The Monkey's Raincoat Read online

  “I don’t want to fuck with you, Mr. Rice. I just want to ask you about Morton Lang.”

  He looked past me at the door again, only this time he said, “Well, thank Christ! Where the hell you been?”

  The man in the doorway was a little taller than me and a lot wider, with the sort of squared-off shoulders boxers get. He wore a heavy Fu moustache, a little business under his lower lip, and a two-inch Afro that was thicker on top than on the sides. Not quite the Carl Lewis look. He was very, very black. He looked at me. He looked at Garrett Rice. “Nature call. You didn’t want me to mess the floor, right?”

  Rice said, “Throw this asshole outta here. C’mon.”

  The black guy looked back at me and sucked a tooth. “How ’bout that, Elvis? Think I oughta throw your ass outta here?”

  I sucked a tooth back at him. “She-it,” I said. “How’s it goin,’ Cleon?”

  Garrett Rice looked from Cleon Tyner to me and back to Cleon. “What the hell is this? ‘Cleon. Elvis. Howzitgoin?’ Throw the sonofabitch out, goddamnit!”

  Cleon said, “Unh-unh,” and let himself down in the chair opposite Rice’s desk. He wrapped one arm over the back of the chair so I could see his Smith. It was in a pretty, gray brushed-leather rig. Cleon was wearing dark blue designer jeans, a ruffled white tuxedo shirt, and a gray sharkskin jacket. The jacket was tight across his shoulders and biceps. “You’re looking good,” I said.

  He tried to give me modest. “Cut down on the grits. Dropped a few pounds. Workin’ out again. How’s Joe?”

  Garrett Rice said, “Hey, hey, this guy walks in here, he’s got a gun. Look right there, under his goddamned arm. He starts pumpin’ me, he won’t leave when I ask, he could be anybody, goddamnit, and you’re shootin’ the shit with him. What in hell I hire you for?” His forehead was damp.

  Cleon let out a long, deep breath and shifted forward in the chair. Rice jerked back an inch. Probably didn’t even know he’d done it. Cleon’s voice was polite. “I know this man, Mr. Rice. He won’t take muscle work. If he does decide to move on you now, why, then I’ll step in. That’s what I take the money for. But if all he wants to do is ask you about something or other, then you talk to him. That’s the smart thing.” Cleon gave me the sleepy eyes. “That’s all you wanna do, blood, is talk, am I right?”

  “Sure.”

  Cleon looked back at Rice. “There. You see. Why make somethin’ out of nothing?”

  Garrett Rice chewed his lip. He said, “I don’t know where Mort is, all right. I told you.”

  “You told me you saw him about a week ago. He say anything about leaving his wife?”

  “Look, it was a party, see? A social situation. We were meeting with a potential backer about this project of mine. Mort had some bimbo with him. An actress. It was good times, that’s all. Mort wouldn’t’ve brought up any shit about his wife.”

  “Kimberly Marsh?”

  “Yeah, I guess that was her name. The bitch was all over me. That’s the way it is, see? These bimbos find out you’re a producer, they’re all over you.” Talking about that brought him to life.

  “Sounds rewarding.”

  He leered and made a pistol with his fingers and shot me. I considered returning the gesture with my .38. Cleon picked his thumb, ignoring us. I said, “Can you think of anyone else Mort might’ve talked to?”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “You were friends.”

  “We had business.”

  “You played cards with them. Every week for almost a year.”

  “Hey, I’m everybody’s friend. You want me to be your friend? I’ll be your friend, too. I’ll even play cards with you. I’ll even lose, you want me to.”

  I looked at Cleon. He shrugged. “It’s a gig, man.”

  “Not what you call your quality employment.”

  “Is it ever?”

  I stood up. Cleon shifted, rolling the big shoulders. “Leaving,” I said. Cleon nodded but stayed forward. Cleon knew the moves. I looked back at Garrett. “I like the bruises. They go with the liver spots.”

  “Some asshole thought I stole his script. That happens, this business.”

  “Must be some asshole, you hiring on Cleon.”

  “Man just dig quality, bro, that’s all.”

  I nodded. Garrett Rice gnawed at his lip.

