‘Over my dead body,’ Laura said.
‘So we’re still on our own,’ Dan said.
Earl nodded. ‘Besides, Boothe apparently managed to get to Ross Mondale, to use the police department against us—’
‘Not the department itself,’ Dan said. ‘Just a few rotten apples in it.’
‘Still, who’s to say he doesn’t have friends in the FBI too? And while we’d be able to get Melanie back from the government if they took her away from us, we’d probably never find her again if Boothe regained control of her.’
For a couple of minutes they were silent. They ate lunch, and Laura tried to feed Melanie, though with little success. A Whitney Houston number faded away on the jukebox, and in a couple of seconds Bruce Springsteen began to sing a haunting song about how everything dies but some things come back and, baby, that’s a fact.
In their present situation, there was something decidedly macabre and disquieting about Springsteen’s lyrics.
Dan looked at the rain and considered how this new information about Boothe helped them.
They now knew that the enemy was powerful, but that he wasn’t as all-powerful as they had feared. That was a damned good thing to know. It improved morale. It was better to deal with an ultrawealthy megalomaniac — with one enemy, regardless of how crazy and influential he might be — than to be confronted by a monolithic bureaucracy determined to carry out a course of action in spite of the fact that it was an insane course of action. The enemy was still a giant, but he was a giant that might be brought down if they found the right slingshot, the perfectly shaped stone.
And now Dan knew the identity of ‘Daddy,’ the white-haired and oh-so-distinguished pervert who regularly visited Regine Savannah Hoffritz in that Hollywood Hills house that couldn’t decide if it wanted to be Tudor or Spanish.
‘What about John Wilkes Enterprises?’ he asked Earl. Even as he voiced the question, he saw what he should have seen earlier, and in part he answered his own inquiry: ‘There’s no John Wilkes. It’s entirely a corporate name, right? John Wilkes Boothe. The man who assassinated Lincoln, although I think that was spelled B-O-O-T-H, without the E. So this is another company owned by Palmer Boothe, and he called it John Wilkes Enterprises as — what? — a joke?’
Earl nodded. ‘Seems like an inside joke to me, but I guess you’d have to ask Boothe himself if you want an explanation. Anyway, Paladin looked into the corporation this morning. It’s no deep dark secret or anything. Boothe is listed as sole stockholder. He uses John Wilkes Enterprises to manage a collection of small endeavours that don’t fit under his other corporate or foundation umbrellas, one or two of which don’t even turn a profit.’
‘John Wilkes Press,’ Dan said.
Earl raised his eyebrows. ‘Yeah, that’s one of them. They publish only occult-related books, and they break even some years, lose a few bucks other years. John Wilkes also owns a small legit theater in the Westwood area, a chain of three shops that sell homemade chocolates, a Burger King franchise, and several other things.’
‘Including the house where Boothe keeps his mistress,’ Laura said.
‘I’m not sure he thinks of her as his mistress,’ Dan said with considerable distaste. ‘More like his pet … a pretty little animal with some really good tricks in its repertoire.’
They finished lunch.
The rain beat on the windows.
Melanie remained silent, empty-eyed, lost.
At last Laura said, ‘Now what?’
‘Now I go see Palmer Boothe,’ Dan said. ‘If he hasn’t run like all the other rats.’
35
Before they paid their check and left the coffee shop, they decided that Earl would take Laura and Melanie to a movie. The girl needed a place to hide for a few hours, until Dan had a chance to speak with Palmer Boothe either in person or on the telephone, and seeking shelter in yet another motel room was too depressing to consider. Neither the FBI nor the police — not even the minions that Boothe could marshal — would think of looking for them at an anonymous shopping-center multiplex, and there was virtually no chance that they would be accidentally spotted by someone in the darkness of a theater. In addition, Laura suggested that the right film might hold therapeutic value for Melanie: The forty-foot images, unnaturally bright color, and overwhelming sound of a motion picture sometimes gained the attention of an autistic child when nothing else could.