Truck Shot
A Stoney Winston Mystery
by
Jim Stinson

Truck Shot
Copyright 2012 by Jim Stinson
ISBN 9781476353029
Published at Smashwords
(Hard cover edition originally published by Charles Scribner’s Corrected and reformatted text, August 2012
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Truck Shot
A Stoney Winston Mystery
by
Jim Stinson
Ah, the romantic, primitive 1980s! No Internet, Facebook, or Twitter. Telephones tied to the wall. Music on vinyl or flimsy cassettes - and don’t even start on the fashions! Hollywood wandered in the desert between the lush studio days that were gone and our flush modern times full of cable and Netflix. Work for film people was scarce in those days, and Stoney Winston just barely scraped by. If the 1980s were romantic, Stoney was far too busy surviving to notice.... 
Chapter 1
Film making is always nine parts boredom, but staring for hours at a pregnant goldfish was threatening to push tedium across the threshold of pain.
“It still goes out of focus.” The cameraman sounded irritated.
“Reduce the width it has to swim in.” At my suggestion, two of my film students reached into the water, grasped the vertical glass plate confining the fish to the front half of the tank, and shoved the panel farther forward.
The cameraman peered through the viewfinder of the ancient Bolex camera, then mumbled a grudging “Better. Can we shoot the damn thing? I’m going to lose the light.”
George DeGrasse, the official fish wrangler, sighed theatrically and stared at the ceiling. “Not ‘til it starts spawning, Deidre.”
In fact we had ample light, even on this October Sunday, because the painting classroom we’d appropriated had a wall of windows - handy for lighting a fish without poaching it in its tank.
Deidre the cameraman wrinkled her big nose until it looked like a withered turnip. “Are you real sure it’s pregnant?”
Wrangler George peered doubtfully at his performer. “The store clerk said it was hot to pop.”
Deidre sneered at this simple faith. “And it’s going to lay its eggs center stage and right on cue. Sure.”
The four shabby students in my film workshop sighed and muttered as they watched another Sunday go down the tubes. They often pursued this class project on Sundays because those were the only days not pre empted by illustration, still photography, fashion, or industrial design. Angeles Commercial Design College tried to conceal its mediocrity by working the students so hard they wouldn’t notice.
“Mr. Winston?”
I wasn’t ten years senior to my oldest student, but I’d grown resigned to being viewed as a geezer in a late stage of decay. I just said gently, “Stoney, Bob.”
Bob studied me anxiously, as he studied everything in life. He was a three shave a day man, and now at two p.m., his thin cheeks were shaded blue black. “Stoney, we gotta finish the fish this week. We have to shoot my wife too, and I don’t know how long she’ll last.”
“Mm.” I secretly hoped she wouldn’t “last,” because Bob’s wife was as pregnant as the fish and rather bigger, and he wanted to film her in the nude. I didn’t mind. I think advanced pregnancy is a highly attractive condition - possibly because I won’t have to go through it - but I couldn’t answer for the alumni, trustees, and film industry biggies who were supposed to inspect the class film at the college’s awards night.
Whatever my doubts, Bob was determined to make what he called “my statement.” He continued doggedly, “And I still don’t have permission from the cemetery.”
Cemetery?
Aw hell, the situation was my fault. In this, the school’s purely token film course, the twenty minute class production was a collective effort; and in my inexperience as a teacher, I’d given my students a free hand in writing the script. “Creation” had seemed a harmless concept; but now I was stuck with a soggy pudding of clichés about birth and copulation and death, complete with T. S. Eliot on the sound track. On top of that, the class had voted Bob director and he was slower than a refund check. Something told me this fill-in job would soon go the way of all my others.
George DeGrasse yelled, “Here come the eggs, here come the eggs!”
In fact the goldfish was sculling gently, a faraway look in its eye. It extruded a thin, tan tendril.
“It’s just taking a dump.” Deidre, whose elfin name was contradicted by 170 pounds of bone and muscle, straightened to her six foot height.
Bob looked defensive. “I can’t help it if the fish has to...”
But then the room exploded. With a stunning sound concussion, the floor bucked, stacked easels lurched and clattered, windows crackled, and shattered glass flew like vicious sleet.
The fish water heaved and slopped as the table buckled under the tank. Deidre grabbed the aquarium before the table disintegrated, but she couldn’t hold a hundred pounds of water, glass, and panicked goldfish. She crashed to the floor on top of it.
Bob ducked and covered his head as a tall cabinet collapsed and painting supplies rained down on him. George DeGrasse stood frozen, staring blankly at an arrow of glass that dangled from his shirt sleeve half an inch from flesh. Always a cameraman, I grabbed the Bolex as reflexively as a mother snatches up her baby, then stumbled and collapsed heavily on Connie Roderick. I shouted, “Connie, you okay?”
“I dunno.” At 97 pounds, dripping wet, Connie had no upholstery to protect her. She paused to take internal inventory, then cocked her head and listened. “It’s over. Was that like an earthquake?”
No, the sound was not the groaning rumble of tortured earth, but the instant, deafening bang of an explosion.
The class crouched or sprawled in a dying fall of rattles, creaks, and tinkles; dust floated in the sunlight, thick as plankton; and the goldfish paddled in its half full tank. The returning silence was eerily resonant.
Deidre stood up, absently rubbing a breast that had smacked the aquarium rim. The front of her bib overalls was soaked with fish water. “Well shit,” she said, without special rancor. The other students simply sat or stood, half shell shocked but unhurt.
I struggled to my feet. “Guess we’re okay, folks, but we better look for others.”
“What others on Sunday?” Connie Roderick struggled upright, brushing at her long, slim body. “We wouldn’t be here if Deidre didn’t have a key.” My enterprising students seemed to have keys to half the school.
“At least let’s check the damage.” We trotted out into the second floor corridor.
The gloomy hall and stairwell of the old wood building were now trashed with student art work sprung from walls or belched from glass display cases. The debris thickened as we reached the ground floor and picked our way toward the west wing of the building. The south wall of the musty corridor was varicose with puffy cracks and one classroom door had been blasted off its hinges. We crowded through the opening and into the ceramics studio.
The classroom looked bombed out: windows shattered, walls blackened, stools and tables smashed to kindling, pieces of equipment blown to bits. The plaster ceiling was shattered in places, exposing thick, old fashioned beams above it.
A yellow flame whooshed from a ruptured pipe that twisted off the wall as if in agony. While Deidre pounded into the hall for a fire extinguisher, I traced the pipe to a shutoff valve near the baseboard and twisted it closed. Deidre lugged in an obsolete brass extinguisher, flipped it upside down, and doused the flaming paint below the pipe end. George DeGrasse picked daintily through scraps of smashed equipment, looking still half dazed, and Connie floated in from a telephone to report that she’d called the fire department.
The east wall had been half punched out, exposing part of the room beyond. I could see nothing but a blank oak panel canted forward, so I ran out into the hall and yanked at the next door over.
It opened on the inner office of Benjamin Millard, the college’s president. The carpet was littered with fallen books, shards of glass, and smashed frames holding the remains of citations and awards. A massive oak conference table lay crippled where the blast had negligently tossed it and a matching bookcase had vomited its contents onto the desk even as it slammed down on top of them.
Not quite on them. President Millard had apparently been sitting at the desk and now his upper body lay mashed beneath the bookcase, one cheek pasted to the blotter, skull crushed by two hundred pounds of blast driven oak that had hit him like a wrecking ball. Blood meandered down his half-bald scalp and soaked his tweedy collar. Millard’s lumpy face lay toward me, blank eyes open, bloody mouth still peevish, as if death were just another stupid interruption.
My students crowded in behind me. Connie’s thin face went white and she shrank against the wall.
“George!” Waving him forward, Deidre ran to the desk and grabbed one side of the bookcase. George took the other and they heaved the brutal oaken mass over on its side. The crash made us all wince.
While Deidre looked on grimly, I made myself walk up to Millard’s body. His punched-in skull resembled a half inflated ball. I pressed reluctant fingers to the side of his throat. Nothing.
I considered moving him - at least so he wouldn’t remind us of a squashed insect - but the sirens keening up the long school drive dissuaded me. Millard was quite evidently dead, and those who’d need to deal with him would want him undisturbed.
* * * *
For the next two hours, the half-wrecked building was trampled even flatter by officious functionaries who poked at this, turned over that, made notes on clip boards, muttered into walkie talkies, and answered endless pages from their belt clipped beepers. This herd of investigators grilled us relentlessly: whom we’d seen? No one. What had happened? Obvious, up to a point. Why were we there on Sunday? Ad lib tap dance by S. Winston. Then the stampede disappeared over the horizon, leaving only an insurance company bureaucrat who wanted to ask just a few more questions, purely routine, you understand. The class and I waited our turns with his inquisition in the lunch room, a depressing assemblage of recycled banquet tables, scuffed folding chairs, and vending machines that lurched along one grimy wall. By now my students had all been dismissed, except for Connie Roderick, who was being grilled in the next room.
I shifted my under-achieving butt on a creaking chair and looked around the seedy lunch room, wondering if teaching here at Angeles Commercial Design College was such a suave career move after all.
In fact, I’d wandered into part time pedagogy. For several months, I’d worked as a writer/ director/ producer/ editor/ cameraman at a small instructional media company. But the market was already glutted with films like The Wonderful Slime Mold and The Genius of Fenimore Cooper, and as the financial sap had dried, I had withered and dropped off the tree. So when the man who taught film at the college was removed to a local bin for dehydration, a friend had got me his job.
As it turned out, I loved the work. For all their youthful artiness, my students did everything with ferocious energy and an oddly simple sweetness. And as I taught them the holy crafts of movies, they taught me why I remained so stubbornly besotted with film making.
The door opened and Connie Roderick floated into the dreary lunch room. She joined me at a table and dropped a thin hand on my shoulder, as if for support. In fact she needed little help to bear her almost negligible flesh, but Connie was a natural toucher, and lately she’d been touching me more often than necessary. “Stoney, I need to talk to you.”
I nodded. “About today.”
“No, my automotive class.” With her Audrey Hepburn face and figure, she could have been a fashion model, but Connie’s dream was to design for Porsche. “I think somebody’s like cheating.”
I felt too numb to think straight. “What’s this got to do with...?”
“I don’t know, but it’s been on my mind and I guess today kinda shook it loose.”
 After today’s grisly events I had no interest in petty student gripes. “Tell your teacher.”
“Caldwell and I aren’t... simpatico.” Her smile insinuated unlike you and me. Connie’s big eyes were almost black, with sparkles like cross-lit anthracite; and as Tracy once said of a different Hepburn, there wasn’t a lot of flesh there, but what there was, was choice.
“Connie...”
The lunch room door opened six inches and an impatient voice called “Mr. Winston?” I looked at Connie and nodded toward the sound.
Connie set her mouth. “I’ll wait.” She stacked her knobs and angles on a chair; dumped her back pack on the weary table; and deployed ten chocolate chip cookies, a quart of Fritos, and a meatball submarine sandwich of nuclear class.
I plodded off toward yet another inquisition, marveling that Connie could eat at a time like this. As I glanced back from the doorway, she ripped a shark size bite off the submarine sandwich. 
* * * *
The adjacent room was crammed with student lockers and a long, battered bench, on which a trim man of forty sat with an open attaché case on his lap. “My name is Motteux, Mr. Winston.” He pronounced it the original French way. “Sit down.”
I don’t respond well to commands, so I stood. “People usually call me Stoney.”
Motteux ignored that. With a look of faint distaste, he scanned a paper in a manila folder. “I’ve reviewed your statement to the sheriff’s department. You were here illegally, of course.”
“Not unless they still have Sunday blue laws.”
“I meant a college regulation.”
“Then the college can deal with it.” Motteux raised his eyes from the file folder and studied me, his face unreadable. I said, “If you’ve read my statement, what else do you need?”
“Some facts about your policy with Empire Fire and Casualty.”
“Not my policy. I just work here. Talk to the administration.”
He replaced the folder in his case. “That’s an odd point, Mr. Winston, there doesn’t appear to be an administration. You are the closest thing to authority I can find today.”
“A part-time instructor?”
Motteux crossed one leg on the other. Despite his sober business suit, he affected dusty desert boots of the type once known as Brothel Creepers. “Twenty minutes ago I had a phone conversation with the college’s vice president.” He stared at a row of lockers and his voice turned dreamy. “It seems he is now the former vice president. Your late President Millard asked him to resign at the end of the last term.”
I shrugged. “There must be deans or something. I only started here eight weeks ago, so I don’t...”
“No deans. No other staff.” Motteux looked at me again. “Wouldn’t you call that an unusual way to organize a college, Mr. Winston?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Apparently, Millard ran the place single handed, except for an office manager named Tina Morgan.”
“I do know Tina.”
“She is out of town for the weekend and unreachable. So that leaves you, Mr. Winston.”
By now, I disliked the man intensely, so I put on my very best Basilisk stare.
He looked at my expression, then said with a certain eerie mildness, “I must say you appear reluctant to cooperate.”
“I’m reluctant to be bullied.”
Motteux’s tight smile brought Winter in its wake. “I find a certain... firmness useful in my work.”
My big flat feet were hurting from the concrete floor. “What is your work, exactly?”
“Insurance fraud.” He almost whispered it. “In my sixteen years with Empire, I’ve saved them countless dollars, countless.”
“Oh, I suspect you’ve counted every one.”
His arctic smile faded. “Partly through a certain firmness, as I said; and partly through persistence.”
Oh, dandy: Javert lived.
Motteux closed his attaché case, snapped the latches down, then tested each and nodded. “It might be more productive if I spoke to you later.”
I’d had about enough of this performance. “So you’re warning me not to leave town.”
Still mildly, “I’m not police, Mr. Winston...”
“I noticed.”
“...So I have neither their powers,” his stare intensified. “nor their, shall we say, procedural limitations.”
But I kept on doing Stonewall Winston.
He stood up, holding the case as if to shield his stomach. “I’ll call you at a better time.”
“I shall live by the phone.” I turned my back on his icicle smile and walked out.
* * * *
As I plodded back into the lunch room, Connie demolished the meatball sub and cleansed her palate with soda pop. “Can we discuss my problem now?”
“Connie, a man is dead and half the building’s blown away.”
“I know.” She shook her head. “I mean I don’t know.” She rubbed her forehead. “Okay, maybe I want to think about something else.”
I should have seen that. “All right, tell me about your problem.”
“You heard about the contest?” I shook my head. “Well there’s this automotive design contest: five thousand bucks for the best pickup truck design. It’s our class assignment.”
“Who’s giving the prize?”
“Some sponsor, like a maybe Japanese company.”
“Why ‘maybe?’”
“Big secret. You know how paranoid car companies are about new designs.”
“Vaguely.”
“Caldwell knows the sponsor, I mean, him being the teacher and all; but we can’t get it out of him.”
“Go on.”
“Well there’s this student Nick Beltrán? A total nosepick - walks on his necktie, right?” She started on the Fritos. “Okay, Beltrán is the worst in the class: can’t design, can’t render, can’t find the right end of a felt tip pen.”
“I get the picture.”
“So what happens? We hand in preliminary sketches of our trucks and all of a sudden, Beltrán can really draw.”
“Maybe the prize inspired him.”
“And maybe your Beetle won a Grand Prix race. On top of that, he did an okay design. Not as sharp as mine maybe, but not his usual dorky stuff.”
“Hm. So you think Beltrán is handing in someone else’s work.”
“Totally.”
“Whose work? Look, is every automotive design major in the contest?”
“For a five thousand dollar prize? Sure!”
“Then anyone helping Beltrán would be competing against himself.”
“I never thought of that.”
I pushed my chair back. “It doesn’t sound plausible, Connie.”
She stood up, looking angry. “Okay, but it’s true. Just come up and see, all right? Beltrán is cheating. Period! And there’s five thousand bucks and a lot of prestige at stake.”
It seemed I had no escape. “I guess it couldn’t hurt to look.”
“Promise?” Connie’s big eyes softened again.
I sighed but nodded.
Connie looked more cheerful. “Know where the room is? Second floor, west wing.” She glanced at her pink junk wristwatch. “O my gawd, I’m supposed to be home by now.” She wafted toward the lunch room door. With about ten pounds of lunch aboard, she should have looked as pregnant as Bob’s wife, but she still had the lines of a ballpoint pen and the grace of a flying crane.
Nice girl, too. In this dusty paddock full of hacks and also rans, she had an obvious thoroughbred spark.
* * * *
Rattling home in my flatulent Beetle, I turned over thoughts like an archeologist assembling pot shards: exploding classrooms, dead college presidents, fired vice presidents, insurance fraud, rigged design contests. How did they fit? Did they fit, or were they merely fragments of different pots, dropped by coincidence into the same untidy midden? Disorder irritates me - except in bachelor housekeeping - and I played with my pot shards all the way back to my moldy little flat in Laurel Canyon.
But the pieces stayed perversely separate, and by the time I turned my thoughts to improvising supper from the science projects growing in my fridge, I had found only one common element in the facts: Angeles Commercial Design College was also growing fungi, quietly, as fungi grow, and in the dark.
Chapter 2
On the northern rim of the Los Angeles area, Pasadena, Altadena, and Sierra Madre slam into the Angeles National Forest below Mount Wilson. These municipal plate tectonics have trapped a square mile of unincorporated county between the cities and the official “forest,” which is actually mangy scrub.
Recently a speculator had bought the whole square mile, proclaimed it “Mountain Meadow,” and announced a grandiose mixed-use development. To date nothing existed but the dusty concrete matrix of a stubby office tower and Angeles Commercial Design College, whose seedy clapboard shanties had snuggled in the little hollow for over sixty years.
The college was a tedious commute from my flat in Hollywood: through Burbank, Glendale, and Pasadena; then north up Michillinda Avenue, straight as a laser beam despite the punishing rise into the foothills. My ‘63 VW, christened Beetle Bumble, was howling in protest at this killer grade. Ignoring the rattle of ancient valves behind me, I floored it up the brutal slope, eager to get back to work. The college had been closed for three days while the worst of the damage was cleared away, but by today, Wednesday, the dust had settled and I was about to meet my film class again.
I snaked around the wicked curves connecting Michillinda to Mountain Meadow “Parkway” (two lanes of pimpled blacktop), wriggled through an almost invisible notch, and chugged across a mini dust bowl toward the college hunkered down on the far right knoll.
The college buildings had been thrown up in the early twenties as the world headquarters of a nutball guru with a name like Swami Piranhabanana. But when the Most Holy Person had been summoned to a higher astral plane, his cult had promptly collapsed, leaving the musty structures empty and forgotten for decades.
In the late sixties, a few counter-culture fanatics had organized an art school as a kind of hippie commune and leased the mothballed complex. Today, they survived mainly through taking in applicants too poor to attend Art Center College, a pricey institution some miles to the west. These students, in turn, took an obscure, sour pleasure in referring to Angeles Commercial Design College by its initials: AC/DC.
I parked B. Bumble in the faculty lot, climbed rickety wooden steps to the main campus building, threaded my way among students clotting the west corridor, and entered the college administration center.
The big room resembled the office of an ancient grade school: a chest-high counter of battered fake walnut, matching desks beyond it, windows apparently too tall to wash, walls that might have once been tan - or maybe not. An appropriate nerve center for this decrepit place, particularly since it appeared empty. I recalled what Motteux had said about the strange lack of college staff.
As I walked forward under merciless fluorescents, my footsteps cued a head to rise above the counter. “Yo, Stoney.” The head submerged.
“Morning, Tina. You look gloomy.”
Her disembodied voice, “Ripped my panty hose on that stupid counter. Damn thing’s made of splinters.”
“And the gate’s pretty narrow.”
“I’m not that fat.”
I approached the counter and leaned over it to look at her. “You’re not fat, period.”
She flipped her skirt hem down and rose from a low typist’s chair, looking embarrassed.
In fact, Tina cut an impressive figure in her trim red pumps: Wedgwood gray eyes under tousled glossy hair, in a face whose bones would still impress when it was eighty. Beneath the fabric of her flowing dress, her round body was a fugue of curves, as if her builder had taken everything female and enlarged it, to good effect.
Unconsciously, she smoothed the front of her dress as if hoping to compress her stomach. “Listen, I want to talk to you.” She waved me through the swinging counter gate. “I just got off the phone with the insurance vultures. They’re withholding payment for the damage.”
“They said they might. How long?”
“Long enough to put us out of business.” Tina looked bleak.
“I’d be sorry if that happened, but you’d get another job.
“Not this job. Two days ago, they made me acting president.” Before I could congratulate her, she continued sourly, “Temporary, desperation-time acting president.” She slapped the file folder on her desk. “But for now, I run the ship, and I’m not standing on deck while it’s shot down in flames.” Tina had a penchant for salad bar metaphors.
“Does your policy say they can withhold payment?”
“Doesn’t say they can’t.” She pulled a sheaf of fine print out of the file folder and wagged it at me. “I went through this baloney with a fine toothed comb.” Tina dropped the policy, stared at it morosely.
“How much money are we talking?”
“Over four hundred thousand.”
“Just to repair the damage?”
Tina shook her head. “It’s a ceramics lab, remember? Four kilns, special gas lines and plumbing - God knows what all.” She dug among the papers and found a graphic arts supply house catalog. “Drafting stools alone are 200 bucks a copy and I have to buy 20 of them.”
“Why not just close the lab until the cash comes through?”
“I planned to do just that and use the settlement to keep the school open.”
“Is it that broke?”
Tina looked exasperated. “Don’t you notice anything? We’re down to 200 students - less than one fourth capacity; but the overhead costs are fixed. This crummy place is swimming in red ink, and it’s just about down for the count.”
“I didn’t know. Maybe that’s why Millard was laying off administrators.”
“Why not? There’s almost no work left to do.” Tina rubbed her fingers on the insurance policy as if trying to summon a genie; then she looked at me again and her voice was softened by a tone of appeal. “Stoney, there was nothing in that ceramics lab that could have set it off.”
“Something did.”
Tina shook her head. “Ceramics kilns cannot explode by accident. You just heat them up and then turn them off.”
I didn’t like where this was heading. “What is it you want, Tina?”
“I need you to help me find out more about that explosion.”
Though I had indeed “found out more” on a couple of previous occasions, I had no reputation for doing so because my half-assed sleuthing had left me in queasy legal positions and I’d never told a soul about them.
“Why me?”
Tina paced over to the smudgy window. “Suppose somebody did it on purpose somebody connected with the school. You’re the only one here I know I can trust.” She stared out the window while I uncoiled myself from the chair and joined her. Before I could answer, she said to the glass, “And we’re friends.”
I’d met Tina in her previous job, running the office of a small film production house. We were friends, as she’d proved by getting me this job, soon after starting here herself. I put a hand on her shoulder and she relaxed slightly under it. “I’ll help if I can.”
Tina looked out at the dusty campus beyond the window. “Look at it: just blowing away.”
I studied the complex curves of her profile against the dirty glass, then left her to stare out at the smoggy Fall sunshine.
* * * *
This mid-week class was like a replay of the previous Sunday: big Deidre in her bib overalls, hulking over the Bolex camera, Connie ready with the camera slate, George DeGrasse fussing at the goldfish in its tank. My classroom here in the north building lacked a wall of windows, so we were using movie lights.
Bluebeard Bob hovered tensely, fiddling with the home made contraption he’d placed in a corner of the aquarium: an electric immersion heater. “That should do it.”
Deidre eyed the lethargic goldfish floating in front of her lens. “Do what, exactly?”
“Make it spawn. The book says they react to warmer water.”
“Why?”
George giggled. “Maybe they think it’s Spring.”
Bob rubbed his palms together. “You set?”
Deidre nodded, sighed, and bent to her viewfinder.
“Roll.” The Bolex buzzed.
“Mark it.” Connie held the slate before the lens.
“Action.”
Deidre muttered, “You talking to the fish?”
The goldfish worked its mouth repeatedly, as if saying yahoo, yahoo, but seemed otherwise unstimulated.
Wrangler George said “Give it a minute to warm up.”
“No, cut.” Bob studied his improvisation. “The heater isn’t working. A wire came undone.” He hooked a copper lead around a screw.
The fish performed a spastic entrechat, plunged toward the bottom of the tank, rolled belly up, then drifted toward the surface upside down while the stunned class tracked its majestic ascent.
“Scratch one goldfish,” Deidre said.
“Oh God, what happened?” Bob reached for the heater control.
“Don’t touch anything, it’s electrocuted!” I yanked the heater’s wall plug from its outlet. “Save the lights, George.”
George, the official fish wrangler (ret.), stared at his late goldfish, then thrust both hands toward the ceiling. “A buck sixty-nine shot to hell.”
“It’s not funny!” Bob looked ready to weep.
I intervened. “Okay folks, that’s a wrap for today. I’m very sorry about the goldfish, Bob.”
Connie followed me to my desk at the end of the big bare room. “Too bad about Bob’s fish and all.”
“Yes. I should’ve checked his home-built heater. It didn’t look too competent.”
She dropped her volume. “He’s always doing stuff like that. We call him Engineer Bob.”
Diplomatic for once, I made no reply. Connie kept her voice low. “Caldwell doesn’t have a class this period.”
“I don’t track you, Connie.”
“I can show you the contest sketches.”
“I’m sure he locks his classroom.”
Connie grinned. “No problema.”
* * * *
Outside the auto design lab, Connie produced a key from somewhere, unlocked the door, swung it open, and waved me in. This morning she was modeling a fuchsia sweater that hid her knees, over floppy sailcloth pants pegged at the ankles with straps and buckles. On her, the effect was somehow chic; but then, she could make the most bizarre outfits look attractive - a knack she demonstrated daily.
“Where’d you get a key, Connie?”
“What key?” Slipping it into a pocket apparently basted on with binding twine, she closed the door behind us and switched on the classroom lights.
The lab seemed to fill the entire wing: tables, stools, and chalkboards at one end; sinks and cupboards at the other; and in the center, a caucus of great gray roaches that turned out to be clay car models on tables. One wall was papered with full size profiles of sports cars rendered with felt pens and strips of colored sticky tape, some as thin as filaments.
Taking my arm as if I couldn’t navigate unaided, Connie led me to the opposite wall, which displayed a dozen rough sketches of pickup trucks.
“That one’s mine.” The truck was low and mean, with squared off contours and squat, fat wheels.
“It’s a beauty, Connie. Looks like a barrio cruiser taken uptown.”
Connie glowed. “You got it! This is my brother’s truck after it dies and goes to heaven.”
“Your brother’s?”
A proud nod. “Angel Ramón, my favorite little brother.” She saw my faint bemusement. “Hey, Connie Roderick’s my professional name, right?” She struck an imperial pose. “Yo soy Maria Elena Concepciòn Rodriguez.”
“Encantada, and I like your real name better.”
Her grin turned wry. “Yeah, but how would Porsche like it?”
I nodded diplomatically. As a WASP of embarrassing purity, I had no right to criticize, though I’d begun life in England as a child of the lower orders. “Anyway, your truck’s a killer. How’d you get it so low?”
“It’s based on a front wheel drive chassis. I added 60 series tires and adjustable shocks. Now look at Beltrán’s.” Though more conventional than Connie’s, Beltrán’s truck showed promise. The crisp lines flowed in long, expressive curves and the surfaces gleamed with deft highlights that lent a strong solidity.
And yet there was something labored about the drawing. It was too finished for a sketch, too heavily revised.
While I studied it, Connie rummaged through a tier of flat drawers, pulled two sheets of Bristol board, and held them up before me. “Here’s some older stuff he did.”
Sketches of a taxi and a trendy minicar, coarsely conceived and drawn with poor control. Like the pickup, they were signed Nick Beltrán.
“I don’t know, Connie. The truck could be by the same artist - only heavily worked over.”
“By who? That’s the point. Not Beltrán.” Grimly, she restored the older drawings to their drawer. “Hey, I’m not bragging, Stoney, but I’m the only one in the school who can turn out work like that truck.” She glanced disgustedly around the seedy studio. “And I wouldn’t be here if I could afford Art Center.”
“Then it must be someone from outside.”
Connie snapped off the lights and opened the door. “Who?”
I had no idea, but as I stepped into the corridor, I noticed the new cracks that sketched a road map on the wall. The auto design lab was in the west wing, directly above the ceramics studio. “Connie, don’t lock the door yet.”
I reentered Caldwell’s lab and checked the floor. Sure enough, it had bulged and buckled in two places near the center of the big room.
“Okay.” I walked out again.
Connie cocked her head suspiciously. “What was that for?”
I simply shook my head. Up to now, I hadn’t thought Connie’s contest too important; but the more I learned about it, the more it looked like a way to explain the explosion.
* * * *
By five o’clock that afternoon, I was buzzing home along the asphalt cow paths that pass for streets in Laurel Canyon. As I piloted B. Bumble through the khaki hills, I thought about Beltrán’s truck sketches. They had obviously been reworked by another hand. But whose? And how was the explosion connected or was it?
Still lost in a fog of rhetorical questions, I pulled into the driveway of my long-departed landlady and parked beside the other car.
Other car?
It was completely unfamiliar: a sleek Toyota Supra in gunmetal blue; and when I tried the house door I found it unlocked, as if it had been opened and quietly closed without latching. The main level, above my basement flat, had been vacant since my landlady’d left a year ago, and I had the only key. That door should not have been open.
I entered quietly and peered into the living/dining area: empty, and so was the cantilevered deck beyond the big glass doors. Kitchen deserted too, guest room ditto. The bedroom was vacant but the bathroom door was half open and faint noises drifted through it, as if the intruder was rifling the medicine chest.
I was poised to glide forward when the door swung wide and who should appear but my long lost landlady Sally, still tall, still blonde, still stunningly abundant, and at present, as naked as an egg.
“Oh, hi, Stoney.” She added an offhand wave.
“Hi. Uh...”
Sally grabbed a hairbrush from the flight bag on the bed and disappeared into the bathroom again, leaving me dazzled by the afterimage of her splendid caboose. Her dark voice floated out. “I’m back.”
Evidently.
* * * *
 As we dawdled through a supper improvised in Sally’s kitchen, she explained why she was home again. In a year of selling computers in the Pacific Northwest, she’d racked up twice as many sales as any other rep, so her company’d rewarded her by slashing her territory in half. When Sally’d offered to perform similar surgery on her sales manager, a parting of the ways had been effected, leaving her unemployed (though now too rich to worry) and thoroughly soured on the Private Sector.
Sipping my pinot noir, I studied Sally in the candle light while she herded food around her plate, systematic as a collie with its flock. With her ripe peach cheeks and her helmet of corn silk hair, she looked more Wagnerian than ever.
I watched her big decisive hands at work with knife and fork, noticed the blonde glow of delicate forearm fuzz, smiled at her unconscious habit of tucking one foot up as if to hatch it under a long round thigh. Loving Sally was like riding a bicycle: you never lost the knack. After a year apart, it was as if she’d been gone a week.
Wishful thinking. This was a new Sally, though not, perhaps, improved. Her brow was tight, her normally curling mouth pulled flat, her eyes enclosed in strained parentheses.
“It’s nice to have you back.”
Silence.
“I missed the footsteps overhead. And things.”
Sally nodded tensely, then dropped her fork, blinked, waved a hand in vague frustration, picked up the fork, returned to shoving her steak in circles.
“Been a long time, Stoney. We feel like strangers.”
“Not me.”
“Well, I do.”
“You need time to relax.”
Sally dispatched a hefty chunk of cow, then sighed and dropped her fork again. “I have to tell you, I had... well, a personal involvement in Seattle.”
I said, “I see,” touched by a dry ice finger of loss.
“I don’t think I’ll stay here. Maybe sell this house. Go work in... oh, wherever.”
“Mm.” The touch became a grip.
“I haven’t decided.”
I couldn’t justify my hurt and resentment. What claim had I? Besides, I’d had a brief “personal involvement” myself.
“Anyway...” She folded her napkin and placed it on the table with greater care than necessary. “I drove five hundred miles today and I’m shot. Guess you better go on downstairs.”
“See you in the morning then.”
“Maybe.” Then, as if realizing that we’d spoken only of her. “What’re you doing these days?”
“I’m a school teacher.”
For the first time, the ghost of past affection glimmered in her eyes. “I think you found your calling.”
Chapter 3
The next morning, I encased my skinny six feet two in yesterday’s jeans, clean socks, a Kmart golf shirt, and, after a weather check, my third best sneakers. A pause for raisin bran drowned in milk that was gently going solid state, then off to AC/DC in a dispiriting drizzle. I parked B. Bumble, trudged up a path that was already muddy, and looked up Tina Morgan in the office.
When I explained what I wanted, she looked doubtful. “Stoney, I can’t make Caldwell tell who’s sponsoring the contest.” She stood with her back to me, shoving junk mail into faculty pigeon holes. On this rainy day, the administration center looked even grimier than usual. “I asked him days ago, when I found out about it. He very nicely refused to tell me. Said it was sponsor’s orders.”