  I said, “This has been disappointing, Garrett. I bucked rush hour for this.”

  “Tough.”

  I said, “I see Ellen Lang, I’ll give her your best.”

  “Tell her Mort’s an asshole.”

  “She might agree.”

  “She’s an asshole, too. So are you.”

  I looked at Cleon. There was a little smile to his eye, but you’d never know it unless you knew him well.

  I went out along the cement walk and down the metal stairs and took the long walk back to my car. I drove to Studio City to pick up eggplant parmesan and an antipasto from a place called Sonny’s and a six-pack of Wheat beer from the liquor store next door. By the time I got out of Sonny’s, the sky was a deep purple, coal red in the west behind black palm-tree cutouts. I drove south on Laurel Canyon, up the hill toward home.

  I had very much wanted to turn up some good news for Ellen Lang. But good news, like magic, is sometimes in short supply.

  4

  It was eight o’clock when I pulled into the carport. I put the eggplant in the microwave to reheat and ate the antipasto while I waited. Oily. Sonny’s had gone downhill. The little metal hatch I’d built into the door off the kitchen clattered and the cat walked in. He’s black and he walks with his head sort of cocked to the side because someone once shot him with a .22. I poured a little of the Wheat beer in a saucer and put out some cat food. He drank the beer first then ate the cat food then looked at me for more beer. He was purring. “Forget it,” I said. The purring stopped and he walked away.

  When the eggplant was ready I carried it and the beer and the cordless phone out onto the deck. The rich black of the canyon was dotted with jack-o’-lantern lit houses, orange and white and yellow and red in the night. Where the canyon flattened out into Hollywood and the basin beyond, the lights concentrated into thousands of blue-white diamonds spilled over the earth. I liked that.

  I’m in a rustic A-frame on a little road off Woodrow Wilson Drive above Hollywood. The only other house is a cantilevered job to my east. A stuntman I know lives there with his girlfriend and their two little boys. Sometimes during the day they come out on their deck and we’ll see each other and wave. The boys call my place the teepee house. I like that, too.

  When I bought the house four years ago I tore off the deck railing and rebuilt it so the center section was detachable. I detached it now, and sat on the edge of the deck with my feet hanging down, eggplant in my lap, and nothing between me and Out There. The chill air felt good. After a while the cat came out and stared at me. “Okay,” I said. I poured some more of the Wheat beer on the deck. He blinked, then lapped at it.

  When the eggplant was gone I called the answering machine at my office. There were three messages from Ellen Lang and one from Janet Simon Ellen Lang sounded scared in the first two and teary in the third. Janet Simon sounded like Janet Simon. I called Ellen Lang. Janet Simon answered. It works like that sometimes.

  “Mort came back and tore up the house. Could you come over here?”

  “Is she okay?”

  “He was gone when she got here. I made her call the police but now she’s saying she won’t let them in the house.”

  “Want me to pistol-whip her?”

  “Don’t you ever let up?”

  Apparently not. It took me eighteen minutes to push the Corvette down the valley side of Laurel, up onto the freeway, and over to Encino. Ellen Lang lived in the flat part above Ventura Boulevard in what’s called a sprawling California Tudor by realtors and Encino Baroque by people with taste. Janet Simon’s pale blue Mustang was on the street in front of the house. I pulled into the drive behind a Subaru
wagon, cut the engine, and went up to the door. It opened before I could knock. Ellen Lang was pinched and thin behind her glasses, more so than this morning. She said, “I called you. I called and called and you weren’t there. I came to you so the police wouldn’t get involved and now they are.”

  Janet said, “Oh, for God’s sake, Ellen.”

  I had one of those dull aches you get behind the eyes when your beer drinking is interrupted.

  Ellen Lang said, “Well, it’s Mort’s house, isn’t it? He can do what he wants here, can’t he? Can’t we call the police back and tell them it was a mistake?”

  I followed them like that into the living room.

  Every large piece of furniture had been turned over and the bottom cloth ripped away. Books had been pulled off the shelves and cabinets thrown open. The back was off the television. A palm had been worked out of its heavy brass pot, scattering dirt over the beige carpet. The Zenith console stereo was turned on its face and about two hundred record albums spilled out on the floor. One of those large ceramic greyhounds you see in department stores was cracked open on the hearth, its head intact but lying on the carpet upside down. It looked asleep.

