THE DEADLY DOOWOP
A Red Trevorak Mystery
By Charles Deemer
1/
Tues, 8 June 54: Lionel's great line in the Army, "Fashion is the first refuge of a scoundrel." Get this in a play!
I
found the address on a shady, pine-lined lane in the foothills north of
Pasadena. It was one of those new
upper-crust neighborhoods I'd never heard of, called - surprise of surprises -
Foothills. All the homes were lean and
long, on huge, shady lots.
I
was about half an hour late, having under-estimated the time it would take to
negotiate all the new freeway construction going on between the office in
Venice and the suburban glitz of east Los Angeles County. The trip had been one detour after another,
crisscrossing back and forth over the deep gullies that were the transportation
arteries of the future. It was hard to
see the future in all the dust and racket of construction.
I
pulled Bad-Ass the Buick into the driveway, turned the key and waited until the
engine sputtered still. Adjusting the
rearview mirror, I buttoned my shirt collar and pulled up my tie. Then I got
out.
On
a lesser scale, digging in the earth was going on here, too, right next
door. A gray-haired man in a red
baseball cap was chest-deep in a hole alongside his house. Bad-Ass had attracted his attention, so I
acknowledged his stare with a wave and he nodded before going back to his
shovel. I guessed he was digging
himself a fallout shelter. Freeways and
fallout shelters were all the rage, both granted the Good Housekeeping Seal of
Approval.
I
walked up the brick walk to the front porch and rang the doorbell. A young Negro woman answered, and I probably
did a double-take, forgetting for a moment where I was. But her presence made sense: in the lily-white glitz of Foothills, having
a Negro housekeeper would be as prestigious as having a fallout shelter.
When
I told her who I was, she invited me in and led me to the den, not the living
room.
"Mrs.
Davies will be here directly, Mr. Trevorak," she said.
She
was tan and pretty but somehow looked out of place in her starched white
uniform. I got the idea she didn't like
her job.
The
den didn't look lived in, which made me wonder what the living room was
like. I'm a big man, almost three
hundred pounds, and all the chairs in the room looked too expensive and frail
to sit on. For a moment I stood in the middle of the room, admiring the view
out the large bay windows. It looked
like a golf course back there. Finally I sat down on the divan and picked up a
magazine off the adjacent coffee table.
There was a framed photograph there, too, and I wondered if the
tired-looking guy at the barbecue was her husband.
I
was lingering over an underwear ad when a woman entered the room. As I closed
the magazine and made a move to rise, she said, "Keep your seat."
I
relaxed and heard the cushion under me groan.
"You're
late," she said.
"I
forgot about all the construction going on."
She
just looked at me, as if I'd said something in a foreign language. Then she stepped to the divan with her hand
out, saying, "I'm Joan Davies.
You're not the one I talked to on the phone."
I
shook her hand and tried to rise a gentlemanly distance up off the cushion,
which was no easy task at my weight.
"Red
Trevorak. You talked to my dad. We're a family agency."
"I
see. And he sent you."
Though
it was late in the morning, she was dressed for cocktails and dinner, in a
black dress that looked expensive. She was a pretty woman, slender, tall, with
jet black hair to match the dress. I put her at not quite thirty. She didn't seem thrilled that Dad had sent
me and, to tell the truth, I wasn't so thrilled to be there either.
"I
suppose you'll do fine," she said.
"I want you to hear something."
She
went to a radio console in the room and turned it on. She stayed there, looking
out of place without a martini in her hand, staring down at the radio.
Then
the radio came to life and said, Yes,
indeedy! It's Lovin' Dan the
Sixty-Minute Man, approaching the hour of high noon. Oo-ee, and we been having
fun this morning! I love you cats out
there, you know I do! And we'll be
right back with more of the best in rhythm-n-blues, on radio KRB, your station
for top Negro entertainment - after this message.
A commercial jingle started,
One little, two little, three little
sparkplugs; four little, five little, six little sparkplugs; seven little,
eight little, worn-out sparkplugs . . .
Joan Davies said, "I
want you to listen carefully and answer some questions about the disc
jockey."
Who was soon back on the
air: Oo-ee, baby! We got a great one
for you now, going all the way back to 1948.
Last year they had Crying in the Chapel but this was their first big
one, and it's one sweet side. Lovin' Dan playing for you: It's Too Soon To
Know!
The song started and Mrs.
Davies turned off the radio.