“Then we’ll dig it out some other way.”
“Why’s it so important?”
“Because the contest may be connected with the explosion.”
She paused, then faced me again. “Explain.”
“The blast was directly beneath the automotive design lab. Suppose it was the target, not Millard.”
“Why”
“That’s what I have to dig out.”
But I couldn’t go around asking questions without some reason, so I tried out an idea I’d had. “Are you the only person in this office?”
Tina gaped at me. “Boy, that serve came right out of left field.” She gave a so what? nod. “Yeah, I am.”
“Not even a secretary?”
“I had to do everything.” She finished the mail and looked at me. “After I got hired, I found out that Millard had laid off the secretaries, the dean of students, and the vice president.”
“Didn’t you find that peculiar?”
“After three months’ unemployment, nothing’s that peculiar. What’s this all about, Stoney?”
“How about promoting me. Make me, say, Executive Assistant to the President. That has an impressive ring.”
“Why don’t I just kiss you and turn you into a prince?”
“You want to stay in business?”
Tina nodded reluctantly. “Okay, Stoney, but promoting you is risky. I’m walking on eggs here...”
“I’ll be careful.”
“...and I’m working without a net.”
* * * *
I spent the next two hours with my class, then wandered back upstairs to the automotive design lab for a chat with Prof. Caldwell. I found him at work on a clay car model: sixtyish and slightly built, with a shock of gray hair, small blue eyes behind clear rimmed trifocals, and the slight flush that in Los Angeles means too much of either booze or sunshine.
“Professor Caldwell?”
“Chick Caldwell, yes.” He dropped a wire tool and proffered his small hand. Caldwell favored a loud checked shirt and knit tie, over white-belted blue slacks. He looked like an aging art director, at liberty and faintly seedy. “Winston, aren’t you? I’ve heard about your new film workshop.”
“No doubt from Connie Roderick.” I pointed to his model. “Am I interrupting?”
“No no, I’m just finishing. What can I do for you?”
“Ms. Roderick’s been after me to see her truck design. She’s very proud of it.”
“Oh.” Caldwell led me over to Connie’s sketch, push pinned to the cork display board. “It’s a good design; a bit - shall we say ethnic? - for the general market, but well-executed.”
I eased along the ranks of sketches, pretending to study all of them. “This one looks interesting too.”
“Which?”
“It’s signed ‘Beltrán.’”
“Oh yes.” As he walked over to join me, I noticed that he affected European-style sandals over pale blue socks. “A promising designer - if he can improve his graphic skills. The poor lad must have sweated that sketch. It’s better than his usual.”
Casually, “Do auto companies often hold contests in design schools?”
“All the time.”
“But why would a Japanese auto company need another truck design.”
“Another?”
“They have whole lines of trucks already.”
“Not if they’re new to the market.”
I made my nod casual but knowing. “Diversifying.”
Caldwell nodded back. “They’re known here for fork lifts, mini tractors, things like that. But now they want to crack the auto market.”
“And pickup trucks are hot.” 
“Exactly. First, they make their image with a sexy pickup, then they bring in their sedan. It’s done very well in their domestic market.”
Offhandedly, “That’s the front wheel drive job.”
He nodded.
Caldwell was typical of the AC/DC faculty: an empty burnout going through the motions. But he seemed to know his job well enough, and if he saw nothing unusual about Beltrán’s work, then maybe Connie’s suspicions were just competitiveness run rampant.
Still, it wouldn’t hurt to follow through. A Japanese company known for forklifts and mini tractors, with an existing line of front wheel drive cars sold domestically but not in the U.S. That shouldn’t be hard to track down, and the Pasadena central library had a splendid business reference room, in keeping with the municipal ideology. With nothing on for the afternoon, I decided to pay it a visit.
* * * *
And now I was sitting on my landlady’s deck as I pretended to savor the sunset while covertly savoring Sally. She was churning through tricky aerobics in her usual bikini, to Vivaldi laid on by Isaac Stern.
“So anyway, the car company has to be Saka Motors.”
“Don’t know them.” Arms on hips, she twisted violently from side to side. Sally’s accessories responded to the centrifugal force and I responded in turn. But what was she to me anymore - or rather, what was I to her?
“The Japanese parent is something or other Heavy Industries. Their American headquarters is down in El Segundo. Saka’s a made up name.”
Sally sneered. “By the marketeers, I’ll bet, so they can use slogans like ‘Saka to me’.” Hands still on hips, she started deep breathing, which realigned the axis of her mastoid sweeps. At home Sally’d always gone as bare as the weather permitted, but what had once seemed nonchalance now struck me as indifference, and that hurt.
“No, they’re named for the home office in Osaka. Aren’t you getting cold or something?”
Sally’s glance said she’d heard the edge in my tone. She reached for a sweatshirt. “Sorry.”
So was I. I sighed and remembered my dinner, microwaving in my kitchen below us: number thirty-six in a line of patent entrees called One Hundred Ways to Maim Chicken.
* * * *
But life looked better in the morning sunshine. Sally leaned against the wall in her warm kitchen, cradling the phone receiver in a crimped shoulder and glowing from her daily three mile run. Her stained sweats and headband said Miller time, but her voice was all business. “And your name is? (pause) Fine, Jeannie. Thanks. (pause) No, I’ll call his office directly. And you take care of that cold, okay?” She hung up, wearing the first grin I’d seen since her return home.
Listening from my post at the sink, I’d discovered why Sally was such an awesome salesman. In about ten minutes, she’d talked to the secretaries of six top Saka executives and learned their bosses’ names, titles, and duties. In the process, she’d won name recognition and beginning friendships from those outer office sentries whose only power was to control access to their lords. No wonder Seattle was now groaning under the weight of the mainframes she’d unloaded up there.
Sally carried her notes to the breakfast bar. “Bud Lipscomb’s your boy.”
I joined her. “How can you tell?”
“His title, ‘Coordinator of Special Projects.’ That kind of bullshit title means one of two things: a made up job to get rid of a drone or something they want to keep quiet. Saka’s too young to have burnt-out executives, so it’s probably the other.”
“Now what?”
Sally’s blue eyes sparkled. “Now we do our routine. You ready?”
I nodded and she returned to the phone to dial a number from her sheet of notes. A pause, then, “Francine? Hi! This is Sally at Angeles Design College. Is Mr. Lipscomb available for Mr. Winston?” A pause, and then Sally’s tone chilled thirty degrees. “Executive Assistant to the President. I’m sure Bud Lipscomb knows... Thank you.”
At her wink and wave, I ambled to the phone, assembling my Busy Executive role.
Sally grinned again. “Remember what I told you. Oh...” She held up a hand. “One moment; I’ll transfer.” In quick succession, she tapped the hold button, gave me the handset, tapped hold again. Then she stabbed a finger toward me like an audio director.
“Bud? Spencer Winston.” I flinched at the sound of my given name, which I never use - let alone the complete Spencer Churchill Winston.
“Good morning howarya?” The voice was cautious, neutral.
My best take charge tone, “Fine, Bud. Say, the president wanted me to touch base with you on the truck design contest.”
A long pause, then, from the other end, “Mmmm.”
“I guess you heard about our accident last week.”
“Mmm.”
“And with a new team and all, I think we need to review our game plan.” No response. “Get our ducks lined up, you know?” Sally signaled tone it down.
“Mm.”
“I mean, that explosion rattled a few cages around here, Bud, and I want to get the snakes back in the bag.” Sally winced and held her nose.
“M.”
“You got a minute sometime today, Bud? I can run down.”
A long pause, then, “How about eleven.”
“Great. See you then, Bud.” Click. “That was Bud.”
“Ancient joke, Stoney, same as your clichés. ‘Rattle my cage’ went out years ago.” She looked dubious. “Are you sure you can impersonate a businessman?”
“I guess I can bring it off.”
She started to say something, then apparently thought better of it and grinned. “I just figured out one thing about my life in Seattle: it was boring.” As I was about to respond with becoming modesty, she added, “Foolish is more fun.” Sally swung toward the kitchen door. “I’m going to go rinse the sweat off. Don’t you shower ‘til I get your hair trimmed.” She took off down the hall in powerful strides, stripping as she went.
I wished she wouldn’t keep doing that.
* * * *
I wheezed down the San Diego freeway, still pondering the change in Sally that had started when I’d told her about Saka. She’d leaped on the problem with all four paws, making the calls, playing my “secretary,” critiquing the costume I’d scrounged from my closet - even creating my executive haircut with clippers and gel. Maybe she had indeed been bored, but for whatever reason, she was suddenly showing her old easy energy.
Though not, alas, the affection that had once gone with it.
I puttered south through the wan October sunshine, passed by everything on the freeway. Sally’d offered her Supra to enhance my role, but I figured I could park far enough from Saka headquarters to hide my decidedly blue collar car. Down the off ramp, hard right, and into El Segundo, a tidy gray wasteland of industrial plants and office towers, south of the airport. Every time I passed El Segundo, I wondered why there was no El Primero. Whatever the reason, it was somehow symbolically right for Los Angeles.
In the stark lobby of the building where Saka Motors leased six floors, security guards tore their eyes away from the parking lots and corridors on ten monitors long enough to pass me through to the Saka reception desk on the fifth floor, where other guards checked my appointment, signed me in, issued my numbered and dated visitor’s badge, and passed me up to seven, where a receptionist led me through a carpeted maze, opening doors by pressing her badge against little black boxes on the walls. By the time we reached Bud Lipscomb’s office, I knew what it must be like to disappear into the Gulag.
While the receptionist announced me, I snuck a look at my image in the mirror tiles lining the hall: gray suit over a button down shirt and fiscally sound tie, black shoes not quite right but all I owned. Keep them under a table.
I’d seen a hundred Bud Lipscombs during the industrial films I’d worked on: medium age, height, and build; medium eye and hair color; medium suit; medium voice and handshake grip. Everything sanded corporate-smooth. Wife and two kids in frames on the desk, framed awards on the dove-gray walls. His taut stance suggested that he worked out daily, but his softening jaw and pouchy eyes said maybe nightly too. A full ashtray confirmed that seventh floor life had its little stresses. An ionizer wheezed softly beside it.
Before we could even launch into small talk, his door opened to admit two clones, though one was a handsome young Japanese in a hand-tailored suit. After terse introductions, we settled at an oak conference table behind Lipscomb’s desk.
He indicated the others. “I asked Jack and Yoshi to join us, Mr. Winston.”
I nodded as if that weren’t self evident and dealt my new AC/DC business cards, run off at an instant print store. They passed me their own cards and we solemnly studied the little rectangles.
Then I stacked their cards with careful fingers. “As I said on the phone, I think we need to review the truck design contest.”
Lipscomb’s face stayed as blank as new snow. “Tell us about this contest.”
“President Millard seems to have set it up, but he was killed of course, and no one else knows much about it.”
Lipscomb tapped the point of his pencil on the table, flipped it over, tapped the eraser. The table’s oak surface was already pocked with graphite blackheads.
He wielded the pencil: tik; flip; tunk; flip. Jack studied a yellow pad as carefully as if its top page were not blank. Yoshi gazed at me with polite interest.
I touched thumbs and forefingers to the four corners of the cards before me and focused on not moving my hands. I tried to match Yoshi’s calm stare as I looked at Lipscomb.
Tik; flip; tunk; flip. I started counting them.
Finally, Lipscomb opened his hands to indicate So?
“So what can you tell me?”
Lipscomb looked at Jack and Yoshi, then stared out the window at a sister office tower beyond the parking lot below. “We were interested when we heard about this contest.”
“Heard about it?”
Lipscomb looked at me again with something faintly unpleasant in his blank face. “And we wondered why you contacted us.”
“Because you’re sponsoring it, I believe.”
“People believe all kinds of things.”
“Then you’re not sponsoring the contest?”
“Why do you think we are?”
I signaled tolerant amusement. “We’re both too busy for games, Bud. Are you or aren’t you?”
Lipscomb sighed. “Mr. Winston, do you know what the word ‘proprietary’ means?”
I nodded. “I can spell it too.”
He smiled sourly at this bravado. “Then you can understand when I tell you the whole subject is proprietary information.”
“At least that answers my question. Since you claim proprietorship, you must be sponsoring the contest.”
“Not necessarily. The fact that we weren’t sponsoring a contest would also be proprietary.”
He gazed blandly at me while I searched for a way to goad him into talking. Finally, I had to admit failure and seek a graceful retreat. “For reasons of your own, you don’t want to discuss the contest.” My hand gesture said, so be it. “Speaking for the college, we don’t want any part of a contest with commercial implications over which we have no control. I’m sure you’d feel the same.”
Lipscomb mirrored my so be it gesture. Jack began a doodle on his yellow pad. Yoshi remained politely immobile.
I stood up. “So I’ll tell Professor Caldwell that the contest has been canceled.” Hoping that would get a rise out of Lipscomb, I paused and looked out his window at B. Bumble, crouching humbly in the lot below, as if half afraid to take a space.
But there was no response, so I gathered their business cards. “Of course, all student designs are proprietary, as I’m sure you’re aware.”
Lipscomb nodded, but not at my statement. “We all have to do what’s in our best interests.”
I walked to the door. “Okay, folks, keep smiling.”
They sat like a committee of Easter Island statues.
Back on the fifth floor, I surrendered my badge, signed their Domesday Book again, and swore I would never reveal the location of the men’s room. The guard bestowed a flinty stare, but the receptionist’s mouth twitched upward. In that company, her days were numbered.
* * * *
Jacket and tie on the seat beside me, I struggled north on the freeway again, mourning the dear dead L.A. days when a slowdown was rare and full gridlock unknown. Back then, we’d roamed the freeways as casually as cowboys on an unfenced range.
Yeah, and the skies were not cloudy all day.
In fact, my sour mood arose from the laughable ease with which Lipscomb had handled me. I’d thought I could play a credible executive, but he’d spotted my lapels that were six years old and my Monkey Ward wing tips. They were all the clue he needed that I’d just rolled off the turnip truck.
Of course, my inept performance had hardly reversed this impression.
I eased B. Bumble forward to block a Mercedes pushing in from the right shoulder, on which he’d been driving to bypass us peasants.
Lipscomb seemed to be tacitly admitting Saka’s involvement while flatly refusing to talk about it - or maybe he was refusing to admit that some rival company was sponsoring the contest.
Now we were inching in parallel, but the Mercedes was forced to shove into my lane and the Beetle’s bolt on sheet metal cost one twentieth what his did. Our fender to fender confrontation continued for fifty feet and then his fender blinked. I ignored the seigneurial blast of his horn and focused on keeping the usual six inch distance from the car ahead.
With Saka stonewalling me, Chick Caldwell was our only source of information. Somehow, I’d have to get Tina to pressure him.
The Mercedes finally roared past on my left, while its driver flipped me the royal finger. They always get around you eventually.
Chapter 4
By the time I reached the college office, I’d marshaled my arguments for confronting Caldwell. But Tina opened with a salvo before I could fire a shot. “Stoney, what the hell have you done to me?” She waved me toward Millard’s old office, which by now had been more or less repaired.
I followed her in and closed the door behind us. “Apparently something dire. What’s wrong?”
“Oh, not a thing, not a God damn thing!”
She looked spruce today in a flowing black and white dress, but after my dismal performance at Saka, I was in no mood to appreciate it. “Glad that’s settled then.”
Tina sat in the presidential desk chair. “I don’t have the patience for smartass comebacks.” She waved at a chair. “Siddown!” I took my time doing so. “I’d kill you if it wouldn’t deny me the thrill of firing your ass.”
I stood up again. “And ranting at me. Get to it, Tina, I’ve had a rough day.”
“Hey, the best is yet to come. Twenty minutes ago, I had a call from Seymour Kronkheit.”
“That’s the landlord, isn’t it - the guy who bought all this property?”
“Yes, but rent wasn’t on his mind today. He’d just had a call from Saka Motors. Seems you went visiting.”
“Which I said I would...”
Tina banged the desk. “Told them you were canceling the contest.”
“I repeat...”
She jumped to her feet. “I won’t have this, Stoney. I am piloting this plane and I don’t need a second banana.”
“To blow it out of the water?”
“What does that mean?”
I searched for some little remnant of patience. “Are you all through yelling and breathing fire?” Tina reddened and opened her mouth, but I started using her own tactics, “Then answer a simple question: why did Kronkheit call you?”
Her expression said the question was dumb. “He was concerned about killing the contest, obviously.”
Mildly, “Tina, what’s he got to do with the contest? He’s just your landlord.”
That stopped her. “Well, I suppose...”
“And why would Saka talk to him?” For the first time, she looked as if she might listen. “Tina, Kronkheit must be connected with Saka; and now we’re sure they’re sponsoring the contest.”
Tina’s round face looked uneasy. “Why is all this so important, anyway?”
“Why? Your building exploded and Millard was killed, your design contest looks rigged, Saka Motors won’t admit what they’re doing in your school, and your landlord’s messing in your affairs. If you can’t smell something there, then maybe you shouldn’t run this place.”
That stopped her cold. “I think you better explain that, Stoney.”
“You seem to want this job so badly you’re afraid to do anything that might jeopardize it. I can understand that. But bosses who can’t take action when necessary don’t remain bosses.”
Sourly, “Except in government, education and banking.” Tina looked into space a moment, then, “Okay, maybe you’re right. What am I supposed to do?”
“Get me an appointment with Kronkheit - as soon as possible.”
“What do I tell him?”
“Say I found out some other things I can’t discuss on the phone.”
“Sounds pretty thin.”
“He’s a real estate hustler. He’ll understand.”
She sat slowly and stared at the president’s desk. Then she nodded. “You got it.”
I was heading for the door when her voice turned me. “Sorry I yelled.”
I thought of the bright, funny person hiding inside the insecure manager who probably knew that the job she wanted so desperately was, in fact, beyond her experience. “You’re trying to save this crummy outfit with no information, no support - not even a secretary. You’ve got a right to yell.”
Her answering smile was almost grateful.
* * * *
While waiting for Tina to get through to Kronkheit, I wandered into the lobby of the classroom building and studied the student projects on display: photographs and illustrations, print ads and page layouts, plus a wall full of cars designed for people who must like to drive lying down. I was meditating on a red ceramic doughnut that rotated into a sewing machine when Connie Roderick spotted me.
“He did it again, Stoney.” Today she was wearing a sort of macramé poncho that made her look like a music stand unfolded in a cargo net.
“Intriguing hairdo, Connie.”
“I was modeling for Deidre. It washes out. Listen, we handed in full renderings today and there’s no way Beltrán did his own.”
“I’m working on that.”
“What’d you find out?”
Unwise to involve a student in school business. “I’m making progress”
Connie spent a long time inspecting the sewing machine on its pedestal. Then she spoke without looking at me. “You ever, y’know, eat dinner?”
“Sometimes, on payday.”
She paused, then, “I was sort of thinking....”
Without even trying, Connie broadcast fifty thousand watts of sparkle, talent, and attractive nuttiness, and I couldn’t help tuning her frequency. In another place, I might be scuffing my clodhoppers and waving a fistful of field-plucked flowers.
But not with Sally home again - no matter how small my chances with her. Since I couldn’t explain Sally to Connie, I took a different route. “Connie, it’s bad news for students and teachers to get extracurricular.”
She studied me with something like pity. “How old are you, Stoney, thirty?”
“Plus three.”
“Well I’m like... twenty seven.” (Uh-huh; minus three, if not more.) “At our age, I mean, how much difference does three years make?”
I didn’t correct her computation. “It isn’t age, Connie, it’s relationship.”
“We don’t have that off the ground yet.”
“Yes we do: teacher and student.”
Connie looked disgusted. “There is an age difference: you’re an old fart!”
At that point, Tina appeared from the hallway and beckoned. “Have to run, Connie.” I followed Tina back to her office.
* * * *
Tina had reached Seymour Kronkheit, who’d said I could come in any time that afternoon. Her advice was to “strike while the ball was hot,” so I set out at once.
But as I emerged from the main building, I was stopped by the sight of a 1962 Studebaker Hawk creeping up the road, apparently navigated by straddling the center line. Its original purple paint had oxidized to prune color and its muffler sounded missing and presumed dead. The old car wobbled into the pulloff and stopped when a front tire bumped the curb. A long pause, then the driver’s door creaked open and a very old woman heaved herself out, retrieved a cane, and shuffled around the car with a pained expression that said each separate step took will power. She reached the stairs below me, sighted up their dismaying height, and clamped her lips determinedly. Those stairs were killers, so I trotted down and offered her an arm.
“What?” She centered me in the Coke bottle lenses prescribed after old fashioned cataract surgery, then raked me up and down, moving her head each time to change her glance. “What do you want?”
“May I help you?”
The old lady flashed a grateful look, then studied me sternly again, as if taking inventory. “Over thirty, unmarried, underfed.” She peered up at my blue eyes and beaky nose. “Probably overeducated.”
“Do I cross your palm with silver now?”
The old woman produced a giggle sixty years younger than the rest of her. “Hoard that sense of humor, kid. You’ll need it.”
This sudden warmth melted me all over again. “May I give you an arm?”
“No, two’s enough.” This time, her laugh came out a snort. “Feeble as the rest of me. Would you believe I used to write material for Groucho Marx?” As she grasped my elbow and started up the steps, she added to the ambient drizzle, “On the rare occasions when he wasn’t chasing me around the bed. I’m Farquhar.”
“Stoney Winston,” and for some reason, I bowed slightly.
“Office still where it used to be?”
“As of this morning.”
“Then let’s crank it up.”
We eventually reached Tina Morgan at her desk in the administration center, reviewing a printout and frowning.
“Tina, this is Ms. Farquhar.” Tina looked blank.
The old lady said firmly, “I have come for the rent.”
Tina’s jaw dropped, and her glance at me said this wreck works for the landlord?
Oblivious, Ms. Farquhar collapsed into a wooden chair, telescoped her patent cane to swagger stick length, and composed a pair of legs like stockinged kindling. “Call me Full Moon; it’s my love name.”
“Ms. Full Moon Farquhar.”
Snappishly, “Just Full Moon.” My face must have betrayed me. “You think I’m a crazy old bat.” I opened my mouth but she waved it shut with her stick. “Never mind.” Turning toward Tina, she struck an imperious pose. “I repeat, I have come for the rent!”
Tina looked careful. “I’m a little confused, Ms...”
“Full Moon.” Jerking her head like a chicken, the old lady aimed thick lenses at Tina. “Yes, you look confused, though not otherwise stupid. I own this property.”
“I was under the impression...”
“You lease this place from Seymour Kronkheit, don’t you?”
“Yes...”
“Well he leases it from me. It helps his Mountain Meadow project look impressive.” She squinted out the window at the forlorn concrete skeleton on the opposite knoll. “And it needs all the help it can get.”
“How do I know...?”
“That I’m telling the truth? Here.” The old lady rummaged in a vast and shabby handbag, pulled out some papers, scanned the top sheet through her lenses, and handed them to Tina.
Tina glanced up at me. “The lease to Kronkheit.” She handed the papers back.
Full Moon stuffed the papers away. “In fact, I own the whole valley and everything in it, including these valuable firetraps.” She leaned back complacently.
“Even so...”
“Since Kronkheit subleases to you, you normally pay rent to him. But he hasn’t paid me in six months. I’m too old to be patient, Ms. Morgan, so I’m cutting out the middle man. Until Seymour Kronkheit resumes his payments, I’ll simply collect from you.”
Now Tina’s face was wary. “You can’t do that without legal...”
“A point on which I turn a deaf ear.” Then to me, “In fact, it went deaf from too much turning in the first place.” She paused, as if hearing a snare drum rim shot in her head, then added, “So I moved it to the second place.”
I mimed the Groucho cigar and eyebrows shtick at these pitiful efforts and Full Moon looked gratified.
Tina continued evenly, “...but I’ll skip the bullshit.”
The old lady paused, peered at her, then flashed a set of graying dentures. “Well! Communication may be possible after all. I thought you weren’t stupid.”
Tina smiled politely. “We’re broke - at least until our insurance comes through.”
Full Moon nodded. “That explosion business. Pity. Must have disrupted the vibrations entirely. Nonetheless...” and she flapped her turkey wattles.
Tina took a deep breath. “I’ll do my best.”
The old lady’s smile was genuine. “I know you will. You seem conscientious.” Extending her cane to walking length, she creaked to her feet. “And people function better with a deadline.”
“Which in your case will be in about two weeks, as darling Groucho once remarked.” Full Moon clutched my elbow and we doddered in sync to the door. 
After a slow crawl to the parking lot, I watched Full Moon’s Studebaker creep back down the dead center of the road, wondering how she avoided the local law. If her muffler wasn’t illegal, her vision certainly was.
* * * *
Then I repaired to Pasadena for a visit with our landlord, who hadn’t paid his own rent to Full Moon in six months.
His office was in Pasadena Old Town, not far away. A few years back, the Pasadena Powers bounced the winos from the scabby west end of town and bought up several city blocks of banal old buildings. They sandblasted, gutted, refurbished, and gilded these Babbitty relics; then restocked them with boutiques, galleries, antique shops, and enough restaurants to feed Detroit - assuming Detroit was crazy for blackened catfish. Though the restorations were relentlessly tasteful, the result was as dead as a back lot set - a tour de force of decorator nostalgia.
The buildings’ upper floors were leased to architects, lawyers and genteel firms, including The Mountain Meadow Group, Seymour Kronkheit, Prop.
The receptionist, who looked as if she drove a Volvo wagon and sent her kids to private school, led me down an oak trimmed hall that had given three months’ work to a cabinet maker. Lights shone through frosted glass doors, but a certain lack of background noise suggested that the brightly lit offices behind the doors were empty. The receptionist opened Kronkheit’s door, smiled mechanically, then took her chino skirt and Hush Puppies back to her desk.
The large office was a restrained orchestration of Turkey carpets, green baize, and tufted leather. Mallards swam the paneled walls in oak framed prints and green glass-shaded brass lamps bestowed a creamy glow on desks and tables. In the soft north light through the looming windows, the green/brown room seemed like a cozy copse on a vast and ancient estate.
Kronkheit enhanced the effect with a Harris tweed jacket the color of lichen, charcoal flannels, and penny loafers. His thick silver hair, gray eyes, and strong, tanned face hinted at stud farms and old family trusts. But like his office, and in fact the whole neighborhood, Seymour Kronkheit appeared faintly over designed. Something - perhaps his extravagant cufflinks - suggested that he was to the manor bought.
He rose smoothly from his oak and leather chair, shook my hand, and sat me down at right angles to his desk. He had the politician’s knack of looking at you with that genial intensity that says you’re important and fascinating and I will always treasure this meeting and what was your name again?
“Thanks for coming down on short notice, Mr. Winston...”
“Stoney, please.”
“And I’m Sy. You would be too if your mother’d named you Seymour.” The line and accompanying grin showed long practice. “I hear you’re executive officer now.”
“Nominally.”
“I hope you can help Miss Morgan out. This whole thing has been a mess. Poor Ben killed, building smashed, this contest business....” He shook his handsome head.
“I think the contest is the issue at hand.”
“I wouldn’t call it an issue, exactly. More like a situation.”
“All right.” After this morning’s fiasco at Saka, I played it perfectly straight. “Ms. Morgan has taken on the college presidency without any warning or preparation She’s inherited a truck design contest with a large cash prize and implied commercial use of the winning entry. But the sponsor won’t admit any connection with the contest and the design teacher insists that secrecy is one of the rules.”
An understanding nod.
“Ms. Morgan feels it’s bad policy for the contest to continue without the administration’s knowledge and consent.”
“For obvious reasons.”
“But though Saka Motors won’t talk to her or me, they called you as soon as I’d left their offices; and minutes later, you were on the phone expressing your concern to Ms. Morgan.”
“And you want to know what the hell business it is of mine.”
I couldn’t help smiling. “I wouldn’t say what the hell.”
Kronkheit’s gray eyes half vanished in smile wrinkles. “In your place, I would.” He relaxed in his chair and inspected the ceiling. “You know, I didn’t know much about Miss Morgan.” He shrugged. “Didn’t know you existed. But the two of you seem to have your heads screwed down. That’s a relief to me.” Kronkheit stood up and tugged his jacket straight with an unconscious twitch. “Let’s go in the conference room.” He started toward the far wall, opposite the windows.
Kronkheit opened a pair of glowing oak doors to reveal an even bigger room beyond. A conference table and chairs had been squeezed into one end to make way for an elaborate architectural model ten feet square. Kronkheit dialed a dimmer switch and the miniature world was warmed by a dozen little pin spots clamped to a hanging pipe. As I looked at it from the six o’clock position, the Mountain Meadow Parkway snaked into the model at seven, the office tower stood at eight, and the hills from nine through midnight were dotted with expensive homes on gently curving streets. The college sat on its knoll at two o’clock, transformed from tired clapboard to romantic neo Spanish. The central valley was all golf course, with a clubhouse complex spotted conveniently below the homes and office tower.
The detailing was exquisite: swimming pools and water hazards gleamed, tile roofs glowed in the incandescent sunshine, and the trees that lined the fairways seemed to sway in phantom breezes. Like a fine movie miniature, the model appeared more real than reality itself.
And while I surrendered to its charming artifice, Kronkheit described his dream: a mile square enclave in which living, working, recreation, and learning all lay within a healthy jog, cradled in the great mothering lap of the mountains. I could imagine them beyond the shiny model, rolling up to Mount Wilson with its diadem of TV towers.
Phase One, the office block, was half complete. Construction of the housing tract (Phase Two) was financed and land grading was underway. Phase Three, the golf club, was being organized, and very soon Phase Four would see the transformation of AC/DC from a forlorn hillside squatter to a world class campus.
And that, Kronkeit said, was where Saka Motors came in. They wanted a firm connection to the Southern California automotive mystique that now influenced car design world-wide. Kronkheit had convinced them that by linking with the college, they could, in one painless step, acquire both the glow of educational philanthropy and a friendly neighborhood design center.
The college would be a neighbor because Saka Motors had leased the entire office building for their expanded U.S. headquarters. Their executives and staff would buy the houses and play golf at the country club. As proof of its benevolent intent, Saka’s opening gesture was the truck contest.
“But why wouldn’t they tell me this when I saw Lipscomb this morning?”
We walked back into Kronkheit’s office and he began pulling folders from a desk file drawer and stuffing them in a gleaming leather briefcase. “To be frank, Saka’s got the fidgets. They’re concerned - over concerned - about their image. They worry about a relationship with a college that explodes and kills people.” Kronkheit smiled gently at his wit. “That’s why it’s important to keep a low profile and run a successful contest.”
“I don’t even know what’s running.”
“You know as much as I do. That teacher - Caldwell? He handles the details.”
“He won’t discuss it without Saka’s permission, and Saka won’t admit they’ve ever heard of it.”
“I can reassure them, but I need a day or two.” Kronkheit pulled a thick four color folder from his briefcase. “Here’s the Mountain Meadow prospectus. It’ll give you a better idea of our long term goals for the college.”
I took the glossy folder as Kronkheit walked me to the door and snapped off the office lights. “I’m on my way out myself. You in the garage?”
In the parking structure, Kronkheit walked me to the Beetle, shook hands, and strolled off toward a Jaguar coupe in a reserved space. As he unlocked his car and got in it, I thought of his big, vulgar cufflinks and the bright, closed offices with no sounds coming out of them.
As I wheezed out into the Pasadena sunset, I realized what had bothered me about the Old Town restoration: it sparkled with the fake perfection of Kronkheit’s model. 
* * * *
Sprawled on her back on my living room couch, Sally propped Kronkheit’s prospectus on the convexities of her T shirt, while I struggled to program my VCR, an ancient appliance most charitably described as user-hostile.
Sally looked up from the folder. “Pretty slick, Stoney. Kronkheit put Phase One together by himself and he went first cabin. I’m not surprised.”
“How come?”
Sally rummaged for a loose sheet in one of the folder’s pockets. “The paper did a feature on Kronkheit. He put a copy in the prospectus.” She scanned the sheet through oversize glasses. “Looks like he knows his business: shopping malls, a Caribbean resort - even a hospital complex in Europe.”
“He seemed assured.
Sally resumed her study of the prospectus. “The housing tract was a different deal: ‘Mountain Meadow Properties.’ He sold limited partnerships to finance it.”
“Is that common?”
“Always rent your money, Stoney, never spend your own.” Complacently, she sipped Gewürztraminer.
“I’ll keep it in mind.”
“Now he’s financing the golf club with another, separate partnership called ‘Mountain Meadow Recreation Group.’” She slipped off her glasses and closed the folder. “As a business setup, it looks okay, I guess. As a community, I don’t know.”
“Why do you say that?” I tapped her bare foot and Sally drew up her legs to give me a seat.
“There’s no school system, no retail business, and not enough people to pay for that country club.”