  Some mistake.

  “How long ago did you call?” I said to Ellen Lang.

  Janet Simon answered. “About forty-five minutes. She told them it wasn’t an emergency.”

  “If you had they’d have been here forty minutes ago. As it is, they’ve called it out to a radio car. They’ll be here any time.”

  Ellen Lang crossed her arms in the keep-me-warm posture and began nibbling the side of her mouth. Every light in the house was on, as if Janet or Ellen had gone through, making a point of driving out as much darkness as possible. There was a little night-light behind a wingback chair beside the fireplace. Even it glowed.

  “He leave a note?” I said.

  She shook her head.

  “Take any clothes for the boy?”

  Shook her head again.

  “Take anything else?”

  She squinted and did something funny with her mouth, blowing air out the corners while keeping the lips together. “I checked my things. I checked the silver. The Neil Diamond records are still here. Mort loves Neil Diamond.”

  “This is A-plus help you’re giving me, Mrs. Lang.”

  She looked at me like I was fading out and tough to see. “Mort isn’t a thief. If he took anything of his, that isn’t thievery, is it? He paid for it, didn’t he? He paid for all this and that gives him some rights, doesn’t it?” She said that to Janet Simon.

  Janet Simon reached a cigarette out of a little blue purse, tamped it, fired up, and pulled enough smoke into her chest to fill the Goodyear blimp. “When are you going to wake up?” she said.

  I left them to it and went down the hall. There was a door on the left, closed, with the sounds of running water. “That’s the bathroom,” Janet Simon called. “The girls are in there.” The girls’ bedroom was just past the bath but on the right. It was pink and white and had twin canopy beds and probably used to be quite nice. Now, the mattresses were half on and half off and one of the box springs had been turned upside down. There was a dresser and a chest, but all the drawers were out and the clothes were scattered on the floor. Bruce Springsteen was on the closet door, which spoke highly for at least one of the girls. Clothes hung neatly on the crossbar even though the closet floor had been trashed. Just outside the closet, there were two three-ring binders and two stacks of schoolbooks. The binders and the dust covers on the books were covered with doodles and designs and words. Cindy loves Frank. B.T. + C.L. Robby Robby Robby, I want you for my hobby. BOOK YOU. I found a folded piece of three-hole paper in Cindy Lang’s geography book with a message written on it in pencil. The message was ELAM FREID BITES THE BIG ONE!!!!! I wondered if Elam Freid knew that. I wondered how much he’d pay to find out.

  I went to the boy’s room next. It was smaller than the girls’, with a single bed and a dresser and a big oak chest. The chest was turned over and the dresser was on its side and the mattress and box springs leaned drunkenly against the wall. I had wanted to go over the boy’s room. I had wanted to read his diary and sift through his comics and peek under his mattress. I had wanted to go through the wads of paper in his trash and page through his notebooks and study the drawings that he made and pinned to the wall. A week before they left, maybe Mort had said something to the boy and the boy had left a clue. All of that was gone. There was only a big mess here that made me hope the boy wouldn’t suddenly come through the front door, run back here, and see it.

  The master bedroom was at the back of the house looking out on the pool through some nice French doors. It smelled of Anaïs Anaïs. I pulled the bolts at the top of each French door and ran my fingers along the stiles. They hadn’t been jimmied. There was a kingsize platform bed, a dresser, a chest, and a desk, and all of it was torn up pretty much like the others. They had one of those sliding wall closets with the mirrored hanging doors. The left half was Ellen and the right Mort. Boxes and shoe bags and a Minolta camera case and a larger box that said Bekins had been tossed out to the center of the room. Mort had some nice pants and some nice shirts and half a dozen pair of Bally shoes. There was a tan Nino Cerruti shirt I liked a lot hanging beside three dark gray Sy Devore suit bags and two from Carroll’s in Westwood. A lot of clothes to leave behind, but maybe Mort traveled light.

