Timothy Hallinan - The four last things

I was just beginning to like her when she got killed. One of the interesting things about surveillance-make that the only interesting thing about surveillance-is the relationship between watcher and watched. Study the outside of anybody's life long enough and you'll develop some sort of emotional reaction. Sometimes you feel like an entomologist looking at a particularly loathsome new insect; you wish you could do it from farther away. Sometimes you fall in love.

I wasn't in love with Sally Oldfield yet, but I knew I'd like to get closer than across the street.

Sarah Marie Theresa Oldfield, nee Murphy, thirty-two years old, married. Light brown hair, gray eyes, tiny hands and feet, skin with a natural golden cast to it. Big thick horn-rimmed glasses that she wore on top of her head when driving. Farsighted. The cleanest automobile I'd ever broken into. You could have performed brain surgery on the front seat. Ms. Oldfield also had a quick, broad smile, sturdy runner's calves, and an utterly guileless demeanor.

A thief and a spy, according to the man who had hired me. A dangerous drain on the precious capital of Monument Records. He obviously expected me to break out in a cold sweat when he uttered those accusations. I didn't, but I worked up a sympathetic shiver when it became apparent that the man was willing to pay about twice my usual fee.

I don't like surveillance. I didn't like him, either. Nevertheless, I picked her up at lunch time on the first day right where he said I would, just outside the Monument Records building on Gower.

Even in Hollywood, which has the same relationship to architecture that the radioactive bug movies of the fifties have to biology, the Monument Records building is a standout. To the best of my knowledge it's the only structure ever built intentionally to look like a stack of records. With a stylus on top. It was built to suggest forty-fives back before the era of the LP; now that forty-fives are no-tech, they're talking about chrome-plating it and rededicating it to CD's.

One-ten on a glum, gray November afternoon. I was stopped in a no-stopping zone and trying to blend in with all the other illegally parked cars when the first few raindrops took the big jump and splattered on Alice's dusty windshield. The dust was Alice's camouflage: she's a dumped, vintage Buick painted horsefly metallic blue. I'd removed the furry dice that had dangled from the rearview mirror the night I won her at a game of poker in a garage somewhere in Pacoima, but otherwise she was still Jaime's dream of heaven on wheels. Jaime was the guy I won her from. I'd never seen him again, but I had Alice to remember him by.

Rain always catches Californians by surprise, even when it's been gray for days. There was the usual sidewalk scurrying in anticipation of Noah's flood. People looked at the sky disbelievingly. The weatherman had said it might rain, so everyone was sure it wouldn't. In L.A., where the weather is the same three hundred and fifty-five days a year, the weatherman is right about fifteen percent of the time, roughly the same average as the handicappers at Santa Anita, astrologers, and the guys who predict lower gasoline prices. Faith in the U.S. Meteorological Service does not run high in Los Angeles. Astrologers, on the other hand, do a boom business.

In all the hubbub, I almost missed her. A bunch of people rushed into the stucco entrance to Monument Records as another bunch of people rushed out. In the day of the forty-minute lunch hour and the fifty-minute psychiatrist's hour, the hungry and the disturbed do not dawdle. There was some milling around and a few collisions, and Neil Diamond managed to escape from Alice's radio. I looked down to change the station. When I looked back up, Sally Oldfield was crossing the street.

She walked fast. She was wearing a bright print dress and as the rain increased she glanced up and laughed. Everybody was standing in doorways looking like bums, except for the real bums, who were using the shower to get clean. She bounced down the sidewalk alone, happy, and wet.

When she turned the corner onto Fountain, I pulled Alice out into traffic and followed. The light at Gower and Fountain was red. It's always red, no matter which street you're on. I sat there muttering at it, and she darted across Fountain and jumped into a white late-model Corvette with a man in it. The car pulled away from the curb, fishtailed on the wet asphalt, and sped down the block. I looked both ways carefully, like they tell you to do in driving school, and ran the light.

She surprised me twice the first day. Surprise number one was the little white car's destination: a run-down hot-bed motel on one of the worst blocks of Sunset, and Sunset has a lot of bad blocks. At least four colors and three sexes of wet hookers squinted into the rain, trying to catch a glimmer of interest behind the busy windshield wipers. Nobody was buying.

The white sports car was already parked when I hit the first speed bump in the motel parking lot. Sarah Marie Theresa Oldfield was halfway up the stairs, followed by a slender, well-dressed man with blow-dried blond hair. No check-in for them; they already had a key.

After the door closed behind them I went upstairs and checked the room number: 207. Getting progressively wetter and feeling progressively sillier, I went back downstairs to note the number of the sports car's license plate and take a look inside. Nothing of interest but the fullest ashtray this side of Philip Morris corporate headquarters. Then I dodged wet traffic to get to a phone booth on the north side of Sunset and called the number I'd been given.

"Harker," Ambrose Harker said. The guy didn't waste a lot of energy on charm.

"And a good afternoon to you too," I said. "It's raining. The old dog is snoring."

"I don't know what you mean," he said. He said that a lot, I'd noticed.

"It's code," I said. "If you had your one-time pad with you, you'd know that it means she's in the Sleepy Bear Motel, 1589 Sunset, in room 207, with a light-haired guy who drives a white eighty-six Corvette, license number 1LBS004. Why do you suppose they don't start license plates with zero? It'd give them another twenty-six trillion numbers to play with."

He didn't say anything.

"I've got a lot of interesting questions," I said. "Would you like to hear some more?"

"No. What does the man look like?"

"He has a very good haircut on the back of his head."

"That's amusing," Harker said in the tone of voice of a man who hadn't laughed since the day the hogs ate grandma. "Is that your entire description?"

"Until he turns around. I could tell you that he moves with an easy, athletic grace or that he has a port-wine birthmark covering the left side of his face, or that his knuckles scrape the ground, but none of it would be true."

"When will he turn around?" Harker said patiently.

"Most likely when he comes down the stairs. Graceful or not, he'll probably come down facing front."

"Call when he does," Harker said.

"When they split up, who do you want me to follow?"

"Who were you hired to follow?" Harker asked. Then he hung up.

I was debating whether to call him back and blow the whole thing off when I saw the bum. He was standing outside the door, waiting to get into the booth and away from the rain. I hung up the phone, fingered the coin return out of habit, and came up with a quarter. I gave it to the bum as I came out. He looked at it as if it were a button.

"Get a cup of coffee," I said.

"You can't get a cup with a quarter," he said sullenly through all four of his teeth.

"Then get a saucer."

He mumbled something unpleasant and I reached out and took the quarter back. Slowly he looked down at his dirty, empty hand and then back up to me.