“Saka Motors’ll have six hundred in the office tower.”
“Most of them hourly employees. Those folks don’t belong to fancy country clubs.”
“Hm.” I liked this domestic scene: Winston’s patent meatloaf digesting nicely, wine in sparkling jelly glasses, Sally preempting my shabby couch, relaxed as a dozing leopard.
She dropped the folder on the coffee table, sat up, and leaned against the sofa back. “Well at least you found out that Saka’s behind the contest.”
“I still wish I understood the cheating business. My student Connie Roderick says no one in the school could do that quality work. I tend to believe her.”
“Someone outside the school, then.”
“But who? Car design’s an esoteric art.”
“Beats me.” The leopard awoke and stretched. “Time to move it out.”
“Big day tomorrow?”
“Nope.” Sally shut her eyes and smiled. “And I’m starting to get used to that.”
I studied her exuberant body and strong, tan face. (How had she kept a tan in Seattle?) The face revealed thirty years of living, managed with powerful character and intelligence. I’d known no other face quite like it and probably never would.
Sally opened her eyes and caught me staring. Her face changed but not to the look of irritable strain I’d seen earlier. Now she seemed doubtful or even confused.
She rose abruptly. “Wine’s got me half asleep. Night, Stoney.”
As she left, I realized that my meatloaf, wine, and sofa were not the sources of my well being. And neither, come to think of it, was Sally. I had conjured it myself, out of need and wishful thinking.
Chapter 5
Saturday’s my day for domesticity: laundry, cleaning, digging for my desk down there somewhere beneath a tumulus of takeout cartons.
I’d excavated about two meters when Tina Morgan phoned, sounding tense and worried. “Can you come up to school, Stoney?”
“Now?”
“It’s more trouble, and I can’t discuss it on the phone.”
“Give me an hour.”
Before I left, I checked the videotape I’d made on time shift. It’d captured half an hour of promos and a Bela Lugosi movie. Par for the course. 
* * * *
As Bumble wheezed up Mountain Meadow Parkway, I noticed the stark skeleton destined for the future home of Saka Motors. The construction area looked deserted, understandably on Saturday, but something else beside activity was missing. I stopped near the entry gate in the chain link fence and studied the site while a chilly wind wriggled through my busted vent window and my engine muttered behind me like an old man grumbling at the cold.
The sign!
Normally, any project bigger than an outhouse displays a brag board as packed with credits as a crawl of movie titles: client, architect, contractor, engineers, financing bank. But the sign on this site was a tiny effort that listed only Mountain Meadow Group and one Sandusky Construction Corp.
Still puzzled, I revved the Beetle and struggled on to the college.
The administration center was empty as usual, but I spotted Tina through her open office door. “You rang, madam?”
She paused as if trying to phrase something carefully, then shrugged. “We’re missing forty thousand bucks.”
“What?”
A grim nod. “And Millard took it.”
After a moment to process this, I asked, “How did you find out?”
“Bank statement - it arrived this morning.” She picked a fat envelope off her desk.
“I thought you wrote the checks, even when you worked for Millard.”
Tina waved the envelope. “Sure, from the general account.” She extracted a thick sheaf of checks wrapped in the statement pages. “But Millard had his own account for discretionary funds. I didn’t sign those checks and I never saw a statement ‘til today.”
She handed me a check. It was made out to cash, endorsed by Millard in the same hand, and canceled. “This is only ten thousand dollars. Then thousand in cash?”
“I found three more debits in the last two months, all for ten thousand dollars and all unrecorded.” Tina fanned the sheaf of checks, “But the canceled checks were missing.” She pointed to the number on the check. “This check came out of the back of the book. I found five missing there.”
“And you only saw this check because Millard didn’t live to remove it first.” I took a pensive turn around the office. “This’ll make an awful mess, Tina.”
“Worse than that. In a couple of weeks, I have to pay the IRS quarterly withholding and Social Security. Without the money, I can’t do it.”
“But I thought the salary account was separate.”
An embarrassed tone crept into her voice. “When Millard hired me, he explained that he’d shifted funds out of the salary account - temporarily, he said, to cover a capital purchase.”
“How bad is this, Tina?”
Wearily, “Withholding taxes belong to the government. If I can’t pay them, I have to explain why.”
“And admitting that Millard embezzled forty K will hurt the school’s reputation.”
“Hurt? It’ll kill us.”
I remembered a stall in the first floor men’s room. On the dispenser of cut sheet toilet paper, someone had lettered diplomas: serve yourself. I sighed. “It puts the explosion in a new light. Millard needed forty thousand bucks badly enough to steal it. To pay someone back?”
“Or pay them off.”
I nodded. “Someone willing to put heavy pressure on him.”
“An oak bookcase did that.” She thought a moment, then shook her head. “But if they killed him, they wouldn’t get their money.”
“How could they know he’d be in his office on Sunday? Suppose they just wanted to scare him. Millard wouldn’t get hurt, but he would get the message; and the gas fired ceramics kilns could explain what happened.”
Tina shook her head doubtfully. “Forty thousand dollars is pretty small change for that kind of message.”
“How about forty million?” I looked out over the little tan valley. “The way Seymour Kronkheit tells it, the Mountain Meadow project includes an office complex, a country club, and two hundred upscale homes, all on a full square mile of prime land.”
Tina considered the idea. “The old lady said he doesn’t own the land.”
“If you want to find corruption in Southern California, look at real estate.”
Tina surveyed the rolling hills beyond her office patio. “I’m looking but it doesn’t tell me anything.”
“Maybe Full Moon Farquhar will.”
The next morning, I browsed through my three running feet of phone directories - the Great Books Library for film production managers - on the trail of Full Moon Farquhar. Working outward from Pasadena, I finally found her in West Hollywood, of all places, where Farquhars were few and Farquhar, Fool Moon unique. She lived only ten minutes away.
“I’m afraid I don’t entertain anymore.” Detached from her ancient carcass, Full Moon’s phone voice sounded thirty years younger.
“This is more in the line of business, M... uh, Full Moon.”
“The rent money?”
“In a way. It’s about Seymour Kronkheit.”
“Aha.” Then a long silence.
“If it wouldn’t be inconvenient.”
“Everything is inconvenient. But come along.”
“When would...?”
“One o’clock.”
“About one, then.”
“Sharp!”
“Yes, Ma’am.” 
* * * *
West Hollywood is a recently incorporated town just down the hill from my flat in Laurel Canyon. Its homes, in the usual riot of L. A. styles, are inhabited mainly by gays and pensioners, in amiable co existence. The aged B. chuckled down Crescent Heights Boulevard, turned right on Santa Monica, rattled past leather bars and kosher butchers, swung left into a residential street, and rolled to a stop at Full Moon Farquhar’s home.
Her shingled bungalow squatted between a Tudor farm house and a mock-Spanish reverie. The bungalow looked nearly as old as Full Moon and nearly as dilapidated. When the bell didn’t work, I banged on the oak front door. After a two minute wait, Full Moon opened it.
She peered at her plastic digital watch. “One-oh-four-oh-six. ”
“Sorry.”
Full Moon shrugged. “Oh, I don’t care. I just like to play with my watch.” She hobbled backward and waved me in. “It has five alarms and I have nothing to get up for.” Today, she wore a wrinkled cotton skirt and an ancient cashmere cardigan, long unwashed. Her only decoration was a phone beeper dangling from a cord around her neck.
Inside, the house was a surprising essay on luminous space: oriental volumes of light defined by redwood posts and beams. The planks gleamed, the wall fabrics glowed, and the spare-lined prairie furniture seemed to grow from the floor.
Full Moon tapped her way along a corridor, steadying herself with her free hand on a wall already grimy with finger marks. It was the only visible dirt.
I followed her. “Lovely house. I’d say Greene and Greene, but it’s later - and in the wrong part of town.”
The old woman shook her head. “Helen Simon, 1923. Almost the first house built in this subdivision.”
“I don’t know Helen Simon.”
“A genius, a woman, and a Jew, three strikes.” Her tone carried the sour resignation of age.
We doddered up to a stained glass door, which I opened, and entered what had once been a greenhouse. But now the only plants were low ferns and broad leaf shrubs rising above the ten inch lip on a wide, knee high, U shaped table that lined three walls of the big glass room. A faint smell filled the humid air like the breeze off a distant zoo.
Full Moon sank into a wheelchair with its right arm removed and rolled herself toward one end of the table, which turned out to be a city of countless turtles - yellow, green, tan, and brown. They ranged in size from silver dollar to bowler hat.
“My pets,” she said. “Old croaks like me are supposed to keep cats, but I prefer turtles. They don’t yell, fight, shed, rut, or pee on the rug. Hello, Vilma! That’s Vilma Banky.” Full Moon centered me in her stage light lenses. “Terrapene Carolina, common as dirt, but what a lovely name!” She moved her chair slowly forward by scuffing her feet on the floor, while patting her torpid pets. “What did you come here for?”
Though she seemed to address a turtle, I picked up my cue. “To learn more about Mountain Meadow.”
“Why?” Full Moon inched along the table.
“Because part of the plan is to rebuild the college.”
She stopped. “To what?”
“That’s right. Pull down every building and start over.”
“Impossible. They’re shrines to The Sainted. They were his corporeal home.” She twisted a tap with both big knuckled hands and water gushed from a high spigot into a wide, shallow pool.
“I don’t know much about him.”
“Few did, but The Sainted was a spiritual tower - a great campanile with bells at the top.”
And bats. But I said aloud, “You knew him well.”
“He named me Full Moon. I’d never liked my name. Schondorf was klunky and Edith was gray like my pinched, Lutheran father.” She shut off the water and resumed snailing along the table edge. “I’d acquired Spoony Farquhar for his name as much as his money. And then The Sainted finished the job: Full Moon Farquhar.” With evident effort, she shook off her reminiscent tone. “I might renovate those buildings - within reason and on others’ money - but they will not be torn down.”
“Kronkheit plans to replace them.”
“Kronkheit will not keep them if he doesn’t pay his rent.”
“You said you lease him Mountain Meadow. Is he behind on all his payments?”
“Not exactly. Marie Dressler, you’ve been naughty again. He loves to snack on the lobelia.”
He? I soldiered on. “Another puzzle: if Kronkheit only leases the land, how can he sell homes on it?”
“He has a lease-option. I’ll sell him land for the houses if he ever comes up with the money.”
“For the country club too?”
“What country club?”
“The whole central valley is a golf course and country club. It’s on his model.”
This time she stopped and fixed me in her glass gun sights. “Nonsense! I’m not selling that part.” But a worried tone was creeping into her voice.
I couldn’t figure Full Moon out. Sometimes she seemed like an experienced business person - and sometimes a vague old woman. “How much do you know about this project?”
“I’m a limited partner in Phase Two.”
“The homes.” She nodded. “So you didn’t know about Phases Three and Four - the club and the college.”
She shook her head and her jaw line flapped like a loosened tent. “I bought in by forgiving him five years’ rent on the office building land.”
“Then why did you come to collect...?”
“I insisted on cash rent for the college. Seymour wanted the buildings included so he could claim he had the whole square mile. Have you met C. Aubrey Smith?” She held up a big box turtle. Aside from its green complexion, it did have the look of a pukka colonel long-retired to cricket and port.
By now, we had glaciated back to the door and Full Moon creaked erect. “So much for that. They need love, you know, but I’m growing bored with them - like guests that overstay.”
“I guess I’d better be...”
“I didn’t mean you.” She patted my arm with a mummy’s paw. “Come along. I’ve Oreos and punch.”
Disdaining my help, the old lady tottered back up the hall, amending the finger mark mural at every step. She’d misaligned her wraparound skirt, exposing a spread of grayish cotton panties over her large behind. Full Moon was a strange assemblage of withered arms and legs attached to an almost globular body - like Tik Tok of Oz.
After a lengthy voyage, we reached the clean, cheery kitchen, where she sighed down into a straight backed chair, before a spread of cookies and fruit drink. I sat opposite.
Like a child, she split the chocolate cookies and scaled off the creme centers with her dentures, which clicked and popped expressively. And while she ate, drank, and smoked unfiltered Camels all at once, she reminisced.
At seventeen in 1926, Edith Schondorf had fled the stifling comfort of Elmira, New York, to play tiny parts on Broadway, until Witherspoon Farquhar appeared with stage door bouquets and then a wedding ring. After ten months of screaming boredom, she’d packed a large wardrobe and a small settlement and taken her new name to Hollywood.
Within two years, she would turn her flair for dialogue into a modest career as a script doctor, but in silent 1927, sound was but a cloud no bigger than an agent’s heart, and Edith Farquhar was surviving on canapés from the parties she was skilled at crashing.
The Sainted had changed all that by inducting her into his cult and bed, and before the Most Holy One was abruptly Translated (into what, she didn’t say) he made Full Moon Farquhar his earthly vicar. But the faithful drifted off, as faithful will, leaving her to tend the altar and the real estate, which the Sainted had placed in her name.
And now, six decades later, she crept around her empty house, remote from humanity and bitter that her age, which had finally made her life-long eccentricity acceptable, now deprived her of the vigor to enjoy it.
“You seem to manage pretty well though.”
She peered around the tidy kitchen. “The girl came in yesterday. And TV dinners don’t need pots and pans.”
“You have a microwave?”
“Certainly not!” She cracked another cookie and scraped the filling off. “Microwaves destroy vibrations.”
“Ah.”
“He is still here, you see.”
I had thought he was haunting the college, but never mind. “You’re sure you don’t know any of the other partners?”
Full Moon trained her heavy glasses on the cookie plate. “There was another man...”
“A partner?”
“...in Kronkheit’s office when I went there once.”
“Recall his name?”
She shook her wattles irritably at her uncertain memory. “A gray, middling sort of man. He had no vibrations whatever. Kronkheit called him a fellow investor.” Full Moon strained forward to reach the final cookie and the beeper hanging from her neck dipped into her fruit punch glass. “Oh, drat!” She wiped it with a well-used Kleenex.
Wondering who would want to summon Full Moon, I asked, “What’s the phone pager for?”
She squinted at the little box distastefully. “Stupid thing. My doctor insisted on it.” She snorted. “If I fall down dead, I’m supposed to push the button. Ridiculous!”
Ah: a medical emergency caller. “Whom does it dial?”
“I couldn’t think of any one, so I put in the number of a funeral home.” Another grim snort. “They can collect the garbage before it stinks.”
I watched her crumble the last cookie in her yellow dentures. Her wispy white hair was unbrushed and her wrinkled face unwashed. Too feeble to drive or cope at home, she persisted in doing so anyway, with mulish dignity. There was a wistful gallantry in that. “You really ought to put in the paramedics’ number.”
“Or dial-a-prayer.”
“Or mine.”
“Why yours, for gawdsake?”
“I live just up the hill.” Full Moon peered suspiciously, as if looking for the catch, so I dropped into Groucho: “Now you say ‘come down and see me sometime.’ Do you do Mae West? You look like Down East. Can we start this conversation over?”
Full Moon smiled at this attention, but said only, “I forgot how to do it.”
“I’ll do it for you.”
I discovered that entering my number was worse than programming my VCR, but I worked it out eventually.
Looking up, I found her peering at her empty plate as if trying to recall its purpose. “Well thanks for the information and the tea party.”
She brushed an ash off her stained cashmere sweater. “I’d have offered a martini, but one never knows whom one will offend these days.”
I smiled. “And I enjoyed talking.”
Full Moon sighed. “I did too, surprisingly.”
I closed the kitchen door behind me, leaving her to her plate. 
* * * *
I drove back uphill to Laurel Canyon and, seeing Sally’s Supra in the driveway, invented chores to keep me home, in case she might just wander downstairs. She didn’t though, and I hadn’t the courage to wander up. By night, I’d bullied my flat into tidiness, suffered a dinner of heat-and-eat sawdust, rejected the programs on forty channels, and re-dedicated myself to the reduction of my wine stock. By the time I wobbled feebly off to bed, I was not in prime condition.
Chapter 6
At its now infrequent best, California driving is an ad-lib folk dance - a vast communal improvisation by millions of empathic villagers swooping and swirling with instinctive cooperation. Toyotas and Trans Ams, Beemers and Buicks, Porsches and Peterbilts interlace at 70 with implausible precision and success - all dancing to the same inaudible tune.
But some drivers are cursed with a psychic deafness that prevents them from hearing the tune or feeling the rhythm. Though they push the right pedals and follow the signs, they disrupt the gavotte and shove other dancers into walls.
Tina was one of these tone-deaf drivers. Tooling down the freeway on-ramp, she pushed her little Sentra to a dizzy 38 mph as she merged with traffic doing 70, while I sat in the passenger seat and tried to suppress the instinctive pumping of my brake foot. Speed up; slow down; up; down; signal on; signal off; on again; floor it; desperate lurch left into line; stand on the brake pedal. The Sentra’s nose bobbed up and down, a yard upstream from the car ahead.
“Traffic’s light today.” Tina’s voice showed only cheerful composure.
I concealed a dry swallow.
“What did Kronkheit say, exactly?”
“Just that he’d cleared things with Saka and they’d be glad to talk to us.” I’d taken Kronkheit’s phone call this morning at my newly-assigned front office desk.
She swerved across three lanes, provoking a chorus of outraged honks. “Think that’s true?”
“I don’t know why not.” I regretted my Methodist rearing, which denied me the comfort of a rosary.
“I still don’t see why we have to schlep all the way to El Segundo.”
“In the interest of good relations.”
Wallowing into the fast lane, Tina settled at 50 miles per hour with occasional gusts up to 60, as traffic bunched behind us like a string of freight cars. “I’ve never seen you wear a tie.”
“When in El Segundo...” I’d given up the businessman charade, and today’s knit tie, corduroy jacket, and loafers looked more honest on me.
“You could pass for a professor.”
“In the dark with the light behind me. You’re spiffy yourself”
Unconsciously, Tina sucked in her stomach, made rounder by the seat belt beneath it, and dropped far behind the car ahead as absently as she had been crowding it.
We made it to Fort Saka with only four near collisions, signed in, pinned on badges, and followed a slim, blonde vision who looked like a TV weatherperson. She led us down a hall lined with executive portraits that displayed the curiously gentle look peculiar to Japanese business elders. This interview looked to be different.
“Welcome to our Welcome Center.” Ms. Weatherperson ushered us into audiovisual heaven: video projector slung below the ceiling, six by eighteen-foot screen, and a convention of slide projectors in banks behind a long glass window set high in the rear wall. A dozen swivel chairs scaled for football tackles surrounded a conference table - a rosewood behemoth that must have come in twenty pieces, though the round surface didn’t show a single join.
Ms. Weatherperson turned on her best Channel 4 smile. “Bud thought you might like to see our corporate presentation. He’ll be down in a few minutes.” She turned and left.
The pin spots on the table faded down, expensive speakers hissed, and 24 computer-run projectors launched into The Saka Motors Saga. 
* * * *
An hour later, I had to admit that Saka knew how to massage a guest. Even factories and forklifts had seemed exciting when machine gunned at us by 24 projectors. Then the lights had faded up on the entrance of Bud Lipscomb, trailed by handsome, silent Yoshi and a white-jacketed factotum pushing a cart groaning with deli.
And now we were wiping fingers on linen napkins and draining diet sodas. I mopped a spot of mustard off my pants. Bud Lipscomb looked exactly the same today, as if he’d bought six sets of the same gray suit and wore them in rotation.
His manner, however, was different. “Tina, I’m real glad you could come on down. You too, Stoney.” He pinched the sides of his empty Sprite can. “And I’m glad we got the contest straightened out.” Lipscomb launched the can toward a wastebasket. It clanked on the edge and bounced in. He looked at Yoshi and made a ta daa! gesture.
The quiet young Japanese shook his head. “Two points off. You hit the rim.” Yoshi grinned and was suddenly human.
Lipscomb grinned back, then turned to us, “You see how it is. Japanese bosses are bastards for precision.”
Yoshi took this as if it were a running gag between them. “I have to keep you honest.”
I pinched my own can, but suppressed the impulse to compete with Lipscomb. “I can see why you had to be cautious - if you’re actually going to develop the winning truck.” Lipscomb nodded pleasantly and I added, “The design would become... proprietary.”
For just an instant, Lipscomb’s face went blank, then he reset it to genial. “Sure would.” 
“And that’s the only reason for keeping it quiet?” His shrug asked what other reason could there be? “Seymour Kronkheit hinted at a longer term relationship.”
“One step at a time.” He produced a neutral smile.
“Hm. Do you plan to develop the winner.”
“If it’s good enough.” Lipscomb seemed to find this hedge too strong, even for him. “And Caldwell says he’s getting great designs.”
“That reminds me, would you tell him he can discuss the contest with us?”
A nod. “But only with you two. Well.” Lipscomb stood up and silent Yoshi followed. “A pleasure to meet you; keep in touch, you guys.”
And in a traveling billow of social chat, they showed us out. 
* * * *
Tina dawdled back to the college at 50, stitching lanes together, punishing her brakes, and generally doing her bit for road rage. As I endured her driving, I reviewed the meeting, at least in part to keep from sobbing with fear. Lipscomb had not admitted any further plans for the college - let alone the fact that Saka had leased Kronkheit’s building. One intriguing point though: Lipscomb had said Japanese bosses, and Yoshi had said “we have to keep you honest” - as if he were Lipscomb’s superior instead of vice versa. In fact, Yoshi was a larger puzzle. He’d sat there saying nothing, but missing nothing and hinting at power sheathed in impassive courtesy. Nonetheless, Caldwell would have to talk about the contest now, so the trip would be worth this ordeal.
If Tina got us back alive to talk to him
* * * *
“It’s precisely as Bud Lipscomb described it to you. The winner gets five thousand dollars and a six month apprenticeship at Saka.” Caldwell popped a plastic lid, inspected the greenish mess in his refrigerator cup, and found it good. We were meeting during lunchtime in Tina’s dusty office patio, and the auto design teacher was killing two birds.
When Tina had explained my “promotion” to him, Caldwell had said, “That’s nice” in a tone of indifferent acceptance.
And now my new boss, the victim of a gardening spasm, was picking dead leaves off a hopeless ficus. “Is every auto design student entered?”
Caldwell chuckled. “And competing their little hearts out.” He spooned green ooze with gusto.
Though I wanted to ask what vile muck he was eating, I only said, “Who’ll judge the entries?”
Caldwell lowered his spoon, looking vexed. “As a matter of fact, that’s a problem. You see, Bud Lipscomb is one judge, I’m the second, and Ben Millard was the third. We haven’t decided how to replace him.”
That gave me an idea. “You could do it, Tina. You’re president now.”
Tina gaped at me across the ficus and seemed about to protest. I sent her a warning look. Well...” She studied the plant, which appeared terminal. “Well, I just might.”
“Then that solves the problem.” A pause while I faked an interest in the ficus, then, “Are you getting good designs?”
“A few. We don’t have many top students.” Then Caldwell saw the implications of that and added, “At the moment, anyway.”
I pretended to review the entries in my mind. “Connie Roderick’s truck seemed well done.”
“Oh yes!” His enthusiasm sounded genuine; then his face clouded. “But Saka won’t buy it. As I said, too ethnic. And I tend to agree with them.” Caldwell’s tone was regretful. “Look, the ‘best’ design’s whatever the client likes and Saka’s the client.” Tina nodded reluctantly and Caldwell added, “They’re not doing this for charity, you know.” He polished off his leftover, good to the last slop.
“What about Nick Beltrán’s design?”
Caldwell considered this. “It is the only other decent effort. And I think it’s rather more commercial.”
Tina said, still mildly, “So you’ve already picked the winner.”
Time for a more direct attack: “Do you think Beltrán’s handing in his own work?”
Caldwell looked surprised. “What makes you ask that?”
“Nothing too concrete. But the design I saw was heavily revised - and much better than his earlier stuff.”
“I’d like to think that’s because I’m teaching him something.” The tone carried gentle remonstrance.
I kept my tone casual, “It’s a pretty tempting prize. And others have mentioned their suspicions.”
“What others?”
Better not get Connie in trouble with her teacher. “As I said, the evidence is sketchy.”
“Well I’ll certainly take another look at Beltrán’s work.” He seemed distressed. “In fact, I’ll check everyone...” He trailed off with an unhappy frown and went inside.
“What do you think, Stoney?”
“He seems a bit naive for a veteran teacher.”
“Oh, he’s always sort of vague.” She dusted her hands.
“Well let’s wait and see what he finds.” 
* * * *
At five o’clock, I was half way out to patient Bumble when a reedy voice called “Winston!” and Caldwell scuffed across the faculty lot in his open toed sandals. I wondered how he kept his socks so clean.
His look of distress was evident. “You were right. Beltrán was cheating.”
At last a piece had dropped in place, but I kept my pleasure out of my voice, “I’m sorry Chick. What happened?”
He smiled wanly at my condolence. “To use the customary phrase, I confronted him with the evidence.” We resumed walking toward our cars. “I never would have thought it.”
“And he admitted it.” Caldwell nodded. “Who did the work for him?”
“I didn’t press him. He was terribly upset.”
We strolled in silence for a moment, then, “Chick, I’ll have to talk to him.”
“Yes, I suppose some sort of discipline...”
“There’s that of course, but I need to learn who the other person is. Whoever faked Beltrán’s work was cheating too, you know.”
“Oh my. I never thought of that.” Caldwell looked at me ruefully. “I guess you’re a good choice for administrator. I never tumbled to Beltrán at all.”
“I know, and when a good student goes sour, the teacher hurts a little.”
Caldwell stared at me with something like gratitude. He hesitated. “Yes.” After another pause, he abruptly held out his hand.
I shook it and then watched as the slight, stooped man turned and shuffled off toward his car, a flawless 1966 Corvette. 
* * * *
A fine October evening full of L.A.’s schizophrenic weather: genuine smog-free mist creeping over West Hollywood below Sally’s house like a gray down comforter, while the last yellow sunshine splashed our hills and rim lit the eucalyptus trees surrounding her deck. Birds gabbled in the branches and cars grumbled invisibly down Laurel Canyon Boulevard, far below. In the distance, the lighted office towers of Century City would be swarming with getters and spenders, still hard at it.
Sally and I were absorbing the therapeutic sunset and sipping Chardonnay in paper cups. She was more or less dressed this time, which was just as well under the circumstances. When I’d found her banging around her kitchen, she hadn’t invited me to supper.
But then, what did I expect?
“Glad you cleared up the contest thing, Stoney.”
“Which sends me right back to square one.”
“The explosion?”
“And the money Millard stole, and the Kronkheit business.”
She studied a neighborhood tabby on the ground below the deck, out for its evening lurk. “At least it gives you something to do. I’m getting bored again.”
I pushed my luck a bit. “My kids are shooting tomorrow. Want to come along?”
The cat leapt at a sparrow on a low tree branch, missed, and tumbled into the eucalyptus leaves. When Sally laughed out loud, the cat looked up with murder in its eye, then washed itself with dignity.
“What time are you starting?”
“Six thirty, worse luck.”
Sally considered this, then nodded. “Might be fun. Six thirty then. My dinner’s probably ready.” She wandered inside while I signaled thumbs-up at my paper cup.
Chapter 7
Verdant Hills cemetery dated from the turn of the century, when much of the San Gabriel Valley had been empty except for farms and ranches. Ancient eucalyptus and live oak trees shaded little hills and dales, kept stoplight green by enough piped water to drain half the Sierras. Headstones carved with the usual pieties stood sentinel over the long dead farmers who had ridden cheap trains from the Midwest to this last frontier.
Sally and I had explained our business at the gatehouse and were now surging up the cemetery road, wrapped in the Beetle’s bronchial roar. We’d driven the Venerable B. because I would need to stop at the college later and my parking sticker was a talisman against tickets. The campus police, a cohort of one, was vindictive even with faculty.
We found my four students already filming in a misty canyon mouth at the north end of the cemetery, as far as possible from the caretaker in his gatehouse. I introduced Sally and let the crew get on with it.
Today, Bob was shooting the most pretentious sequence in the whole muddled film. In the Midst of Death, We Are in Life, he called it, so pleased with this profundity that I’d not had the heart to comment.
The camera framed a foreground full of gravestones, in front of a gnarled grandfather oak. The eerie scene was softened by mist, augmented by George DeGrasse, who was dithering with an ancient Mole Richardson fog machine. Big Deidre started the camera, Connie Roderick slated, and Engineer Bob peered tensely toward the oak tree.
“More fog!”
At Bob’s command, George aimed the fog machine at the graves and pumped its plunger. An acrid smell like insect poison filled the air as “fog” (a petroleum-based liquid vaporized by a heating element) boiled out to mingle with the mist.
“And action!”
Nothing happened at first, and then something peeped shyly out from behind the oak: a pink half moon with a knob protruding from its center like the handle on a pastry plate dome. The bulging half dome emerged as cautiously as a blimp from its hangar, pulling behind it the otherwise slender form of Bob’s wife, ostentatiously pregnant and emphatically nude.
I couldn’t resist a glance at Sally, who had no idea of what was to be shot today. Her eyes widened slightly and then she brought her face under iron control, except for an occasional twitch as she fought to banish a smile.
Evidently a trained dancer, Bob’s wife wafted among the grave stones, striking poses that emphasized her maternity, her face set in the ethereal look that seems droll to us clods who are not into Dance. She wielded her heroic stomach with aplomb.
Deidre called, “That’s it” when the spring driven Bolex had ground to a halt. Bob yelled “cut” anyway, to show who was director, and Connie handed Bob’s wife a gaudy muumuu.
I turned to Sally, expecting a wry remark, but she was gazing at nothing in particular and smiling gently. “How nice she looks,” Sally said. 
* * * *
We spent two hours shooting different angles, with the efficiency that came of knowing that by ten o’clock, the mist would depart and the public arrive. They mightn’t be ready for the sight of a vastly pregnant nudist depicting all over their late Uncle Wilbur.
Still, for all her portentous choreography, Bob’s wife was a sweet, fey girl with a kind of solemn charm. Between shots, she explained to Sally that this was her chance to refute the stereotype of wallowing, waddling maternity. Pregnant or not, she was a dancer, and dance she would. Her name was Simone. As I wandered out of earshot, she was shifting to the pros and cons of underwater birthing.
Meanwhile, the crew had set up for the pièce de résistance. Taking advantage of a dip in the ground behind an old headstone, Bob had positioned a homemade contraption the size of a shallow coffin. From the camera’s low angle, this box was invisible behind a rim of portable turf, and with the actual headstone, it looked passably like a new grave. A concealed cable ran over to a winch placed out of frame.
Bob clutched the winch handle and Deidre manned the camera, while Simone shed her muumuu and struggled into the box. As George DeGrasse pumped out fake fog, Connie slated and Bob called for action. The Bolex whickered softly.
After a few seconds, Bob started cranking the winch handle and the grating sound of crude machinery floated out of the box. From my vantage point at camera height, I could see nothing at first. Then Bob’s wife appeared, spherical belly first, like the slowly rising moon. She levitated into full silhouette, mysterious as Stonehenge in the misty backlight, and lay silent on her grassy bier.
Suddenly, a snack! like a .22 pistol shot, and Bob’s wife vanished with a metallic crash. Engineer Bob gaped at the end of his broken cable as the rest of us rushed to help Simone. She lay on her back in the packing crate casket, her Astrodome belly shaking with laughter. We started laughing with her.
“Cut,” Bob said in an injured tone.
Deidre brayed, “It certainly is!” and slapped an outsized thigh. 
* * * *
“Exactly what is this epic about?” Sally leaned against a table in my classroom as I shoved the Bolex case into a storage cabinet.
“Creation - but don’t blame me, it was Bob’s idea.” I stowed the battered friction-head tripod.
“He takes it very seriously.” Sally smiled. “I don’t think he appreciated our laughing.”
I locked the cabinet with a key on my ring. “He has a gift for contraptions that don’t work. “See that aquarium?”
“What’s the gizmo in it?”
“Bob’s handy dandy heater. He built it to warm the water but when he plugged it in, it fried a goldfish.” I started chuckling as I said this, I couldn’t help it.
Sally chuckled too, then checked her watch. “Is there a Ladies on this floor?”
“I guess. I’ve never had occasion to look for one.”
With scorn for this feeble jape, Sally swept out.
I was taking an odd pleasure in tidying my classroom, when the door opened again and two men walked in: youngish, hard, and large. In their suits, white shirts, and thin, dark ties, they looked like ex linebackers selling insurance; but the expressions on their faces said they hadn’t come a-wooing. One wore a blond pompadour, the other a crew cut, which helped to tell them apart. They strolled up and stood flanking me by the equipment cabinet.
“Something I can do for you gents?”
Crew Cut looked down at me calmly. “We need to have a little discussion.” His tenor voice was as mild as his gaze.
“About what?”
He moved uncomfortably close. “Career counseling.”
“Who are you?”