  A collection of family pictures hung over the bed. The kids. Mort and the kids. Ellen. Mort and Ellen. Mort didn’t seem to be playing favorites. The nicest had Mort in the pool with the younger girl on his shoulders and Perry and the older girl in his arms. Nothing looked wrong in those pictures. Mort didn’t look crazy. Ellen didn’t look small. Nothing ever looks wrong in the pictures. Everything always goes wrong when the camera’s turned away.

  The bathroom door was still closed, the water was still running, Janet Simon was still smoking, Ellen Lang was still standing with her arms crossed, cold. I went into the kitchen. Every cupboard had been emptied, every bag of sugar and rice and flour and box of cereal spilled. The grill had been pulled off the bottom of the refrigerator and the stove had been dragged away from the wall, scarring the vinyl with ragged furrows. I found a bottle of Extra Strength Bayer aspirin in a mound of Corn Chex, ate three, then went back out into the living room.

  Janet Simon gave me frozen eyes. Ellen Lang watched the floor. I cleared my throat. “Someone was looking for something and someone knew where someone else might want to hide it,” I said. “This was professional. Mort didn’t do this. You’re going to need the police.” Stating the obvious is something I do well.

  Ellen Lang said, “No.” Softly.

  Janet Simon crushed out her cigarette and said, “Yes.” Firmly.

  I took a deep breath and smiled sweetly. “I’m going to check around outside,” I said.

  It was either that, or hit them with a chair.

  5

  I went out to the Corvette and got the big five-cell I keep in the trunk. I looked for jimmy marks on the front door lock stile and the doorjamb, but didn’t find any. Three bay windows at the front of the house overlooked a flower bed with azaleas and snapdragons. The windows weren’t jimmied and the flowers weren’t trampled. I walked around the north side of the house and there were four more windows, two and a space and then two more, each still locked on the inside. I let myself through a wooden gate and walked the back of the house past a little beaded bathroom window to the pool. No openings punched in the wall, no sliding door off its track, no circular holes cut into glass. No one slugged me with a ball peen hammer and disappeared into the night.

  I stopped by the pool and listened. Motor sounds from the freeway to the south. Water gurgling through pipes to the little bathroom. Somewhere a radio going, Tina Turner coughing out What’s Love Got to Do With It?. Through the glass doors, I could see Ellen and Janet in the living room, Ellen with her arms squeezed across her chest, Janet making an explanatory gesture with her cigarette, Ellen shak
ing her head, Janet looking disgusted. I thought of great teams from the past: Burns and Allen, Bergen and McCarthy, Heckle and Jeckle. I took a deep breath, smelled jasmine, and kept going.

  On the south side of the house it was the same thing. No footprints beneath the windows. No jimmy marks. No sign of forced entry. That meant a key or a lock pick. Maybe Mort had hired somebody to go in there and given them his key. But if so, what could he have wanted? Stock certificates? Negotiable bonds? Nudie shots he was scared Ellen would show their friends?

  I went back out to the front just as a black and white pulled up. They pegged me with their spotlight and told me not to move.

  “Should I grab sky?” I said.

  The same voice came back, “Just stand there, shithead.” Service with a smile.

  One of the cops came forward with his hand on his gun. The other stayed behind the light. You can never see what they’re doing behind those lights, which is why they stay there. The cop who came out was about my height but thicker in the butt and legs. It didn’t detract from his presence. His name tag read SIMMS.

  I spread my arms, careful not to point the five-cell in their direction. “White pants and jacket. The latest in cat burglar apparel.”

  Simms said, “Little man, I’ve cuffed’m that went out in red tights. Let’s see some ID.”

  “I’m Cole. I work for the owner. Private investigator. There’s a Dan Wesson .38 under my left arm.”

  He said okay, told me he was going to reach under and take the gun, then did it. “Now the paper,” he said.

  I produced the PI license and the license to carry, and watched him read them. “Elvis. This some kind of bullshit or what?”

  “After my mother.”

  He looked at me the way cops look at you when they’re thinking about trying you out, then gave me the benefit of the doubt. “Guess you take some riding about that.”

  “My brother Edna had it worse.”

  He thought about it again, figured I wasn’t worth the paperwork and handed back the gun. “Okay. We got a B&E call.” The other cop came around and joined us but left the spotlight on. I clicked off the five-cell.