“So I won’t be here much longer,” she said. “I’ll be moving on soon. Any time now, you know. I feel lots of good things coming. Like really good vibrations, you know?”
Her situation was ineffably sad, and Tony could think of nothing to say that would make a difference to her. “Uh … well … I sure wish you all the luck in the world,” he said stupidly. He edged past her, through the door.
The gleam of vitality vanished from her eyes, and she was suddenly desperately posing again, shoulders back, chest out. But her face was still weary and drawn. Her belly was still straining at the waistband of her shorts. And her hips were still too big for girlish games. “Hey,” she said, “if you’re ever in the mood for some wine and, you know, a little conversation….”
“Thank you,” he said.
“I mean, feel free to stop by when you’re not, you know, on duty.”
“I might do that,” he lied. Then, because he felt he had sounded insincere and didn’t want to leave her without anything, he said, “You’ve got pretty legs.”
That was true, but she didn’t know how to accept a compliment, gracefully. She grinned and put her hands on her breasts and said, “It’s usually my boobs that get all the attention.”
“Well… I’ll be seeing you,” he said, turning away from her and heading toward the car.
After a few steps, he glanced back and saw that she was standing in the open door, head cocked to one side, far away from him and Las Palmeras Apartments, listening to those faint whispering voices that were trying to explain the meaning of her life.
As Tony got into the car, Frank said, “I thought she got her claws into you. I was about ready to call up a SWAT team to rescue you.”
Tony didn’t laugh. “It’s sad.”
“What?”
“Lana Haverby.”
“You kidding me?”
“The whole situation.”
“She’s just a dumb broad,” Frank said. “But what did you think about Bobby buying the Jag?”
“If he hasn’t been robbing banks, there’s only one way he could get hold of that kind of cash.”
“Dope,” Frank said.
“Cocaine, grass, maybe PCP.”
“It gives us a whole new place to start looking for the little bastard,” Frank said. “We can go out on the street and start putting some muscle on the known dealers, guys who’ve taken falls for selling junk. Make it hot for them, and if they’ve got a lot to lose and they know where Bobby is, they’ll give him to us on a silver platter.”
“Meanwhile,” Tony said, “I’d better call in.”
He wanted a DMV check on a black Jaguar registered to Juan Masquezza. If they could get a license number for the hot sheet, then looking for Bobby’s wheels would be part of every uniformed officer’s daily duties.
That didn’t mean they would find him right away. In any other city, if a man was wanted as badly as Bobby was wanted, he would not be able to live in the open for a long time. He would be spotted or tracked down in a few weeks at most. But Los Angeles was not like other cities; at least in terms of land area, it was bigger than any other urban center in the nation. L.A. was spread over nearly five hundred square miles. It covered half again as much land as all the boroughs of New York City, ten times more than all of Boston, and almost half as much as the state of Rhode Island. Counting the illegal aliens, which the Census Bureau did not do, the population of the entire metropolitan area was approaching nine million. In this vast maze of streets, alleyways, freeways, hills, and canyons, a clever fugitive could live in the open for many months, going about his business as boldly and unconcernedly as any ordinary citizen.
Tony switched on the radio, which they had left off all morning, called Communications, and asked for the DMV check on Juan Mazquezza and his Jaguar.
The woman handling their frequency had a soft appealing voice. After she took Tony’s requests, she informed him that a call had been out for him and Frank the past two hours. It was now 11:45. The Hilary Thomas case was open again, and they were needed at her Westwood house, where other officers had answered a call at 9:30.