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  “What, Mr. Lurie?” Ron asked with rapidly thinning patience.

  “There’s this beautiful black Lamborghini. It’s stopped smack in the middle of the intersection. Like the driver saw the stop sign only way too late.”

  “And the driver was?”

  “Jimmy Thunder.”

  With those two words, Buster Lurie richly rewarded Ron’s forbearance.

  “You recognized the driver of the car that night as the Reverend Jimmy Thunder?”

  “That’s what I just said. It wasn’t raining right then, and I recognized him from TV. And I saw the plate on the Lambo, too. It was: T-H-U-N-D-E-R. I could even see the look on the guy’s face: it was like something awful had just happened. Then the Lambo screeched again, and was gone quick as a wink.”

  “And you’re sure of the time you saw Jimmy Thunder?”

  “There’s a clock on the wall in the service area. Right after the Lambo split, I looked at it to see how much time I had left to work on my car and catch a little sleep before I opened the station at six.”

  So Jimmy Thunder had lied to him about being home all night, Ron thought. He was out near the scene of the crime very close to Isaac Cardwell’s time of death, as estimated by Dr. Ryman. If that sonofabitch Marcus Martin hadn’t come to town, Ron could have yanked Thunder in and grilled him. As it was, he wondered if he had enough to get a search warrant to go over Thunder’s estate with a fine-tooth comb in hopes of finding the murder weapon.

  “So, what do you think?” Buster Lurie asked, interrupting the chief’s reverie. “Is this good stuff or what? Because I sure could use that reward. Open my own station and work on my car whenever I goddamn well please.”

  The chief replied, “It’s useful information, Mr. Lurie. No question about that. Whether it leads to anything, we’ll have to wait and see. But tell me something. You look scared about something. Maybe about talking with me. Why is that?”

  “Are you kidding? A guy who owns a Lambo and lives in a mansion on the lake, he’s got plenty to lose. I know what can happen to someone who squeals on a guy with money.”

  Ron would bet Lurie’s sense of peril was inspired by a lifetime of TV viewing … but with Didi DuPree wandering around unaccounted for, and his role in Jimmy Thunder’s life not entirely defined, the young man’s instincts might not be far wrong.

  “You may have a point,” the chief responded. “So we’d both do well to keep our little talk confidential.”

  “Bet your ass,” Buster Lurie said. Then he added, “No offense.”

  “None taken. Tell me, Mr. Lurie, when you saw Reverend Thunder, do you think he might have noticed you?”

  Buster gave it all of two seconds thought before he shook his head.

  “Tell you the truth, the way he looked to me, I think the station could’ve been on fire, with the gas tanks exploding, and he wouldn’t have noticed.”

  After Buster Lurie had left, Ron had Dinah bring him the Goldstrike Hotel and Motel Directory. Leafing through it, he counted forty-two different entries. Lodgings in town ranged from five star to fifty-five dollars per night with a free breakfast. Then there were the campgrounds where you could park your own motorized bed-and-breakfast.

  But Ron didn’t see Didi DuPree as the RV type.

  He also didn’t see any mid level hotel that cried out as the sure bet for the former houseguest and jailbird friend of Jimmy Thunder. After staying at a posh lakeside estate, it was reasonable to assume DuPree would want to maintain a certain level of creature comfort, so Ron would start looking at the upscale places first. But he didn’t know the state of DuPree’s finances, so he’d have to work his way down the amenities scale if his hunch didn’t pay off.

  This wasn’t going to be nearly as easy as pegging the feds to stay at the Hilton. But then legwork was the basic exercise of any police investigation. Ron considered sharing his burden with Oliver, but decided against it. The deputy chief was still hot on his Colin Ring angle, and Ron didn’t want to pull him away from that. Who knew? He could be right.

  The chief got up from his desk and told himself it would just be a long day behind the wheel, that’s all. He informed Sergeant Stanley what he’d be doing, and told the sarge to call him if anything important came up.