He shook his head and continued as mildly as ever, “You’re not cut out for teaching, you know. You might do better someplace else.”
“I don’t think so.”
Crew Cut nodded carefully and moved even closer. “Not yet, you don’t. So we dropped in to help you change your mind.”
“I assume you’re not talking about a bribe.”
Crew Cut gazed down with deadly kindness. “That’s right.”
By now, he and his partner were crowding me toward the equipment cabinet.
My mind was supposed to be racing here, but it seemed to be swimming through oatmeal. Unable to think of anything, I set down the reflector case I was holding and started to unlock the cabinet. Then, for no special reason, I hesitated.
The blond mountain shot a glance at Crew Cut, then grabbed my shoulder and turned me. He jerked his big head toward the cabinet. “What’s in there?”
There was nothing important, but to buy some time, I just looked apprehensive, which required little faking. Crew Cut clamped my other shoulder. “Open that door.” I shook my head. He looked up at his partner. “Take the keys.”
With his free hand, Blondie squeezed my wrist. I was straining to keep my fingers wrapped around my key ring when Sally opened the classroom door and then froze in surprise.
I yelled, “Go!” Sally paused for just a beat, then vanished.
“Shit! Go get her.” Crew Cut jerked a finger toward the door and Blondie started for it. As he freed my arm, I lobbed the key ring toward the fish tank. It hit the water and sank.
Crew Cut snapped his head toward the aquarium, then back to me. “What the Christ...?” He pounded toward the tank.
The instant he let me go, I flung myself toward the wall, and as he instinctively plunged a hand into the fish tank, I plugged in Bob’s lethal heater.
Crew Cut screamed and jerked his arm so violently that he pitched backward onto the floor. Halfway out the door, Blondie turned at the noise, saw his pal flopping like a fish in a rowboat, and started for me.
I raced around the walls of the classroom, but Blondie skidded to a stop, reversed himself, and reached the door before I could make it. He grabbed a handful of my polo shirt and yanked me toward him hard enough to rip a seam. I pulled on his wrists with both hands but it was like trying to lift a box car coupler. He removed one hand to begin a slap at my head, but then the fire bell went off.
The racket froze him. He looked at me, checked his writhing partner, cocked his head at the noise of the bell, then swore. He swung around and lumbered toward Crew Cut, who was lurching to his feet. Blondie hung Crew Cut’s arm over his shoulders and stumbled out the door with him.
Dazed and shaking, I skirted the puddle on the floor and pulled the heater plug from the wall outlet. Then I remembered Sally. I raced out into the empty hall and looked around. It was empty.
I yelled over the racketing fire bell, “Sally?”
A door marked women cracked and Sally looked around it. “You okay?” she said.
I nodded. “They took off. Thanks for pulling the alarm.”
Sally blew a puff of relief. As she came through the door she looked at it and erupted in a snort of nervous laughter.
“What’s funny?”
Sally pointed at the women sign on the restroom door. “I just took it for granted they’d never look in there.” 
	* * * *
By the time Sally and I had made our cautious way down to the faculty parking lot, the dusty field was empty except for an electric utility cart that rolled toward us in stately silence. That would be Fat Floyd, the college’s one man security force. He pulled up to the Beetle and stopped to inspect us with irritating self importance. “That yer car?”
“It’s me, Floyd.” His gibbous face streamed sweat from the exertion of turning his steering wheel. “Floyd, did you see a car leave the lot just now?”
For a long moment he sat there immobile - a 300 pound pile of suet overflowing the seat. Floyd was so immense in the little open top cart that he looked like an Indian elephant upended on top of its howdah. “Why?”
“Ah, we thought my students might be here. We were filming today.”
“Not s’posed ta be here. ‘S here’s faculty.”
“And I’m faculty, remember?”
Floyd processed that, perhaps subcontracting the job to a ganglion at the base of his tail, which eventually shipped back an answer: “Oh.”
Sally stepped forward with a sunny smile. “Are you sure you didn’t see a car leave just now?”
The guard turned his vast head and surveyed her with the ghost of libido in his eyes. He actually smiled. “Yeah, but it wasn’t no stoonts.”
“Who was it, Floyd?” Sally’s dark voice was warm.
“Cops.”
“Really?” She made it sound fascinating.
“Big guys in a sedan.”
“How did you know they were police?”
“Hubcaps.” Sally looked a question. “Dinky lil hubcaps. They always give away yer unmarked car.”
“Did you talk to them?”
Floyd ruminated. “Yeah. Yesterday. Afternoon.”
As I stood there seething with impatience, I had to admire Sally’s control. She kept prompting, “And what did they say yesterday afternoon?”
“About the film class. They wanted ta like visit.”
“Yes?”
“Tol’m no class t’day. I looked it up.” Floyd added, “I got a book,” as if that answered a difficult question.
“Did you ask where they were from?”
Floyd twitched his shoulder meat in a shrug. “Dint need ta. Cops.”
“Thanks, Floyd.” Sally turned up her smile and Gargantua smiled back. He even touched the brim of his cap, and in Floyd’s scale of responses that was like sweeping his cape over a puddle.
Sally has that effect on people.
* * * *
“Stoney, why didn’t you tell security about those men?” Sally and I were chattering homeward in Bumble, through the warm afternoon.
“Floyd wasn’t the man to report those goons to. He reached his level of incompetence at parking tickets.”
She turned to look for following cars. “I don’t see anybody.”
“I don’t expect you will. They’ll think we’ve reported this to the police by now.”
“Will you?”
“They’d want to know who sent those men; and I couldn’t give them an answer.”
“Rent-a-goons don’t work in business suits. They looked like corporate security. I’ll bet they’re from Saka.”
“They seemed too much like film clichés. You know: button-down heavies from an Evil Government Agency.”
“Yeah, that would be about right.”
“Sally, you can’t be serious.”
“I’ve been selling to big companies for eight years, friend. I’ve run into types like that.” She thought a moment. “And security people drive cheapo company cars.”
I imitated Floyd. “Wit’ lil dinky hubcaps.”
We rolled down Michillinda Avenue, past vapid ranchos roofed with crushed white rubble, as if it had once snowed rocks. Sally checked our rear again. “I wonder how they found you.”
“I guess they camped out near the college and watched for the Beetle. There’s only one road in. When I didn’t show up yesterday, they came back today.”
Sally nodded. “Which means they know your car.” She thought a moment, then, “Where did you park at Saka?”
“In the visitor’s lot.”
“Can you see it from Lipscomb’s office?”
“Come to think of it, yes. Clearly.”
“Aha.”
We entered the 210 Freeway West, pleasantly uncongested on this inbound side. Sally shoved her feet into the passenger side floorboards and stretched until her seat back creaked in pain. “I suddenly feel like a dress and heels. I feel like...” She thought for a moment. “...Like Peking duck and butterfly shrimp. Is the Grand Star still in business?”
“It’s about the only restaurant in L.A. you can count on.”
“Then let’s go to Chinatown tonight. My treat.”
I kept my tone casual. “Okay.” In the old days I’d resented Sally’s ever-ready cash, but her offer marked a heartening change in attitude.
I hoped. 
* * * *
 For reasons obscure to the western mind, some Chinese restaurants serve ambrosial food on linoleum tables. But not the Quon Brothers’ Grand Star. At seven thirty Sally and I settled gratefully into a well padded booth lit by soft pin spots. The bar waitress brought Johnny Walker for Sally and Jack Daniels for me and the four of us tried to relax. As always, the silver sparkled and the linen was so clean it smelled good.
Sally was linen covered too, in a white dress that set off her tan arms and throat and corralled her figure to the point where it was not an incitement to civil disorder. For my part, I was as close to presentable as I get, meaning my socks matched.
I toasted Sally with my whiskey. “To the end of a taxing day.”
Sally smiled. “You have a gift for taxing days, Stoney.” She sipped her drink. “Though I have to say they’re lively.” She glanced around the quiet restaurant.
“Looking for goons?”
She shook her head but her short laugh carried a trace of embarrassment.
“Don’t fret about them. They didn’t follow us this afternoon, and they don’t know your Supra.” For this elegant night on the town, we’d left my Beetle at home.
“You’re right, though I still think you should tell the police.”
I shook my head. “Saka’s already nervous about monkey business at the college.”
“Why is Saka so important?”
“If they hook up with the school, they could save it - at least, according to Kronkheit.”
Sally toyed with a little cardboard tent advertising rum drinks shaded by parasols. “You know, an awful lot of this is ‘according to Kronkheit.’”
Sharing an intimate booth with Sally, I was not in the mood for Kronkheit. I opened a menu the size of a tabloid. “Shall we order a package deal or wing it?”
She cracked her own menu without looking at it. “Seems like Kronkheit needs Saka more than the college does. Without them he hasn’t any tenants for his office building.”
“They’ve signed up already, college or not.” But then I had to add, “According to Kronkheit.”
The wrinkled waiter materialized on cue. Recognizing two old customers, he smiled even more broadly than usual. “You folks decided what you’re gonna have?” He recorded our choice with a two inch pencil and plodded back into the shadows.
Then we sat. A subtle tension seeped into the air. I didn’t want to talk about my year away from Sally and I didn’t want to hear certain things about hers.
She sipped at her scotch. “I like Johnny Walker - I never could take a single-malt scotch.”
“Same with Jack Daniels. It’s not as fierce as Kentucky bourbon.”
We nodded our satisfaction at doing justice to this important subject.
More silence.
“You know...” Sally’s reflective tone worried me. “You know, it’s funny that Kronkheit didn’t tell the old lady about the college and country club.”
I noticed that I’d been holding my breath. “And he’s behind in his rent.”
Sally’s face grew animated and I realized that she too was grateful for a safe topic. If this dinner wasn’t going where I’d hoped, at least it wasn’t self destructing now. I raised my whiskey glass but it was empty.
* * * *
Through shrimp and spicy pork and Mongolian beef and Peking duck, Sally pincered up her meal with darting chopsticks while I hobbled behind on my fork.
Kronkheit kept us going through the meal. Some things were oddly wrong about his project - like his almost empty office, the rent he owed to Full Moon, the pitiful little sign at the construction site.
Sally wrapped her almond cookie in a tissue and stashed it in her purse, as usual. She snapped her fortune cookie, withdrew the little paper strip, and read it in an offhand tone. “Look for undervalued assets close to home.” Her face froze, then softened, and she tucked the little paper in her purse.
I read her my own fortune. “Renewed efforts will be rewarded.”
With the pro forma smile of someone who’s only half listening, Sally calculated the tip and signed the card slip.
I eased out of the booth. “Thanks for a nice dinner, Sally.”
“Yes, I enjoyed that.” But her tone said her mind was elsewhere. 
* * * *
Sally aimed us homeward through the crisp autumn darkness, up the Hollywood freeway, off at Highland, and west on Hollywood toward Laurel Canyon Boulevard. As she piloted the Supra with her usual precision, I reflected that in both elegance and power, she and her car were a perfect match. We swung into her driveway, parked beside the bread loaf form of the forsaken Beetle, and emerged into the cool night air.
I hoped she would ask me in and I thought she sensed that. “Well,” she said, as if to dilute the thickening silence.
“Thanks again for dinner, Sally.”
“Well.” She turned on an uncertain smile, then turned it off again. “I guess I’ll see you later.”
I nodded, my own smile fake as Formica. “G’night.” I started slowly toward the steps down to my flat.
“Stoney?”
I stopped and Sally approached me, her large form softened by the dim light.
“Yuh?”
Once again, she seemed to change her mind. “I’ll make some calls tomorrow - check out Kronkheit’s track record.”
“Okay.” Not an offer to make the heart leap. “Thanks.”
But Sally had noticed my tone. She came close enough to put a hand on my upper arm, then held the arm a moment while she looked at my face with an odd puzzled seriousness. Then she squeezed my arm, turned, and diminished in the darkness.
I stumbled down the steps, unlocked my door, and entered Mildew Manor, juggling ten interpretations of her look. Given my keen instincts about women, twelve out of ten were wrong.
Chapter 8
After another night’s communion with the grape, I wobbled off to AC/DC in the morning, resolved to tread the path of virtue, if I lived.
In class we screened the cemetery dailies and I had to admit that no matter how vaporous the content, their technique was quite professional - especially Deidre’s camera work. Today, Engineer Bob looked as seedy as I felt, since his wife had spent the night evicting nine pound six ounce Robert, Jr., stimulated perhaps by the day’s aerobics in the cemetery. Dependably, it was Deidre who jibed, “I guess we can’t shoot pickups.”
We were chugging along at trolling speed when a student brought a note from Tina Morgan, asking me to see her after class.
I found her in the haggard lunch room, extracting a Snickers bar from a vending machine. She made as if to hide the candy, then shrugged. “I think the contest problem solved itself. Beltrán left school.”
“When?”
“He hasn’t been here two days running.”
“Could he be sick?”
Tina shook her tousled curls. “Caldwell says he took his contest drawings with him.”
“Too bad.”
“Saved us the trouble.” Tina chomped her candy bar with big white teeth. “What’s wrong?”
I plonked onto a grimy folding chair. “I wanted to talk to him. Maybe sniff out a link to the explosion.”
Tina smoothed her dress over her hips. “You know, I think the two things were just coincidence.”
“Even so, I’d like to get his home address from the office.”
“Okay.” Tina preceded me out the door. “But you’re barking up a blind alley.”
* * * *
With Beltrán’s address in my pocket, I hunted up Connie Roderick. She was spinning through high fashion poses on the grass plot between the buildings, while Deidre and eight other students blazed away at her with cameras. Connie’s costume was ‘forties retro, and on her slight frame, the gaudy, padded blouse looked as if she’d forgotten to remove the hanger. The perfect shape for Harper’s Bazaar.
During a pause in the shooting, I told Connie about Beltrán and my resolve to talk to him.
Connie looked at his home address. “I better go with you.”
“Why?”
“Eastside, hijito.” She dropped into burlesque Mexican dialect: “Djew ain’ gonna ge’ nobody to say nut tin.”
Perhaps she had a point. “Do you speak Spanish, Connie?”
“¡Por supuesto! What did you think?”
“All right, if you can stand the Beetle.”
Connie grinned like a kid offered a zoo trip and scampered over to tell the instructor. 
* * * *
Squeezed between Monterey Park and Boyle Heights, City Terrace is a homey jumble of knobby hills and swooping streets lined with stucco bungalows. The modest lawns and houses looked well cared for, and only the frequent security fences admitted a local crime problem. Behind the chain link barriers, the driveways teemed with vehicles: pickup trucks, camping trailers, and the inevitable “Chebbies” of teenagers who spent more time customizing them than driving. B. Bumble was outclassed, as usual. 
Connie and I wheezed along through the amber sunshine, looking at house numbers. “There,” she said.
“Okay, you stay in the car.”
Connie looked disgusted. “Then what’d you bring me down here for?”
“Just until I check it out, okay?”
Connie rolled her eyes at this, but nodded.
I parked, opened a driveway gate so wide that it rolled on casters, and followed a path of pebbled concrete disks to the tidy front porch. A huge black mongrel raised its head, checked me out, then sighed back into its puddle of sunshine. While I waited for an answer to my knock, I studied the sign posted by the door…
This Is a Christian Home!
…in English and Spanish.
The door cracked just wide enough to reveal a withered brown female face peering out between upper and lower door chains. The face jerked upward in a silent question.
“My name’s Stoney Winston, Ma’am. I’m looking for Nick Beltrán.”
The old woman raked me up and down suspiciously. “Why?”
I smiled my best old lady charmer smile. “I’m an administrator at his college and we wondered why he hasn’t been at school.”
Her sharp dark eyes narrowed. “You like the truant man?” So much for my foolproof smile.
“Oh no, we’re just... concerned. Is he here?”
Instantly, “No.”
“He does live here, doesn’t he?”
She paused as if calculating how much an admission would cost, then, “Mm.”
I pretended she’d said yes. “Will he back soon?”
She produced the ancient peasant shrug that can mean maybe, maybe not, who knows? it’s in God’s hands, or just plain go away.
“I see. Well, if... when he comes back, would you ask him to call me?” I poked a business card at her through the narrow opening. She took it as if it were a summons and shut the door.
I said “Thank you” to the wrought iron knocker. Then to the big black dog, “Another warm welcome.” The mongrel’s rheumy eyes said “What’d you expect, you stupid Anglo?”
I returned to the aged B, to find it empty and Connie visible beside a custom pickup truck two driveways down, in lively conversation with a pair of teenage boys. The few words that floated my way were Spanish, so I stayed beside Bumble and decoded the exchange from their body language. She asked about the pickup and got a tour from the taller boy, whose face glowed like the truck’s body at her compliments. The shorter boy spotted another kind of pickup and commented on Connie’s own body work. Connie smiled seductively and chopped him down to size. The taller boy roared and even the shorter one grinned ruefully. Connie jerked a thumb at Beltrán’s house. Rapid explanations with gestures toward the West. Connie smiled at the taller, punched the shorter on the arm, and turned away. As she swayed toward me, I could have sworn she’d grown a pair of female hips.
Connie opened the car door, looking pleased with herself. “Macho jerks.”
“Whom you thoroughly enjoyed.”
Connie looked miffed. “Yeah, so how’d you do?”
I fired up the Beetle and pulled out. “Got nowhere.”
“What’d you expect?”
“That’s what the dog said.”
Connie ignored this. “I warned you. Around here, strange Anglos at the door are salesmen or cops. Or immigration.” She poked her angles into the beetle’s doughy seat. “I did better. The kids said Nick’s off skin diving.”
“For two whole days?”
“His family has a little trailer. He took it up to Pajarito Beach on Monday afternoon. Where’s Pajarito Beach?”
“On the ocean.”
Connie’s thin face crinkled with amusement. “You’re pissed ‘cause I did what you couldn’t.”
“No I’m not.” Yes I was. Don’t be small, Winston. “Thanks for helping, Connie.” Not good enough. “I mean, thanks for doing what I couldn’t. You pulled it off.”
Connie grinned all over her elegant face.
* * * *
On the Ventura Freeway, Sally’s muscular Supra became a sour joke as we inched through the world’s thickest all-day rush hour. Sally drove on the infrequent occasions when the car was moving while I navigated by my DeLorme Atlas, the film location finder’s friend. Connie Roderick was piled across the Supra’s tiny rear seats like a wooden drying rack in a closet. She’d come along to point out Beltrán, whom I had never met.
I peered at the map page. “Old Route 1 splits off a few miles north of Ventura. There’s a bunch of little beaches - county parks, mostly. Pajarito’s in the middle of them.”
With a deft twitch of the wheel, Sally insinuated the car into a slot with only six inches to spare. “Is all this torture necessary?”
“Without Beltrán, we’re at a standstill.” I left it at that, since Sally and I’d decided not to tell Connie what the contest might be linked to.
But Sally seemed to have forgotten this. “Late last night, I called a friend in Zurich. She runs European marketing and sales.” At Sally’s former company, no doubt. “She got back to me this morning. Kronkheit’s Dutch hospital deal’s a rat’s nest of litigation and the resort on Martinique was never finished. Out of cash.”
“I’m not surprised.” I prodded Sally’s thigh to warn her.
But Connie was too sharp. “Who’s Kronkheit?”
Sally recovered the ball. “A business interest of mine.” She saw her chance, flicked the Supra into the fast lane, and left a drove of slowpokes in the distance.
I turned around to Connie, smiling. “A little different from my Beetle, isn’t it?”
“But just as bourgeois.” Suddenly Connie found the scenery absorbing.
That wasn’t like Connie. I glanced at Sally, who was smiling tolerantly. What was going on here? 
* * * *
Some seventy miles north west of L.A., the old coast road rises from its grave beneath the freeway and wanders through the beach parks, most of them no more than wide spots full of RVs parked nose to tail like files of metal elephants. The “beaches” are just rock piles and the sea is cold and often gray, but the folks fill up the parks year round, as if any place was preferable to home.
Pajarito was at least better sited, down a rutted, roller coaster road, behind concealing dunes, above a tiny beach of honest sand. The vehicles were different here - not custom pickups pulling fifth wheels that cost as much as condos, but little rust-flecked trailers with dented sides. We rolled through the camp in our own small dust cloud, watched by lolling dogs and grubby children.
“Looks like Tijuana,” Connie said disdainfully.
“You’re not far wrong. These people squat here.”
“I guess it beats sleeping in the streets.” But Sally’s face said, though not by much.
At the far end of Tin Can Row, the settlement gave way to tents and vans and newer looking trailers, each with its own fire ring and picnic table: the transient section. We parked and got out, Connie unfolding like a carpenter’s rule from the sadistic back seat. The sullen pumpkin sun above the water back-lit scrub and dune grass, and the scene would have passed for pretty, except for hobo town behind us.
“Sun’s going. We better find Beltrán.” But I wasn’t sure where to begin.
“Try over there.” Sally pointed to a small knot of kids around the tailgate of a white pickup with both doors open and rock music detonating the speakers inside.
As we strolled toward the group, Connie whispered, “That’s Beltrán, getting out of the truck.” She nodded toward a short, fat figure whose glasses winked in the sunset. He joined his pals at the tailgate: two interchangeably blond, lanky surfers in wet suits and a thick specimen with a bumper crop of zits. When they saw us coming, they stiffened just slightly and stopped talking.
I didn’t want to attract attention. “Remember, as far as the others go, we’re just a bunch of beach bums.” It was plausible. I looked like a vagrant as usual, Connie was sporting cutoff jeans and a riotous shirt, and Sally wore shorts and a sleeveless turtleneck jersey on which the maker had not lavished excess fabric.
That gave me an idea. “Let’s cut Beltrán out of the herd. Sally, how about doing your Mae West for these deserving lads while Connie takes him for a stroll.”
Sally slipped off her denim jacket while Connie shot me her macho jerk look. I didn’t mind. Sally understood me.
We stopped at the little group and Connie said, “Yo, Nick.”
I did my harmless citizen act. “Hi. You guys know if any sites are left?”
A jumbled chorus of “I dunno,” “Prolly not,” and “Maybe,” while Beltrán stared at Connie, as if mildly stunned.
Connie smiled at him. “Hey where ya been, dude? Been lookin’ for ya.” And still in Gidget mode, she grabbed his arm and walked him companionably away. Beltrán was shaking his head faintly.
Meanwhile, Sally had leaned back and hooked her elbows over the truck tailgate. “Boy, the ocean smells great!” She took a very deep breath and held it for a very long moment.
One surfer said casually, “Feels good on your face,” but Manny, Moe and Jack weren’t gaping at her face.
Sally turned to survey the white pickup truck. “Hey!” She pretended to notice something. “Is this truck a convertible? She strolled around to inspect the unroofed cab. “Does that mean this is a topless beach?” She grinned at them as if to say, a little humor, there, men.
The boys maintained blasé expressions, but almost stampeded over to her. I left Sally just fascinated by the truck and its young riders, and started after Connie and Beltrán.
I caught up with them as they disappeared into an eccentric home-made camper: a raggedy khaki tent exploded from a tiny plywood trailer base. I followed them in through the canvas flap door.
The dim interior had a certain carpentered ingenuity. The two hinged halves of the trailer lid were unfolded outward to form platforms for foam mattresses, one of them now piled with scuba gear. Beside the entrance flap, a folding table held a plastic dish pan and a Coleman stove. Beltrán stood defiantly before the far bunk, as if guarding his scuba gear.
I motioned Connie to a seat. A propane lantern stood on the tiny dinette table. I lit it with a match from a box beside it and sat down opposite, where I could see Beltrán.
The dead white propane glare revealed a squat, tubby 20 year old, whose almost oriental appearance was enhanced by a Charlie Chan mustache. His lank black hair was already thin and his brown eyes were magnified by thick, black rimmed glasses. Right now, the eyes wavered between defiance and uncertainty.
Connie turned to look at him, her face spilling contempt. “This is it, Gordito.”
“Who’s he?” Beltrán’s voice was an unexpected baritone.
“Stoney Winston. He teaches my film course.”
“And I’m helping Tina Morgan, the new president. Come sit down.” When Beltrán didn’t budge, I repeated “Sit!” in a tone suitable for an erring pet.
Beltrán shot me a hostile glare, but squeezed his toady shape onto the bench beside Connie. I gazed at him silently until uncertainty conquered defiance in his look. “So?”
“Are you leaving school or just playing hooky?”
“Naw, man, this is a field trip.” Beltrán’s elaborate sarcasm belonged to a kid years younger.
“Be pretty rough if you were expelled.”
“I’ll make out.” He pulled some kitchen matches out of the box and started shaping a design on the table.
Connie snorted. “Throwing burgers at MacDonald’s?”
Beltrán ignored her. “Look, get it over and get out.”
“All right.” Since Connie’s hostility was so obvious, I tried the Good Cop bit. “But you know, you haven’t been expelled yet.”
Beltrán looked puzzled. “Caldwell said...”
“That’s not his decision. You might even get by with a three day suspension.”
“I could?” in a tone that added, what’s the catch?
“You’re not the first student that ever cheated on an assignment.”
“I thought...”
Reflectively, “Of course, you’d have to change your attitude....”
Beltrán looked as if he saw a glimmer. “How?”
“To start with, we need to know who helped you.”
His hopeful look clicked off and Beltrán’s fat face shut tight. “This is just between me and me.”
“Helping someone cheat’s as bad as cheating. Why should you take all the blame?” I sounded like a cop in an old gangster movie, but this kid might be green enough to buy it.
“No way.”
He didn’t buy it. I dialed up the sympathy. “You’ve finished what, three years? So you’re eight months short of graduating. A lot of tuition too. That’s hard on your family.”
“I paid every dime myself.”
I nodded approvingly. “Even harder on you then. And of course, you can’t get any kind of job in the auto industry.”
Connie kept up her Bad Cop end. “Except in a car wash.”
Winston the kind school counselor, smiled at this stray lamb. “Isn’t that a lot to give up to cover someone else?”
“You finished?” But his tone suggested I was getting to him.
“Professor Caldwell feels pretty let down about this, you know that?”
Beltrán wrinkled his mushroom cap nose and something unreadable happened in his eyes.
“I mean it. He said you show real promise as a student.”
Connie snorted again. “That figures.”
“He had no idea you were faking your work.”
Beltrán’s chubby hands were shaking slightly.
“I think he’d be very sorry to lose you.” A look between fury and disgust flickered behind his thick lenses. “Especially over a dumb trick like this.”
Beltrán swept away the matches with sudden intensity. “Hey man, you the one who’s dumb! You don’t know anything.” He slapped the table. “Nothing! Caldwell’s let down about me. Caldwell’s sorry to lose me.” His tone was scathing. “Man, who you think faked the work?”
I tried to cover my surprise. “Caldwell?”
To Connie, “You see how dumb he is?” Back to me, “Who else gonna help me - her? Some other student? Wise up, man.”
It didn’t jibe with his teacher’s apparent distress. “How did Caldwell help you?”
“He made me hand in everything three, four times. Each time, he gives it back with suggestions. I re-do it, hand it in again, ‘til he likes it.”
Connie shook her head. “What about the renderings? You couldn’t do those if you tried a hundred times.”
“Well, Caldwell touched ‘em up a little.”
“A little?” Connie threw up thin arms as if appealing to higher authority.
If Beltrán was lying about Caldwell, he did it implausibly well. I stood up. “Okay Nick. How about you come to school tomorrow? I’ll see what I can do for you.” No reaction. “Will you come?”
A pause, then, “Maybe. I dunno.”
“Well, think about it.”
Beltrán struggled out of the narrow seat and shuffled over to the other bunk and stood with his back to us.
Outside in the twilight, Connie and I picked our way back toward the beach. The boys had built a fire near the truck, which was now issuing soft country music through its sawed off cab top. As we approached, we saw them sitting on a log with Sally in the middle, outstretched legs gleaming in the flickering light, toasting a weenie on a barbecue fork. She chuckled at something someone said and handed off the weenie. In the soft fire light, the boys’ expressions were near adoring. In twenty minutes flat, Sally’d transformed herself from sex fantasy to Great Mother. Amazing woman.
Connie surveyed the scene, then sniffed. 
	* * * *
The drive back seemed even longer, despite the lighter traffic perhaps because guilt had goaded me into taking the micro seat in back. I was forced to sit half leaning on the passenger side wall, with my legs gangled across the seats. But I felt reconciled to my torture in this position by the ability to look at Sally’s profile all the way home.
After an hour on the road, Sally and Connie seemed to have forgotten me, and were murmuring together with the odd candor that overcomes strangers in dark moving vehicles.
Connie said, “You sure had those boys wrapped up.” Sally smiled briefly, and Connie added, “But frankly, I don’t know how you could do it.”
“Hm?”
“Boggle them with your boobs.”
“Ah.” Sally drove in silence for several minutes. Then she seemed to address the road beyond the windshield, “I’ve lived in more or less this body for over fifteen years. For ten of them, it gave me trouble.” She danced around a poky truck with her usual panache. “Men seemed to make assumptions.” Sally shrugged. “Or maybe they just pursued fantasies - wish fulfillment. Men do that.”
Connie sighed “I’ll say,” in a woman of the world tone that didn’t quite come off.
“So for ten rough years, I wondered what was wrong.” Sally stopped speaking for so long that I thought she’d finished. Finally she said, “Then I decided it really wasn’t my problem. If testosterone softens the brain, that’s too damn bad.”
Connie’s “Mm” was thoughtful, as if perhaps she recalled the way she’d handled the two boys in Beltrán’s neighborhood.
After another reflective interlude, Sally said half to herself, “Maybe that’s why I quit selling computers: it was too easy. They were always bought by men - the hopeful, predatory bastards.”
This predatory bastard was hopeful only that Sally wouldn’t remember me back here in my martyrdom until she’d forgotten the whole conversation. Like Br’er Rabbit, I lay low - not that the seat offered much choice.
Chapter 9
“Ridiculous!” Caldwell stood up huffily, as if to leave.
“Maybe you’d better sit back down, Chick.” This meeting was more formal than our last Caldwell interview. Tina was impressive in the presidential desk chair, I sat to one side of her, and the auto design teacher stood in front of the hot seat opposite the massive oak desk.
Tina studied a gold pin on her blue suit lapel. “I’d hate to have to take this matter to the faculty.”
Caldwell sat down again, shaking his head. “Why on earth would he say such a thing?”
I put in, “I think because it’s true.” Caldwell inflated angrily. “Wait! Beltrán was obviously handing in work he couldn’t have done himself.”
Impatiently, “I never said he wasn’t cheating.”
Tina said relentlessly, “And no one had the skill to help him but you.”
I added, “I should have been suspicious when you said you hadn’t noticed. The alterations jumped right out at me; and I don’t have your trained eye.”
 “I can only repeat, this is ridiculous.” 
I sighed patiently. “Beltrán has copped a plea, Chick.”
Tina caught the flicker in Caldwell’s eyes and pressed the advantage, “I’d rather put this to bed right here.” She let that sink in a moment. “But if the bed doesn’t fly, I’ll have to run it past the faculty.”
Caldwell just looked mulish, so I said, “I’m afraid you will, Tina.”
She consulted her desktop planner. “There’s a meeting next Monday. Should we have Beltrán come in?”
“I’ll see to it.” I stood up.
“Uh...” I stopped at the sound and looked at Caldwell. His face reflected several things I couldn’t read, then he wagged an arm disgustedly. “It’s true.”
I sat down and Tina leaned forward at her desk. “Tell us about it.”
“It’s just as Beltrán explained it to you. I showed him how to revise his design and kept him at it until he produced a good one.” A grimace, “Finally.”
I nodded. “And the renderings?”
“I did rework those, but they were his to start with. It is his design, you know. I simply played the midwife.”
Tina looked genuinely sorry for him. “Why?”
“Isn’t it obvious? For the fifty thousand dollars.”
Everything stopped for three full seconds, then Tina whispered, “What fifty thousand dollars?”
“If Saka decides to develop the truck, they’ll give fifty thousand for auto design scholarships. I thought you knew that.”
“No.” And now her tone was dangerous.
Caldwell leaned toward her in appeal. “We have just one competent student now, just one.”
I said, “Connie.”
Coldly, “Yes.” He looked at Tina again. “With that money every year, I could have ten.”
Her voice was even softer, if possible. “The grant is annual?”
“Of course. We could start building up this... place. Maybe compete with Art Center.” Now Caldwell addressed us both. “That’s why I did it, for this college.”
I wouldn’t let that one pass. “For your department, in which you are the only teacher.”
My tone sent him back to Tina. “I did stand to benefit, but not personally. What’s wrong with that?”
Tina said with more authority than I’d seen in her, “Any other small surprises we should know about?”
Caldwell shook his head. “You see why I wanted to handle everything myself: to keep control of it.”
“But now the cat’s out of the can.” She stood up. “We’ll leave things where they are for now.”
I rejoined the conversation. “I still think Connie did a fine design.”
