The Monkey's Raincoat (2 page)

“Listen, Mrs. Lang,” I said, turning back to Ellen, “I don't know if Mort is going to call or not, or what you want, or what Mort wants. A couple hundred women have sat where you're sitting, and usually their husbands call. But not always. You're going to have to decide which way you want to jump.”

Ellen Lang nodded. Pinocchio's eyes shifted back and forth a few times. Janet Simon smoked. After a while Ellen Lang took two photographs out of her purse and put them carefully on the desk. “On Friday Mort always picks up Perry from school. Perry goes to Oakhurst and the girls go to Westridge. That's Cindy and Carrie. Fridays, Perry gets out two hours earlier. Only this past Friday they never came home. I tried all weekend to find Mort. I phoned Oakhurst Monday but Perry wasn't there, and I phoned again this morning and he still wasn't there. They've been gone for four days.”

I looked at the pictures. Mort was four or five years older than me, balding on top with a round face, thin lifeless hair, and skinny arms. He was wearing a tee shirt that said
U.S.S. Bluegill, Maui, Hawaii
. He had the sort of eyes that had just been looking somewhere else. On the back of the picture someone had written
Morton Lang, age 39, 5′ 10″, 145 lbs, brown hair and brown eyes, no visible scars or tattoos, mole on right forearm
. The writing was even and firm, all of the letters identical in size.

“I wrote that,” Ellen said. God bless television.

The other picture was a wallet-size school photo of a little boy who looked like a smaller, less-worn version of Mort.
Perry Lang, age 9, 4′ 8″, 64 pounds, brown hair and brown eyes, no visible scars or tattoos or moles.

I put the pictures on the desk, then opened my right top desk drawer and took out a Bic pen and a blank yellow legal pad. I had to move my gun to get the pad. The gun was a Dan Wesson .38 Special with the 4-inch barrel, a gift from George Feider the day I got my license. It was a good gun. I closed the drawer, put the pad beside the pictures and the Bic on the pad.

“Okay,” I said. “Did Mort leave a note?”

“No.”

“Why would Mort take your son but not your two girls?”

“I don't know.”

“Was Perry Mort's favorite?”

“That would be Carrie, our youngest daughter. I asked her if Mort said anything about this to her, thinking he might have, but she said no.”

I nodded and wrote
Carrie
on the pad.

“Your husband make any large withdrawals recently?”

Ellen Lang said, “I'm not very good with figures. Mort handles all our business affairs.” She said it apologetically.

“How about work? Someone there who might know what was on your husbands mind?”

Ellen Lang looked at the floor. “Well, he's not part of an office anymore, like I said. He worked out of the house, and he didn't really talk …” She trailed off and turned red, her lips a tight purple knot.

I tapped the Bic against the pad, which wasn't exactly brimming with information.

I looked at Janet Simon. She had a tight, sexy grin on her face. Or maybe it was a sneer. “I wouldn't think of interfering,” she said.

“Maybe if I said please.”

Janet Simon took a final pull on her cigarette, tossed it out over the railing, and came back inside. “Tell him about the girlfriend, Ellen.”

Ellen Lang's voice was so soft I could barely hear her. “He has a girlfriend. She lives at the Piedmont Arms off Barrington in Brentwood.”

“Her name is Kimberly Marsh,” Janet Simon said. “She's one of his clients. 412 Gorham, just above San Vicente. Apartment 4, on the ground, in the back. An actress.” She took two rolodex cards from her purse and flipped them down on the
desk next to the photographs. The top one had KIMBERLY MARSH typed on it along with the address and a phone number.

“We followed him.” Ellen Lang said it the way you say something that embarrasses you.

I looked at Janet Simon. “And I'll bet you drove.”

She looked back. “And I got out of the car and I checked the apartment number and I matched it to a name on the mailbox.” Some woman, all right.

“Okay,” I said. “What about friends?”

Neither of us bothered to look at Ellen Lang. “Mort was trying to get a film project off the ground with a producer named Garrett Rice. That's his name and number on the second card. It was one of those deals where you do a lot of talking about firming up Redford with a commitment from Coppola so you can get the money from Arab investors. That kind of thing. They call it ‘blue-sky.' ”

I nodded. “How come you know more about her life than she does?”

