Whispers

Frank took the photographs out of the envelope and gave them to Tucker.

The black man looked at each of the three shots. “I know the little bastard. He’s one of about thirty guys we’re building files on right now.”

Tony’s heartbeat accelerated a bit in anticipation of the chase to come.

“Only he doesn’t use the name Valdez,” Tucker said.

“Juan Mazquezza?”

“Not that either. I think he calls himself Ortiz.”

“Do you know where we can find him?”

Tucker stood up. “Let me call the information center at Self-Pride. They might have an address on him.”

“Terrific,” Frank said.

Tucker started toward the kitchen to use the phone in there, stopped, looked back at them. “This might take a few minutes. If you’d like to pass the time looking at my designs, you can go into the study.” He pointed to a set of double doors that opened off the living room.

“Sure,” Tony said. “I’d like to see them.”

He and Frank went into the study and found that it was even more sparsely furnished than the living room. There was a large expensive drawing table with its own lamp. A high stool with a padded seat and a spring back stood in front of the table, and beside the stool there was an artist’s supply cabinet on wheels. Near one of the windows, a department store mannequin posed with head tilted coyly and shiny-smooth arms spread wide; bolts of bright cloth lay at its plastic feet. There were no shelves or storage cabinets; stacks of sketches and drawing tablets and draftsman’s tools were lined up on the floor along one wall. Obviously, Eugene Tucker was confident that eventually he would be able to furnish the entire townhouse with pieces as exquisite as those in the living room, and in the meantime, regardless of the inconvenience, he did not intend to waste money on cheap temporary furniture.

Quintessential California optimism, Tony thought.

Pencil sketches and a few full-color renditions of Tucker’s work were thumbtacked to one wall. His dresses and two-piece suits and blouses were tailored yet flowing, feminine yet not frilly. He had an excellent sense of color and a flair for the kind of detail that made a piece of clothing special. Every one of the designs was clearly the work of a superior talent.

Tony still found it somewhat difficult to believe that the big hard-bitten black man designed women’s clothes for a living. But then he realized that his own dichotomous nature was not so different from Tucker’s. During the day, he was a homicide detective, desensitized and hardened by all of the violence he saw, but at night, he was an artist, hunched over a canvas in his apartment-studio, painting, painting, painting. In a curious way, he and Eugene were brothers under the skin.

Just as Tony and Frank were looking at the last of the sketches, Tucker returned from the kitchen. “Well, what do you think?”

“Wonderful,” Tony said. “You’ve got a terrific feeling for color and line.”

“You’re really good,” Frank said.

“I know,” Tucker said, and he laughed.

“Does Self-Pride have a file on Valdez?” Tony asked.

“Yes. But he calls himself Ortiz, like I thought. Jimmy Ortiz. From what we’ve been able to gather, he deals strictly in PCP. I know I’m not on solid ground when I start pointing the finger at other people … but so far as I’m concerned, a PCP dealer is the lowest kind of bastard in the drug trade. I mean, PCP is poison. It rots the brain cells faster than anything else. We don’t have enough information in our file to turn it over to the police, but we’re working on it.”

“Address?” Tony asked.

Tucker handed him a slip of paper on which the address had been noted in neat handwriting. “It’s a fancy apartment complex one block south of Sunset, just a couple of blocks from La Cienega.”

“We’ll find it,” Tony said.

“Judging from what you’ve told me about him,” Tucker said, “and from what we’ve learned about him at Self-Pride, I’d say this guy isn’t the kind who’s ever going to knuckle down and rehabilitate himself. You’d better put this one away for a long, long time.”

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