Caldwell looked at me as if I were to blame for all this. “As you said yourself, you don’t have the eye.” Knowing a good exit line, he stalked out of Tina’s office in his Ho Chi Minh sandals.
Tina exhaled a great volume of air, but without seeming to deflate much. “I hate this, but at least it’s settled.”
“I don’t think so.”
She quoted, “‘Don’t nobody bring me no bad news.’”
“Sorry, but Kronkheit, Lipscomb, and Caldwell all explained that contest to us, and not one of them mentioned any scholarship money.”
“Maybe I don’t want this job after all.” Tina plucked a brass watering can off a side table.
“And we still can’t account for the explosion or the money Millard stole.”
Tina carried the can into the presidential rest room. After thirty seconds of running water noises, she reappeared. “Now what?”
“Lipscomb again, I think. I’m tired of his games.”
Tina nodded and, as if on autopilot, carried the watering can out to her patio.
* * * *
But Lipscomb was out of town when I phoned, so I had myself transferred to Yoshi Sato.
“Yoshi, we still have to straighten out this contest.”
His soft, polite baritone, “What’s the problem?”
“Seems Saka’s also pledged a fifty thousand dollar annual scholarship that Bud somehow failed to mention.” I waited a beat, then, “Somehow.”
A longish pause, then Yoshi said, “Will you excuse me just a moment, Stoney?”
“Sure.”
After a full minute of elevator music free of charge from Saka, Yoshi took me off hold again. “Stoney, I’ll be up in Westwood today. Let’s do lunch.”
“It’ll have to be early. I teach a class this afternoon.”
“No problem.” Yoshi chuckled. “Do lunch. I’m still amazed at English idioms.”
We worked out time and place and then rang off. Funny about Yoshi: every so often he hung out a humane signal, like a line full of laundry strung from a Shinto shrine. 
* * * *
Westwood Village snuggles against the vast south flank of UCLA, whose students do their civic bit to adorn its sidewalks and clot its veins with traffic. After ten slow circuits, I gave up hope and committed La Bumble to a parking lot that charged about a dollar a minute.
Predictably, the restaurant was fern bar moderne - all pinkish grayish mauvish tints and everything rigidly matched, right down to the waiters’ complexions. I trailed the hostess, a part time sculptor in mousse, it appeared, through the flat, eerie light to a parsons table where Yoshi Sato was already seated. An orbiting waiter demanded my drink order almost before I’d sat down.
Today, Yoshi broadcast quiet power from inside a suit that cost more than I made in a month. After an amiable greeting, he opened with “How about that Rams game?”
I nodded reflectively. “That was some game.” I’ve found that this reply works every time, while concealing the fact that I seldom know what game we’re discussing or even which sport.
My ploy didn’t fool Yoshi though. He politely switched topics, and by the time the salad arrived (a six leaf island on a twelve inch plate) we’d exchanged capsule biographies. Yoshi attributed his swift ascent through Saka corporate ranks to family connections. (Considering his evident intelligence and natural authority, I didn’t take that at face value.) After his current three year assignment to Saka’s U.S. branch, he hoped to return to Japanese headquarters, where the action was. Though diplomatic to a fault, he said this with the wistful patience of a colonial bureaucrat exiled to a third-world backwater. In fact, he was probably lonely here.
The waiter dealt our entree plates, each as designed as a Zen courtyard and nearly as bare, and we tucked into our meals - what there was of them. As we ate, Yoshi told stories of his encounters with L.A. that were funny and mostly at his expense.
“Well, your command of English shames me, Yoshi. Except for a little Spanish, I don’t speak a foreign language.”
“It is the reward of eight years’ study at home and four years at Stanford.”
That was unusual. “If I may ask, aren’t people like you supposed to go to a prestigious Japanese University?”
Yoshi smiled ruefully. “I lacked the discipline to get in. So my honored father sent his lazy son to an American college, where everyone else would be just as lazy.”
“Were you a business major?”
“Philosophy.” Yoshi’s rueful smile broadened.
“I know the feeling. I majored in English up the street here.”
As the waiter replaced his entree with a cubic inch of watermelon, Yoshi returned to the theme of cultural relations, and at that point, his purpose began to appear. “Even after all this time, the most difficult thing for me is forming conclusions about individual American people.”
I thought I should hold up the side. “We feel similar frustration with the Japanese.”
“Many Americans have said so.” Yoshi nodded politely, then put down his napkin as if he’d made a decision. “In this case, I have decided to trust you and I show this by telling you.” He put his oddly stubby hands together on the table cloth, as if to pray. “My true task at Saka Motors is to oversee matters here in the U.S. subsidiary and represent the interests of the home office.”
So that was where his power came from. “Then you don’t report to Bud Lipscomb.”
“Osaka company policy is to permit our foreign subsidiaries self determination. They know their countries better than we do.”
“You give them full autonomy?”
Yoshi smiled candidly. “In Japan, we prefer to have people follow strict orders, but we avoid the distasteful process of giving them. It is my task to effect this situation here.”
I continued my encouraging noises. “A hard trick to pull off.”
“We have a thousand years’ practice.” His tone was matter of fact.
“But your U.S. employees don’t.”
Yoshi sighed and relaxed, as if he’d got me to say what he himself would not. “Exactly. And that is why we’re talking now.” He looked as if he were considering taking a risk. “I will continue frankly. I don’t know very much about your contest and I don’t have confidence in the situation.”
“What’s Bud Lipscomb say?”
Yoshi only shrugged.
“I suspect you could order him to tell you.”
Yoshi nodded. “I could, but that would mean application of direct authority.”
“Which is inconsistent with a policy of consensus.”
He grinned. “You were an English major. But yes.”
I prompted him again. “About the contest.”
“The news of an annual grant was a novelty to me, and it should not be so. Did Bud Lipscomb promise this grant?”
“I don’t know. I’m not yet sure there really is a grant.” Now it was my turn to risk confiding in a possible adversary. Knowing I might compromise the whole contest, I told Yoshi about the cheating and explained that the annual grant information had come from Caldwell.
Yoshi listened with his usual impassive politeness. Then, “This contest is so important to the college?”
I nodded. “And not only the contest. Everyone hopes the relationship with Saka will continue after you move to your new building.”
For the first time, Yoshi looked surprised. After a long pause, “Explain please.”
Afraid I’d blown it again, I said cautiously, “I’m told you signed a lease with Seymour Kronkheit for the office building he’s putting up near the campus.”
His surprise only increased. “Who is Seymour Kronkheit?”
“You don’t know Seymour Kronkheit.”
He shook his head. “I do know we are moving - probably to Orange County.”
My turn to pause. “Are you sure Saka has no lease with Kronkheit?”
“Absolutely. I would have to consent to it.”
I was suddenly fed up with the whole stupid business. “Well tell me this, Yoshi, is the contest real?”
Soothingly, “Oh yes, and the prize and the six month apprenticeship with Saka. If an actual student design is of quality.”
“I know at least one that’ll blow you out of your sandals.”
The waiter returned and Yoshi appropriated the check so deftly that it seemed to disappear. While he coped with charge card slips and politely refused his carbons, I made up my mind to go all the way. “Just one more thing, Yoshi. A couple of large, unpleasant men showed up at the college. They tried to intimidate me, tried to make me quit teaching there.”
“Why?” Yoshi seemed puzzled by this unexpected subject.
“The only thing I can think of is the contest. Does Saka motors have a security force?”
“Yes...?” He caught my meaning. “But not that kind. It is inconsistent with consensus.”
“You sure?”
For the first time, Yoshi sounded irritated. “We don’t work that way, Stoney.”
“How about your U.S. people. Maybe Lipscomb?”
He nodded acknowledgment. “It is true that I know less than I thought of Bud Lipscomb’s activities. But if he sent those men, he obtained them someplace else. They do not work for Saka.” When I opened my mouth to speak, he added quickly, “I will nonetheless check,” and rose from the table.
I got up too. “Let’s keep each other informed.”
“Yes.” He shook my hand.
“Arigato, Yoshi.”
He grinned at me. “Don’t mention it.”
I walked out into the Westwood bustle, following a trail of pinkish-mauvish neon on the mauvish-pinkish wall. 
	* * * *
Caldwell wasn’t at school when I returned, barely in time for my two p.m. class. Today we were shooting in the still photography studio, to take advantage of its cove, a table whose milky Lucite top curved so smoothly into a vertical backing that small objects placed upon it seemed to float in dimensionless space. It was normally used for product photography.
Big Deidre had little to do but light this miniature void, since the Bolex camera was rigidly locked on its tripod, framing a small figurine that Engineer Bob had placed on the cove. Ranks of similar clay sculptures marched across a side table, waiting their turns.
Bob consulted a lengthy list. “Give it five.”
Using a cable release to run the camera, Deidre shot five seconds of film. Then Bob removed the sculpture and switched on a strong light below the cove, which illuminated a grid he’d taped to the underside of the translucent plastic. He used the grid coordinates to position the next sculpture, then turned the grid light off.
Knowing nothing of clay animation, Bob had invented his own system, doggedly sculpting, glazing, and firing three dozen figures that covered the life cycle of a flower. Cut together, the shots would crudely animate the flower from seedling to full bloom. The bloom would dance about the cove (in echo of Simone, Bob claimed) and then decline into compost.
Well, maybe, but I’d let him try it.
Whatever the result would be, the process was numbingly dull, and as the class repeated the same sequence again and again, I found my attention wandering back to Yoshi’s revelations.
As far as Yoshi knew, Saka had not promised an annual grant to the automotive design department. Maybe someone else had dreamed up the idea, someone like the late, lamented President Millard. There was an idea there, but half distracted by the shooting, I lost track of it.
“This glaze is just amazing.” George DeGrasse held up a figurine. “How’d you do it, Robert?”
Bob’s pride overcame his impatience at the distraction. “It’s the way they’re fired. I let the kiln cool part way and then reheated it.”
“I thought that ruined the glaze.” George put back the figurine.
Engineer Bob looked smug. “Not if you know the secret.” He switched off his grid light and shooting resumed.
And what about the Dinky Hubcap Brothers? Sally was sure they worked for Saka; but if not, then who had sent them?
And why?
“What’s it supposed to be doing now?” Connie sounded as bored as I was.
Bob turned earnest eyes on his clay creation. “It’s straining to break from the earth and dance.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Deidre said.
My sentiments exactly. I felt depressed by the whole crass business: real estate hustlers and corporate twisters and venal professors, all busily burying feeble old AC/DC.
And why should I run around stopping them for self absorbed dimwits like Engineer Bob?
“Wait ‘til you see the resurrection part,” Bob said.
	* * * *
Dinner with Sally only deepened my depression. The table conversation kept veering back to dreary AC/DC, as if we still dared speak of nothing else. And now, after an hour on the couch in front of Sally’s TV, I couldn’t recall what program we’d watched.
“Any wine left?”
“An inch.” Sally poured it in my glass and said too casually, “Y’know, Stoney, you’ve been hitting it pretty heavy lately.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
Sally looked at me with honest concern. “Any special reason?”
I shrugged.
“Your career?”
I shrugged again. “This college business?” She muted the TV sound with the remote. “Okay, is it bigger than a bread box?” Sally pulled up her legs, rotated to face me, and settled tailor fashion on the broad leather couch. “You want to unload your sorrow on the bartender?”
I smiled sourly. “Not too productive.”
“Why?”
“Because the bartender is the sorrow.”
“Ah.”
I watched Toyota owners leaping ecstatically on the silent screen and freezing in mid air. “I think I may have to move, Sally.”
“Maybe I know why, but tell me.”
“First I have to admit something inconvenient - maybe unpleasant. I love you just as much as ever. More, even.”
“I know.” She said it quietly.
“Of course you do.” I drained the wine. “And, in the circumstances, that’s not fair to you.”
“Why?”
“Hanging around you, I’m like an inconvenient dog you took in once and then had to care for out of decency.”
Sally stared at the screen a moment, then revolved and stood up. “After all my moral superiority about your boozing, I want more wine.”
I didn’t watch her leave the den. At the moment, Sally’s usual shorts and T shirt only added insult to injury.
She was gone longer than it took to open a wine bottle, and when she brought it in, she looked as if she’d been thinking. “I don’t mind your living here.” She filled our glasses.
I shook my head. “Staying here is just as hard on me.”
“Things change, Stoney.” Sally smiled gently.
“But some things don’t change, not for me.”
Her smile broadened. “Or me.” That sounded hopeful. My face must have shown it, because Sally added hastily, “The trouble is, I’m not sure which things.” Sally jabbed the remote control as if the TV had suddenly offended her and the picture collapsed. “You know, Stoney, you’re good news and bad news; and the hell of it is, it’s the same damn news!” She jerked to her feet and went to stare out the glass door at the shadowy deck beyond. “You’re the only man I ever went for who didn’t climb all over me sooner or later.”
“I seem to recall some mountaineering.” Images of Sally in bed washed past and left my forehead aching.
She turned and smiled at me. “I meant emotionally. You never dominated.”
I joined her at the sliding door. “I hope that’s the good news.”
“And the bad.” She studied the October night again. “Maybe you didn’t try to dominate because you didn’t care enough.”
Didn’t care enough? I tried to cap my welling irritation. “You want me to prove my feelings by bullying my woman? You?”
She shook her head impatiently. “You know if you tried it, I’d knock you right on your ass.”
“We were talking emotionally.”
“I know. I just want you to want to dominate but, well, not dominate. You see?”
“I’m not non-domineering in the right way?”
She turned. “That’s it. You understand?”
“I don’t even understand what I just said.” By now, I was practically squeaking with frustration.
“All right.” Her tone was placating.
I jammed my hands in my pockets to hide my fists and turned to address the den. “This is impossible!”
Without warning, Sally wrapped her arms around my waist and leaned her cheek between my shoulder blades. “Ah, Stoney, you’re such a jerk.” But her tone said almost the opposite. I pulled my hands out of my pockets, put them over hers, and started to separate them.
She clasped her hands more tightly. “Don’t. Just stand here a minute.”
I stood there, demented by the sunshine smell of her hair and her apple warmth against my back. Half of me ached to turn around and grab her. Half of me was delirious that she’d grabbed me. Half of me was afraid to break it, spoil it, screw it up somehow.
She stood still a long moment with her ear against my back, then, “I thought women’s hearts were supposed to do that.”
“What?”
“Ta pocketa ta pocketa.”
Another long pause and then Sally sighed. Still locked to my back, she rotated until we both faced the door. “See that door?” I nodded. “When I turn you loose, you go straight through that door.”
“I...”
“And out the front and down the steps to your place. She gave a friendly squeeze that set my floating ribs to bobbing. “G’night, Stoney.”
When she released me, I stood dead still, fighting myself and her, then sighed and stumbled out without turning around.
I was half way down the outside steps when it hit me: that was what she’d meant. She really wanted me to ignore what she’d said, to turn around and...
Or maybe she just wanted me to want to turn around, or...
Aw, shit.
Chapter 10
When I chugged past Kronkheit’s skeletal building the next morning, the site looked as empty as ever. But today was Friday, a work day, and come to think of it, I’d never seen any construction going on there. I rolled up to the college, swung B Bumble through the turnaround, and rolled out again, waving at Fat Floyd in his golf cart.
When I puttered into the construction driveway, I found the chain link gate ajar, so I drove in, wheezed around the office trailer, and parked behind it next to a white stretch limo with a boomerang TV antenna perched on its trunk. The area was otherwise deserted.
As I emerged from Bumble, the limo driver’s door opened and a gray haired man got out. I walked over to him, acting harmless as a butterfly. “Morning.”
He nodded.
The limo meant biggies of some kind, so I said, “Boss around? I’m Winston, from the college over there.”
“Wait a minute.” He disappeared into the big car and spoke into a transceiver. Then he re-emerged, carrying a hard hat stenciled VISITOR. “He says go on up.”
I put on the hard hat, which squatted precariously atop my 7 5/8 head. “How do I get up there?”
The driver led me to the construction elevator and showed me how to work it. “Top floor. This button’s up, this one’s down, okay?”
“I can probably handle it.” I closed myself in the wire cage, pushed up, and watched the driver drop below me. He looked worried.
The noisy elevator racketed upward more slowly than I could have climbed a flight of stairs, but I enjoyed the almost kinetic sensation of skeletal stories sinking beneath me with all deliberate speed. At the seventh floor, I stepped out onto the dusty concrete floor and looked about. No one was visible, but in the sudden quiet, someone up ahead around the corner of the service core was singing in a sweet, trained tenor,
Ho-o- oooo-sti-as
I walked quietly toward the sound.
Eet preces tibi,
I stepped carefully around and over cables, loose rebars, and plywood scraps. The voice was not only trained, but loud:
Do-o-ooooooo-mi-ne.
It was the Verdi Requiem the quartet that the tenor begins with such tight, lyric anguish that I always think of the Giotto cherub jackknifed almost backward in the sky with grief over the dead Christ below him.
As I reached the service core and turned its corner, the tenor sang the next phrase, Tibi, Domine, laudis offerimus. I picked up the basso’s repeat, a fifth below, Hostias, then carried on in my terrycloth baritone, dah dahing the words I didn’t know.
The singer revolved, cocked his head, then took the soprano entrance and we roared it out together, faking the other two voices. However nutty it might seem to stand on a seven story skeleton and bellow Verdi at the hills, it felt glorious. We warbled the final word in perfect sync. The tenor looked at me, beaming all over his swarthy round face. “Not too fuckin’ shabby! You big for Verdi?”
“Bigger for Monteverdi, but yes, I love the Requiem.”
“Greatest composer ever lived. Who’re you?”
“Stoney Winston. I work over at the college.”
“Yeah?” His tone was challenging but not hostile.
“We’re sort of neighbors.”
“So what are you, the Welcome Wagon?” He grinned at his joke, unveiling a double row of teeth so white and perfect they looked capped. My duet partner stood a blocky five-eight in pressed tan slacks and a tight polo shirt that displayed his bunched arm and chest muscles.
“You’re Sandusky?”
“Yeah.” Despite the name, he looked Sicilian.
“You sound like Placido Domingo”
“Ah.” He waved this off. “Just amateur.” But Sandusky seemed pleased by the compliment.
“Compared to me, you do. Your driver sent me up here.”
“I told him to.” He pointed at the two-way lying by a sheaf of music on the unfinished concrete floor. He scooped the music up. “Getting in some practice. We’re doing the Requiem at St. Margaret’s in Gardena.”
“Didn’t mean to interrupt.
Ignoring this, Sandusky stowed the music in a leather portfolio. “Some people sing in the shower, you know? That’s no good. Any clown sounds great in the shower. It’s your tiles resonating on ya.”
“Ah.”
“I use to practice in the back yard, but the wife made me cut it out.” Another snowy flash of teeth. “Said the neighbors’d think I was bats.”
“So you came up here for peace and quiet.” Casually, “Isn’t this a work day?”
Sandusky looked around the deserted building. “Yeah, well, we’re on hold here for a little while.”
“How come?”
He looked at me quietly for a beat, then clamped the portfolio under a thick biceps. “Anyway, what can I do ya for?”
“I need some information about the Mountain Meadow project.”
“Go see the developer.” Sandusky started pacing back and forth along the unguarded edge of the floor, as if to bleed off the nervous power he couldn’t control. He stopped with only inches between his small, trim loafers and thin air. The loafers kept tapping the concrete.
I walked over to join him and the two of us stood side by side, gazing at Mt. Wilson in the distance. The sky was a hard, clear blue, and I noticed three or four hang gliders swooping lazily above the foothills. They take off from the highway to Mount Wilson and sometimes ride the thermals as far as Cucamonga. Researching a documentary script about them, I’d once flown myself a time or two, until the ecstasy of Icarus warned me to ground myself before my wings melted in the sun.
Still watching the gaudy nylon birds, I picked up the conversation. “Trouble is, Seymour Kronkheit’s hard to reach and we have some confusion about things.”
“Yeah?” He tapped the loafers forward until his toes were at the edge.
“Kronkheit said he’s rebuilding the college, but a woman named Farquhar seems to own it...”
“I met her once.”
“...and she says no way.”
“Crazy old woman.” Sandusky turned to face me. “What’d she, change her mind?”
“Then she’d agreed to it?”
A shrug. “According to Kronkheit. How would I know? I’m just the contractor.”
I waved at the foothills in the middle distance. “You putting up the houses too?”
He surveyed the scene with satisfaction. “Yeah, that’s my main business, houses. This here’s branching out for us.”
“Then I guess you’ve got the country club as well.”
“Sure do.” He squinted down at the hollow seven floors below us as if visualizing his future handiwork. “Big job for an outfit our size - you know how it is. But doing it one part at a time makes it easier.”
I strolled back toward the relative safety of the service core, hoping I looked casual. “Phase One, Phase Two, and so forth.”
“Yeah.” Sandusky bounded over to join me. “Kronkheit likes to talk like that. It impresses the money people.” A chuckle. “Boy what I could do if I had his line a bullshit.”
“I hope it isn’t all bullshit. Mrs. Farquhar told me she never agreed to sell the college or the country club land.”
Sandusky looked surprised. “No kidding? The land too?”A pause. “You sure of that?”
“Positive.”
He batted the idea away with his music portfolio. “Well, that’s Kronkheit’s problem. I got enough to do right here. Besides, in this game, you don’t wanta count your chickens, you know?”
“Right.” Offhandedly, “When do you start work again?”
“Week, maybe. Just a little cash flow thing.” A flicker of annoyance crossed his round, mobile face, as if he wished he hadn’t said that.
I pretended not to notice. “Well, I guess I’ll have to get hold of Kronkheit somehow.” I turned toward the waiting elevator.
“He’s your boy. Hey!” I paused and he bounced up to me, groping for his wallet. “Since you’re a fella music lover, how about taking a couple tickets to the Requiem?” He extracted a fat pad of them. “Just two bucks apiece, and it’s for the new gymnasium.”
I reached for my own much thinner wallet. “I guess I...”
“My kid’s in parochial school there.”
I found four dollars and exchanged them for two tickets. “Be fun to hear you sing it.”
“Ahh, well...” Sandusky’s smile was almost coy.
I offered my hand. “Thanks for your time, Mr. Sandusky.”
“Yeah.” He shook it and the smile blossomed into full grin. “See you in church!
On the long ride down, I reflected that Sandusky knew I was coming up to meet him, so the concert had been for my benefit.
Vanity, all is vanity.
Something else too: Sandusky had said “according to Kronkheit.” That phrase sounded more ominous each time I heard it. 
* * * *
As I drove back to the college, I began to recapture the idea that had been driven out of my head yesterday by the jabber of my students: Millard and his forty thousand dollar embezzlement.
Millard and his forty thousand, Caldwell and his fifty. Two hefty sums of phantom money. Still noodling the idea, I hiked up the staircase to the main building. Of course it was a long shot. The amounts were different, and I could see no clear connection, but still...
As it turned out, I was lucky. Checking her salary records, Tina discovered that Caldwell belonged to a one-office local credit union to which the college sent his paychecks for automatic deposit.
“That means you may have his account number on file here, Tina.” She looked puzzled. “I want to find out whether he’s made a series of ten thousand dollar deposits – no, wait: as series of smaller deposits adding up to ten K.”
Tina peered at Caldwell’s page in a book of bound printouts. “The number’s 4386, but you can’t get that information.”
“Maybe not, but these little outfits are less stuffy than banks. I’ll bet the tellers know most of their customers.”
“That makes it even harder. They’ll never tell you.”
“But they might tell Caldwell.”
Tina stared at me. “I think your chain slipped off its derailleur.”
I raised my pitch and started clipping syllables: “No, not precisely. In fact, I think I may say that my, ah, chain is functioning correctly, thank you.” Tina goggled and I couldn’t resist adding, “As long as you refrain from yanking it.”
“Then why are you suddenly talking that way?”
“I think it should be evident. I am practicing Caldwell’s voice.”
Tina trained imploring eyes on the ceiling.
* * * *
It took half an hour to develop a Caldwell impersonation and a strategy for using it, and now Tina and I were on adjacent extensions in the outer office, listening to the credit union phone ring.
“Eastside Area Schools Employee Credit Union.” The voice was middle aged or older.
I tried to imagine myself wearing sandals and pale blue socks. “Good morning, Caldwell here. Who is this, please?”
“Morning, Professor Caldwell. This is Doris.”
She apparently knew Caldwell. “Oh Doris! You always sound so young on the phone. It deceives me every time.”
The receiver giggled appreciatively.
“Listen, Doris, I need to check on my account. Number 4386.”
“You have to call the special number and give them your secret telephone code. You did get one? We mailed them out last month.”
“Uh, I did? To tell the truth, I must have overlooked it.”
“We can’t give out your balance without it. Security, you know.”
“Oh, of course.” I glanced at Tina, who mouthed I told you so.
“We’re open to six today. You could come in.”
Time for Plan B. “The trouble is, I’m at my broker’s now, writing a check for some stock, and I don’t know how much I can buy.”
Doris said “I’m sorry” politely but firmly.
“Oh wait, I have an idea. My records show I have well over fifty thousand dollars - give or take - in my account.
“Yes?”
“Well you see, over the last several months, I made several large deposits - in cash.”
“That’s unusual; um, yes, I see them here. They average four to six thousand each. That’s a lot of cash.”
I heaved a big sigh. “Um, yes. I was a silent partner in a Pasadena restaurant. Well, it failed - you know how that is.”
Puzzled but patient, “I guess so.”
“So...” I glanced at the checkbook pages Tina held, “...just add up my deposits in the last two months and tell me if the total’s over 50K or not. You won’t break any rules that way.”
Doubtfully, “It would still be...”
I made Caldwell’s voice both urgent and confidential. “Doris, the New York markets are closing in half an hour and this is a very special opportunity.”
The pause was so long that I thought I’d failed. Then Doris said, “All right, since I know you. Hold on.” While I listened to the chk chkita chk of Doris’ keyboard, I looked at Tina again. This time, she was grinning with amazement.
“Professor Caldwell? You were right to check. Your balance is - well, more than ten thousand dollars under that.”
An exasperated sigh. “I thought it too good to be true. I expect I will have to come in and get my exact balance.”
Apologetically, “I’m sorry, but...”
“No, no. I’m glad to see you’re taking such thorough precautions.”
“And I’m sorry about that investment.”
“Don’t spare it a thought. It paid off handsomely.”
“But how...?”
“Got to toddle, Doris. Thanks so much.” I hung up and turned to Tina. “There’s your smoking gun, kiddo.”
Still grinning widely, Tina put her own phone down and strode over to me. “Speaking of smoking guns!” She grabbed my shoulders and kissed me smack on the mouth.
That surprised me pleasantly. “As Jack Benny used to say, ‘Well!’”
Tina’s Wedgewood eyes flickered slightly, and though her smile remained, her face changed around it. She made a fist and punched me lightly on the shoulder, like a teammate. “Great job, Stoney.” Then she walked briskly to her desk and sat down. “How did you know the deposit amounts?”
“I didn’t, but the checks were for ten thousand apiece. Since banks have to report cash deposits of ten K and up, I figured he’d put in just under that amount.”
Tina nodded. “I guess we better hit Caldwell again. Tina pulled out the writing board on the left side of her desk and checked a schedule taped to it. “He’s finishing a class about now.”
“Then let’s get it over with.”
Tina rose, smoothing her pink blouse into her navy blue skirt. “Third time’s a charm.”
* * * *
Not this third time. We couldn’t actually prove that Caldwell had received the cash from Millard, or even that he’d made the deposits. And Caldwell knew that wherever Millard might be now, he wasn’t taking any calls. So the automotive design teacher simply stonewalled, even when I threatened to confront him with Beltrán. At length, we had to leave him where we’d found him, standing defiantly in his empty studio.
Tina and I emerged from his classroom to find Connie Roderick lounging ostentatiously against the corridor wall. Today, she brightened the world in a double breasted jacket, with buttons like rhinestone beer coasters. The coat almost reached the hem of her black micro miniskirt, which, in turn, set off her long, sleek legs in lime green tights. Tina blinked at this apparition, then wore her own more timid costume back to her office.
Connie jerked a thumb at Caldwell’s closed door. “What’s the story?”
“Let’s leave it at this: the race is still on and you look like a dead cert.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“It’s good. Hang in there, kid.” Connie’s answering smile triggered an idea. “Do me a favor, will you? Find out if Beltrán’s come back.”
“He hasn’t showed up here.”
“Then call his folks. I think they’ll talk to you.”
“¡Si, mi general!”
I nodded at her Spanish. “Exactly.” 
* * * *
In due course, Connie reported that Beltrán was still at Pajarito Beach, according to his grandma. I decided I’d have to go collect him, reluctantly, since the trip would cruelly tax my feeble Bumble.
But first, I needed to check Sandusky’s story. So around two o’clock, I rattled down to Full Moon Farquhar’s bungalow, parked, and banged on her rustic door.
After a long wait, she opened the door, wearing exactly the same outfit as before: same filthy cashmere sweater, same wraparound skirt that didn’t.
“Hi, Full Moon.”
“We gave at the office.” But the big eyes behind her heavy lenses crinkled at the corners. She let me in.
When I explained my mission, Full Moon led me, at her usual geologic pace, to a study off the living room. She rummaged in the cubbies of a roll top desk, alternately peering at papers held a foot from her nose and tossing them on the floor.
By the time she found the document she wanted, the old lady was standing ankle deep in paper. “Got it!” She waved a fat sheaf of legal size sheets.
After a twenty minute wallow through a legal swamp of except insofar ases and provisions of paragraph three notwithstandings, I found it. The contract included an option to buy both the land for the country club and the college property. Kronkheit had hidden it by referring to the parcels only by their legal descriptions. I flipped back and forth between the attached copies of the county plat book pages and the surveyor’s jargon in the contract: that portion of the... commencing at a point....
“Well?” in Full Moon’s standard crusty tone. I looked at her, slumped at her scruffy desk in a shaft of dust-clogged sunshine. She shaded her weak eyes to see me better.
I waved the contract. “I’m afraid I was right.”
“What?!”
“The country club and college are included.”
“They are not!” But Full Moon’s wattled face looked apprehensive.
I showed her. Full Moon rattled through the pages with arthritic, trembling hands.
“Do you remember specifically excluding those parts?”
She peered up at me. “I’m sure of it... I mean I think so.”
“Really sure?”
Full Moon flung down the contract, her wrinkled mouth rigid with anger. But as she thought, her furious look sagged into resignation. She mumbled something no louder than a throat clearing.
I leaned toward her. “I didn’t hear that.”
Some of the fury returned. “I said I don’t remember! Is that plain enough?”
Gently, “Hey, Full Moon. I’m on your side.”
The old lady chuckled bitterly, with a sound like dead leaves.
I thought a minute. “You said Kronkheit was behind on his rent.” She nodded, looking puzzled. “Far enough behind to void the contract?”
 “Possibly, but what would that achieve?”
 “Perhaps a chance to renegotiate draw a new contract that excludes the land you want to keep.”
She worked on that a moment, then squinted up at me. “He’d almost have to, wouldn’t he?”
“I don’t really know, but it’s worth a shot.”
Full Moon relaxed into one of her rare, girlish smiles. “Kid, you and I could make beautiful music.” The Groucho eyebrow waggle. “Know anybody named ‘Beautiful Music’?”
I grinned back. “Remember what Groucho said about his two headed sheep?” She cocked her head. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever herd!”
Full Moon treated that with proper contempt, but now her smile carried a sad, sweet memory of flirtations dead for decades.
Chapter 11
“¡Arrib’arrib’arriba!” I was doing Speedy Gonzales as I fired the Supra up Route 118 to Ventura. Sally’d taken pity on the Beetle, in exchange for my promise to drive her car with moderation.
All right, so I lied. I jabbed a button on the console that shifted to sports suspension.
I surged through the autumn afternoon, past farm roads and produce stands and chuffing tractors, all fronting fields of tumid vegetables, gorging on piped in water and topsoil fifty feet deep.
I was feeling replete myself, perhaps because of the glove leather scent, the bun-cupping seat bucket, and the Bach on Sally’s thousand dollar sound system. Besides, once I got Beltrán in hand, I could settle this contest business for good.
Hi yo, Supra!
* * * *
I was still rafting on an inner tube of self congratulation when I swung off 101 above Ventura and hummed along the beach access road. The camp grounds were full on this late Friday afternoon, and the winding road was empty but for one forlorn sedan, rolling southward toward the rush hour behind me. What a glorious day.
Pajarito Beach looked just as ratty as before. I eased carefully through the squatters’ section on full pothole alert, suddenly aware that I was driving $30,000 instead of my own $300.
I was just pulling into a parking spot above the beach when a helicopter thundered over, so fast that I barely heard its approach above my stereo, and so low that its downwash churned the sand around me into vicious little cyclones. I stabbed the electric window buttons and cursed the hotdog pilot. If that sand took off the Supra’s skin, Sally’d do the same to mine.
