The Monkey's Raincoat Read Free

don’t depend on you to sweet-talk the customers.”
    â€œI don’t do this for the customers.” Pike’s voice was flat. No smile. No humor. Normal, for Pike.
    â€œThat’s why I like to call,” I said. “Always the pleasant word. Always the cheery hello.”
    Nothing came back over the line. After a while I said, “We added a new client today. Thought you’d like to know.”
    â€œAny heat?” Pike’s only interest.
    â€œWe got through the interview with a minimum of gunshots.”
    â€œYou need me, you know where to find me.”
    He hung up. I shook my head. Some partner.
    An entire afternoon ahead of me and nary a thing to do except drive out to Ellen Lang’s and dig through six or seven months of phone bills, bank statements, and credit cardreceipts. Yuck. I decided to go see Kimberly Marsh. The Other Woman.
    I slipped the Dan Wesson into my holster, put on the white cotton jacket, and picked up the sandwich on my way to the parking garage. I ate in the car driving up Fairfax, turning left at Sunset toward Brentwood. I’ve got a Jamaica-yellow 1966 Corvette convertible. It would have been easier to take Santa Monica, but with the top down Sunset was a nicer drive.
    It was shaping up as another brutal Los Angeles winter, low seventies, scattered clouds, clearing. The sky was that deep blue we get just before or just after a rain. The white stucco houses along the ridges were sharp and brilliant in the sun. I passed the coed-specked running paths of UCLA, then wound my way past a house that may have been the one William Holden used to slip the repossessors in
Sunset Boulevard
. Old Spanish. Same cornices and pilasters. The ghosts of old Hollywood haunting the eaves. I’ve wondered about that house since I discovered it, just two days after I mustered out of the Army in 1972. I’ve wondered, but I’ve never wanted to know for sure. After the Army, magic was in short supply and when you found some, you held on tight. It wouldn’t be the same if I knew the house belonged to some guy who made his millions inventing Fruit Loops.
    A half mile past the San Diego Freeway I turned left on Barrington and dropped south toward San Vicente, then hung another left on Gorham. The Piedmont Arms is on the south side of the street in a stretch of apartment houses and condominiums. I drove past, turned around at a cross street, and parked. It looked like a nice place to live. An older woman with wispy white hair eased a Hughes Market cart off a curb and across a street. She smiled at a man and a woman in their twenties, the man with his shirt off, the woman in an airy Navajo top. L.A. winter. They smiled back. Two women in jogging suits were walking back toward Barrington, probably off to lunch at one of the little nouveaux restaurants on San Vicente. Hot duck salad with raspberry sauce. A sturdily built Chicano woman with a purse the size of a mobile home waited at a bus stop, squinting into the sun. Somewhere a screw gun started up, then cut short. There were gulls and a scent of the sea. Nice. Four cars in front of me, north side of the street, two guys sat in a dark blue ’69 Nova with a bad rust spot on the left rear fender. Chicanos. The driver tried to scowl likeCharles Bronson as I cruised past. Maybe they were from the government.
    The Piedmont is a clean, two-story, U-shaped stucco building with a garden entry at the front braced by stairs that go up to the second floor. Around each stair is a stand of bamboo and a couple of banana trees for that always-popular rain forest look. There are two rows of brass-burnished mailboxes in front of the bamboo, with a big open bin beneath them for magazines and packages and Pygmies with blowguns. Kimberly Marsh’s drop was the fourth from the left on the top row. I could see eight or nine envelopes through the slot. In the bin there were three catalogs and a couple of those giveaway flyers that everyone