Ellen Lang leaned forward out of the director's chair. It was the first time she'd shown any animation since they'd walked into my office twenty minutes ago. “Garrett is an old friend. We used to play bridge with Garrett and his wife Lila until they were divorced, oh, I guess it was five years ago. We used to play every week for almost a year. Mort was so happy to be back in contact with him. Garrett was Mort's best friend. I guess that's why he told me.”

Janet Simon sighed the way you sigh when you've been holding your breath at a horror movie, and said, “Mort didn't believe in sharing his life. At least, not with his wife.”

“Well, that was his way,” Ellen Lang said. Her eyes were still wide. “Mort would just die if he knew about this, Mr. Cole. That's why I wouldn't go to the police, even though Janet said that's what I should do. I couldn't get my own husband in trouble with the police. He'd never forgive me. You can see that, can't you?”

Maybe it was my expression. Ellen Lang's face got dark, her chin trembled, and she said, “What's wrong with a woman caring how her husband feels?” I got the feeling she'd been saying it a lot lately.

“You'll take the job?” Janet Simon said.

“There's the matter of the fee.”

Ellen looked away from me again. “I'm afraid I forgot my checkbook.”

Janet said, “She's not used to this. Mort always paid for everything, so she didn't think to bring it.”

I tapped the Bic against the pad.

“You can understand that, can't you?” Janet said.

I stood up. “Yep, I can understand that. Why don't I come by your house this afternoon, Mrs. Lang? You can give me the check and we can go through your husbands things.”

“Why do you have to do that?”

“Clues, Mrs. Lang.”

Janet Simon said, “You look like John Cassavetes twenty years ago.”

“Who do I look like now?”

Janet Simon smiled grimly and stood up. Ellen Lang stood up, too, and this time Janet Simon didn't push her back down. They left.

I wrote
old friends
on the pad, drew a box around it, then tore off the sheet and threw it away.

Some notes.

I went out on the balcony and watched the street. After a few minutes they pulled out from beneath the building in a sky-blue Mustang convertible. Janet Simon was driving. It was the GT handling package. Great maneuverability. Tight in the curves. Without sacrificing a smooth ride.

I went back into my office, called the deli on the ground floor to order a pastrami on rye with Chinese hot mustard, and then I called Joe Pike.

A man's voice said, “Gun shop.”

“Give me Joe.”

The phone got put down on something hard. There were noises and words I couldn't understand, and then the phone got picked up again. “Pike.”

“We just had another complaint about your office. Woman goes in there, comes out, says what kind of office is that, empty, no phone, no desk? What could I tell her?”

“Tell her she likes the office so much she can live there.”

“It's a good thing we don't depend on you to sweet-talk the customers.”

“I don't do this for the customers.” Pike's voice was flat. No smile. No humor. Normal, for Pike.

“That'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.”

“Any heat?” Pike's only interest.

“We got through the interview with a minimum of gunshots.”

“You 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 card
receipts. 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 like
Charles 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 gets. Lot of mail. Maybe four days' worth.

I walked through the little courtyard past some more banana trees. Apartment 4 was all the way back on the left. That Janet. I knocked, but there was no answer. I walked back up to apartment 1, where a little sign on the door said MANAGER. A fat man built like a pear came around the mailboxes, started up the stairs, and saw me. Jo-Jo isn't here,” he said. “He's got the aerobics class on Tuesday.”

“Jo-Jo the manager?”

He nodded. “He'll be back around five or six. But I can tell you, there aren't any vacancies.”

“Maybe I could pitch a tent.”

He thought about that. “Oh, that was a joke.”

“You know Kimberly Marsh?” I said. “In number four.”

He said, “Number four,” and thought about it. “That the pretty blonde girl?”

“Yes.”

He shrugged. “You see her around, that's all. I said hi once and she said hi back, that's all.”

I took out the photograph of Mort. “You see this guy around with her?”

He squinted at me. “Mr. Suspicious I don't know who you are,” he said.

“Johnny Staccato, Confidential Investigations.”

He nodded and stared at the picture and rubbed his arm. “Well, I dunno,” he said. “Gee.” Gee.

I thanked him and walked around until I heard a door upstairs open and close. Then I walked back to number 4. I knocked again in case she had been in the shower, then took out two little tools I keep in my wallet and popped Kimberly Marsh's deadbolt lock. “Ms. Marsh?” Maybe she was taking a
nap. Maybe she just hadn't wanted to answer the door. Maybe she was waiting behind it with an ice pick she had dipped in rat poison.