over it.”
“Who had the heart attack was the guy in this job before me, and it was the nun chewin’ him out that gave it to him.”
Stooping, Ethan extracted a white plastic bag from under the gurney that had held Dunny’s body. The bag featured drawstrings, to one of which had been tied a tag that bore the name DUNCAN EUGENE WHISTLER, his date of birth, and his social-security number.
With a wheeze of panic in his voice, Toledano said, “That held the clothes he was wearing when he was admitted to the hospital.”
Now the bag proved empty. Ethan put it on top of the gurney. “Ever since the old lady woke up fifteen years ago, you double-check the doctors?”
“Triple-check, quadruple-check,” Toledano declared. “First thing a deader comes in here, I stethoscope him, listen for heart and lung action. Use the diaphragm side to hear high-pitched sounds, bell side for low-pitched.” He nodded continually, as though while he talked he were mentally reviewing a checklist of steps he’d taken on receipt of Dunny’s body. “Do a mirror test for breath. Then establish internal body temp, take it again a half-hour later, then a half-hour after that, to see is it dropping like it should if what you’ve got is really a deader.”
Pomp found this amusing. “Internal temperature? You mean you spend your time shovin’ thermometers up dead people’s butts?”
Unamused, Jose said, “Have some respect,” and crossed himself.
Ethan’s palms were damp. He blotted them on his shirt. “Well, if nobody could get in here to take him, and if he was dead—where is he now?”
“Probably one of the sisters jerking your chain,” Pomp told the morgue attendant. “Those nuns are jokers.”
Cold air, snow-white ceramic tile, stainless-steel drawer fronts glistening like ice: None of it accounted for the depth of Ethan’s chill.
He suspected that the subtle scent of death had saturated his clothing.
Places like this had never in the past disturbed him. He was disturbed now.
In the space labeled Next of Kin or Responsible Party, the hospital paperwork listed Ethan’s name and telephone numbers; nevertheless, he gave the harried attendant a card with the same information.
Ascending in the elevator, he half listened to one of Barenaked Ladies’ best songs reduced to nap music.
He went all the way up to the seventh floor, where Dunny had died. When the elevator doors opened, he realized that he had needed to go only as high as the garage on the first subterranean level, where he’d parked the Expedition, just two floors above the garden room.
After pressing the button for the main garage level, he rode up to the fifteenth floor before the cab started down again. People got on the elevator, got off, but Ethan hardly noticed them.
His racing mind took him elsewhere. The incident at Reynerd’s apartment. Dead Dunny’s disappearance.
Badgeless, Ethan nonetheless retained a cop’s intuition. He understood that two such extraordinary events, occurring in the same morning, could not be coincidental.
The power of intuition alone, however, wasn’t sufficient to suggest the nature of the link between these uncanny occurrences. He might as well try to perform brain surgery by intuition.
Logic didn’t offer immediate answers, either. In this case, even Sherlock Holmes might have despaired at the odds of discovering the truth through deductive reasoning.
In the garage, an arriving car traveled the rows in search of a parking space, turned a corner onto a down ramp, and another car came up out of the concrete abyss, behind headlights, like a deep-salvage submersible ascending from an ocean trench, and drove toward the exit, but Ethan alone was on foot.
Mottled by years of sooty exhaust fumes that formed enigmatic and taunting Rorschach blots, the low gray ceiling appeared to press lower, lower, as he walked farther into the garage. Like the hull of a submarine, the walls seemed barely able to hold back a devastating weight of sea, a crushing pressure.
Step by step, Ethan expected to discover that he wasn’t after all alone on foot. Beyond each SUV, behind every concrete column, an old friend might wait, his condition mysterious and his purpose unknowable.
Ethan reached the Expedition without incident.
No one waited for him in the vehicle.
Behind the steering wheel, even before he started the engine, he locked the doors.
THE ARMENIAN RESTAURANT ON PICO boulevard had the atmosphere of a Jewish delicatessen, a menu featuring food so delicious that it would inspire a condemned man to smile through his last meal, and more plainclothes cops and film-industry types together in one place than you would find anywhere outside of the courtroom devoted to the trial of the latest spouse-murdering celebrity.
When Ethan arrived, Hazard Yancy waited in a booth by a window. Even seated, he loomed so large that he would have been well advised to audition for the title role in The Incredible Hulk if Hollywood ever made a black version.
Hazard had already been served a double order of the kibby appetizer with cucumbers, tomatoes, and pickled turnip on the side.
As Ethan sat across the table from the big detective, Hazard said, “Somebody told me they saw in the news your boss got twenty-seven million bucks for his last two movies.”
“Twenty-seven million each. He’s the first to break through the twenty-five-million ceiling.”
“Up from poverty,” Hazard said.
“Plus he’s got a piece of the back end.”
“That kind of money, he can get a piece of anybody’s back end he wants.”
“It’s an industry phrase. Means if the picture is a big hit, he gets a share of the profits, sometimes even a percentage of gross.”
“How much might that amount to?”
“According to Daily Variety, he’s had worldwide hits so big he sometimes walks away with fifty million, thereabouts.”
“You read the show-biz press now?” Hazard asked.
“Helps me stay aware of how big a target he’s making himself.”
“You got your work cut out for you, all right. How many movies does the man do a year?”
“Never fewer than two. Sometimes three.”
“I was planning to chow down so much on his dime, Mr. Channing Manheim himself would notice, and you’d get fired for abusing your credit-card privileges.”
“Even you can’t eat a hundred thousand bucks’ worth of kibby.”
Hazard shook his head. “Chan the Man. Maybe I’m not hip anymore, but