"Well?," she
said. "What can you tell me about
the disc jockey?"
I had no idea what she was
getting at. I said, "It sounds
like he loves his job."
"What race is he?"
Though the question came
from left field, I threw back a quick answer.
"Negro, I assume."
"Exactly," she
said.
She moved back across the
room and sat in one of the frail wooden chairs across from the divan. She was so thin the chair didn't even squeak
under her.
"That was my husband on
the radio," she said, "and he's white. Or at least, I assume he is." xxx
She
paused, letting this sink in, but I was still looking for her
drift. Then she came from left
field again.
"Did you read the paper a few weeks ago, about the little scandal
we had
here in Foothills?"
I
tried to remember a story about Foothills and couldn't. Lately
the
papers were dominated by what reporters called the Rat Murders, a
bizarre
series of killings with a weird m.o.: the murderer left a dead
rat with
each of his victims, as well as a short chapter in an on-going
treatise
he called "The History of Rats."
"I don't recall," I said.
"I was up in the Bay area for a few
days,
maybe I missed it."
"Flo Albertson, who lives in the neighborhood, not far from here,
as a
matter of fact - I used to play bridge with her regularly -
anyway,
she gave birth to a son recently. The
baby is a Negro."
Again
she paused for effect before going on.
"Flo is white, or so we thought.
So her husband thought. As it
turns
out, she's a Negro who was passing for white.
Hence, her dark
baby. You can imagine how
upsetting this is to everyone, not to
mention
her husband."
I
thought I was beginning to see her drift but it was too bizarre
to take a
wild guess about. Better she told me
herself.
"What are you trying to tell me,
Mrs. Davies?"
"Dan, my husband, hasn't been himself lately. Ever since Flo was
discovered. And I'll never
understand why he took the job at that
horrible
station, he used to work in Pasadena, playing Montavani and
wonderful
music. He says he actually enjoys Negro
music. I just need
to be
sure."
My
hunch was right but I still wanted her to say it herself.
"Sure about what?"
"Well, you heard yourself that he sounds just like a Negro on the
air. Under the circumstances . . . well, I was
one of Flo's best
friends,
I thought I was, and never for a minute suspected she was a
Negro."
I
just looked at her.
"I want a family myself some day," she said. "Your father said you
can do
background checks."
"We do that," I said.
"Well, then?"
"I'm still not sure what you want," I lied.
"I want to know if my husband has Negro ancestry."
It
pained her to say it, and suddenly I felt sorry for making her.
She stood
up and said, "Your father quoted me a fee over the phone.
I'll get
it."
She
fetched an envelope from a shelf filled with knick-knacks. I
managed
to struggle to my feet by the time she got back with it.
"How long will this take?," she asked, handing me the
envelope.
"Depends. It would help if
I knew the name of his
parents,
grandparents, as far back as you can go."
"I thought you'd want that.
I wrote down everything I know - it's
all in
the envelope."
"Shouldn't be a problem then."
"Call me as soon as you find out anything."
We
turned to leave the den and found the housekeeper standing in
the
doorway. I wondered how much she had heard.
"I'm through now, Mrs. Davies," she said.
"Very good, Ruth."
Ruth
didn't budge from the doorway.
"Is there something else?," Mrs. Davies asked.
"Today's payday, ma'am."
"I'm sorry, I forgot. I'll
write you a check."
I
told Mrs. Davies I could find my own way out.
She offered her
hand, and
I shook it. Her hand seemed colder than
before.
"I want to hear the minute you find out anything," she
repeated. I
nodded
and got the hell out of there.
On
the porch I pulled loose my tie and snapped my collar open. I
started
toward Bad-Ass and heard a voice calling to me.
"Excuse me! Can you give me
a hand over here?"
It
was the neighbor digging the hole for the fallout shelter. "I
can't
quite reach my ladder," he said.
"Apparently I've dug myself
into a
hole!"
He
laughed like hell at this while I walked over and got his ladder
for
him. I lowered it into the hole.
"Thank you," he said and climbed up to ground level. He took off
his
baseball cap, which I saw now was a Phillies cap, and wiped his
brow with
a forearm. He drew one hand over his
thinning gray hair and
put the
cap back on.
"How about an iced tea for your trouble?," he asked.
His
name was Jeff Berger. I waited in the
den while he fetched
drinks
and, unlike the den next door, this one was lived in
considerably. A sports shirt was
draped over a rocking chair.