The chopper arced dramatically above the beach and then settled above the tide line, twenty feet from a knot of people. Its door opened, two men jumped down, and someone threw a stretcher out. The men picked up the stretcher and trotted toward the crowd.
As I approached, I made out a short, fat, supine form in a wet suit that had been half cut away: Beltrán. His thick dark face was yellow and his doughy chest moved only when the swimmer straddling him compressed it with his fists. One paramedic checked his pulse while the other slapped the snout of an oxygen rig over his lumpy nose.
I stood there, numbly fascinated by the zombie spectators and the paramedics sweating over the fat, still form. Noises grew distorted like a poorly mixed soundtrack, with the over-loud ocean swamping tinny human voices. Back-lit by the setting sun, bodies glowed fiercely at their edges and faces sank into purple shadows. All movement seemed to be at quarter speed.
In fact, it was only five minutes before Beltrán was loaded like soft cargo and the helicopter cycloned away.
I took a deep breath and noticed that I was shaking from the ebb of an adrenalin rush. I pulled myself together and looked around.
A surfing type not much older than a boy was clearing the area with the self importance conferred by a green twill uniform. I walked toward him, collecting props for the only role I could think of in my shaken state: a shirt pocket pen and a three by five card from my wallet. “I’m Winston, L.A. Times.” I held the card so he couldn’t see the shopping list I’d filled it with. “You seem to be in charge here. What happened?”
The man waved at the empty spot now surrounded by scores of footprints. “Drowned,” he said in a tone implying that veteran professionals like him took death in stride.
“You sure? The paramedics were still giving him oxygen.”
The young man shook his surf blond head. “We worked on him for half an hour before the bird showed up. Couple kids saw him floating in the surf and the boy pulled him out.” In fact, a teenager was still hanging around, a tall, slender girl in a hot pink one piece suit.
“Who’s the victim?”
“Guy named Beltrán, from L.A.
“Anything else you can tell me, for the paper?”
“Not so far, but you call me at the office in Ventura. In about two hours.”
“Fine.”
Shugar wrote the phone number on a small notebook page and gave it to me. “Ask for me personal or they’ll put some PR guy on.” He glanced at the battered green pickup parked at the edge of the sand. “Which reminds me, I gotta go call in again.”
Pleased that fame was just a headline away, Shugar comma Charles A. strode cheerfully off to his truck.
The young girl stood there unselfconsciously, studying me with immense blue eyes. She looked about fourteen. “They screwed it up,” she said.
“Who screwed what up?”
“The whole thing. I pulled him out, y’know, and, like, sent Kevin for a lifeguard or whatever.” The giant blue eyes narrowed. “You really a reporter?”
I looked at this grave young lady and decided she had an already well-developed crap detector. Given the shape she was also developing, she would need it in life. “No.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“I’m investigating a crime.”
The girl checked out my scruffy clothes. “You like Columbo or something?”
“Sort of.” O, the brutal candor of youth. “You were telling me what happened.”
The girl nodded again. “So Kevin runs all around the beach and can’t find anybody and I’m like trying to get the scuba junk off the guy and turn him over and stuff. So, well, Kevin comes back, y’know, and I go like ‘we gotta give him respiration or something’ and Kevin goes ‘I don’t wanna touch him, like maybe he got sick.’ Kevin’s such a dork anyway.”
I smiled my apology for the male sex.
“So I told him they got this phone booth by the rest room and go dial 911, y’know? So he goes and I’m like pushing on the guy’s chest only I don’t really know how and Kevin comes back again and says he doesn’t have money for the phone and I go ‘you don’t need money for 911’ - only he didn’t know that.”
“Then what happened?”
“Anyway, people come and help and then that park guy comes and he goes ‘who pulled him out?’ and Kevin goes ‘we did’ and the guy writes down what Kevin says just like he did it because of course it couldn’t be just a girl did it, okay?”
I nodded sympathetically. “What’d they do with his scuba gear?”
“His diving buddies took it.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, they said they didn’t want it like ripped off.”
I remembered the two interchangeable surfers. “Who were they, some of the kids camping here?”
“No. Couple real big guys.”
Real big guys. I started feeling chilly. “How were they dressed?”
She shrugged. “Shirt and pants and all; even neckties.”
“Did one have blond hair and the other one a buzz cut?”
The girl looked exasperated. “I was sort of busy. Anyway, they took all his junk and put it in their car.”
“What kind of car?”
“I dunno, just a nothing kind.”
“A sedan?”
She thought a while, wrinkling a long straight nose that would look just right when she grew into it. “Yeah. What’re you investigating?”
“Murder.”
The word produced only a matter of fact nod. “You better get my name.” A sneer. “Of course, the park guy didn’t bother.”
I smiled again, and took her name and phone number. “Thanks, Virginia. You gave a very complete report.”
She shrugged, deflecting the compliment. “That’s okay. I gotta go.” She turned and walked away.
I watched her move off down the beach with a stride that must already turn some heads. Then without warning, she scampered down to the ocean, shrieked, and belly flopped into the surf. Suddenly she looked ten years old.
* * * *
Somehow, the Supra wasn’t fun anymore, and the long drive home was just an endless slog. Beltrán had been a sweaty little twister, a small fat man scheming to escape the prison of his own mediocrity. But cheating on a contest was not a capital offense. Why had he drowned? Beltrán was young and healthy, if overweight; and the scuba gear I’d seen had looked well cared for, as if its owner was a seasoned diver.
Scuba gear. Removed by two large “diving partners” who weren’t dressed for diving and who disappeared in a nondescript sedan.
A sedan like the one I’d seen when I’d driven in here, headed away from the beach at the start of the camping weekend. I tried to recall it: light color, late model; maybe a Chrysler K car, by its squared off shape.
Doubtless, dinky little hubcaps too.
Chapter 12
After a night of soul searching, I’d almost decided I’d have to call the police. Embezzlements and contest scams were one thing, but murder was a different kettle of wax, as Tina might put it. I started toward the telephone in my kitchen.
On the other hand, involving the police would send Saka skittering out of sight as fast as its corporate legs could move it, leaving the contest (and maybe the college) as dead as Beltrán. But if I could clear up the explosion before that happened, the insurance money might come through in time to keep us alive.
I hung up the phone without dialing and dug out Caldwell’s address, which I’d copied from his folder along with his credit union account number. He lived in Pasadena and, on this Saturday morning, just might be at home. 
* * * *
Home turned out to be a two story apartment complex built in the style of Post Modernist Eyesore: a pastel farrago of meaningless cubes, Palladian windows, and cutesy pie chimneys, with the inevitable barrel arch over the entrance. I followed a claustrophobic pathway between pale gray walls enclosing four by eight “patios” to the entrance of Caldwell’s ground floor flat.
He answered the door, dressed in his usual decorator colors, but today without socks inside his open toed sandals.
“What is it, Winston?” He was clearly just tickled to see me.
“We need to talk some more about the contest.”
“No we don’t.”
Before he finished shutting the door, I said “Beltrán is dead.”
Caldwell paused, stared at me without expression, then opened the door.
He led me into a white plaster living/dining/cooking area as cramped as a one car garage. The spare furnishings were ‘fifties modern: a contoured plywood couch and chairs upholstered in nubby monk’s cloth, plus wire-legged boomerang end tables. The only decoration filled one wall: an unframed acrylic of a giant nude female torso, whose magenta nipples seemed to twinkle. I couldn’t resist walking close enough to learn that they were clusters of small, reflective disks that wiggled in the draft on tiny hooks.
Caldwell walked behind the breakfast bar that paralleled the kitchen wall and turned to face me. “You said Beltrán was dead?”
“Drowned in a skin diving ‘accident,’ quote-unquote, late yesterday.” I mounted a stool on the living room side of the bar.
“I’m sorry...” in a tone that wondered what he had to do with it.
“In fact, your student was probably murdered.”
Caldwell stared at me.
“By two charming men who found me at school and tried to muscle me into quitting.”
“I still don’t...”
“Because I was too interested in your contest.”
“...see any connection,” Caldwell finished doggedly.
“Try this: those men first appeared soon after I’d approached you about the contest. Beltrán took a sudden vacation just after I told you I thought he was cheating. He was killed only hours after I threatened to confront you with him.”
An angry look flicked across Caldwell’s thin face. “None of that had anything to do with me.”
“And the same two men were seen removing his diving equipment.”
“I had no connection with it.”
“Not that I can prove, but homicide is a police matter. I’m sure professionals can succeed where I couldn’t.”
Caldwell said, “Be my guest,” but his casual tone sounded forced.
“I’ll also tell them about those ten thousand dollar checks Millard cashed, and those intriguing four to six thousand dollar deposits to your account.”
Defensively, “I can explain those.”
“No doubt you can also explain the relationship between the dates of Millard’s checks and your deposits. Banks do keep records, you know.”
Caldwell simply stared at me, so I climbed down off the bar stool and strolled over to inspect the huge nude painting. “The fact is, I’d rather not tell the police just yet - not until the college collects insurance on that explosion.” The torso’s pubic hair was a copper mesh pot scrubber glued to the painting. I turned to face Caldwell. “And speaking of explosions, who would want to blow up your classroom?”
“Blow up my...?” He seemed genuinely confused.
“That’s what it looks like. Or were they trying to murder Millard?”
“No I mean I don’t know.” He pulled himself together. “I don’t know anything about the explosion.”
“Then that’s something else for the cops to find out. I’m afraid it’ll be quite messy.”
“Now look...”
I kept my voice very quiet. “This, Brother Caldwell, is our fourth go-round on the contest, and I am tired of ripping the truth off you in little shreds. Now you can tell the whole thing to me or you can tell it to the law. It’s up to you.”
Caldwell leaned his elbows on the bar and rubbed his eyes with the heels of hands. Then he looked up at me, finally defeated. “Millard told me he’d already set up the truck contest with Saka. Big prestige, big scholarship, big opportunity.” His mouth curled bitterly. “Big mistake! I had to explain that none of my wretched students could possibly produce an acceptable entry.”
“And so?”
“So he said why didn’t I do it and get a student to front for me.”
“And what would you get for your pains?”
“Millard said he’d give the first year’s scholarship to me and hide the fact in the college books. Fifty thousand dollars, well...” Caldwell pronounced the sum with the wan reverence of any career teacher. “I said I’d do it if I got the money in advance.” A brief sneer. “I’d had some prior experience with Millard’s lofty promises.”
“He paid you fifty thousand?”
“The explosion killed him before we’d, ah, completed the transactions.”
“Inconvenient for both of you.”
“Anyway, it wasn’t hard to recruit Beltrán, with five thousand dollars and an apprenticeship at Saka. I gave him the designs, he re-drew them, and then I touched them up for him.”
“And that was all of it?”
Caldwell looked me in the eye. “Yes.”
“What about the explosion?”
Fervently, “I have absolutely no idea. Millard still owed me ten thousand dollars when he died.”
“The men who muscled me? Beltrán’s death?”
“I only know this: Millard had fingers in things - connections. Though who and what and why, he never told me.”
“But someone else is involved.”
“Must be.” He said it reluctantly.
“And you don’t know who?”
“I don’t.” Caldwell straightened up behind the bar, as if preparing to hear his sentence.
“I’m going to leave it there, for now.” I started the trip to the tiny front hall. “Of course, you’ll have to return the money.”
Sourly, “Only forty thousand.”
I turned at the door. “But if I were you, Caldwell, I’d start looking for another job.”
He shrugged in disgust. “The way that school is going, we’ll all need one.” 
* * * *
As I rattled home to Hollywood, I reviewed Caldwell’s explanation. He’d been recruited by Millard and he probably knew Bud Lipscomb, the other contest judge. So where did Kronkheit fit in? Or did he? It was about time for another chat with Pasadena’s master builder.
Back in my cave under Sally’s house, I erected a meatloaf sandwich, pinching three mold spots off the bread, and started to hunt down Kronkheit. No answer at his office on this Saturday afternoon, so I’d have to find his home phone. Nothing to do but hit my three foot shelf of phone books.
Half an hour later, I was about to give up, when my own phone rang.
“Hi, Sally. Where are you?”
“Upstairs. There’s a handsome gent of the Asian persuasion on my doorstep, name of Sato. Says he knows you.”
“Yoshi, sure.”
“Want me to send him down?”
“Ahh...” I looked around my seedy flat, saw crusty dishes in the sink, a week’s discarded clothing in a bombing pattern around the laundry hamper, the remnant of my moldy sandwich. “Okay if I see him upstairs?”
“No problem.”
“Be right up.” I wasn’t about to entertain down here, not Yoshi in his thousand dollar suit.
But Yoshi fooled me. I found him in Sally’s living room, dressed for Saturday in an open shirt and cardigan, crisp slacks, and loafers that gleamed like bankers’ club paneling.
The three of us made small talk over diet Cokes. At ease on her tan leather couch, Sally looked even more stunning than usual in white canvas shorts and a T shirt displaying a prone, sunbathing duck and the legend SUN YOUR BUNS. Yoshi was smiling a lot and his quick eyes sparkled at her. The two of them carried on about this and that at unnecessary length, I thought, just having a peachy time of it, while I stared down at my wrinkled jeans and the naked toe beneath the hole in my Saturday sneakers.
Finally, however, Yoshi looked at me, then flicked his eyes at Sally as if to say, ahem.
“Sally knows everything I do, Yoshi. You can talk to both of us.”
Yoshi looked meditatively at Sally, then nodded. “I was up in Beverly Hills playing tennis, so I thought to drive over here and see you. I didn’t want to wait until Monday.” 
* * * *
“About the contest.”
Another nod. “Mr. Lipscomb has resigned from Saka Motors.”
“Resigned?”
Yoshi smiled at my skeptical tone. “I did impress on him that this might be the wise alternative.”
I didn’t have to ask what the foolish alternative might be. “What happened?”
“He admitted that the 50 thousand dollar scholarship and the building lease were entirely his own idea. The home office did not even know of them.” Yoshi said the last part in a tone of polite amazement.
Sally’s eyes narrowed. “How much authority did Lipscomb have in the U.S. management?”
Yoshi shrugged expressively.
“Then how did he hope to authorize the lease?”
“He planned to use the contest outcome to sell the home office on the college.” Yoshi smiled wryly. “When they saw the students’ brilliant work, Saka Motors would be eager for a long term relationship.”
I said, “That sounds pretty half baked.”
It was Sally’s turn to smile sardonically. “Nothing like a little greed to screw up your judgment.”
Yoshi shook his head doubtfully. “But greed for what? Lipscomb would not tell me what he hoped to gain from all this.”
Even as he said it, I remembered that Full Moon Farquhar had seen another investor in Kronkheit’s office, a “gray, middling sort of man” with no vibrations. “He may have stood to get something from the developer if Saka leased his building.”
“That would be logical.” Then Yoshi shrugged as if unwilling to speculate. He stood up, tugging down the hem of his cardigan. “Well, I am sorry things turned out this way.”
I stood up too. “It may not be a dead loss, Yoshi. A young woman named Roderick did a very fine truck design.”
“I will look at it with care. Thanks for the Coke, Sally.” She held out her hand and Yoshi grasped her fingers, turning them knuckles-up as if to kiss them. “I hope I will see more of you.”
Sally unshuttered a megawatt smile. “Me too.”
I strode to the front door, trying not to appear over brisk. “‘Bye, Yoshi.”
Yoshi bestowed a parting twinkle on Sally and then followed me. As I opened the door, he paused. “Oh, I checked on those men you mentioned? No such persons have ever worked for Saka.”
“For Lipscomb, then?”
He pondered that, then shook his head. “I think not. He is not the type.”
And Yoshiaki Sato, captain of industry, charmer of ladies, and snappy dresser, strolled off toward his Acura coupe.
The self assured sonofabitch.
When I returned to the living room, Sally said, “What do you think?
I scratched my cheek, regretting that I’d skipped shaving this morning. “The missing piece is Kronkheit. But I can’t get to him. He’s not in his office and his home phone isn’t listed.”
Sally gazed down at the cartoon duck on her chest. Then, “Would Full Moon have it?”
I brightened. “She is his landlord. I’ll phone her.” 
* * * *
Full Moon remembered that the gray investor in Kronkheit’s office had been called “Lipchitz or Coxcomb or something,” which was close enough to Lipscomb for me. She dug out Kronkheit’s phone number and his address in the San Rafael hills above the Rose Bowl.
But when I called there, I got only a phone machine, so I hung up without leaving a message. But what if he was really there and using the machine to screen calls? With this in mind, I coached Sally on some more telephone role playing, and now she was dialing the number again.
She waited for the machine message and the beep, then dropped into her most managerial voice. “This is Sally Helmer at three forty p.m. on Saturday. Bud Lipscomb of Saka Motors told me that Mountain Meadow Properties offered some very attractive limited partnerships. I’m looking for investments in the low to mid six figures, so... A pause and then Sally signaled got him! “Yes, Mr. Kronkheit? ....All right then, Sy. Did you hear the message? .... Fine. Well, Bud was real high on this investment and... Trouble is, I’ve got to get back to Seattle. My company won’t run itself, you know. ....Oh, with friends on Linda Vista Avenue. They say it’s near the Rose... You’re kidding! A cliché like ‘small world’ comes to mind. Bud gave me your address, but as an out-of-towner, I had no idea where it was.... No, I’d rather not involve my friends in this. Why don’t I just run over there instead? Say five o’clock? ....Looking forward to it, Sy.” She hung up and broke out a big, fat grin.
Then she frowned. “Okay, I’m in. Now tell me why I’m doing this.”
“If I show up unannounced, Kronkheit might just check me out through the door peeper and decide he’s not home. So you get in there, bat your baby blues or something, and then ask if your ‘business associate’ can join the discussion.”
Sally’s frown deepened. “You know, Stoney, that’s the second time you’ve used me that way.”
“Quote: ‘If testosterone softens the brain, it’s not your fault,’ unquote.”
Sally stared at me for a long moment, then sniffed. “Okay, but go clean up. You look like I found my ‘business associate’ under a rock.” She stalked off toward her bedroom with the thudding gait that always says she’s angry. 
Chapter 13
It worked. Sally piloted the Supra over to Pasadena and up Linda Vista, up, up and around and up again, twisting through jumbled hills barnacled with pricey homes. We found Kronkheit’s number painted on the curb, swung into his winding driveway, and climbed upward yet again to the generous turnaround in front of his house. Sally pointed the Supra outward toward the valley below, so that I would be invisible in the early twilight, and left me in the car. I aimed the rearview mirror to frame her on the doorstep. The door opened and she disappeared through it.
What I could see of the house was typical: a gabled roof of thick cedar shakes above wood siding painted Williamsburg blue and accented with shutters screwed flat to the house.
The view in the other direction included a building below me that bridged two knolls, the black steel cigarette-carton shape of Art Center College. Ironically, Kronkheit gazed down on the world’s best automotive design school, even as he diddled the worst one.
Sally reappeared on the porch and beckoned. I got out of the car, being careful not to bang the door against Kronkheit’s glossy Jaguar parked beside the Supra, and loped up to the house.
Kronkheit looked as suave as ever in gray wool pants and blue preppie pullover. His eyes widened when he recognized me. “The hell is this?”
Quite a day for cordial welcomes. “Greetings, Seymour.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Same as you, Sy: shoveling shit - only we push it sideways, to see what’s behind it.”
He blinked at my rough tone and look. “That’s pretty cryptic not to mention crude.”
“Cryptic, I will fix.” I waved at the foyer, which was done in upscale Ethan Allen. “You want to talk here in the hall?”
Kronkheit stared at me silently. When I matched him scowl for scowl, he sighed disgustedly and stalked into his living room. Sally and I followed.
He took the commanding spot in front of the Federal fireplace. “This had better be good.”
“Trust me.” I collapsed into a Queen Anne wing chair, while Sally arranged herself more gracefully on the floral patterned sofa. In her business uniform of suit and flowing scarf, she looked commanding. I nodded toward her. “Ms. Helmer here is really a financial analyst, specializing in real estate partnerships.”
“Call me Sally.” She washed him in a smile like scented bubble bath and pulled his brochure from her Mark Cross case. “Intriguing prospectus, Mr. Kronkheit.”
“What...?” No wonder he looked confused. Sally’s manner and dress were all business, but the rest of her had the power to cloud men’s minds.
“She’s been retained jointly by the college and Full Moon Farquhar. You’ve jerked us around long enough, Sy.”
Kronkheit stared down his upscale nose. “If you don’t leave...”
“You will summon the authorities. That will be entirely convenient, believe me.” I settled more comfortably in the wing chair.
Sally placed the brochure carefully on the solid cherry coffee table. “On the other hand, Mr. Kronkheit, we may find it in our mutual interest to postpone that...” another smile “...perhaps indefinitely.”
Warily, “What is it, then?”
I rose, to avoid staring up his nostrils. “I’ll start with what we know already. You got Mountain Meadow going by leasing the land from Full Moon Farquhar and starting an office tower. Then you got Bud Lipscomb to fill that tower by bringing in Saka motors, in exchange for a limited partnership interest. Bud needed a justification for leasing, so you thought of the College’s auto design department. You and President Millard cooked up a truck design contest to show Saka the value of a long term relationship.” This well prepared speech carried me over to the porcelain pieces on a side table.
Kronkheit shrugged. “I told you that part.”
“But there weren’t any students good enough to turn out a plausible truck, so Millard and Caldwell faked the contest, probably with your full knowledge. A pretty shaky building so far, but holding together.”
“Barely,” Sally said serenely.
“Then the structure began losing some bolts. You fell behind on lease payments to Full Moon, construction stopped, and Millard got himself killed.” I strolled back to the coffee table. “That was where I came in. I uncovered the contest gag and traced it to Millard and Lipscomb. I also found out that you’d conned Full Moon into leasing land she’d expressly excluded from the deal.”
“Oh?”
“You did it by hiding the college and country club acres in the technicalities of the legal description.”
Sally’s leopard purr cut in, “When Mrs. Farquhar was informed of this, she demanded a new lease.”
I added, “Or she would break the old one for defaulting on payments.”
Kronkheit shrugged. “That would take a long time.”
Sally shrugged back, to more esthetic effect. “During which the project would come to a standstill.”
I wandered a few feet beyond the coffee table, so that Kronkheit would receive us in stereo. “But you couldn’t have that. You had to keep the project going.”
Sally finished the volley. “Because, with the Rotterdam hospital tied up in court and the Martinique resort repossessed by its backers, a third failure would ruin you.”
Kronkheit looked surprised at that one. He stared at Sally, then turned to me and stared some more. At length, “Your looks are deceiving, Stoney.” He turned back and smiled at Sally. “Not to mention yours, Ms. Helmer.”
With the same serene good cheer, “Sally.”
 Kronkheit nodded several times, still smiling. “Fine, Sally.” He took a deep breath and composed his face. “Care for a drink?”
Sally’s purr deepened. “Scotch please, very tall.”
I said, “Similar.”
“Okay.” Kronkheit opened what looked like a colonial wardrobe, revealing a fridge, wet sink, bottles, and glasses. He made the drinks offhandedly, as if his mind was elsewhere.
When he turned around and handed us our glasses, his handsome face was perfectly composed. “You’ve got most of it right, except for two things. First, I’ve done nothing illegal. Absolutely nothing. I did propose the contest to Millard, but making it work was his problem. I had nothing to do with that part. As for Lipscomb, how he used his influence with Saka was not up to me. I simply asked him to be my advocate there.”
I swallowed a sip of very good scotch. “In exchange for a part of the action.”
“It’s a free country, barely.” Kronkheit saluted our free country with his glass. “Now about the land. Of course you’ve met Mrs. Farquhar? Then you know she can be vague, capricious changeable.” A tolerant smile. “She is very old.”
“But not gaga.”
He nodded. “Then I presume she was sharp enough to have her attorney review the lease before she signed it.”
“You knew she’d excluded part of the land.”
“That’s not true. It was only later that she had second thoughts.”
Sally spoke up. “You said we were wrong about two things.”
Kronkheit swung to face her. “Those other projects. You don’t understand large scale developments. Financing is always a juggling act. Litigation is common.” He threw up his free hand dramatically. “My god! Zoning boards, city councils, no growth nuts, environment dingbats - it’s a miracle anything gets built anymore.”
“O pioneers!”
My comment turned him back to me. “Yes, where are they?”
Kronkheit drained his whisky and carried the glass back to the bar counter. “I expect to do well enough out of this, and why not? I imagine things. That’s my profession. I make things happen. Without people like me, nothing would ever get done. The country would end up like, like Norway!”
“I’m sort of fond of Norway.” Sally’s Viking blood was up.
Kronkheit ignored her. “All right. I make deals, I cut corners, I have to. But I have done nothing wrong.” Looking honestly agitated, he walked swiftly to the bar again and poured a second whisky.
After two large swallows, “And if you’ll just stay out of my hair, I can still pull this off.”
I did my Lieutenant Spock eyebrow. “Maybe. When Saka found out about the contest and the lease business, they fired Lipscomb.” Kronkheit looked surprised, so I gave him the other punch: “Besides, they’re moving to Orange County.”
“I didn’t know about Bud.” Kronkheit seemed slightly shaken. Then he straightened. “But it doesn’t matter. I can get all the tenants I want. This whole area’s booming.”
Sally shook her head. “You can’t complete your project without all the land.”
I added, “And I don’t think Full Moon will change her mind. That’s consecrated ground to her.”
Kronkheit considered this for a moment. “I’ll go see her on Monday.” He nodded as if confirming that, then looked at me again. “So what’s your reaction?”
I made my tone just slightly reluctant. “If what you say is all true, then yes, you seem legal enough.”
“I’m glad you see it that way.” He set his glass down again.
Sally stood up. “I suppose if you made your back payments, Mrs. Farquhar couldn’t find you in default.”
Kronkheit gestured toward the front hall, shaking his silver head ruefully. “I wish you hadn’t been lying about that mid six figure investment of yours, Sally.”
Following him out of the living room, Sally turned on her killer smile again. “You of all people, Sy, should understand.” 
* * * *
As we hummed down the hill in the early fall darkness, Sally stared through the windshield, preoccupied. Then she glanced across at me. “Why didn’t you mention the goons?”
“Or Beltrán’s death?” Sally nodded. “Because of what I noticed while I waited for you to call me inside.”
“What?”
“Kronkheit’s Jag. I saw that car in the parking structure at his office.”
Sally looked a question.
“And he saw Beetle Bumble.”
“You think those bozos work for Kronkheit?”
“Who else is left?”
Sally was silent for half a mile of tortuous road. Then she said, “When we get home, let’s make some supper.”
It seemed I was forgiven. 
* * * *
Supper turned out to be tacos - lots of tacos. We constructed them together in Sally’s cheerful kitchen. She was barefoot and back in her shorts and T shirt.
“Sally, that’s a porterhouse steak!”
“I don’t like hamburger tacos.” She flicked the last two molecules of fat aside and diced the beef with flashing, lethal knife strokes. She braised the beef, dumped in water and potent spices, and stirred this happy mess with vigor, wagging her tail as she always does. The aroma was almost erotic.
She pointed at the block of cheddar on the counter. “Fire up that grater, kid.”
“Yass’m.” I started shredding cheese and lettuce while Sally fried tortillas in olive oil.
“Did you get out an onion, Sally?”
“Over here.”
I took it from the cutting board beside her and started back toward my own area, absently patting her butt as I passed. Lettuce into one bowl, cheddar in the other. Let’s see, I’ll need a...
Patting her butt? I snuck a glance toward the cook top. Sally was smiling benevolently at a tortilla. She plucked it deftly from the oil and folded it onto the wire taco rack. Then she grabbed an open jar of salsa. “Feel like mild or hot tonight?”
“Oh...hot, I guess.” Listen to Joe Casual, will you.
Sally spooned salsa into a bowl
* * * *
I collected the taco platter and carried it to the sink, where Sally was rinsing dirty dishes. “One taco left. Shall I put it in a baggie?”
She shook her head. “They’re lousy when you microwave ‘em. Throw it out.”
“Children are starving in Saskatoon. Let’s share it.”
“Don’t tempt me, Stoney.”
“C’mon, here.” I held it in front of my own mouth, pointed toward her.
Sally frowned, then grinned and turned. She leaned in toward the taco and took a healthy chomp. While she tried to grin and chew together, I took a bite myself. Salsa squirted on my chin. Sally leaned closer and licked the salsa off.
That did it. I kissed her lapping tongue, and when it retreated in surprise, I followed it home. She wrapped her arms around me.
“Mm fhm pfhm fhm.”
Sally pulled her mouth away. “You going to finish your supper or what?”
I gulped the bite and dropped the taco remnant in the sink. “I’m just beginning.” I stalked her mouth again.
“Not here, you’re not. The counter’s cutting me in half.” But she kissed me back.
“I’m open to suggestion.”
“Do that again. Mmmmmm. How ‘bout the TV couch? We haven’t done that in a while.”
Lady, we haven’t done anything in a while. I said aloud, “I’ll race you.”
* * * *
But that was the problem: we raced each other. Hopping about with jeans around my ankles, stripping off my shirt, stripping off her shirt ohdeargod snatching at her shorts, flinging pillows on the floor to clear the couch.
And so forth.
Then she sat on the floor with her knees up and her back against the sofa. How could a woman as big as Sally look so fragile? I wandered naked to her desk, rummaged a side drawer, and exhumed the cigarettes I thought might still be in there. I lit one. It was a year old and tasted every day of it, which was good, since I didn’t want to start smoking again.
I sat on the couch and put a palm on her bare shoulder.
“Sorry,” Sally said. She covered my hand with hers briefly, then dropped her arm again.
Silence.
“I’m sorry too, Sally.” More silence. “I think I wanted you too badly.”
She turned her head and looked at me. “You know what? I did too.” She looked down at her spread knees. “I didn’t think I did but I did.”
I sighed and patted her shoulder some more. “Well then... uh... what say we hang around while I build up the old Precious Bodily Fluids?” No reply. “The second feature’s often better.”
But Sally shook her head. “We’d only try too hard again.” She stood up and retrieved her shorts from the top of the TV. “Maybe you better go on downstairs - for now, anyway.”
I gathered my own clothes and then paused to watch her dress. Hmh: the unbearable grace of a long-legged woman bending to step into panties.
But she had said she’d wanted me too. While I dressed, I clasped that to me as an actor hugs a call-back notice. Then I kissed her sunshine hair, shambled out into the night, and descended to my pit.
Chapter 14
Phone. Phone. Phone!
Okay okay okay! Fumbling in the dark toward my bedside table. Time’sit? Red digits floating in black: 4:16. Aw hell, wrong number dialed from the East Coast.
“Yeah?”
“Emer gency emer gency emer gency emer gency there is a med I cal emer gency...” And the dead flat digital voice began spelling an address, one letter at a time. It was starting on a phone number before I’d hauled myself awake enough to register: Full Moon’s beeper!
Zero to sixty in one second flat. Pants. Forget the shorts. Shirt. Sneakers. Now out!
I raced up my steps and around to the Beetle crouching in the driveway. Key. Ah. Glad I didn’t empty my pockets. Hit the starter.
Click.
Again: click. Not even the dashboard warning lights came on. Der Bumble was kaput.
What now? Supra there beside me. Sally!
I pelted toward the front door. Wrong. Sally’s bedroom at the back. I swung myself over the railing and onto the side deck. Around the back to the far side, where Sally slept with her sliding door cracked open.
“SALLY!”
“Hunh. Stoney?”
“Full Moon’s beeper went off.”
“What?”
“Her medical beeper just called me. Maybe heart attack or something. My car won’t start.”
“Gotcha, go out front.”
In less than three minutes, we were swinging down the empty lanes to Laurel Canyon Boulevard. We swooped right on Laurel and howled downhill, running the light at Hollywood Boulevard and bearing right again to pick up Crescent Heights.
Sunset was busy even this early, so Sally hit her high beams and warning flashers, then leaned on the horn as the Supra hit the intersection, swerved around a street sweeper, evaded three cars, and hurtled south. She drove as brilliantly as if she’d been awake for hours.
Right on Santa Monica, left on Full Moon’s street, down a block and...
Oh, Christ, fire!
I’d been in a burning building once before and just the memory made me shudder. Sure enough, Full Moon’s bungalow was ablaze. I could see the glow behind the front window curtains.
We jumped out and raced to the front door. Locked of course. I started for the big window beside it. It was glowing hideous yellow.
Sally yelled, “Don’t break the glass; it’ll increase the draft inside.”
“What, then?”
“I dunno. Around the back maybe.” She started down the tight side yard.
I caught up with her at another door. It was locked, but the hardware looked flimsy, so I kicked it open, splintering the frame around the latch. A sheet of flames exploded and a cloud of poisonous smoke boiled out, driving us back to the yard. Sally muscled the door shut.
I stumbled blindly toward the back, my night vision ruined by the firelight. Tripping on shrubs, slipping on the wet grass.  