  Ron considered having the sarge ride along with him for backup, but the man was indispensable at headquarters. What the hell, he thought, he’d dealt with plenty of bad guys in L.A. and he wasn’t too proud to call for help.

  The only thing that really bothered Ron was the idea that he might log a lot of hours and come up empty. Didi DuPree easily could have lived up to his name and blown town.

  Then the chief would have to swallow a ton of pride and ask that shit Horgan for help in finding DuPree.

  Chapter 32

  Didi DuPree was still in town, but not in a hotel, and certainly not in a Winnebago.

  He woke up at mid morning in a private residence. Nothing so grand as the Thunder estate, but the place still went for upwards of a couple million bucks and had a view of the lake. Before he ever opened his eyes, Didi knew that he was alone in the bed. But nearby he could hear and smell the woman who’d taken him in.

  He lazily spread his eyelids revealing orbs as cool, gray and uncaring as stones in a fast-moving stream. He had hair the color of anthracite that swept back in waves from a high forehead. His nose was long and broad, his mouth was full and wide. He wore a new goatee, grown in just enough to look respectable.

  In repose, as he was now, he looked almost slight. But when Didi moved, and he could put it in overdrive while most folks were still fumbling for the ignition switch, all sorts of long, ropy muscles popped out.

  He got to his feet in one fluid motion and eased silently over to where the woman sat naked, clickety-clacking away at her computer. The words just flew up there on that little TV screen like magic. Rat-a-tat-tat. Just blasting out the story from her head. Didi appreciated her speed, if not her dialogue:

  BRETT

  The world’s not big enough for you to hide from me, Colonel.

  If that was the case, Didi thought, the colonel ought to cut off ol’ Brett’s johnson right then and there and gag him with it. But, no, he had to tell the hero how big his hard-on was. And then in the final scene the colonel would get his ass handed to him. That was the kind of thing that had made Didi stop going to the movies. Real bad guys never gave anybody a second chance.

  But Didi didn’t care about Brett or the colonel. He just want to make sure that ol’ — he had to look at those surgically crafted tits before her name came back to him — Gayle Shipton hadn’t been writing about any of the stories he’d been telling her the past few days. Not that she could never use them. He wasn’t a tease. He’d just said she had to wait until he said it was okay.

  They’d met last Friday when Didi had been sitting in one of the sidewalk cafes this town seemed to have no end of. She’d strolled right over to him, given him a long look and said, “I bet you’re dangerous. I need a dangerous man right now.”

  What Didi had needed was a place to stay, so he let her sit down.

  She said she was a screenwriter. She’d come to her “getaway” house to do a complete rewrite of a dogshit excuse for a script that was holding up a sixty million dollar production. She had ten days to do the job. And she needed only one more thing before she sat down and got started: a man. Someone with a real edge to him. She was sure he was that man.

  She told Didi he could have her any time she wasn’t working, and he could have all the coke he could snort. That was her offer. Take it or leave it. Then she gave him a little flash up her red miniskirt to show him just what he’d be leaving if he said no.

  Didi told her he didn’t do drugs. Gayle Shipton’s knees slapped together audibly and almost walked away. But then she remembered the other half of her offer. What about that, she asked.

  “I always was partial to anything shiny and pink,” Didi allowed.

  Gayle Shipton was so happy with his respons
e she not only took him home, she offered him the possibility of doing an uncredited punch-up of any scene in which she bogged down. And since she was getting five hundred thousand dollars for her rewrite, she was prepared to be generous.

  But the woman, running on coke and speed the past four days, hadn’t bogged down anywhere, in bed or at her rat-a-tat-tat computer.

  Besides, Didi had his own project in mind. One that involved serious money.

  The woman didn’t miss a keystroke when he put his hands on her shoulders, so he gave her right nipple a little twist. Just living up to his billing. She was the one who’d said he was dangerous.

  “I gotta go out,” Didi told her when she looked up, startled.

  It took Gayle Shipton a minute to remember who he was. Then she smiled. “I’ve been meaning to ask, will you drive me down to Betty Ford when I finish this fucker? I’ve got a room reserved. We’ll put you up somewhere nice in the Springs.”

