I hand him my business card and tell him my fee for one missing person. I’ve raised the rate significantly over the years. This isn’t due to the fact that I’ve gotten any better but because it’s gotten harder and, in some respects, with all the guns and drugs out on the street, more dangerous. He doesn’t bat an eye.
I tell him I’m an old man and I move a little slower than the action heroes on television nowadays. I’m no Superman, I tell him. I can’t fly off a roof, although once somebody tried to push me to do just that. He says he doesn’t care. Besides, he doesn’t watch television. Gives him a headache.
Our waiter with the tattoos returns and lays a check down on the table. Pinky grabs it one step ahead of me. “My treat,” he says.
We stand up and shake hands. He has small soft hands, like a twelve-year-old girl. Or, I dunno, maybe he’s just one of those guys who rubs a lot of lotion on them. “I’ll do what I can,” I say.
He nods, tugs at his chin, then takes a pen and scribbles something onto the back of his business card and hands it to me. “This is my private cell,” he says. “I don’t give this out, understand? But you’ll never get anywhere if you go through the regular number.”
“Soon as I learn something,” I say, “I’ll give you a call.”
“Deal.” His eyes search mine, suddenly unsure. Or maybe he’s perpetually unsure. “We have a deal, huh?”
“I’ll do what I can,” I repeat. I slip his card into my old leather wallet. “You’ll be the first to know.”
Chapter 2
I LIKE TO KNOW who I’m working for. Some guy comes along out of the blue with a big crazy story, a leinga meisa that makes no sense, well, it’s always a good idea to check it out. I flip open my Rolodex at home and find the old phone number for Denny Marlborough, which is no longer in service. Then I call Maxine in personnel; she’s been at the LAPD forever. She calls me honey. I like to think that’s because she’s sweet on me, but the truth is I’m not special: She calls damn near everyone honey. Wait a minute, honey, I’m going to put you on hold and I’ll be right back. “Detective Marlborough,” she informs me when she returns, “has moved on to greener pastures.”
“He quit?”
“Last September. We still have his employment file, of course. Thank God for bureaucracy, I say.”
“Tell me, Maxine, does that file of yours give any clues as to where I might find him?”
“More than a clue,” she says. “He’s got his new business card stapled right here, in case we ever need to reach him. He started his own home security service. Calls it Stop, Look & Listen. Remember they used to say that to us all the time when we were growing up.”
“I remember it well, Maxine.”
She reads me all the pertinent information. He has a plant in El Segundo where they manufacture electronic kits to stop home burglaries and unwanted intruders. I think about driving down there, but the last time I was in El Segundo it left a bad taste in my mouth. When I was a kid, it was just a lot of oil wells. Then when they built LAX, it became home to Douglas Aircraft and Hughes and Northrop. Better, but still nothing much to get excited about. El Segundo was where you went on your way to somewhere else. I call him instead, and his secretary, a young man named Corbett or Corbin—I couldn’t tell which—puts me through. We chat about old times for a while, what I’m up to these days, why he left the LAPD, then I ask him about Pincus Bleistiff.
“Oh yeah,” he says, “we talked about installing a system at his house. That was last year, I guess. In the end he changed his mind. I think he thought we were trying to gouge him.”
“That what he said?”
“No. It was all very cordial.”
“But were you?”
“No,” he says, “it was a fair price. Just more than he wanted to pay.”
“Okay,” I say. “That was then. So now he calls you looking for a detective?”
“Actually,” Marlborough says, “he wanted to hire me to find that singer of his. I told him I don’t do that, turned him down. That’s when I mentioned your name.”
“Thanks,” I say. I don’t think I’m being sarcastic, but my voice has betrayed me so many times in the past, that’s what he must have heard.
“You could turn him down, too, Amos,” he says after a lengthy silence. “I mean, if it’s not that interesting. I just figured at your age, you might get a kick out of it.”
“A check is more what I’m looking for, Denny. A kick I don’t need.”
“So you took him up on his offer, then.”
“You bet.”
“Well, if his house on Mulholland is any indication, he’s got money to burn. I’d charge him the going rate, whatever it is. No discounts for senior citizens.”
“Not to worry,” I say. Then I tell him thanks again. And this time I mean it.
The next morning, after I get Loretta her oatmeal and set her down in front of The Today Show to settle her until Carmen arrives to take over the caregiving, I go into my office to think things over. I call it my office; it’s really just a spare bedroom with a foldout couch, but since we haven’t had overnight guests since my cousin Shelly slept there once when he got drunk and his first wife threw him out, I’ve taken to calling it my office. There’s a small oak desk I got at a synagogue rummage sale. That’s where my laptop sits, along with the Rolodex and a yellow legal pad and a jelly jar full of pens and pencils and paper clips. Also one of those art deco lamps, just a reproduction, really, but to the untrained eye it lends an air of sophistication.
There’s one other venerable object—a six-inch framed black-and-white photo of a kid. His name’s Enrique Avila. He’s staring into the camera from an alley behind his house. A little boy with a thick mop of dark, uncombed hair and a goofy grin. He’s got his whole life in front of him. Once upon a time he lived in Alhambra. His family was poor. Neither of his parents spoke much English, and he didn’t stand out in the classroom. He never raised his hand, his teacher told me; he was a nice boy, a well-mannered boy, but that was the main thing she remembered about him. And then he disappeared one day on the way home from school. Just vanished into the warm June air. There were no witnesses, no clues, no ransom notes, nothing. He was eight years old. I’ve been looking for him, it must be going on forty years now.
I type in Pincus Bleistiff on my computer. He’s not hard to find, and if you believe the internet, he is who he says he is—a music promoter. There were a number of bands in the sixties that he was affiliated with and a few record albums he somehow had a hand in. I hadn’t heard of these groups, or maybe I did know them at the time, but hey, it was the sixties. My life then was so full of distractions—sex, drugs, Vietnam—I’m just lucky I came through it all in one piece. Other interesting facts that pop up: Pinky was married once. No mention of the former Mrs. Bleistiff, but he has two grown children—a son, Joshua, who lives in Israel, and Julie, who is married and makes her home in Santa Monica. There is no mention of the house on Mulholland Drive, the one Denny was going to trick out with electronic devices. I meditate on that neighborhood for a moment. Chances are he’s sitting on a fortune. Either that or he’s up to his eyeballs in debt.
Loretta’s calling me from the living room. She wants me to change the channel. This has become a problem lately. She gets bored with the relentlessly happy talk, or she hates the blouse the weather girl is wearing this morning, or the commercials for certain women’s skin products annoy her because she’s tried them before and it’s all a hoax, whatever. I’ve shown her at least a dozen times how to work the remote, but she can’t get it straight. That’s what she says. Or maybe it’s none of those things, I think. Maybe she’s scared and won’t admit it.