The Lexington Hotel was located on a side street a block off lower State Street near the beach. The structure was a chunky five-story box of weary-looking yellow brick, spanning an arcade that ran across the ground floor. On one side of the building, a jagged crack, like a lightning bolt, staggered through the brick from the roof to the foundation, suggesting earthquake damage that probably dated back to 1925. The letters of the word Lexington descended vertically on a sign affixed to one corner of the building, a buzzing yellow band of neon with dead bugs in the loops. The marquee boasted • DAILY MAID • PHONE • COLOR TV IN EVERY ROOM. The entrance was flanked by a Mexican restaurant on one side and by a bar on the other. A blaring jukebox in each establishment competed for air space, a jarring juxtaposition of Linda Ronstadt and Helen Reddy.
I moved into a lobby that was sparsely furnished and smelled of bleach. Two rows of potted fan palms were arranged on either side of a length of trampled-looking red carpet that heralded the path to the front desk. The desk clerk was not in evidence. I picked up the house phone and asked the operator to connect me with Ray Rawson’s room. He answered after two rings and I identified myself. We spoke briefly and he directed me to his fourth-floor digs. “Take the stairs. The elevator takes forever,” he said as he hung up.
I took the stairs two at a time just to test my lung capacity. By the second-floor landing, I was winded and had to slow down. I clung to the stair railing while I climbed the last flight. Being fit in one sport seems to have no bearing on any other. I know joggers who wouldn’t last twenty minutes on a stationary bike and swimmers who couldn’t jog more than a mile without collapsing.
I composed myself slightly before I knocked at 407. Ray opened the door with a buzzing portable electric shaver in his hand. He was barefoot, in chinos and a white T-shirt, his balding head still damp from the shower. The already closely clipped fringe of gray had been trimmed since yesterday. His smile was embarrassed, and the gap between his two front teeth gave him an air of innocence. He motioned me in. “You’re too quick. I was trying to get this done before you got all the way up here. Be right back.”
He moved into the bathroom, the buzzing sound of the shaver fading as he closed the door.
His room was spacious and plain: white walls, white bedspread, rough white cotton curtains pulled back on fat wooden rods. There were only two windows, but both were double wide, looking out onto the backside of the building across the alleyway. The carpet was gray and seemed relatively clean. The glimpse I had of the bathroom showed glossy white ceramic tile walls and a floor of one-inch black and white hexagonals. Ray returned, smelling strongly of aftershave.
“This is not bad,” I said, turning halfway around.
“Fifty bucks a night. I asked about weekly rates, just until I get a place of my own. I don’t suppose Bucky’s said anything about the rental.”
“Not to me,” I said. “Did you hear they had a break-in?”
“Who did? You mean, Bucky and them? When was this?”
I gave him the Reader’s Digest condensed version of the story, watching as his smile was extinguished by disbelief and then concern.
“Jeez. That’s terrible,” he said, and then he caught my expression. “Wait a minute. Why look at me? I hope you don’t think I had anything to do with it.”
“It just seems odd there wasn’t any problem until you showed up. Johnny died four months ago. You blow in last week and now Chester’s suddenly got problems.”
“Come on. Hey. I was sitting in the bar last night, watching big-screen TV. You can ask anyone.”
“Mind if I sit?”
“Sure, go ahead. Take the good one. I’ll take this.”
There was one hard wooden chair and one upholstered chair. Ray steered me toward the latter and took the wood chair for himself. He placed his hands on his knees, rubbing the fabric as if his palms were sweating. “I’m probably the oldest and best friend Johnny ever had. I’d never do anything to mess with his son or his grandson or anything like that. You have to believe me.”
“I’m not accusing you, Ray.”
“Sure sounds like that to me.”
“If I thought you’d broken in, I probably wouldn’t have come up here. I’d have gone to the cops and had ’em dust for prints.”
“They didn’t do that?”
“Chester can’t be sure anything was taken, which means it wasn’t even a burglary as far as the cops are concerned. The techs here only lift prints at the scene of a major crime. Felonies, not misdemeanors. Malicious mischief wouldn’t qualify unless thousands of dollars’ worth of damage had been done, which wasn’t true in this case.” What I didn’t bother to say was the procedure is lengthy and the department is perpetually backed up. Three weeks is standard. In a rush situation, prints could be lifted, photographed, and traced, with the resultant tracings being faxed to CAL ID in Sacramento. The turnaround time could be a day or two. In this case, we didn’t even have a suspect. Except maybe him, I thought. I watched him, acutely aware of the key in my pocket. I didn’t want him to know about that just yet. He seemed like a man who had something on his mind, and I wanted to hear his tale before I told him mine. “What’s in Ashland?” I asked.
There was a millisecond’s pause. “I got family back there.”
“Was Johnny really in the service?”
“I have no idea. I already told you, I lost track of him for years.”
“How’d you connect up again?”
“Johnny got in touch.”
“How’d he know where to find you?”
Impatience flashed across his face as if his picture were being taken. “Because he had my address. What is this? I don’t have to answer this stuff. It’s none of your damn business.”
“I’m just trying to get to the bottom of this.”
“Well, try somewhere else.”
“Chester thinks Johnny was a spy during World War Two, some kind of double agent for the Japanese.”
Ray rolled his eyes briefly and then gave his head a quick shake. “Where’d he get that?”
“It’s too complicated to explain. He says the old man was very paranoid. He thinks that’s part of it.”
Ray said, “The old guy was paranoid, but it didn’t have anything to do with the Japs.”
“What, then?”
“Why should I tell you? I have no reason to trust you any more than you trust me.”
“And here I thought we were such pals,” I said.
“Well, we’re not,” he said mildly.
I eased the key out of my pocket and held it up to the light. “You know anything about this?”
His gaze flicked to the key. “Where’d you get that?”
“It was in a safe Bucky found in Johnny’s apartment. Have you ever seen it before?”
“No.”
“What about the safe? Did you know about that?”
He shook his head slowly. This was like pulling teeth.
“I don’t understand what the deal is,” I said.
“There’s no deal. It’s nothing.”
“If it’s nothing, why not tell? It can’t do any harm.”
“Look, I might know who busted in. If it’s who I think, then some guy might have followed me out here. That’s all it is, and I could be wrong about that.”
“What was he after?”
“Jeez. Don’t you ever give up?”
“You must have some idea.”
“Well, I don’t.”
“Of course you do,” I said. “Why else would you drive all the way out here from Ashland?”
Agitated, he got up and crossed to the window, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Hey, come on. Enough. I’m getting tired of this. You can’t force me to answer, so you might as well lay off.”
I got up and followed him to the window, leaning against the wall so I could watch his face. “Here’s the way my mind works. This sounds like something criminal.” I tapped my temple. “I’m thinking to myself, What if Johnny never went into the Air Force? I keep having trouble with that piece of it. If he wasn’t in the service, then the whole picture shifts. Because then you have to wonder where he was all that time.”
Ray’s gaze met mine. He started to say something, but he seemed to think better of it.
“Want to hear my theory? I just came up with this,” I said. “He might have been in prison. Maybe this business about the Air Force — this AVG bullshit — was just a polite explanation for his absence. The war had started by then. It sounds a lot more patriotic to say your husband’s gone overseas than he’s been sent up.” I waited a moment, but Ray made no response. I cupped a hand behind my ear. “Care to comment?”