The greenhouse! “Sally! This way.”
When she found me, I was kicking at the greenhouse door. It must have been stronger than the other one, because it only shuddered when I hit it, while the panes around it creaked in protest.
I pried a brick out of a garden border and struck a pane, but the wire mesh sandwich only crazed. Again. Still no luck.
I heard Sally say, “Aw, give me a break, Stoney,” and then she hurtled past me and 170 pounds of flying Valkyrie hit the door and blew it off its hinges.
Sally picked herself up. “No smoke in here yet.”
I followed her into thick blackness and tried to get my bearings. I could hear the roar of fire in the main house and something else: water running in the dark.
I caught Sally’s arm. “There’s a table on three sides like a platform, feel it? It breaks for this door. That means the house wall’s to our left.”
Holding on to each other, we crept cautiously into the dark until we bumped a wall. “That’s it. Door’s in the middle.” We went by Braille across the wooden wall until we found the door. Locked again.
“God dammit!” I lunged into the door, but only hurt my shoulder.
“Wait, Stoney?”
“Watcha doing? I can’t see anything.”
“Should be a switch beside the... Ah!” And light flooded us from above.
I bent to study the door hardware. “Okay, this is just an inside snap lock. We should be able...”
“Don’t bother, Stoney.”
“What do you mean? She may still be alive.”
“Stoney!”
I straightened up. “What?”
“Look.” And Sally pointed toward the greenhouse back wall. 
 Dressed in a soaking flannel nightgown, Full Moon Farquhar lay on her back in the middle of her giant turtle pool, under a waterfall gushing from the faucet above her. Her thin white hair was plastered to her skull and her eyes were closed.
 As we moved near, I could see her chest rising and falling. “Full Moon, are you conscious?”
Full Moon’s Groucho voice: “Certainly.”
Sally looked puzzled. “Did she say ‘soitenly?’”
I was too relieved to bother explaining. I reached over and shut off the water. “C’mon, we have to get you out.”
“Can’t move.”
“We’ll move you.” Looking around, I spotted Full Moon’s rust-pocked wheelchair standing by the inside door. I rolled it over to the low table, while Sally heaved the drenched old lady upright and maneuvered her to the edge. Between us, we dumped her in the chair and started for the outside door. She was clutching at her stomach, as if in pain.
Negotiating the side yard was easier on the way out because of the light now spilling in from the fire trucks on the street. We hauled the wheelchair by main force, cursing the bushes and flower beds, and reached the front sidewalk in time to see a hole appear in the bungalow roof, with flames licking below it.
Full Moon fumbled in a cloth pouch tied to the one remaining chair arm and brought out a pair of glasses. She managed to get them on her nose with shaking hands, and turned their thick lenses toward her home. Her prune mouth pursed but the rest of her old face remained under iron control.
Full Moon said softly, “Helen Simon, rest in peace.” 
* * * *
“When I came out of my room, I couldn’t see anything with these stupid eyes of mine. Thank God I had extra specs in the chair pocket.” Full Moon settled them more firmly on her nose. She was still in her chair on the sidewalk, but now under several fire department blankets.
A fire official continued the interview: “Then what?”
“I started toward the front of the house, but it was so hot and bright...” She trailed off vaguely, then resumed. “So I went the only other way. I thought I might get out through the greenhouse. Besides, I had to get my turtles.”
The official seemed about to ask a question, then thought better of it.
“But the outside door was stuck shut and the other door latched itself and... well, it suddenly felt hot in there too, and I thought about glass melting and so on.”
“Then what?”
Full Moon shrugged. “I did the only thing I could. I crawled up on the table and turned the water on me.” She found the official in her gun sights. “Was that right?”
“You did just fine, Mrs. Farquhar.”
“Full Moon.”
The official glanced up at the sky, then shot me a puzzled look. I shook my head. He turned to Full Moon again. “Just fine. And now the ambulance is ready.”
“I’m not sick, you know.”
“We’ll take you in for observation. Just for tonight.”
Full Moon peered around her at the trucks and personnel and snaking hoses, now fully visible in the Sunday dawn. “It’s already tomorrow, but all right.” Sighing, she burrowed around under her layers of blankets and brought out a big round rock.
She held it out in my direction. “Stoney, take care of C. Aubrey Smith.” The rock was her favorite box turtle. “He was all I could save,” she said, and for the first time, her voice trembled. 
* * * *
It was eight a.m. by the time we got back, drenched and filthy and shuddering with cold. And no wonder. The two of us had put on only one layer of clothing. Not even Jack Daniels helped, so we repaired to Sally’s oversize shower.
Normally, a shower with Sally was reliably stimulating. She would stand below stereo shower heads, washing her corn-gold hair, the rest of her dressed in soapsuds that slithered down her magnificence and collected around her feet as if reluctant to leave her. But this morning, I was tired and upset about Full Moon, so I simply carried on washing.
And when we progressed to her king size bed, we just dumped ourselves down on it.
Sally stretched out on her stomach. “Noof! I’m shot.”
Understanding this signal, I nodded and fell back beside her. “Me too.”
A drowsy pause, then I said, “Thanks...” and stopped.
“Thanks what?” She sounded half asleep.
“I started to say thanks for helping, but the fact is, you did most of it.”
Another pause, then Sally said, “I’m so sorry about the old lady.”
“Me too.” 
* * * *
We checked in again about Noon, but didn’t get out of bed until two because we got distracted. Then we lazed around Sally’s sunny house consuming thick, disgusting sandwiches and Dos Equis beer. Then we got distracted again. Each time was better, and I hoped these were only previews of coming distractions.
“Stoney?”
“Mmmmm.”
“It’s almost four.”
“And all’s well.”
“True, but it’s time to move it out.”
“Tomorrow. Or maybe next Spring.”
“Here,” Sally tilted the last inch of beer into my mouth. “I have to go check on Full Moon and you have to see the police.”
I sighed and stood up, not panting to spring into action. “All right, but I have a better idea: Empire Fire and Casualty won’t pay for the explosion until they know what caused it. They assigned a bloodhound named Motteux to sniff it out.”
“How’s his nose?”
“I’ve never seen him use it. But I think he might be interested.”
I climbed into my clothes, which we’d run through the dryer between distractions, kissed Sally until she shoved me away, and wandered off to consult my phone books.
My instinct was to stay far away from grim, frigid Motteux, but I remembered his veiled threat that he was not constrained by police “procedural limitations.” His work, his self esteem, his only sour joy, lay in saving those “countless dollars” for Empire Fire and Casualty. If he thought my information might help him disallow that claim, he’d be only too ready to follow up on it.
It took three calls to find Motteux on Sunday, and when I finally reached him at home, his voice grew hoar frost on the handset. But he agreed to drive out to the college and see me.
As I climbed my steps to the driveway, Sally called out her door, “I set up the cables to jump start your Beetle.”
If I knew Bumble, it would need a defibrillator.
* * * *
But Sally got me going somehow, and I chuffed away through the quiet Fall Sunday toward the college. As I corkscrewed down the north side of Laurel Canyon, I tried to pull together a story for Motteux - or at least a motive for my sudden cooperation. It took some fancy reasoning, but by the time B. Bumble staggered up to the main college building, I had built a plausible structure, if you ignored the duct tape and baling wire holding it together.
As I parked, Motteux emerged from a prim Buick sedan, carrying an attaché case with one hand and a black clamshell computer with the other. I let us in with my new assistant-to-the-president’s sub master key and installed us in Tina Morgan’s office.
Motteux claimed the desk chair as if it were his right, plugged in his laptop, deployed pen and note pad from his case, and set up a micro cassette recorder. Only then did he wave me to a chair. I took no notice of this gamesmanship.
He placed his fingers over the computer keyboard in the pose of a court reporter. “Now, Mr. Winston, what do you have to tell me?”
I told him what I knew about Millard, Caldwell, Saka, and Kronkheit. Especially Kronkheit. I described his scam, showed how it went awry, and detailed his increasingly desperate improvisations to regain control of it - improvisations that included arson and double murder. Throughout my story, Motteux asked questions and tippety-tapped on his keys.
When I finished, he ignored me for several minutes while he studied his notes, his trim features bathed in the glare of his screen. Then he looked at me with his usual lack of expression. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“I had to dig it out first, one shovel at a time.”
After due consideration, “And what to you hope to get by it?”
“Resolution of the damage claim.”
Motteux consulted his notes again, then shook his head. “That’s unlikely. Your theory is that Kronkheit sent his muscle men to explode this building. But the insurance wouldn’t come to Kronkheit.”
“He and Millard were together. Perhaps they worked it out.”
“Inconveniently for Millard, it would seem.” Motteux turned on a tiny, icy smile, as if to say, there: I’ve made a joke.
“It was Sunday morning, after all. Those men wouldn’t know that Millard was here.”
Motteux rose from Tina’s chair and bent to study his screen again, his tidy hands held palms together below his nose, as if he were giving a Buddhist greeting. “I see it in a somewhat different light, Mr. Winston.” He straightened and stared at the wall behind my head. “Try this: President Millard has stolen fifty thousand dollars of employee withholding and Social Security. He has expected to replace it with grant money from Saka Motors. But now the truck contest is falling apart and the grant with it. He goes to Seymour Kronkheit for the money, but Kronkheit is in difficulties too. No sale.” Motteux pattycaked his hands as he thought. “Millard is now desperate for cash, and so he thinks about the insurance on this building.”
I stood up too, disgusted. “Right: then he rigs a bomb in the ceramics lab, strolls to his office next door, and calmly waits to be blown to pieces. Oh: and why was he giving it all to Caldwell?”
Motteux patted the air, counseling patience. “Think of the mess he’s in. Think of the scandal. In those circumstances Millard might look for, shall we say, a graceful exit.”
“If you call small, bloody pieces graceful.” I put my hands on the desk and leaned across it. “I know where you’re going, Motteux. If Millard blew up his own building to commit suicide, you have a way to deny the claim and add to all those countless dollars you’ve saved the company.”
Mild as ever, “I’m only doing my job.”
“Is your job to learn the facts, or to find excuses for refusing to pay off?”
For the very first time, I’d reached him. His face hardened and he sat down abruptly. “I don’t need you to tell me my job. We make decisions fairly.” He jabbed a finger at a function key and the computer’s hard disk hummed.
“Then be fair. I say Kronkheit, you say Millard. At least pursue both theories.”
Motteux snapped the laptop shut. “I will.” He took his time in stowing the recorder, pen, and pad, as if to do some thinking. Then he paused and stared at me speculatively. “But you know you have only a fifty-fifty chance here.”
“Without that insurance money, this college is out of business. Don’t you think that’s worth one chance in two?”
“I couldn’t say, Mr. Winston. I never gamble.” 
* * * *
I found Sally wielding a carpenter’s stapler, pinning chicken wire around one corner of her deck railing.
“What’s that?”
“An apartment for C. Aubrey Smith.” Snack. She squeezed the heavy gun adroitly. Snack. At each sharp report, the big box turtle on the decking yanked its head inside its shell.
I told her about my reception from Motteux.
Sally nodded. “Hold that, will you?” I grabbed the top of a short two by four she’d braced expertly upright while she stretched the wire mesh around it. Snack snack snack.
“Are we providing turtle care?”
“It fell off the deck three times. That sucker covers ground.” She pulled the chicken wire back to the rail to complete a four sided pen. “But I’m more worried about Full Moon care.” Snack snack.
“What happened?”
“I talked the hospital into keeping her one more night. But what about tomorrow?” Sally began stapling the mesh to the decking.
“We could have her here.”
She shook her head. “I get the feeling Full Moon would not be an easy guest.”
“Hm.” I snatched the turtle, which was galloping toward the railing shell-for-leather. It retracted instantly. “There is a little cottage on the college grounds. It’s empty.”
“Would they let her stay there?”
“I’ll talk to Tina.”
“Tina?”
“The college president. She’s an old friend.”
“Funny, you never mentioned her.” Sally put the turtle in the pen. It seemed to like it there as well as any place. “Tina who?”
“Morgan.”
“Tina Morgan.”
I watched the turtle determine if the wire mesh was edible. “Mm hmh.” Then I glanced up at Sally. She was looking at me and smiling.
“What is it, Sally?”
“Nothing. I better get some lettuce for the turtle.” She walked off briskly toward the kitchen door.
Now what was that all about?
Chapter 15
The next morning, Sally went to bail Full Moon out of the hospital and buy her replacement clothes and denture cream and whatever. Bumble was a dicey proposition, even after an overnight trickle charge, but I nursed it out to the college somehow.
I had no class on Monday, so I spent the morning on secretarial chores for Tina and then rounded up my film students for a spot of domestic labor on the cottage that Full Moon would occupy. Tina was not ecstatic at having the old lady around, but until we came up with some rent, it was prudent to coddle the landlord.
So now I stood in the cottage parlor, directing my cleanup squad. George DeGrasse was dusting the mangy furniture with finicky care, Connie was banging around in the tiny kitchen, Deidre was on the front veranda whacking the be-jasus out of a rug, and Engineer Bob was somewhere out back, repairing the hot water heater, I thought he’d said.
Uh-oh. I double timed out to the little service porch, to find Bob prone on the scabby linoleum, reaching into the heater.
“Bob, are you sure you...?”
 “Wait: 58...59...60, now.” He paused and the heater said whoomp. “We have ignition!” Bob sat up, looking pleased. “You gotta hold the pilot in for 60 seconds or it won’t stay on.” He stood up, wiping sooty hands on his jeans.
Before I could congratulate him, the heater said tick tick tick and shut off. Bob’s face fell, then he dropped back to floor level.
“Don’t, Bob. I’ll get someone in to fix it.”
Bob shook his head. “It only needs...”
“Bob!”
“Okay okay.”
“Come help Deidre get the rug back in.” Bob nodded reluctantly and stood up again.
I returned to the parlor. One nice thing about a rug: not even Bob could make it malfunction.
“Where do you want this?” Connie floated in from the kitchen, bearing a rusty biscuit tin of the type I remembered from my English childhood. Her getup today looked like a pink tennis dress, above two mismatched leg warmers.
Full Moon Farquhar tottered in after Connie. Sally had bought her the same style wraparound skirt and cashmere pullover, but at least they looked clean for a change. “On the mantel.” She waved at it with her cane, collapsed in a moldy arm chair, and peered around the room in her jerky chicken manner. “It hasn’t changed a bit.”
I said “Glad to hear it.”
“It always was a dump.” She smiled at Connie, who had suppressed a snort of laughter, and smoothed the balding plush of her chair arm. “But the memories! This was the Sainted’s very own cottage.”
George DeGrasse put down his dust rag. “The swami guy?”
“Not a swami, young man, not one of those Hindu frauds; the Sainted!”
“Oh.” George seemed to accept that at face value.
“It was in this very room that he began my spiritual conversion.” Noticing their respectful looks, she suddenly dropped into Groucho. “Of course, he finished it in the bedroom.” This time, Connie chortled aloud.
Full Moon looked at her and smiled. “The Sainted was inspired, but not, thank God, ascetic.” She settled back in her chair. “And now he has come home.”
I must have shown my puzzlement, because Connie jerked her head toward the fireplace. “The can.”
Full Moon wagged her wattles. “I’d thought to scatter his ashes at sea, but boat trips made the Sainted seasick. He never liked water.”
“Except to walk on.” Deidre had come in off the front porch.
“Show some respect, young woman.” But Full Moon grinned at Deidre’s zinger. She peered toward the biscuit tin on the mantel. “If I hadn’t stowed him in my greenhouse, he’d have been cremated twice.” Her ancient face looked positively sappy. “I can feel his vibrations everywhere.”
Deidre rolled her eyes and tromped out again, but Connie shivered deliciously. “Do you talk to him, Mrs. Farquhar?”
“Full Moon! No, but we... commune.”
“Maybe you could you know, with a Ouija board, or like, a medium.”
Full Moon sighed. “I tried, but his spirit is too great to channel through a medium.”
My turn for Groucho: “Then maybe he’d fit a large.” To the students, “Come on, you guys, let’s finish.”
George DeGrasse picked up his dust rag. “Well, I think it’s fantastic. And Full Moon gives this dreary place some class.” He tripped off toward the one tiny bedroom and the others dispersed behind him.
Full Moon sat on her overstuffed throne, beaming regally. “Nice children. I’m going to like it here.”
“They are good kids - all of them.” I strolled out to the porch, pleased that something was finally working out.
Tina Morgan was on the wide veranda, elegant as usual, in canary colored linen, and standing well clear of Deidre and Bob, who were still walloping the carpet draped over the bungalow railing. “How’s it going, Stoney?”
“She and the kids are equally nutsy. They love each other already.”
Tina nodded vaguely, as if her mind was elsewhere. “Caldwell gave back the 40 K.”
“Will it help?”
“I can pay the withholding and Social Security. Thanks, Stoney.” I nodded.
Tina checked a paper in her hand. “What I really came over, I’m doing the program for presentation night next Saturday. The big deal so far is the truck contest results, but I don’t have much else. Is that film of yours going to be finished?”
Quickly, “It’s not my film.” I dreaded the thought of unloading Bob’s “statement” on the public. “Yeah, we’ll get it together.” Somehow.
“Okay, I’ll put it in the program. She paced away toward her office, an ample patch of color in our dusty little glen.
Deidre dropped her broom. “That should do it.”
Bob said, “Just one more spot.” Whack!
Its back broken by this last straw, the feeble railing toppled to the ground below, rug and all. Engineer Bob had struck again.
So to speak. 
* * * *
It took Full Moon all of one day to establish herself at AC/DC. Though she moved at the speed of C. Aubrey Smith, she managed to poke in everywhere. She sat through a graphic design class, dispensing opinions and ribald asides that unnerved the diffident teacher. She tottered into the lunch room, pronounced it “ghastly,” then stayed to enthrall a large student audience with juicy gossip about Hollywood personalities, most of whom had packed up before these kids were born. The next morning, I found her in the courtyard, posing imperiously for Deidre’s photography class and promising to show the students her Paul Strand nudes. (“Peculiar man, he shot only my knees.”) By lunchtime on Wednesday, Full Moon Farquhar was already a campus fixture - half Queen Victoria and half loony mascot. The students appeared to dote on her.
I spent Wednesday morning in a corner of my dusty classroom, helping Connie edit Bob’s epic on the rackety Moviola I’d borrowed from a film industry friend. We worked well together, so I hardly noticed the time passing. Connie showed a natural flair for cutting, and I had to admit that the picture did not look entirely shabby.
But the sound track was something else. Bob had conned a student pal into writing a synthesized score (“Specially commissioned,” Bob called it) and now we were struggling with a deadly pastiche of Philip Glass that pounded the brain into braunschweiger.
Connie snapped open the Moviola sound head, laid in a strip of magnetic film, and played a minute of sound track through the machine’s tinny speaker. Then she stared dolefully into space. “Which one fits here, deedle dreedle deedle dreedle or DUBBA dubba DUBBA dubba?”
“Don’t you have a two minute trim of that waouw waouw waouw?”
Connie looked at me for a long moment, then we both broke into giggles.
I lifted my hands, palms up. “What can I say, Connie?”
She stared at me and her happy grin slowly faded. “You can tell me why I don’t ring your chimes.” Connie put a slim hand on my arm. “I been hitting on you for two months.”
“I thought we talked about this.”
A disgusted nod, “I’m too young, I’m just a student.” She dismissed this with a head shake. “We talk and like, joke around and I feel it going back and forth between us, you know how I mean?” She squeezed my forearm. “I mean, you can’t mistake what’s happening. I know!”
Looking into her immense black eyes, I said evasively, “I enjoy you thoroughly.”
The eyes turned wicked. “Not yet, you don’t.” I shook my head. “How come? What’s so wrong?”
“Connie...”
Connie slapped both palms on her ribs and pushed up otherwise invisible breasts. “I know, you like meat and potatoes.” Her voice turned bitter. “You hang out with Tina Morgan ‘cause she has meat to spare, and your Sally has the potatoes.” A sneer, “More like melons! That’s all men think about, right?”
I do favor upholstered women; I can’t help that. But Connie’s pain was evident and I realized again that she was indeed very young. I smiled at her, sighing. “Hey, you’re stunning by any standard.” Connie looked skeptical. “You’re also talented and funny and you have enough energy for three people. Also, you’re productively crazy, like all the best folks.” That coaxed a small smile. I took her hand. “And you don’t need any more meat and potatoes.”
Connie looked down at our clasped hands, then up at my face again. “Well then?”
I let go and repeated my palms up gesture. “I’m committed. Have been for years.”
“To Sally?” I nodded. “You like, married?” I shook my head and Connie snorted. “Just can’t take the plunge, hey?”
I shook my head again. “It’s the other way around.”
Connie looked at me quietly for a moment, then, “Ever think about cutting your losses?”
My turn to pause, while I rummaged for a scrap of truth in my rag bag of hopes and self-deceptions. But finally, all I could say was, “I can’t help it, Connie.”
She looked down at her hands and said with phony brightness, “So we’re just good friends.” But her eyes filled.
“Don’t undervalue good friends, Connie. There’s damn few around.”
She sniffed and sighed and picked up the sound track. “I’ll go with deedle dreedle, what the hell.”
* * * *
After lunch, I repaired to my genuine, official Assistant to the President desk, to find a pink while-you-were-out message. I dialed the number.
“Motteux,” in a perfect voice for the morgue receptionist.
“Winston.” I could play that game too.
“Are you still willing to assist in my investigation.”
I had a different idea of who was the assistant here, but I just said, “Yes.”
“Then you may provide some help. Come down to Seymour Kronkheit’s office.”
Did the man ever say please? “Can you tell me what it’s about?”
Silence, then Motteux said cautiously, “I can say this much: Kronkheit flew to England Monday morning.”
“A business trip?”
“Could be, but his secretary didn’t know about it until she got to work and found a note on her desk.”
“She know when he’ll be back?”
“Put it this way: the note said to close the office until further notice.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised.”
“Well, she was. Apparently, he owes her six weeks salary.”
“That fits. What’ll you do now?”
“I’d rather discuss it in person.”
“All right.”
So I nursed pathetic Bumble down the hill to Old Town Pasadena, parked in a concrete warren with a phony brick facade, and made my way through all the yuppie nostalgia to Kronkheit’s oak and etched-glass door.
It was opened by Motteux, still coldly handsome, still elegantly dressed, except for desert boots. He led me as far as the receptionist’s desk, then paused. “The secretary’s name is Helen Pierce. The other man is Fred Urquhart, an associate of mine.”
He started forward again, so I said “Motteux,” in a sharp tone. He stopped and turned. “I can help you more intelligently if you fill me in first.”
Motteux stared at me with the reluctant look of a man who never willingly filled anyone in. But then he nodded. “I dropped in here on Monday morning. Ms. Pierce was visibly upset.
“About her salary?”
“And something more. Perhaps a... relationship with Kronkheit.” He shrugged. “In any case, I caught her at a most productive time.” He smiled briefly, as if pleased with this choice of words. “She’s been cooperative.”
“I see, and what’s my function here?”
“Corroboration. Kronkheit did reveal his plans to you.”
“And several hundred others, but all right.”
I followed Motteux down the inner hallway. As we passed one of the outer offices I gestured to wait a second and opened the door. Sure enough, the room beyond was dead bare and the unmarked dust said it’d never been furnished. I closed the door.
Kronkheit’s office was as cool and green as before, but far messier. File drawers gaped and stacks of papers filled the big oak desk, half hiding a seated man who was peering at a document through bifocals as he punched a printing calculator with sausage fingers.
Ms. Pierce stood beside him with another sheaf of papers, outfitted today in a rugby shirt and denim skirt. She’d struck me before as matronly, but she wasn’t more than thirty five, and her country club chic might well have suited Kronkheit’s taste. She nodded a grim hello and the man at the desk stood up.
Motteux said, “Mr. Winston, this is Fred Urquhart, from our accounting department. He’s looking things over.”
“Afternoon.” Urquhart was a thick bodied man of sixty with a bland moon face and gray hair ruthlessly parted and combed. In his aggressively patterned jacket and dubious tie, he resembled a prosperous farmer. But his eyes were shrewd and his fat fingers moved among the papers with calm precision. He sat down again while Motteux and I took chairs opposite the desk.
Motteux outlined my interest in Kronkheit and asked Urquhart to summarize what they’d learned.
Urquhart picked up a paper and raised his melon head to center the page in his bifocals. “First off, Kronkheit got enough cash or maybe credit to print up brochures, hire an architect, get a model built and start an office building. That’s Phase One.”
He replaced the paper on the desk and went on in the same quiet good-old-boy voice, “Now how does he finish it? He runs his ass excuse - my French - all over Beverly Hills and points west selling limited partnerships in Phase Two.”
I nodded. “The housing tract.”
“Yessir. Only he does just enough land grading to show Phase Two’s off the ground and then uses most of the money to keep Phase One from turning up its toes.”
I nodded. “Then he sells Phase Three partnerships to shore up Phase Two.”
“Partly. And he was drawing up paperwork on Phase four as well, only things kinda fell apart on him. The game was to spend just enough on each phase to make it look like it was progressing.”
“And tuck away the rest of the money.”
Urquhart nodded his big head. “He drives a prospect up there, shows ‘em the building and the housing tract with the land partly graded. Then he brings ‘em down here and tells ‘em what it’s gonna look like in two years and how they’re gonna own the future!” He stood up and waved toward the model in the next room.
“But Phase Four’s the last one. How does he pay for that?”
Motteux chimed in, “He doesn’t.”
Urquhart started toward the conference room. “Instead, he takes off like a big-ass bird, and when he lands again, he’s in the Caribbean someplace, having a reunion with his money.”
“The investors’ money.” Motteux followed Urquhart into the next room, so Ms. Pierce and I tagged along behind.
I joined Urquhart at the rim of the Mountain Meadow model. He’d turned on the pin spots and the little world was awash in lush yellow light. “How’d he get this money out?”
Urquhart stared almost dreamily at the tiny paradise before him. “We don’t know yet. Offshore banks, dummy corporations, European offices. You name it.”
Motteux said, “We did have a list of partners to call thanks, to Ms. Pierce here, and they tell us altogether, they sank over nine million in the two partnerships.”
Urquhart pointed at the miniature office building. “Now there’s maybe three million here, tops.” His pudgy fingers moved over the little homes. “And maybe a half-million here for a little land grading. Add architect fees, this office, brochures...”
Ms. Pierce spoke up for the first time, “And me.” Her tone was poisonous.
“Call it another million all together. So where’s the other five million?”
Motteux said, “Not in the bank. Ms. Pierce knew of three local accounts to check on. All closed out.”
“Surely the investors will file charges.”
Motteux said, “Most of them are still in shock, but I suppose they will...”
“And then we can start to unwind this ball of string.” Fred Urquhart reached behind him and shut off the spotlights.
I stared down at the model. Without its artful lighting, it now seemed small and feeble. “If he’s offshore, they can extradite him.”
Motteux was gazing at the model too. “Maybe, but it could take a couple years to get the papers and even then he could fight it , I found out yesterday.”
“Hm. Well, thanks for the tour, Mr. Urquhart. Mr. Motteux, could I see you a minute?” He nodded and we returned to Kronkheit’s office.
“You want corroboration.” Motteux nodded again. “Well, it fits. Kronkheit gave me exactly the spiel that Urquhart described. Of course, what he wanted from me was cooperation, not money.”
Motteux unsheathed his shivery smile. “And the explosion?”
I had to agree. “I don’t see a connection.” The smile widened, so I added, “Yet.”
“We’ll keep on looking.”
“Will you? If you find that Millard didn’t cause that blast, you’ll have to pay off.”
“Perhaps.” But Motteux’ pale eyes were filled with liquid nitrogen.
Chapter 16
Thursday morning’s omens augured well, from the delicious extravagance of Sally as she lay asleep beside me, to the smogless sunlight that irrigated her kitchen, to the four eggs that I flipped in the pan without breaking a one. With the bacon draining on a paper towel and English scones incontinent with butter, I trotted off to summon Sally to breakfast.
I found her at the wash basin, freshly laundered and blasting her corn silk hair with a howling dryer. I did my Jeeves voice at triple volume, “Breakfast is served, Madam.”
“Two minutes.” She wielded a brush with the irritating vigor of all females, who know they will not lose their hair.
Lingering for the pure pleasure of watching her, I invented conversation. “I’ve been thinking.”
“What?” She silenced the dryer.
“If we could link Kronkheit to Millard’s death, we could get him extradited faster.”
Sally continued brushing her thick hair. “Why’s it so important?”
“The property insurance, for one thing. I’d also feel safer with the Brothers Grim off the street. Have you time to run out to the college today?”
 “Later on this morning. Why?”
“To chat up Fat Floyd, the parking troll. He won’t talk to me, but you affect him differently, for reasons that are, of course, incomprehensible.”
Sally’s look said, ho, ho, funny.
“See if he noticed any strange cars around on the Sunday Millard was killed.”
“With dinky hubcaps.” Sally grabbed her white terry robe and threw it on.
“Or Jaguar coupes.
“Okay.” As she headed for the kitchen, she kissed me quickly on the mouth. Sally smelled of Colgate, Dial, and Arrid.
More omens of a splendid day. 
* * * *
As if to confirm that prophesy, B Bumble started after only seven tries, and by the time the old relic was puffing up Michillinda Avenue, I was awash with simple good spirits. The sky was a joyous blue, and as I rattled into Mountain Meadow Parkway, I spotted two hang gliders playing tag in the bright October sky. Their look of playful freedom fit my current mood exactly. God was in Her heaven and all was well.
As if to cure me of this hubris, the Aged B promptly shuddered, wheezed, produced a string of small monoxide farts, and died. I rolled onto the skinny shoulder, pulled the car as far off the narrow road as possible, and stopped.
Aw, hell.
After grinding the starter so long that my feeble battery could only make it go ur-pause-ur-pause-ur. I got out, raised the hood and trunk lid as distress signals, and looked around me. Great timing, car. You quit exactly half way up the road to school, in the dead center of three miles of empty scrub. The office skeleton was a quarter mile away, but it looked as deserted as ever, and its phone would be locked up in the office trailer. Better just wait. Some student would be along shortly.
But “shortly” turned out to be more than an hour, and I felt hot and nasty by the time a car pulled out of the construction road ahead and started toward me. As it approached, I moved out onto the asphalt and raised my arms to crucifixion height. The car began to slow down, rolled to twenty feet away, then suddenly sped up and whooshed past me down the road to Pasadena.
And no wonder. The car had slowed enough to reveal the Dinky Hubcap brothers, with the blond one at the wheel. The car itself was different, but the goons inside were unmistakable.
I stood for several rigid minutes in the heat and dust, staring off down the road. The goons had pulled out of the yard around the office building. Did they work for Sandusky’s construction company?
One way to find out. The dead Beetle was a perfect excuse to wander in there and see what I could find. I started trudging toward the building through the insects and dead brush smells.
I was half way there when a shiny blue pickup truck emerged from the yard and headed in my direction. It too slowed down, and this time, stopped.
“Car trouble?” Sandusky leaned out the driver’s window. I nodded. “C’mon, I’ll give you a lift.”
Did I want to get in that truck? He was showing his one hundred corn-kernel teeth in a genial grin, but if those hulks worked for him, Sandusky could be one very ugly citizen. On the other hand, he wouldn’t know I’d seen those men leave his yard. I walked around to the passenger side and swung myself up into the high pickup cab.
He jerked his head back toward la Bumble in the distance. “Happened to your car?”
“Just quit on me.”
“That’s why I trade ‘em every three years. He patted the big Ford’s sleek dashboard. “This baby’s only six weeks old. You make the concert?”
“Well, as a matter of fact...”
Sandusky chuckled. “That’s all right, I didn’t expect you. I was just hustling tickets.” He shifted from park to drive and turned the truck around. “Great concert though. That Verdi...” He shook his head in admiration.
“Can you take me up to the college?”
The head shake turned regretful. “I’m out of time this morning, but you can use the office phone.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem.”
We drove about half way to the unfinished building, then Sandusky said conversationally, “Too bad you saw those boys back there.”
My best who, me? inflection, “Which boys?”
Placidly, “You know which.”
I should have trusted my instinct. “No, I don’t.”
Sandusky smiled benignly at the view through the windshield. “Look, Winston, they got a cell phone in their car - cost me a bundle.”
“I see.” As Sandusky slowed to take a sharp curve, I braced my legs against the cab floor and eased four fingers toward the door handle.
“Don’t do it.” Sandusky plucked a squat revolver from a pocket in his door and aimed it at me, left handed. “You settle back, okay?” His voice didn’t lose its pleasant tone. “Enjoy the ride.”
He swung the big truck through the construction yard gate, rolled around to the back side of the skeletal building, and headed out a dirt road that wound away to the northwest.
“Enjoy the ride to where?”
“Little off-road action. I want to show you what this four wheeler can do.”
