The room I entered was long and deep, brightly lit and jumbled. There were four very long worktables along walls that revealed no other door. The tables were strewn with tools, a wide variety of mechanical parts, grease rags, and guns in pieces and whole; there were rifle barrels, bullet clips, and telescopic sites mixed among oil cans and vises, toolboxes, and other metal items all having something to do with the mechanics of death-dealing.
Toward the back wall stood a huge asymmetrical desk that was made from metal and looked like some gargantuan gray and extinct member of the pig family. Upon the desk were blueprints, files, a few paper coffee cups that had soaked through along the seams, and at least a dozen telephones.
Behind this desk sat a man who was maybe sixty but solid. This man stood up as I approached.
Foster “Stony” Goldsmith might have also been constructed from steel. His hair, skin, eyes, and even his suit were all various shades from silver to gunmetal gray. His posture was solid and his hands soiled with the materials from his worktables.
“That’s a whole lotta phones,” I said.
“Makes you wonder why JP Villard didn’t call me in person,” Goldsmith said. “He has the numbers of four of them.”
I took the envelope from my pocket and handed it across the broad back of the porcine desk.
He tore open the letter and read it closely. Then he looked up, suddenly intrigued by my presence.
“What could you possibly have to say to me?” he asked. “And why would the CEO of Proxy Nine need me to listen?”
It was a pleasure to see that the captain of industry could be rocked by just a word. He gazed at the letter in his hand, questioning its origins, and then looked up at me with the same query in mind.
“Where do you come from?”
I went into the story that had been going through my mind for the last twenty-four hours. I told him about Moving Day and Roger Frisk, about Tout Manning and being shot at in front of Benoit’s Gym.
“Why would the police come to you?” Goldsmith asked.
“I’m a private detective. Not too many my shade of brown in L.A. The cops find that I can get work done where they cannot. Also I know things about the world outside my neighborhood.”
“What kind of things?” he asked.
“Like that the man sitting outside your door wasn’t you.”
“Tom Crispin is so close to me that he could finish my sentences.”
“Well,” I said with a shrug, “I’m talking to you.”
“And the police sent you here?”
“No, sir. The police told me not to contact you under any circumstances. But I’m suspicious by nature. I haven’t read about the supposed kidnapping in the newspaper. And even though I’m aware of some of the crimes this Uhuru Nolicé is supposed to have committed, I haven’t ever heard about him before either.”
“So you don’t believe the police?”
It was an odd interrogation. Goldsmith had no intention of sitting or of offering me a seat. I decided that this was some kind of superstition; that if he treated me in a civil manner he couldn’t have me shot on the way out.
“Not necessarily,” I said.
“And what do you want from me?” he asked.
“Like I said, somebody paid me six thousand dollars to start this investigation. I figure that was you. And if I’m working for you it’s only right that we meet face-to-face.”
Goldsmith’s eyebrows creased slightly.
“And there’s another thing,” I added.
“What’s that?”
“I have a daughter of my own and I wouldn’t want somebody out looking for her that I hadn’t met.”
“I’ve never served in the armed forces, Mr. Rawlins, but I’m military just the same,” Goldsmith said. “I live a Spartan life and work in armaments. I taught Rose how to make her bed when she was six years old. I told her that when a man or woman makes their own bed they sleep in it too.”
His words were facts tinged with lament.
“So you’re saying that you don’t want me to find her?” I asked.
The gun-maker gave me a long hard look then. He was angry about something; maybe it was my question.
“Have you ever killed anyone, Mr. Rawlins?”
“Why? Have you?”
“Not by direct physical contact,” he said as if he had been practicing a legal defense. “I have never shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, or asphyxiated another human being. There are people out there, however, who blame me for the deaths of thousands. They think because I make bombs that I am responsible for how those bombs are used. If a child is shot in the DMZ or Johannesburg with one of my guns they lay the crime at my feet. What about you?”
“Are you asking me if I blame you for people killed with your weapons?”
“I’m asking you if you have ever killed anyone.”
“Why?”
“Like you said, I want to know what kind of man is out there looking for my daughter.”
Less than two months had passed since I last killed a man. Keith Handel was a thug and a killer, a ruthless man who would, who had murdered his own confederates for money. I thought he was trying to kill me. If he got the upper hand he probably would have. But that night I was lucky. I strangled him while he was trying to do the same to me.
“In the war,” I said.
“Is war your excuse?”
“Where I come from people don’t have any use for excuses.”
That got me another minute-long stare.
“Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr. Rawlins?”
“You could answer my question.”
“Let me be very clear,” he said. “I did not summon you or go to your house on Moving Day, as you call it. I didn’t give you any money or suggest these things you say about my daughter are true. You are in the employ of the Los Angeles Police Department. So I suggest you address your questions and bring your findings to them.”
Looking at Old Stony’s hard facade, I wondered if stainless steel could rot.
He had, I believed, given me the answers to my questions, but I didn’t understand their meaning.
The door behind me opened and I didn’t have to look to know that Red and Mr. Push-up had somehow been summoned to see me out.