Newspapers and magazines were cluttered about. A dirty dish was on the
coffee
table. One wall was dominated by a
large record collection and
phonograph console, another by framed color photographs of various
nuclear
bomb explosions. Returning with iced
tea, he caught me staring
at the
photographs.
"Incredible, aren't they?," he said. "Beautiful and frightening at
the same
time. I'll put them on the wall down in
the shelter when I'm
done."
He
handed me my glass and went to the phonograph, playing the
record
that was already on the turnstile. It
was classical, some
symphony
or other. He kept the volume low.
"Sit down," he gestured.
The chairs in the room looked sturdy
enough. Jeff took the rocker,
and I took a stuffed chair adjacent to
it.
"Forgive me for being nosy," he said, "but I'm guessing
you're the
detective
that Joanie has been threatening to hire."
When
I admitted I was, he told me what he thought about the matter.
He
thought Dan Davies was as white as he was but was having an affair.
That's
the difference in him that Joanie was reacting to.
"Not that I understand it," he went on. "Joanie's the catch, not
Dan. She has family money, and Dan married up.
Personally, I think
he's a
fool to jeopardize that but I'll bet it's the story. I've
learned
to read human nature pretty well by now, if I say so myself."
He
rocked in his chair, looking very pleased with himself.
"Then there's nothing to this Negro business?"
"You have to understand that Joanie was pretty close to Flo, they
were
bridge partners. My wife Edna was in
the same bridge club. When
you spend
that much time with someone, only to find out that they
aren't at
all the person you thought they were, well, it's very
disturbing."
He
had as much hair on his eyebrows as on his head, and he raised
them now,
in case I missed the seriousness of the matter.
"If Negroes have anything at all to do with this . . .," he
continued. The eyebrows jumped
again.
"Yes?"
"Well, maybe Dan's girlfriend, mistress, whatever, is a Negro. He
does seem
to have an affinity for them. You
should hear how he carries
on the
radio, you'd think he was a Negro himself.
I don't mean that
literally. I mean it - well,
spiritually, does that make sense?"
The
question hung in the air as he got up and moved to a desk in
the room.
"Do you build things?," he asked.
The
desktop was covered with blueprints, all of which he insisted
on
showing me, pointing out the various features he was incorporating
into his
own original design for a fallout shelter. He would be able to
lay in
enough canned food and water to last three months. There would
be
sleeping facilities for four - himself, his wife, his daughter and
granddaughter. There'd be a
small library, a phonograph and the best
of his
records. When he was done, I lied that
I had another
appointment to make and thanked him for the refreshment.
He
walked me to Bad-Ass. I started the
engine, and a cloud of blue
smoke
bellowed out from the exhaust pipes.
Grinning, I waved as he
shook his
head in dismay and got the hell out of there.
On the drive to the office, I found KRB on
the dial. The radio
said,
Shoo-doot-n-shoo-be-do . . .
2/
Between the foothills of east county and the ocean, smog was rising
over the
city like bad breath. The newspapers
liked to write about all
the
beatniks living in Venice but at least here we could breathe
relatively fresh air.
I
parked Bad-Ass in front of the vacant storefront and hiked up the
stairs to
the office. The glass window in the
door needed a paint job:
the final
s is Trevorak Private Investigations was almost gone, looking
like a
foreign language's curly accent line; below it, the
disintegrating paint read Henry Trevorak, Sr., Henry Trevorak, Jr. and
yours
truly at the bottom, Clyde Trevorak. No one called me Clyde, and
I hated
the name. I'd been Red for as long as I
can remember, homage
to a body
full of freckles and orange hair.
I
walked in. The office was barely large
enough for three desks.
Dad was
alone, feet up on his desk, reading the paper.
"Read the front page," he said at once, tossing me the Times.
"Tell me she's not a hooker."
The
reference was to another Rat Murder, announced in a bold
front-page headline, Rat Murderer Strikes Again. Real original, these
headline
writers. I poured a cup of coffee and
took the paper to my
desk. I preferred the evening
paper to the morning, which made me feel
like I
was always behind on the news.
"You read the story and tell me I'm not right," Dad said. He
went
back to
reading the Sports section.
Dad
had spent almost twenty years on the LAPD before a stray bullet
during a
foiled robbery put him on disability.
Now he let Hank run the
agency
while he concentrated on solving the major crimes of the city.