“Then what?”
Sandusky shrugged.
As he threaded the ruts in the high-crowned road, I watched for a moment when the complications of driving might distract him. But with automatic shift and power steering, the big truck was as docile as a trained Clydesdale, and Sandusky controlled it with easy skill. The revolver barrel didn’t waver.
He drove with his head cocked toward me, flicking his eyes between me and the road. “Like I said, too bad you had to spot those guys. They were on their way out of town. I told ‘em to get lost. They got too involved in their work.”
“Like arson and murder.”
A look of honest distaste crossed his face. “I didn’t tell ‘em to do that, not my style.” Regretfully, “I don’t like this either, but I got too much riding on everything. And you keep on the way your going, you’re gonna bust it up. That can’t happen.”
“Too late to stop it now.”
“Explain that.” His look remained regretful, but the slightest edge crept into his tone.
“The police are in it, now that Kronkheit’s taken off.” That wasn’t strictly true yet, but I’d say anything at this point.
Sandusky stared at me until a pothole reminded him of the road. When he’d controlled his bucking mount, he said very quietly, “Tell me about Kronkheit.”
“Didn’t you know? He went offshore on Monday.”
Sandusky’s face hardened as he considered this, but he said only, “I wondered why I couldn’t reach him.”
“With at least five million dollars of the investors’ cash. The law will want to talk to you.” Sandusky looked thoughtful, so I built on this idea. “They might want to know about me too, and another killing won’t help you a lot.”
The dirt track joined a fire road that coiled among the foothills. We turned onto it and climbed for several minutes, while Sandusky thought this over. Then he shook his head. “Nobody else saw you. They’re gonna find your car and think you went for help. But for some reason, you just didn’t come back.”
I tried to sound casual and failed. “This is where I say you can’t get away with it.”
Grimly, “And I say watch me.”
We were now a thousand feet higher, rumbling along the scrubby slopes. The city below was masked by the foothills behind us and the landscape lay as empty as the desert. The perfect place for whatever Sandusky intended.
The fire road angled steeply just ahead. Sandusky braced the steering wheel with one raised knee and worked a second shifter. The truck growled into four-wheel drive and we surged up the steep slope, turned hard right, and bounced onto an abandoned track. This rutted relic was still called the Mount Wilson Road, though a highway to the summit had long since replaced it.
“What else about Kronkheit?” For the first time, he sounded as dangerous as he looked.
“You know already.” Sandusky shook his head. “All right, he never intended to build the project. He got investors to buy into Phases Two and Three by showing them the office building.”
“My office building.”
“The one you’re putting up, yes.”
He turned to look full at me. “The one I own. Where you think he got the money to get this far?” His eyes returned to the road. “That’s every cent I have and I’m in hock up to my eyeballs.”
I tried goading him. “So he conned you too.”
Bitterly, “Yeah.” Sandusky thought for a moment, and when he spoke again, his tone was oddly reflective. “See, if I put out for that building, I got to own it and I got the houses and the club to build. Company the size of mine, that’s like an oil field, a goddam diamond mine.”
“You thought he was legitimate?”
He shrugged. “I knew he pulled some fast ones like the contest and all. I went along. I mean, we had to fill the building, had to bring in people to buy them homes and pay for the club.” Disgust filled his voice. “So yeah, I went along.”
He jerked the wheel viciously to evade another pothole. “But then you started messing with it. Caldwell told Kronkheit and he called me. I told him to do something about you right away. Would he do it? No. Kronkheit wouldn’t do shit. So I had to protect my investment.”
“You hired those men?”
“I asked a couple friends in the business back-East, y’know? They sent me Jack and Harold. But they got too rough attracted too much attention.” He shook his head. “Jeez, I never told ‘em to drown that kid or torch the old dingbat’s house.”
“Why’d they kill Millard?”
“They never. I only brought ‘em in a week after the explosion.”
“Then who did?”
But Sandusky ignored me.
We climbed another thousand feet in silence, isolated from our own dust in the air conditioned cab. I watched Sandusky’s face, his gun, his face again. Time oozed like cooling lava.
When Sandusky began looking about him as if to find a stopping place, I gave it one more desperate try. “This won’t solve your problem.” I thought about Motteux. “I’m not the only one who knows about you and your hired sportsmen.”
Sharply, “Yeah, who else?”
I shrugged. “What’ll you do if I won’t tell you, shoot me?”
Sandusky’s face evolved from wrath to thoughtfulness. He nodded. “Wait a minute. The woman, that one those jerks said was with you at the school.”
Now he was on to Sally too. I could have shot myself if Sandusky didn’t do it for me.
Sandusky sighed. “Ah shit. Well, I take you out, I can take her out too.”
“That still won’t get your money out of that building.”
“Maybe not, but it’ll keep me out of jail.”
“And you’d kill two people to do that.”
Sandusky concentrated on his driving for a moment, and when he spoke again, it was only half to me. “Where I come from, you start with nothing. Zero. You get what you can, whatever way. I told you I don’t like this any.” He drove some more. “I been up. I been down. I been up again it’s that kinda business, you know? But not out. Never out.” Another pause, and then his tone became at once fiercely intense and perfectly matter of fact. “And I won’t be an asshole for Kronkheit or you or anybody.”
As I looked at Sandusky’s calm, set face, I could no longer deny that he was going to kill me, dispassionately - even regretfully, but with perfect self assurance.
Sandusky steered the pickup around a sharp left-hand curve and into an open space chewed out of the improbable slope to make a turnaround. We surprised a mule deer in the clearing - a half grown doe. As we rumbled forward, she looked up, turned, and scampered up the steep incline.
Sandusky watched her go. “Look at that. Deer all over these...”
Wrenching the wheel hard left, I stamped on his accelerator foot and the big truck buried its left fender in the dirt bank. Before it stopped, I popped my door handle, rolled out on the passenger side, hit the ground on my right shoulder, rolled again, and scrambled across the road in a half crawl.
The dirt bank saved me. Sandusky couldn’t force his door open far enough to get out, so he had to pull himself across the wide seat to my side. By the time he pushed my door open again, I was in mid jump over the edge of the road.
Some edge! The ground below it dropped two hundred yards at a sixty degree angle. I half rolled, half fell through rocks and trees and scratchy scrub that lashed and banged my head and hands and knees and elbows, tumbling, flailing, clawing for purchase, halfway down the slope, where I slammed into a boulder, ricocheted off it like a basketball, and came to rest behind a Manzanita bush.
Job number one: resume breathing. It was like inhaling sewing pins, but I slowly reinflated my lungs. No ribs broken - I hoped. I wiggled things. Okay, peripherals still on line. I glanced upward through the pungent, red-barked bush. Nothing visible above, so I was out of Sandusky’s sight too.
Below, another hundred yards of drop off. No way to move down it but no way for Sandusky either. Without a rope, the only way to descend that hill was the way I’d done it, as an unwilling ballistic missile. And he wasn’t that desperate.
I waited for ten endless minutes by my watch, until I heard a door slam, a pause, and then the intermittent engine surges of a truck reversing in a small space: backward, forward, backward, forward, backward and then a long rumble as the big pickup bounced off down the road the way it had come. In the quiet mountain air, I could hear it long enough to prove that Sandusky hadn’t just pulled around a curve and parked. He was gone.
No doubt to hunt up Sally. Time to move it!
But up that brutal slope I made haste slowly, testing each bush, each rock, each negligible foothold, until finally, I crawled painfully over the dirt lip. I lay there a moment, then dragged myself to my feet. My face was lashed, my clothing clawed, my body howling in parts I didn’t know I had. But I was on the road.
Where, exactly? Maybe five miles above the valley below. No more than a mile from the TV towers visible on Mount Wilson above me, but that was an eyeball mile. By this road, which looped like an intestine, they might be three miles off. Still, three was less than five, so I started limping toward the towers and the service sheds with telephones I’d find at their bases.
Chapter 17
After twenty painful minutes, I was sure I wouldn’t make it. Every step hurt, and even the thought of Sally couldn’t keep me climbing much longer. I slogged around yet another vicious bend and into another turnaround.
This one was occupied. A hang glider lay at the far side, its gaudy fabric wing trembling in the breeze up slope; and in the center of the bulldozed clearing, a tall young man lay on his side, gaping at me.
I walked toward him. “Hi. You have an accident?”
“Yeah, I lost my updraft. Turned too sharp and couldn’t pull up in time.”
“Lucky you were over this clearing.”
“I think I broke my leg.” He touched his jeans above one knee and winced. “Hurts like a bitch.”
I nodded. “Did your chase car see you drop?”
“Naw, this here’s outta sight of the top. Can you go get some help?” He seemed about eighteen and the eyes in his thin, homely face showed fear. An idea took root and sprouted.
I pretended to inspect his injury. “I don’t know. That leg looks very bad.”
“Don’t touch it!”
I cranked up the age and authority in my voice. “I don’t need to. Hmmmmm.”
“What?”
“Mm hmh! Multiple compound fractures of the tibia and fibula...” (or were those the arm bones?) “...extensive patellar blood perfusion. Maybe some ah, interstitial hematoma too.”
“You like a doctor?”
“Sports medicine.” He seemed relieved at this, so I added quickly, “You know you could lose that leg?”
“What?” His voice regressed to adolescent squeak.
“The nerves.” Regretfully, “massive trauma like this, they don’t last long.”
He gestured toward the red and white glider. “Can’t you like make a splint or something?”
“That would hold the bones but the nerves....” I looked about the turnaround, pretending heavy thought. Then, “I have an idea.”
“Yeah?”
I walked over to the glider and checked it out. Sure enough, a simple body harness and big beginner’s training wheels on the base of the triangular control bar. Maybe, just maybe, I could pull this off.
Very nonchalant, “I’ll glide down and call the rescue helicopter.”
He waved it away. “You can’t fly.”
“Been doing it for years.” I dragged the glider around to face the wind rising over the drop off, trying to recall how to check out these fragile birds: no dents in the leading edge, no bent tubing, no frayed cables, bolts and shackles tight. What’d I miss? Oh well.
I smiled reassuringly at the boy. “Not all doctors play golf, young man.”
“But how do I know you can...?”
I glanced at the logo on the glider. “I see you have a Sensor 510B.”
“That rig cost me 26 hundred bucks!”
“Son, you want to save that leg or not?”
He looked up at me, then at his leg, then up again. “Okay.”
As I walked toward the big red bird, I forced myself into the acutely focused state required to direct a film: forget the aches and pains, forget the anxious boy, above all, forget the fact that mountain launches are tricky and I’d only flown these things three times, from puny training hills. I crawled under the fabric wing. Okay: untangle the straps and lay out the harness. Legs in first. Do up the knee hangers, then shoulder straps, then waist strap. Should have someone to help with the Velcro.
Right. Grab the big control triangle, upper bars against the shoulders, hands near the lower angles. Up! Oh God, seventy punishing pounds. Wind wants to grab me. Keep it level. Switch hands, right one on the lower bar to carry the weight, left on an upper bar to control the beast. Walk slowly toward the edge. Lot of air out there. Don’t think about it.
Think about angle of attack. Nose too high makes it stall, nose too low makes it drop. Raise it just about level. Okay, don’t hesitate: one, two...
Hold it! A last technicality floated out of the trivia sump at the base of my brain and literally saved my life. Angle of attack has nothing to do with the horizon. It’s relative to the wind angle. And in front of this cliff, the wind angle was up. If I took off with the wing level, I would stall at once and plummet 50 feet onto boulders only 40 feet below.
I paused until I’d stopped shaking, then took several long, slow breaths. I nosed the big wing down about fifteen degrees, ran forward, and commended myself to the god of fools and madmen.
Airborne! First, a sickening drop, but after twenty anxious feet, the big airfoil was moving fast enough to function and the glider leveled off. I picked up speed. Slowly, gently, I pushed the control bar forward to raise the nose and the fabric wing bit and the glider rose on the thermals like a gaudy condor.
Wind direction steady. Keep the bird level, side to side. Is that pitch or roll? Don’t be pedantic, just do it. Orientation’s easy. Simply keep it into the wind and I’ll hit the school dead on.
Regrettable choice of words.
Better avoid hill thermals. Can I steer this sucker? Left side down, sweep to the left, right side down, swoop to the right. Too far! Correct it. Outstanding!
With the launch behind me and the glider stable, I surrendered to the sheer euphoria of flight - the brief escape from gravity that is the oldest dream of all. The hills rolled past below me, the horizon seesawed with slow grace, and the sunshine washed my face with gold.
What was unexpected was the sound. In movies, gliders soar in eerie silence, but in reality they creaked and sang, and the wind bellowed through them in a breathy roar. The twisted cables whined, struts muttered, and even the fabric grumbled, as if this robot eagle was groaning at my extra weight.
Enchanted with the grace of the machine, I started unconsciously dipping first one wing tip and then the other, until I was soaring in a vast, horizontal wave form pattern over the foothills far below. I felt like laughing, weeping, shouting with drunk joy.
Whoa! On that last sweep I dipped the nose too much. The glider fell off to the right, losing altitude. I shoved the control bar sharply forward in near panic and the nose jerked up, the speed slacked off, the descent slowed.
But the sound: the howling, singing noises died away into a silence that was frightening because it meant I was nearly dead in the air. I’d stalled the glider. Suddenly, the big red bird was just a gaudy rock. I dropped with nauseating speed toward the foothill peak below.
Luckily, I was too stunned to save myself, and the Sensor 510B was a forgiving trainer. It leveled off unaided at about 100 feet and we soared toward the face of the hill. A sudden thermal updraft punched us from below and the glider bucked. I controlled it, then dipped the left side slightly and turned in a wide circle. I corkscrewed upward in the warm air like a hawk in lazy search of prey, and when I leveled the wing again and headed down the slope, I was back at 800 feet.
Intent on staying airborne, I hadn’t seen the college up ahead. When I did check in again, it was sweeping toward me at dismaying speed. Too damn high! I’d land on the freeway, miles beyond. Time to hit the brakes.
Brakes?
If I dipped the nose to lose altitude, I’d speed up. If I raised it to slow down, I could stall again. I sorted desperately through my trivia bin and recalled the proper drill. Cautiously, I put the bird into a long series of overlapping figure eights that stretched my flight path long enough to sacrifice both altitude and speed. By the time I was 300 yards from the college buildings, I was down to 100 feet - still twice as high as I should be to start landing. Nothing to do but box the compass and approach up-wind again. I pushed forward, oh so gently, and the glider bore me upward. As I soared over the campus, I could see the scabby, shingled roofs, bedraggled lawns, and student autos huddled in their lot. Several people waved cheerfully as I whistled overhead. I swung around the office tower, veered left into the next leg of a mile-wide square, and glided over the naked hillside raped by Kronkheit’s bulldozers.
I was making the far turn when I spotted Beetle Bumble down below, forlorn by the roadside. A light blue Supra kept it company. Sally! I continued the turn into a full circle and raked the area. She was not there.
In the complicated joy and fright of soaring, I’d forgotten why I’d pulled this lethal stunt and why Sandusky’d roared off down the mountain. Now all I could think of was getting down to Sally. I swept back up-slope of the campus, made my final turn into the wind, and started in.
I was supposed to get my ground speed down to under ten miles per hour, with the ground itself about a yard below my dangling feet. Just short of the landing point, I would push the bar outward, raising the nose until the glider “flared” upward like a landing crow braking with vertical, wide-spread wings and then settling to earth with heavy grace.
It almost worked. At fifteen feet up, the glide path looked right. At ten, the students scattered out of the quadrangle before me. At five my air speed was just above the stall point. But at the last minute my right wing dipped, and with no height to absorb the error, I caught the wing tip on the ground. I became an instant track star, pole vaulting on my own wing, which arced through a perfect circle with myself half way out the radius and smashed into the hard clay. I had the wit to hold my elbows in tight and kick my feet forward so my legs could absorb the impact, but I still crashed onto my face and chest. By the time some students had secured the bird and extracted me from the pile of cables, cloth, and crimped aluminum, I’d jump-started my breathing for the second time today. They stripped me of my harness and I staggered to my feet.
“You okay?”
“Your nose is bleeding.”
“Hey, take it easy!”
I wagged the students off like flying bugs, shook my head, and took off at a drunken trot toward the main building. I could think of nothing but a phone. Call the sheriff. Call Motteux. Call Sally. Call 911. I couldn’t think. Call someone. I hauled myself up the steps and into the building, wove down the endless hallway, yanked at the college office door, and stumbled in.
Then I stood there stupefied, with one shoe gone, clothing shredded, one eye closing fast, blood spouting from my outsized honker and coursing down the remnant of my shirt.
“I recommend a Kleenex,” Sally said.
I took a breath, surveyed the room, and my one eye that could still goggle, did. Sally was leaning toward me over the high counter, smiling and waving a paper tissue. Tina Morgan had frozen in mid rise from a desk behind her. And on straight backed chairs set against the wall for student supplicants, sat two Sheriff’s deputies, who looked amused, flanking Sandusky, who did not.
I took the Kleenex. “Thanks.” 
* * * *
Hands on hips, Sally stood at the foot of her king-sized bed and surveyed me with a sour look. “One cracked rib, one screwed up ankle, one black eye with major cut oh, and one set of ruined clothes.”
I did a feeble Lou Costello: “I was a baaaad boy.” A pathetic comeback, but then she had me at a disadvantage. Sally was radiant, as usual, in a T shirt and crisp shorts, while I lay on my back, dressed entirely in a rib bandage.
“What possessed you, Stoney? What made you think you could fling yourself off a six-thousand foot mountain in a cloth and wire kite?”
“I did some training flights once.”
“Once!” Her tone said give me strength!
Defensively, “I also read a book.”
Sally threw up her hands.
“Okay, okay.”
She rounded the bed corner and bounced down beside me, which made me wince. “I want to know why.”
“Because Sandusky tried to kill me and he was racing off to kill you.”
Sally stared at me for a long moment. Then she smiled fondly at this small, romantic boy and shook her head.
“All right, so you didn’t need me.” What fun to be reminded that I was superfluous.
She remained lost in thought, her smile just sitting there as if absent-mindedly abandoned, until I prompted, “What did happen?”
A shrug. “Driving up to school to talk to Floyd, I saw your car. I stopped, looked all over for you. A few minutes later Sandusky showed up in his pickup. He got out, waved a gun at me, said get in the truck.” She seemed to have finished.
“Then what?”
Offhandedly, “I took the gun away from him.”
She took the gun away from him. Just like that. “You want to tell me how? I mean, I didn’t quite manage that trick.”
Another maddening shrug. “He underestimated me, that’s all. I made him drive to the college and called the sheriff. The end.”
The end of Sandusky maybe, but not the whole story. “Not quite. There’s still Kronkheit.”
“That reminds me, I did finally talk to Fat Floyd. Sure enough, he remembered a Jaguar coupe on campus that morning.”
“Think that’s enough for a grand jury?”
“Who knows? But I’ll bet it’s enough to haul Kronkheit back from wherever.”
Somehow that didn’t feel right. “I dunno. Blowing people up just isn’t Kronkheit’s style.”
“Sandusky said his bozos didn’t do it.”
I could only repeat, “I dunno.”
A long pause while I tried to forget my irritation and recall what Sally’d done for me: hauling me into the hospital, getting me home to bed, coping with the dead Beetle. “How about that kid with the hang glider?”
“The Sierra Madre Rescue Team got him down. Only a broken leg.”
“Good. Anyway, thanks for taking care of me.”
Sally smiled. “You must bring out the mother in me.” Then a flicker crossed her face, and she added, “At least in some ways.”
She was sitting on my good side, so I was able to reach out and stroke her tight round thigh. “I could bring out other things.”
Sally looked at my hand, then smiled again. “Not now, Stoney, you’d shatter on impact.” She kissed me, then stood up quickly, grabbed the sheet and blanket, and flipped them briskly over me as if covering a corpse.
The way I felt, she wasn’t far wrong.
Chapter 18
During the next several days, Sally bullied me back to a semblance of health and the law began proceedings to extradite Kronkheit. I still didn’t think he had killed President Millard, but I couldn’t imagine who had.
Connie Roderick simply overpowered Bob’s vacuous film with her own talent and energy, and by the afternoon of the Saturday night awards program, we had an answer print.
And so we all found ourselves in the college’s dank auditorium with The Creation According to the Gospel of Bob, preparing to stun the world.
The only people who showed up to be stunned were students, doting families, and the shabby faculty, coerced into attendance by a stern memo from Tina Morgan. Full Moon Farquhar was stuffed into an effusion of silk and tulle that had last seen service at a Truman gala. She presided at front row center, holding court with a gaggle of students. I didn’t see Connie around, but her getup tonight would doubtless be stupefying. Sally, who was turned out with her usual offhand perfection, sat in the fifth row, glowing like a nova at Yoshi Sato (the elegant bastard). He bent his handsome head toward her and smiled like a Japanese Cary Grant in his goddam impeccable suit.
My own clothes were peccable enough, but no one would see me, back in the booth with big Deidre and a film projector. I was so engrossed in threading up the film that I missed the first part of the program, and when, at length, I peered through a booth window, Yoshi was standing at the microphone. “And so, I am pleased to present the design selected for further development by Saka Motors. Ladies and gentlemen, Hot Saki!” He pressed his remote control and a slide of the winning design splashed on the screen above him.
It was Connie’s, of course, but she hadn’t known that in advance, and her gale-force shriek could have blown off toupees at six feet. Yoshi brought up another view of her powerful pickup design and she yelled again, a classic Mexican grito that yodeled around the walls.
After three more slides the lights came up and Connie arose from a pride of family to join Yoshi at the podium. Amazingly, she was modeling a breathtaking cocktail dress that set off her willowy form and stunning features. Applauding as he spoke, Yoshi said, “Miss Connie Roderick!”
When the cheering had subsided, Connie bowed to the audience, waved at her large clan, then glanced up toward me in the projection booth. “Maria Elena Concepciòn Rodriguez,” she said firmly.
Then she winked.
At the next window over, Deidre said, “I designed that dress.”
Was there anything my kids couldn’t do?
All too soon it was time to inflict our class project. While I’d been recuperating, Connie had discarded the dreedle dreedle music and laid in a different track: Gabor Szabo’s Jazz Raga. The effect was amazing. A hypnotic fish, an eerie, pregnant earth goddess, and a protean clay flower appeared and disappeared and reappeared again in endless combinations, to the gentle, urgent build of subtle music.
By God, it wasn’t all that bad. 
* * * *
An hour later, I was creeping through the darkness toward Full Moon’s little bungalow with the old lady on my arm.
She peered down at the sidewalk. “I thought your film was splendid!”
“My students did it.”
Full Moon centered me in her lenses. “But I detect your fine Italian hand.”
We tottered on in silence for a few moments, and then Full Moon resumed. “I felt something else there too.”
“Mm?”
“The Sainted. It was as if the film spoke for him: its transcendental quality, its affirmation of life.”
I kept my mouth shut.
She stopped, looked up, and waved her cane vaguely at the moonlit night around us. “The images, the music, the fusion of spirit and body.” Her vaporous tone changed abruptly. “Speaking of body, that young woman had a quite astounding belly. What did she spawn, a boulder?”
“A boy.”
“Well, bless her heart.” Full Moon beamed as complacently as if the child were hers.
After another few minutes, during which we covered all of twenty feet, Full Moon picked it up again. “Your film helped me make a decision. My mission is to tend the Sainted’s flame, and that flame burns brightly here.” She rapped her cane on the sidewalk. “I saw it on the screen tonight.” Full Moon paused again and raised her ancient face of clay and wattles made. “I’m staying here. This college needs my guidance.”
“Tina Morgan will be pleased.” I hoped the irony was inaudible.
Comfortably, “No doubt.” She pointed to a broken piece of pavement. “It also needs my money - well, the Sainted’s money, but I oversee the trust. The income will be spent so that students can imbibe his spirit and carry it with them into the world.”
I could only say, “That’s very generous.”
We had crept all the way to the bungalow door before Full Moon spoke again. “We will need to renovate. I’ll see to it on Monday. Good night.” She banged the door decisively.
I ambled back toward the auditorium, chuckling at the fallout from our vapid student film. Everyone seemed to find it profound - in Full Moon’s case, enough to bail out AC/DC! I laughed out-loud.
All I could think of was our string of farcical disasters. Electrocuted fish! I laughed harder. Pregnant nudist crashing into her coffin! By now, I was bent over in the empty quadrangle, wincing at my screaming rib but cackling uncontrollably.
It was too much, too...
Then I thought of something that should have been obvious and the movie wasn’t funny anymore. I straightened up, wiped at my streaming eyes, and considered the thought most carefully.
I hustled off at a painful gallop, to the auditorium. It was empty by now, so I lurched across to the opposite door, pelted down the hallway to the front entrance, and took the killer steps three at a time to the student parking lot, which was empty, except for an aging Dodge, ten spaces down. I trotted over to it, to find Engineer Bob stuffing baby blankets into the open trunk. Simone sat in the front passenger seat, cradling Bob Junior.
I couldn’t speak until my rib subsided, so I stood there wheezing while Bob and his wife stared at me. Then I finally found my voice. “I’m afraid we need to talk, Bob.”
“‘Samatter?”
“The explosion.”
Bob’s face was suddenly innocent. “Okay, what about it?”
“You caused it.”
Simone said sharply, “He did not!”
“Simone...!”
“Though I don’t think you did it on purpose.”
Defiantly, “I didn’t do it at all!”
This wasn’t going to be easy. “Bob, it would look better for you if you admitted it. But I don’t need that. I can go to the police without you.”
“All right, go.” But the sneer looked tentative.
“Then let me explain what I’ll tell them. You have a pretty dismal track record with machinery. Your aquarium heater fried a goldfish. Your coffin elevator bounced your wife smack on her fanny, with her unborn baby four inches above it.”
“They weren’t hurt.”
“Now we come to your clay flowers.” Bob’s angry face suddenly closed down. “You told the class you achieved that special glaze on them by letting the kiln cool down and then reheating it.”
“So?”
Very quietly, “To reheat it, you had to restart it.”
His shrug asked what this had to do with anything.
“Normally, reheating ceramics will ruin them. That’s why kilns don’t need relighting mechanisms. When they’re hot enough, you shut them down and leave them.”
Another shrug.
“To get your results, you had to restart the gas when the kiln had cooled to exactly a certain temperature.”
Reluctantly, “Well, yeah, you got that right.”
“Now those little cone telltales that potters use are not precise enough. But if you inserted a heat probe, you could read the kiln temperature exactly.”
Bob opened his mouth, but I overrode him. “And if you connected that probe to a thermostat, it could fire an electronic igniter. That way, you could relight the gas automatically, without having to hang around and stare at the temperature gauge.”
“I...”
“Instead you could come upstairs and film a goldfish.”
“I...”
“But if you hooked up your rig incorrectly, Engineer Bob, it might leak.”
“Bob?” Simone’s little cry said, what do we do now?
“And if it leaked for some time before the igniter sparked, you’d have enough loose gas to blow that lab to Glendale.”
“Nice theory.” But his voice trembled.
“And easily checked. The cops and insurance people stored half the debris in zip-bags. That’s how small the pieces were.” Bob winced. “Now that they know exactly what to look for, it won’t be tough to spot shards of your contraption maybe even fragments of clay flowers.”
Bob stared at me, then glanced at his wife. Simone shifted stricken eyes from Bob to me and back. The baby made a brief sound, half cry, half coo.
He touched the baby’s blanket with one finger, then withdrew his hand and looked me in the face. “I felt real bad about Millard.”
Simone put in quickly, “He still does.”
I nodded. “You should, though he wasn’t a great loss to humanity.”
“Then why go into it?” Simone’s voice said she was close to breaking down.
I sighed. “Because you are responsible. And because the insurance company won’t pay for the damage until they’re satisfied about the cause.”
Bob raised his hands. “Well...”
“Hundreds of thousands of dollars.” Regretfully, “Without it, this college is history.”
Simone said in a fearful tone, “What’ll they do to Bob?”
I didn’t really know, but I tried to soften things. “Not much, probably. I don’t have the legal terms. Something like homicidal negligence.”
Bob simply nodded, head down, but Simone’s eyes filled and tears spilled down her cheeks. She sat sobbing in the beat-up car, holding the baby to her. Tears hit the baby’s face and it woke up with a cry of sleepy complaint. She hugged and shushed it, still weeping. Bob touched her shoulder as he had the blanket, then withdrew his hand.
I looked at the two of them: sweet, intense Simone with her dance and underwater birthing; dim, earnest Bob with his crackpot contraptions, ingenious and doomed. They suddenly seemed so young, or I seemed old, or...
Aw, the hell with it. “Look, you made those flowers for my class. I’ll say I authorized it and I supervised it.”
“What’ll that do?”
I shrugged. “Spread the blame a little, I don’t know. It’ll make things easier for you.”
Simone whispered, “Thank you, Mr. Winston.”
Geezer Winston’s ribs ached. “Go on home now.” Bob started for the driver’s side, but I stopped him with a hand on his shoulder and stared at him intently. “Come to school tomorrow, you hear me?” He nodded. “Don’t get crazy.”
“I promise.” Bob opened his door and got in.
I stood back and let the old Dodge roll away. When it disappeared around a bend, I limped morosely toward the college buildings, to bear glad tidings for everyone but feckless Bob.
Chapter 19
As events turned out, Bob’s tidings could have been worse. I insisted that I had supervised his experiments and admitted him to the ceramics lab on a Sunday. That effectively cleared him of both negligence and unauthorized use of school facilities.
My explanation satisfied Motteux and his merry band of underwriters. The insurance company changed their verdict to “accident” and promised to pay for the damage. The insurance and the money returned by the now-departed Chick Caldwell would be enough to keep AC/DC afloat until Full Moon could haul it into dry dock for refitting. She had elaborate plans for transforming the college, and the Sainted’s trust fund would prove more than equal to the task.
Of course, the fly-blown faculty resisted, as faculty always do, but Full Moon made the bailout dependent on her being Chairman of a newly created Board of Trustees. Then the old lady named Tina Morgan permanent president, upon which, President-elect Tina re-thought her opinion of Chairman-elect Full Moon and allowed that they could work in close harmony.
But though Full Moon could transfuse the bloodless college, no one could un-rape the little valley. In time, the bulldozed hillsides would be reclaimed by mountain scrub, as patiently stubborn as Ho Chi Minh; but the building skeleton would remain an ugly monument to Seymour Kronkheit’s greed.
Without a murder charge to speed things up, the extradition of Kronkheit was moving slowly. But what Ms. Pierce didn’t know about his hustle, Sandusky did, and he was touchingly eager to discharge his civic duty. In exchange for reductions in his own charges, he fingered Kronkheit, the dinky hubcap Boys, and anyone else he could think of. The Powers That Be closed the books on Full Moon’s arson and Beltrán’s death, and satisfaction reigned supreme.
I delivered this summary to Sally a month or so later as we celebrated Millard Fillmore’s birthday (any excuse to eat out). This time, there was no constraint between us as we blissed out on about a hundred shrimp apiece. Sally was animated, I was healed, and Mama Quon’s kitchen still dispensed the milk of paradise.
Surrounded by all of this comfort and joy, I was basking in idiot smugness. “Hey, did we do a bang-up job, or what?”
Engrossed in my recitation, I hadn’t noticed Sally’s face lose its glow and turn sour. “The bang up was done by your student Bob and it blasted you right out of a job. Again.”
I tried to wave it off. “Oh, well...”
Sally’s disgust increased. “You had to take the whole responsibility.”
I said placatingly, “Someone had to be responsible.”
“But not the young idiot whose stupidity killed a man.” She flipped away an empty shrimp tail as if it offended her.
I sighed. “Stupidity’s not illegal.”
“Lucky for you.” She yanked another shrimp out of its shell with vicious teeth. “Did you have to get fired?”
Patiently, “I told you: the virtuous faculty wanted my scalp and Tina had to give it to them. I guess I threatened them more than I’d thought.”
Sally stared at me, savaged another shrimp, tossed the shell down, stared at me again. Then her face softened. “I’m sorry, Stoney. I’m just mad because I know you loved the teaching.”
I shook my head. “The kids were fun, but it was only temporary. I’ll always be a film maker I can’t help it.”
After a three shrimp pause, Sally said, “So what’ll you do?”
“The usual: call up production houses, make the rounds. I’m most particularly poor right now. Speaking of which, how are you holding up? You haven’t worked in two months.”
“I can live off my income indefinitely.” She smiled fondly at me. “Besides, keeping you out of trouble is full time work.”
I loved the implications of that, but I tested it further. “Not still thinking of moving?”
Negligently, “Probably too much trouble.” But Sally knew the question underneath, and I felt she’d answered it.
“Okay,” was all I said, but deep inside, a tiny, joyful voice sang out, did I do a bang up job, or what!?
My left hand reached for Sally as my right swept up three shrimp at once.