CLARK’S FIRST THOUGHT when he pulled into Blixden Avenue and saw the lights of a black sedan blinking blue through the dusk was that the Gladmont Securities guy had tracked him to Downtown. His next, as he saw the LAPD badge on the side, was that Timmy Townsend had reported the damage to the Delahaye’s window, under the impression he was doing him a favor. His last was that it was already too late to turn around.
There were two uniformed officers. One had been speaking to the kid Roger. The other stood on the steps of Blixden Apartments amid an assortment of residents. Barbara Eshel was there, along with two thin looking men and a hunched old woman with a gypsy headscarf.
He parked the Delahaye, pulled the keys, climbed out and checked that his glasses were still on his face. The cop who’d been talking to Roger waddled over. For all his lumbering gait, he wore a somber expression of a variety Clark had rarely seen on an LAPD officer’s face.
“Are you Mr Daniel Lamotte?”
He pocketed the keys. The cop’s gun was still in his holster. Everyone on the street was looking over at them. “That’s me. What can I do to help?”
The cop was big and pink. You could hear the bubble of his breathing. The other cop who was coming down the steps to join them was young and fit. They often matched them up that way, although they both seemed oddly nervous. Clark had met cops in a whole variety of situations, but he was still struggling to get a feel for what was going on here. “I’m Officer Doyle. My colleague over there is Officer Reynolds. We just need to have a word with you, fella. You got a room or somewhere we could talk?”
“Can’t we just do this out on the street?”
Instead of asking Clark what the hell sort of game he was playing, Officer Doyle just nodded. Signaling to his pal to stay back, he put a soft arm on Clark’s shoulder and led him a short way down Blixden Avenue. They sat down together on a wall beside the street postbox. The cop looked down at the cracked sidewalk and pulled at his earlobe. Finally, he looked up.
“We’ve been trying to get hold of you now for a few hours. You are Mr
Daniel Lamotte, right? That place up in the hills—”
“Erewhon? Up above Stone Canyon? I sometimes work down here. I’m a writer—”
“Yeah.” The cop’s lungs simmered. “So we found out.” He licked the sweat from his lips. “It’s your wife. I’m sorry, but there’s no easy way of telling you this. Fact is, there’s been a body found. We got a report from some hikers about a red Cadillac Series 90 Sedan parked on a scenic byway up toward the San Bernardino Mountains. There was a dead woman inside the car, a hose was poked in though the side window from the exhaust and the engine was still running. The plates and the ID match April Lamotte.”