“In case you’re not getting this, I’m a little concerned,” Letty said.
“So am I—but I’m not freaking out,” Lucas said. “I’ve still got some lines out on this Pilate character and we’ll see what we see. When she finds Henry, she’ll call back and we’ll see what she has to say then.”
“All right. Well, I’ve got things to do today. I’m hooking up with Carey and Jeff, we’re going over to the U to hang out.”
“Don’t worry too much,” Lucas said. He held up a tie: “What do you think?”
“I would never advise you on ties, any more than Mom would,” Letty said. “You’re better at it than we are.”
“That’s true,” Lucas said. He looked in his tie drawer, then settled on his original choice. “I’ll call if anything comes in on Henry. Or on Pilate.”
? ? ?
LETTY LEFT, and Lucas stood in front of the mirror to tie his necktie. As he did it, he mused on what he’d almost said to her. He’d almost said, “Take your phone with you.” Of course she’d take her phone with her. She was never more than fifteen feet from it. She’d eventually have it epoxied to the palm of her hand.
Not necessarily a bad thing, he thought. Women had been on the verge of taking over the world—the Western world, anyway. Then some sexist pig in Silicon Valley invented the cell phone and women took a sidetrack on which all four billion of them would soon be happily talking to each other twenty-four hours a day, getting nothing else done, and Men Would Be Back.
He whistled a few bars from Lyle Lovett’s “Don’t Touch My Hat,” and checked himself in the mirror. He looked terrific. Not that any women would notice: they’d be too busy talking to each other on their fucking cell phones.
? ? ?
WHEN LUCAS GOT TO the office, a few minutes after eleven o’clock, he had a voice mail from the South Dakota cop: they’d been through a full shift cycle with the patrol, all officers had been queried about Pilate’s caravan, and there’d been no responses. “If I hear anything, I’ll call you.”
He also had an e-mail note from the L.A. cop, Lewis Hall: “Call me.”
The e-mail had come in at ten, eight o’clock L.A. time, so Hall had been up early. Lucas called him back.
“Listen, I talked to some of the rough trade down in Venice last night, and your boy Pilate could be a problem,” Hall said. “I may even owe you. I talked to a guy who’s been around the beach for twenty years, runs a massage place. He says there was a rumor that Pilate knows about the Kitty Place murder. I don’t know if you heard about that . . .”
“I heard something, I don’t know the details,” Lucas said.
“Kitty was an entertainer . . . I don’t know what you’d say, not a hooker, or anything, she’d get small parts in movies, she had lines, now and then, she had a SAG card and she was doing some stand-up work. She had an apartment down on Main Street in Santa Monica.”
“What’s a SAG card?”
“She was in the Screen Actors Guild. Sort of a big deal out here, getting a card. Means you’re recognized as a human being. Anyway, she was putting that kind of life together. Then one day about a year ago, she turned up dead. Found her floating in the water off Marina Del Rey. She’d been slashed to pieces: tortured with a knife, raped. Pretty goddamn awful, even for L.A.”
“DNA?”
“No. She’d been in the water for a while, so we never got good DNA, and we never got a whiff of who might’ve done it. No current boyfriend. Her former boyfriend seemed like a decent guy and he had a solid alibi, he was playing trumpet up in Vegas all through that period. I was talking to my boy Ruben last night and he mentioned that some time, some fairly long time, after the body came up, he heard that some people thought she might’ve been tied up with this Pilate. I talked to the homicide guys this morning, and nobody had ever mentioned Pilate to them.”
“Does Ruben know where Pilate used to hang? Or who he’d hang with?” Lucas asked. “If I could get car tags, we could probably run him down. He was supposedly in Sturgis, South Dakota, at the biker rally last week, probably heading east. The trouble is, we don’t have any solid ID, no solid photo, no real history, nothing we can use to get our hands on him. He claims he’s been in the movies. You think he’d have a SAG card?”
“I could check. I got the impression from Ruben . . . and I’m not sure how much Ruben really knows, he tends to talk bigger than he is . . . but I got the impression that Pilate’s a street guy. Moves around a lot, lives here and there, and sometimes out of his car, sells a little weed. Ruben thinks he had a girlfriend named K—like the letter K—and she might still be around. I’ll try to run her down today.”
“I’d appreciate anything you could get me,” Lucas said.
“Not just for you, anymore. Kitty Place was a very pretty blonde, the vulnerable-looking kind, and a really nice girl. When she got all slashed up, the shit hit the media fan around here. The homicide guys want me to push it—they’d give their left nuts for a break. A good break wouldn’t do me any harm, either.”
“All right. Call me if you hear anything, and if I get anything, I’ll call you.”
“Talk to ya,” Hall said.
? ? ?
DEL CAPSLOCK LIMPED IN the door, carrying his cane. Lucas said, “Good thing you got that cane to hold you up.”
“It’s become a . . . shit, I was about to say ‘crutch.’” He sat down and said, “I talked to Honey Potts. She’s interested. I talked to Daisy Jones. She’s interested, too. I told Honey that we’d fix up a letter saying that we wouldn’t prosecute if she changed her story, and remembered something different, as long as she didn’t perjure herself.”