Favoring his left knee, sorting through things with one hand, feeling like a big crippled bug, he searched the place perfunctorily and found nothing more of interest. Rink was a hit man, and hit men didn’t assist police investigations by keeping handy little address books and paper records of their affairs.
In the bathroom again, he removed the compress and saw that the superficial bleeding had, indeed, finally stopped.
He looked like hell. But that was fitting, because he felt like hell too.
21
When Dan limped out to the curb, carrying the small box of books, George Padrakis was still behind the wheel of the unmarked sedan, sitting in darkness, his window half open. He cranked it all the way down when he saw Dan.
‘I was just on the squawk-box. Mondale wants … Hey, what happened to your forehead?’
Dan told him about the intruder.
Padrakis opened the door and got out of the car. He looked and sounded like Perry Como, and he moved like him too: lazily, casually, with unconscious grace. He was even casual as he reached inside his coat and drew his revolver.
‘The guy’s gone,’ Dan said as Padrakis took a step toward Rink’s house. ‘Long gone.’
‘But how’d he get in there?’
‘Through the back.’
‘This street’s been quiet, and I had my window down,’ Padrakis protested. ‘I’d have heard breaking glass, anything like that.’
‘I didn’t find a broken window,’ Dan said. ‘I think he came in by the kitchen door, probably with a key.’
‘Well, hell, then they can’t blame it on me,’ Padrakis said, holstering his revolver. ‘I can’t be two places at once. They want to watch the back of the house too, they should have put two men on the place. You get a good look at the joker who jumped you?’
‘Not real good.’ Dan returned the key Padrakis had given him. ‘But if you see a guy with a badly mangled ear, that’s him.’
‘Ear?’
‘I nearly tore his ear off.’
‘Why’d you do that?’
‘For one thing, because he was trying to bash my brains in,’ Dan said impatiently. ‘Besides, I’m sort of like a matador. I always try to take a trophy home with me, and this guy didn’t have a tail.’
Padrakis looked baffled.
A gigantic motor home turned the corner, engine roaring, and lumbered down the block, like a dinosaur.
Frowning at the box in Dan’s hands, Padrakis raised his voice above the shrieking engine of the nature lovers’ vehicle. ‘What’s that you’ve got there?’
‘Books.’
‘Books?’
‘Assembled sheets of paper with words on them, for the purpose of conveying information or providing entertainment. Now what about the squawk-box? What’s Mondale,want?’
‘You taking those books with you?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Don’t know if you can do that.’
‘Don’t worry. I can manage. They aren’t that heavy.’
‘That’s not what I mean.’
‘What’s Mondale want?’
Staring unhappily at the box in Dan’s arms, Padrakis waited until the motor home had passed like a brontosaurus making its way through a primeval swamp. Its wake of cold air and exhaust fumes washed over them.
‘I called in to let Mondale know you were here.’
‘How thoughtful of you, George.’
‘He was about to head over to the Sign of the Pentagram on Ventura.’
‘Good for him.’
‘He really wants you to meet him there.’
‘What the hell’s the Sign of the Pentagram? Sounds like a bar where werewolves hang out.’
‘I think it’s a bookstore or something,’ Padrakis said, still frowning at the box of books. ‘Guy’s been killed over there.’
‘What guy?’
‘The owner, I think. Name’s Scaldone. Mondale says it’s like the bodies in Studio City.’
‘There goes dinner,’ Dan said. He headed along the sidewalk, through alternating pools of purple-black shadows and wan amber light, toward his own car.
Padrakis followed him. ‘Hey, about those books—’
‘Do you read, George?’
‘They’re the property of the deceased—’
‘Nothing like curling up with a good book, though they’re not nearly so entertaining when you’re deceased.’
‘And this isn’t like a crime scene where we can just cart away anything that might be evidence.’
Dan balanced the box on the bumper of his car, unlocked the trunk, put the box inside, and said, ‘”The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.” Mark Twain said that, George.’