CHAPTER 2

I coughed until I almost lost it. Shaken and deafened by the concussion, I staggered to my hands and knees and saw the top half of Max Beeler blown to bloody shreds across the parking lot.

A crowd started to gather, drawn by the explosion. One guy in a red-and-white horizontal striped pullover, clamped onto me as if to help me stay erect, but I think he was shouting to everyone that I was to blame. My ears rang and I could only faintly hear the sirens wail as a fire-truck and ambulance arrived.

A patrolman took me away from the Beagle Boy and we went over to lean on the side of Max’s Galaxie. The Ford’s hot surface burned my arm and I noticed that one of the side windows had a thin sliver from my Kaiser’s grill stuck in the glass, as if it had been propelled there by a knife thrower. Somewhere along the way, I’d acquired a silver flask. I paused a moment to slowly touch it to my forehead in a silent salute to its owner.

The leaning telephone pole let loose in a delayed reaction, chopping the ground like an axe.

After that, the whole place became a sideshow. Ambulances flashed their colorful lights. Water arced through the air. Crowds of spectators ringed the area. A tent became erected near the remains. A helicopter made a vibrating pass over our heads. Even a van from KTLA-5 showed up to film the still-smoking wreckage.

I was hustled along to my boat, but before the cops could start questioning me, a thin wiry guy in a dark suit--who I took to be from the FBI--flashed his wallet and ushered me off to a waiting limo. He mouthed some words, including ones that looked like “white dizzy,” and the driver sped me away from the crazy circus.

Twenty minutes later, I had most of my hearing back, but was still a little dazed. My hand shook as I plucked a scrap of moist brown cloth from the sleeve of my coat.

The dark limo dropped me off inside a familiar complex of studios in Burbank. I walked down Mickey Avenue past the commissary to the administration offices. The smell of freshly-clipped grass brought me down out of an adrenaline haze. Buddy Ebsen shuffled past me, humming to himself and going the other way. I remembered how Fess Parker had once threatened to have me arrested for loitering while I was on stakeout near his home. My Noir Man said, ‘What a crockett shit.’

Inside the ochre, stucco three-story, I asked to see Walt. I was beginning to get my wits back and, like a trained observer, began noticing details around me. Beth, a pudgy brunette in a French Twist and a little too much eye makeup, rose from the reception desk and straightened the front of her skirt, smiling. She recognized me from previous visits, seemed to have expected me today, and directed me to the Animation Building over on Buena Vista Street.

I found the building, went up the stairs, and spied Walt standing at the back of a large, high-windowed room, addressing more than a dozen artists seated at their work tables. One guy was sketching Peter Pan for a peanut butter commercial. Another sat in the bright sunlight and drew a bucktoothed beaver holding a toothbrush. Maybe I was still a little dopey, after all.

Walt was wearing his reading glasses and calmly assuring a hunched-shouldered man of about fifty that even though live-action movies were now the bulk of the company’s production, he would never abandon animation. “It’s in my heart and soul, Leo.” The studio head spread wide his arms, one of which almost poked a cigarette into the eye of a lean guy in a polo shirt.

Which was another good reason why I’d stopped smoking.

Walt caught sight of me standing at the room’s entrance and came past me into the hallway. “This way.”

I followed his back as he stubbed out his cigarette and opened a door at the end of the hall.

We went into an empty workroom--empty except for walls filled with images from Sleeping Beauty and three wooden desks covered with stacks of similar drawings. No chairs, so I just stood there while he closed the door and went over to look out the window before closing the horizontal blinds.

“Stan,” he said, taking off his glasses and slipping them into interior pocket of his tweed sport coat.

“Walt.”

“Are you all right?”

“Are you?”

He blinked. “What do you mean?”

“Max is dead.” I took the flask from my pocket and set it on the nearest desk. I wobbled a little but stayed upright.

“I know,” Walt said, his eyes glued to the silver surface. “I sent the limo that brought you here, remember. The police will want a statement, but we’ll pull rank on them and cover you for the time being. We’ve got a line on who did this and why.

“I was almost killed by my car!”

“And we’re going to get the man who did it. I know you’re upset--”

“My parents died in their car ten years ago, remember?”

“And we found a bomb in my car, too.”

“Whose fault is that, Mr. Secret Agent?”

Walt waited while the echo of my voice faded. “You seem tired, Stan. Maybe--maybe it would be best, if you went out of town for a while. While the Bureau clears this up.”

“You’re not listening, Walt. There are people out there who are trying to kill us.”

“They term they use is eliminate or liquidate.”

“Whatever it is, I’m not running away.”

He ran his fingers through his hair. “Look, I’m sick about what happened to Max. But I’m glad that you’re safe. We didn’t know that Reed had a brother. Our records are sketchy at best, but I received a call two days ago saying we were all going to pay for August Reed’s death and something about ‘blood calls to blood.’”

“And?”

“And, we tried to trace the call, but weren’t expecting it to begin with and fully--got nowhere.”

I wondered how the caller knew about Max’s and my involvement in the death of August Reed. “Someone inside the FBI is leaking information.”

“Probably,” Walt said. “Possibly. We’re looking into it. The fact that he called to warn me first tells us that he’s bold and clearly out for revenge. The profiles from Bureau psychologists state that a call like that is designed to instill fear, even at the risk of exposure. When the threat is carried out on any one member of a group, the rest of the members begin to panic.”

“Well, it only motivates me to want to get them before they get me like they did Max.”

“And that sort of reaction is precisely what the psych boys describe as panic. You want to drop everything and run off in all directions at once. We can’t do that, Stan. We have active, on-going cases that have to be pursued methodically. We have to keep our wits. We can’t be stampeded like spooked cattle.”

“Are you going to quote Davy Crockett to me, now? ‘Be sure you’re right and then go ahead’? How do we do that methodically, Walt?”

“By keeping our heads, and keeping them down. You know we have resources to handle this sort of thing. I dealt with something very much like this back in the Forties.”

“Max Beeler was a good man. And you’re not telling me everything--again.”

He sighed. “He’ll be missed. I’d like to have a lengthy conversation with you about it, but right now...” I could see the complexity of conflicting thoughts play across his face. “As you say, there’s a lot I haven’t told you.”

I waited while he weighed how much to explain. “I want to hear it all,” I said. “You owe me that.”

He slumped. “This damn business gets harder every year. Your parents had high-level security clearances while working on projects at Lockheed after the war. They were presented to me one day in 1947 as part of a team to keep the atomic bomb out of soviet hands.”

I clinched my eyes, hoping they didn’t water, and the Noir Man screamed at the back of my throat.