeless, defeated voice, he finished, “He is a white man, Mister Mitchell.”

  “With a name like that, he would be, yeah,” I said.

  No wonder Lamont Smalls felt like change for two cents. Being a Negro in Los Angeles is hard enough any old time. There are only so many places you can live, so many places you can work, so many places you can show your face. Step out of line, the cops and the rich folks the cops work for, they make you sorry.

  That’s all bad enough. Worse than bad enough, you ask me. A black man, or even a coffee-and-cream man like Smalls, he better know his place and stay there. But at least he’s got a place. Or he does till his wife starts sleeping with the enemy, anyway.

  That’s how it would look to him. How it looked to Marianne Smalls …. Married to Lamont, she was a big frog in the little Negro pond, too. But that was a little pond. It always would be. She was even lighter than her husband. On the arm of somebody like Jonas Schmitt, she might be able to pass. Then she could see how big a frog she was in the wide old lake.

  Or maybe I was reading too much into it. Maybe Lamont came upside her head whenever he felt ornery. Maybe he was a stingy son of a bitch. Maybe he was just a dud in the sack. I didn’t know. All I could do sitting there across from him was guess.

  And he was doing some guessing or calculating or whatever you want to call it of his own. Eyeing me, he said, “You, ah, do understand what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

  “Oh, you bet I do. I understand you real well,” I said.

  Maybe he’d believe me, maybe not. I’m lighter than Marianne Smalls. My hair isn’t kinky. It isn’t konked, either, but that doesn’t have to prove anything. My nose isn’t flat, but it also isn’t beaky. My mouth looks like, well, a mouth. I can go one place and seem like one thing. I can go another place and seem like something else.

  Some of the places the Army sent me, I wouldn’t have minded if they thought I looked more colored. They wouldn’t have wanted me at the front if I did. Fool that I am, I didn’t say anything about it at the time. Way too late to get hot and bothered about it now.

  Smalls sat there gnawing on the inside of his underlip for close to half a minute. If he’d got up and walked out the door, how could I have blamed him? (Except for my finances, I mean.) But he’d already told me enough so he must have felt like he had to go through with it. Still looking sour, he said, “Let’s talk turkey.”

  I’ll say this about him—he didn’t make the Lookout as loud a noise as it is by paying too much for anything. Stingy son of a bitch came to mind again. But why dear Marianne was doing the dirty with Jonas Schmitt wasn’t my concern. Lamont and I dickered till we were about equally unhappy. He pulled five sawbucks out of his wallet to get me started, and I was on my merry way.

  Schmitt lived downtown. Lamont Smalls gave me his address. After he left, I discovered I could have found it in the phone book. For all I know, Smalls did. But what the hell? Now I had it.

  I headed downtown on the Red Line to scout the place. It was early afternoon. I figured Schmitt would be away pianoing. I had on dungarees, a white work shirt with a name that wasn’t mine embroidered above the pocket, and a cap that could have said either railroad or baseball. Not my usual style, which was the point.

  I got off the streetcar not far from Al Harris’s smut emporium, and without stopping in walked past it to the corner of Third and Hill. The piano man’s place was up on Bunker Hill, the one that gave the street its name. Third goes through Bunker Hill, but that didn’t do me any good. I mean, Third goes through Bunker Hill, in a tunnel. To get to the top, you have to take Angel’s Flight.

  No, I don’t know if he’s really an angel. I don’t know if he’s what made Junipero Serra call this place Los Angeles. No, and I don’t know how long he’s been at what’s the corner of Third and Hill nowadays. Forever, or close enough—although in this town, forever can be anything longer than a year and a half. Nobody else knows any of that stuff, either.

  I do know he was there when Father Serra arrived. The Indians took Serra to see him. They might have thought the friar and the angel already knew each other. If they did, they thought wrong. The angel surprised the bejesus out of Father Serra. Whether Father Serra surprised the angel—that, I can’t tell you. The angel, he was there then. He’s there now. If a big old quake ever knocks downtown into the ocean, I bet he can fly mermaids underwater.