It
was Dad's theory that the rat murderer was a prostitute. All the
victims
to date had been male, all murdered by a .22 caliber pistol at
close
range. Each victim had been found in
his car, two in
compromising positions suggesting sexual activity. But I thought there
were
holes in Dad's theory, the main one being that it didn't explain
the dead
rat motif, nor the on-going history of rats, which was written
with some
intelligence, I thought.
This
victim fit the pattern: Franklin Cowley was 32, an attorney in
his
father's firm. His Chrysler was found
parked in the Hollywood
Hills
overlooking the city, Cowley slumped over the steering wheel (two
other
victims had been found partially nude in the back seat) with a
.22
bullet hole in his neck. The rat and
new installment were on the
front
seat beside him. As always, the
installment had been neatly
typed on
blue-lined school paper by a Remington Standard typewriter.
This one
read:
Rats
are very good swimmers. A rat can stay
under water for three
minutes. Rats are good climbers
and can jump about two feet. The rat
can breed
all year. However, it likes to breed
best in the spring or
fall. A female rat will have
five or more litters in a year. The
average
litter is eight baby rats. The baby
rats are born 21 days
after
mating. A few hours after the litter is
born the mother can mate
again.
There
was a photograph of the installment and also of the car, taken
from an
angle that showed the lights of the city below. The reporter
was
buying Dad's theory and speculated that the murderer was "a deadly
lady of
the night."
"They were parked in Lover's Lane," Dad said when he saw me
put
down the
paper.
"But no unzipped fly," I retorted.
"So no blow job this time, big deal. You want to cut it out and
put it on
the wall?"
I
fetched scissors from the desk drawer and cut out the new
installment. Dad was saving
them, like episodes in a serial. I took
this one
to the wall and pinned it up with the others. Together, they
gave an
on-going history of rats.
The
first installment read:
A rat is very different from a mouse.
This was probably said for
the first
time in the writings of Giraldus Cambrensis, who lived from
1167 to
1223. For one thing, a rat is much
bigger than a mouse.
There
are many famous stories about rats. One
is about the rats
carrying
away a whole hen's egg. One rat grabbed
the egg with all four
paws, and
three other rats pulled the egg away with their tails. This
story was
told in Persia in 1291.
Another story about rats is from 1284.
The pied piper played on
his pipe
and led all the rats into the river named Weser. But the city
would not
pay him, so he played his pipe again and led all the children
into a
hollow mountain. The pied piper is also
called Rattenganger von
Hamelin.
The
second installment read:
A rat
belongs to the Genus Rattus and the Order Rodentia and the
Family
Muridae. Rats make up the most varied
genus of mammals. For
example,
over 550 species and varieties of rats have been noticed and
described. Some examples of the species and varieties of rats are brown
rats,
house rats, wander rats, gray rats, Norway rats, cotton rats,
wood
rats, kangaroo rats, barn rats, sewer rats, roof rats, black rats,
pack rats
and Alexandrine rats, to name just a few.
However, there are only two main kinds of rats. These are Rattus
norvegicus and Rattus rattus.
Rattus norvegicus is also called the
Norway,
house, brown, wander, gray, barn and sewer rat. Rattus rattus
is also
called the roof, black, climbing and Alexandrine rat.
The
third installment read:
Rattus rattus is the smallest rat and the oldest. Old fossils were
found in
Europe. Then the rat disappeared but
returned to Europe
between
400 and 1000 A.D. It came to Europe from somewhere in the East,
probably
Chinese Mongolia. It probably came to
Europe on a ship.
Rattus
norvegicus didn't arrive in Europe until the 18th century. It
was in
England by 1728. It came to the United
States in 1775. Then it
went west
on the wagon trains.
And
now a fourth installment. Dad joined me
at the wall, limping
from the
old injury that had made him a temporary hero and a permanent
retiree.
"A pretty intelligent whore," I
said. "She writes different from,
not
different than. She knows how to use
the encyclopedia."
"So she's intelligent.
Unzipped flies, Lover's Lane, male victims,
a weapon
only a woman would use. The facts speak
for themselves."
Dad
started rereading the history top to bottom, and I returned to
my desk
with the Sports section. I was reading
about the Angels
blowing a
five-run lead to the Stars when Hank walked in from lunch.
"You get the gig?," he asked me.
"I got it."