  “Keep treating me right, we’ll see.”

  That was close enough. Gayle went back to beating the hell out of her keyboard. Didi watched for a moment, one professional admiring another. If the movie went by as fast as she typed it, he might give it a chance after all.

  Didi showered and got dressed. He donned a midnight blue silk suit, sunglasses, and a broad brimmed hat whose color was almost as cool a gray as his eyes. He left his Beretta in his suitcase. He’d warned Gayle not to mess with his case. But the way the woman was cranking on her movie script he doubted she’d get up to pee before he got back.

  Didi borrowed Gayle’s little froggy black Porsche 911. He let the sport car’s engine rev for a moment, savoring the muted growl of another fast, tight, and if necessary, lethal machine. Then he sped out of Gayle’s garage and went looking for the Englishman that Jimmy’s boy, Junior Cardwell, had mentioned last week.

  Didi fished in the still waters of his mind for the Englishman’s name.

  Ring, he recalled. Colin Ring.

  “Colin Ring,” the librarian said, handing three books to Deputy Chief Gosden with a look of disdain on her face.

  “What?” Oliver asked. “You’ve read them, and they’re no good?’

  “I haven’t read them, and all three were purchased by my predecessor.”

  The deputy chief didn’t want to hear anybody else’s gripes. He also didn’t want to go back to his office where he’d likely be distracted. The library was part of the Muni Complex just like police headquarters. If somebody just had to see him, they only had to walk down the hall. He thanked the librarian for her help and took the books to a carrel in a quiet corner.

  It didn’t take long before Oliver decided that pissing all over people’s reputations was what Colin Ring liked to do best. He wasn’t a great writer, but he conveyed a sense of venom in his work that was powerful. Repugnant, too. The deputy chief understood now why the librarian had turned up her nose.

  Ring’s first book, the only one Oliver dimly remembered hearing of, bludgeoned a famous singer. It exposed her as a drug abuser who battered the two children she’d so publicly adopted. Ring also detailed the fact that the woman had been abused as a child herself: Mom had set her hair on fire one day when an audition hadn’t gone well. The singer’s scalp had been scarred and hair regrowth had been incomplete. Thus the reason she always wore such ludicrous wigs, and had a hard time keeping a husband, Ring asserted. None of the singer’s own suffering was offered as mitigation for the battery Ring claimed she inflicted on her own children. Rather, it was cause for alarm, a warning that the authorities ought to take her kids away from her.

  As Oliver thought he recalled, that warning had been heeded. He also seemed to remember the singer had been confined to a mental hospital after attempting suicide.

  Ring had also destroyed the career of a leading man by revealing that he was both a homosexual and a pedophile. The biographer waxed nauseatingly righteous in this effort, claiming that he was saving innocent young boys from a predatory monster. He may even have been right. But his target, even at the height of his career, had been strictly a B-list actor, who had been reduced to doing infomercials by the time Ring got around to knifing him. The library book was dusty, telling the deputy chief it wasn’t borrowed frequently. Oliver couldn’t imagine it had sold well either.

  The last hatchet job was a bio on a movie studio head who was found guilty of income tax evasion after Ring detailed that the man wrote off the cost of hookers and drugs as a miscellaneous business expenses. That might have tickled or terrified Hollywood insiders, Oliver thought, but it had to make most of America yawn.

  If you didn’t eviscerate somebody who spent a lot of time in front of the camera, somebody the public really knew and considered a personal acquaintance, or better yet really knew and already hated, you were nothing in the character assassination business.

  So Colin Ring had blown three people out of the water, but, in a business sense, only his first target had been worth shooting in the first place. The deputy chief checked the copyright dates of all three books and saw that the most recent one had been published ten years ago.

  He wondered if Ring had picked the wrong target again in Jimmy Thunder.