  He’s about twenty feet tall. Here. Wait. He’s nineteen feet, six and five-eighths inches tall, by surveyor’s measurement. That’s what the WPA guide to Los Angeles says, anyhow, and God forbid it should lie. I keep a copy in the office, for the maps and for what it can tell me about parts of town I don’t often get to. Parts I do get to, it doesn’t talk about much. It’s never heard of any nightclubs or hotels along Central, for instance.

  Nobody’s ever seen the angel, if he is an angel, eat or drink. Nobody’s ever seen him leave Bunker Hill, either. He takes people from the bottom to the top, or from the top to the bottom, when they give him something that’s worth something. That’s what he does. That’s all he does.

  The Romans had a god like that. His name was Aius Locutius, which means “Up and Spoke.” His one job was to sing out a warning in case the Gauls attacked Rome. When the Gauls did, he gave the warning and then went back to sleep. If the Gauls ever come again, maybe he’ll sing out some more.

  Anyway, I dug in the right front pocket of those dungarees and pulled out a nickel. I held it on my open palm so the angel could see it. I guess he could see it, anyway; his face shows no more in the way of features than an Oscar’s does. His right hand moved. His fingers were as thick as a Louisville Slugger, but deft. He took the nickel and made it disappear. I don’t know what he did with it, but that wasn’t my worry. I paid the fare and I got my ride.

  He took me in his arms. His wings unfolded from his shoulders. The WPA guide says his wingspan is sixty-three feet, two inches. It only seems like a mile. He flew up to the top of Bunker Hill. No one waited at his stop there to go down, so he flew back by himself.

  You always wonder if yours will be the time he decides to drop somebody. He never has, but you wonder just the same, or I do. If Angel’s Flight turns into Angel’s Drop, it’s a long way down.

  Back before the first war, Bunker Hill was a ritzy part of town, with big, fancy, expensive houses. They’re still there, but they aren’t so ritzy any more. What they put me in mind of is a bunch of forty-year-old hookers trying to hide the wrinkles with powder and paint. You can see how they used to be hot stuff—and you can see they aren’t any more.

  Hookers don’t get subdivided, though. The houses on Bunker Hill did. They’re nearly all apartment buildings now. All of the signs on the front gates said NO VACANCY. I didn’t see any with FOR RENT up instead. Places to live are damned hard to come by these days.

  I kind of ambled along, not going anywhere in a hurry. I could have been a handyman looking for work. I was too clean to be a bum, too open to be a burglar—or an obvious burglar, I should say.

  Jonas Schmitt’s building was kept up better than a lot of the others. It had a NO VACANCY sign out front. I opened the gate and walked in anyway. I was coming up the front steps when a gal with a housecoat and a dyed-blond bob straight out of 1924 opened the door and barked, “Waddaya want?” A cop rousting a drunk doesn’t sound any nastier.

  “Schmitt, Apartment 4-B,” I said. “Gotta check the wiring. The lights in the bedroom keep going on and off.”

  “Says who?” Her voice was as deep as your usual cop’s, too. The coffin nail in her mouth was about her millionth, if the yellow stains on her fingers gave any clue.

  “Says Schmitt,” I answered. “He wouldn’t’ve called me if he wasn’t having trouble.”

  She muttered, coughed, and muttered some more. Then she said, “He shoulda talked to me first. I’ll give him a piece of my mind, I will.”

  I didn’t want her doing that. It didn’t worry me much, though. Next time I came around, I’d look like somebody else. When you don’t look like any one particular thing, that’s easy enough. I folded my arms across my chest and said, “You gonna let me in or not? You don’t, I gotta use your phone, let the boss know there’s a snafu.”

  She crushed out the cigarette under the sole of her carpet slipper and lit another one right away. A Camel. Why was I not surprised? She gave me the fishy stare. She had a good one, too. But I just looked back at her from under the bill of my cap. “Okay,” she said at last, “but I’m comin’ in witcha, make sure you don’t promote nothin’.”

  “Fine by me,” I said, and it was. I hadn’t figured it was even money she’d let me in at all. What the hell, though? I wasn’t any worse off if she did tell me no. Still playing the electrician, or someone like him, I went on, “Lemme look at the fuse box first.”