Hank
took after Dad. Both were big boned but
able to keep their
weight
down, which made their appearance more athletic than their
habits. Both wore trim
moustaches in the manner of leading men of
Dad's
generation. Dad's moustache was almost
fully gray, Hank's dark
brown.
"Dad, don't you have that memorized by now?," Hank asked.
"She got another early this morning," Dad said from the
wall. He
turned
and began limping toward Hank.
"If the killer's a she," Hank said.
"Course she's a she, even the reporter's calling her a deadly lady
of the
night now. You wait and see if I'm not
right."
I
sympathized with Dad's interest in the major crimes of the city.
When he
was on the force, he'd been involved with the real thing, not
the petty
business of Trevorak Private Investigations. Most of the time
we were
the Peeping Tom Patrol, scurrying about with our cameras,
hoping to
add the documentation of an adulterous embrace to a client's
suspicions. Dad had never been
able to stoop to the level of the
agency's
bread and butter, letting Hank run everything, and when I came
back from
Korea with no worse damage than a missing toe and a bad
attitude,
Dad had put me on the payroll. As near as I could figure, the
only
reason Dad kept coming to the office was to have someone to talk
to and to
listen to his theories about whatever crime was in the
headlines.
Hank
asked about my morning meeting, and I told him about Joan
Davies
and Lovin' Dan the Sixty-Minute Man.
The gig was a little
bizarre,
which perked Dad's interest considerably.
"She doesn't even know the race of her own husband?," he asked.
"Her neighbor was passing for white," I said. "She's a little
paranoid
about it."
"It's different anyway," said Hank.
"He's a deejay and sounds like a Negro on the radio, actually. He
works for
a station that plays only Negro music."
Dad
said, "She pay you?"
"Sure did."
I
told them about Jeff-the-neighbor's theory that her husband was
having an
affair.
"As long as she pays her bill," Dad said. He started limping
toward
the door. "You had lunch yet,
Red? Hank can hold down the
fort."
"I grabbed a sandwich on the way back," I said. It was a figure of
speech:
actually I'd grabbed three Bob's Big Boy Hamburgers, a double
order of
fries, and a vanilla malt.
"See you when I see you, then."
Dad
limped out of the office.
I
waited until Hank left before phoning Butch, a buddy from the
Army. Hank was always nosing
into my gigs, not in a helpful way but to
declare
his superiority and establish my ineptitude for investigative
work. I'd been a linguist in the
Army but somehow this didn't count,
he
couldn't trust me to do anything right.
To be sure, the day I sold
a play to
Broadway I'd be long gone from the Peeping Tom Patrol - but
not even
I expected that to happen soon, if at all, any more. In the
meantime,
I kept my gigs to myself as much as possible and tried to
stay out
of big brother's way. Butch was the
only Negro friend I had,
and I
wanted to pick his brain about a few things without Hank looking
over my
shoulder.
"You're buying me breakfast?," Butch said on the phone,
pretending
to be
shocked. "What'd you do, man,
finally hit the big time?"
"Been a while since we touched bases, is all."
"You usually call when you want to bitch about work or need
information. But that's cool,
man, a free meal is a free meal. So when
and
where?"
We
set a time and place, and hung up.
I got
up and went to the radio on Dad's desk, turning it on. When
nothing
happened, I pounded on it until it came to life. I found
station
KRB.
The
radio said, We sizzle! We sparkle! We fire!
Hot Wire Wally's
got all
the best in Negro music for you - from blues to ballads, from
bebop to
boogie! Yes, indeedy!
It
wasn't Lovin' Dan the Sixty-Minute Man but this deejay sounded
Negro,
too, I thought. I looked up KRB in the
phone book, waited for a
station
break, and dialed the request line.
"It's your nickel, baby!," someone
answered, in the same frantic
voice of
the deejay.
I
said, "Do you take requests?"
"That's what we're here for."
"Anything by Perry Como."
There
was a silence. Then, in a totally different
voice, a voice I
took to
be clearly white, the man on the other end of the line said,
"Don't I wish, man, don't I wish." He hung up.
I
listened to KRB for the rest of the afternoon, background music
to
beginning the paperwork and phonework of tracing the lineage of
Lovin'
Dan the Sixty-Minute Man.
3/
Wed, 9
June 54. A play about illusion and
reality, people
pretending to be something they are not. This is what politicians do
all the
time! A political play, then? A political farce?