  Oliver knew that a lot of conspiracy-minded African Americans thought whitey was out to get any black man who made more than minimum wage. But he’d never bought that. Black people had character flaws, bad luck, and the right to fail like anyone else. And who would really give a rat’s ass if Jimmy Thunder dropped off America’s cable TV channels tomorrow? Or stayed there for the next forty years.

  But … but if Jimmy Thunder could be convicted for — or even just plausibly accused of — crucifying his saintly son to keep his fame and fortune, why, people would buy that book by the truckload. Colin Ring would be back in the big time.

  More than ever, the deputy chief liked the Englishman as his doer.

  Chapter 33

  By lunchtime, Ron had worked his way through the five star hotels and was halfway through the four star tier. Nobody had a Didi DuPree registered, or recognized the photo of the man that the chief had shown them. But the concierge at the Renaissance, an astute middle-aged redhead whose nametag read Marjorie Fitzroy, gave the picture of Didi a prolonged examination.

  Ron waited patiently while she sorted out her thoughts.

  “I may have seen this man, but not looking like this,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” Ron wanted to know.

  “Well … look at the shape of his head. It’s basically narrow and rectangular but his jaw forms a fairly sharp V. Then there are the high, prominent cheekbones. I saw a man who shared those characteristics, but he wasn’t clean-shaven. He had a goatee. I couldn’t see his eyes because he wore sunglasses. I couldn’t tell about the forehead or the hair because he had a hat on. But I could give you at least a maybe.”

  “You’re very perceptive,” Ron complimented.

  “Thank you. I worked my way through college as a life-drawing model. While all the students were busy looking at me, I had nothing to do except look back. I got really good at studying faces. I’ve found it pays to keep up that skill in this job, too.”

  Ron asked for a description of the hat and sunglasses. Gray hat with a broad brim over elliptical silver frames with black lenses, Marjorie Fitzroy told him.

  The chief thanked the concierge for her help. She told him anytime.

  He used the lobby phone to call Sergeant Stanley. He relayed the description of the man the concierge had seen and asked the Sarge to have Didi Dupree’s image digitally modified on the department’s suspect ID software. He was to be disappointed, at least temporarily.

  “System’s down, Chief. There’s a ghost in the machine. Computer techs are working on it right now.”

  “If it lasts more than a couple of hours, do it the old-fashioned way. See if you can find a sketch artist.”

  “What? You mean someone who can actually draw by hand?”

  “I thought you knew everyone in town, Sarge.”
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  “Yeah, but this one’s a reach.”

  The chief gave Sergeant Stanley Marjorie Fitzroy’s name. “I bet she knows somebody who could do it.”

  “Yes, sir,” the Sarge said, his nose slightly out of joint.

  “You might enjoy talking with her, anyway,” the chief mollified. “One knowledgeable pro sharing information with another.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Don’t sulk, Sarge. She’s very nice. Very sharp. Good-looking, too.”

  “Sure, but will Mom like her?” Sergeant Stanley asked deadpan.

  Ron laughed. “Touché, Sarge. But if the computer doesn’t come back up soon, give her a call. Work something out. And there’s one more thing I’d like you to do. The next time you rotate the car outside Jimmy Thunder’s estate, have the officers watch for Deacon Meeker. If he comes out, have the watchers radio for a unit to tail him. He might just lead us to cousin Didi.”

  “Will do, Chief.”

  Ron hung up and considered what to do next.

  The growl in his stomach told him that it better be lunch. He was going to need something to eat before he could continue his rounds. He drove over to What the Hell, a burger place that thumbed its nose at the nutritionally correct, served king-size charcoal grilled patties on jumbo sesame seed buns, and piled on the extras until the customer said stop. Ron had told the owner, Sherm Mason, that if he ever decided to franchise the place, Ron would invest all of his pension fund for a piece of the action.

  Sherm, a genial black man, responded that he liked living in Goldstrike too much to be distracted by taking his business elsewhere. But he was thinking he might someday open a rib joint locally with a similar approach to dining. Call the place No Bones About It. He said if he did, he might let the chief buy a small interest.