I
continued listening to KRB at home at night and also the next
morning
while writing in my journal. All the
deejays sounded Negro to
me, all
had the same frantic style, all had nicknames like Lovin' Dan,
Hot Wire
Wally, Rockin' Ronnie, Brian the Bopper.
The music selection
varied
greatly: a sweet ballad by Nat King Cole could be heard after a
lowdown
blues by Lightnin' Hopkins, music with nothing in common except
that it
was performed by a Negro. The emphasis,
however, seemed to be
on
singing groups with names like The Crows, The Robins, The Orioles
and The
Clovers. In fact, KRB was in the midst
of a local teenage
doo-wop
singing contest, "doo-wop" apparently being the label given to
the group
style of singing, in which nonsense but rhythmic sounds wove
in and
out of the melody line. Though my own
tastes tended toward The
Weavers,
Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, the music on KRB was catching. I
wondered
if Butch listened to the station.
When
I went to the office in the morning, there was a note in
Hank's
handwriting to call Dad. There was also
a snotty p.s.: Where
are the
blowups you promised me? Our office was
so small because half
the space
we rented had been converted into a dark room.
I
phoned Dad.
"Where's this deejay guy from?," he asked.
"Chicago. Why?"
"It will take you forever to put together his family tree by mail.
Let me
check around and see who's in Chicago who can help us. I'll
call you
later in the morning."
Dad
had former colleagues and connections all over the country.
While
they were no help in peeping into a bedroom window, they could be
a real
time-saver in looking for a missing person or doing a background
check. Within the hour Dad
called back and gave me the name of Stan
McNaughton, who was a friend of a friend of his. Fifteen minutes
later, I
had McNaughton on the job in Chicago. I
figured I might have
Dan's
family tree by next week.
I
spent the next hour in the darkroom, enlarging and cropping
photographs of a well-known TV personality doing nasty things to a girl
who
couldn't have been fourteen. At least I
think that's what he was
doing. It was hard to say, the
quality of the photographs was poor and
enlarging
them didn't help. The action had taken
place on the deck of
his
yacht, and I was shooting with a zoom lens from a rowboat a good
distance
away. What I remembered most about the gig was worrying about
falling
into the harbor. A three-hundred pound
man standing up in a
rowboat
is not the definition of stability.
The
radio said, Doot-doodle-loot doodle-loot doodle-lootle- loot,
doot-doodle-loot
doodle-loot doodle-lootle-loot . . .
I
found radio station KRB in a small Negro business district
southeast
of downtown L.A., called South City.
I'm not sure what it
was south
of, except the new Pomona Freeway, which was noisily, dustily
under
construction less than a mile north of the dilapidated building
that bore
the address of the station. It was a
rundown neighborhood,
far past
its prime, with more boarded-up storefronts than operating
businesses.
I parked
Bad-Ass across the street from the station, turned off the
radio,
turned off the ignition, and unwrapped the first of three Bob's
Big Boy
Hamburgers while waiting for the engine to sputter into
silence. I was going to wait for
the tired-looking guy at the barbecue
to leave
the building.
I
could have let McNaughton in Chicago trace the lineage without
staking
out Dan Davies, of course, but the adultery business made more
sense to
me than the other. Besides, this was a
solo gig, and I wanted
to make
the most of the opportunity to work without taking orders from
Hank. If McNaughton gave Dan a
white slate, so to speak, I'd be that
much
farther ahead if I knew he was engaged in extra-curricular
diddling.
It was getting warm past noon, and with
the heat came the smog. In
the
distance I could hear all the digging, scraping, shoving of
progress. Were all these new
freeways under construction supposed to
take
people into L.A. or give them a quick way out?
It was too warm to
roll up
the window, so I got all the noise and the thickening smog
together,
as I finished the first two hamburgers and started on the
third.
I
almost didn't recognize him. In the
photograph in his den, he
looked
thinner, perhaps because of the weary expression he showed the
camera. He didn't exactly bounce
out of the building with a happy,
carefree
gait but he was halfway down the block before it registered
that this
fellow looked a lot like the guy at the barbecue. I started
the
engine, adding bellowing blue smoke to the smog, but turned it
quickly
off when I saw Dan enter the corner building.
I got out and
hurried
down the street, stuffing the last of the burger into my mouth
and
throwing the wrapper in the gutter.
A
hand-painted sign said Caviar's Market, though it looked like the
last
place in the world to purchase gourmet foodstuffs, even though a