Brown's Requiem - James Ellroy [10]
“Okay. If anything drastic comes up, anything you think I can clarify for you, give me a call.”
“Okay, Walter. You take care. I’ll see you.”
On the way home I tried not to worry about Walter. It had been a bad session today. I hadn’t gotten what I needed from him, or imparted what I felt he needed. His ongoing suicide was painful to watch. I stopped at a pay phone and called Irwin at work.
He wasn’t as upset by the violence yesterday as I had thought. He agreed to stay with me; and his loyalty was so touching that I offered him an extra 5 percent of my action for no extra work. Then I dropped my bomb: I told him that I had a case, and that the ten delinquents were all his. He didn’t believe me at first, but finally it sank in. I told him to get his hot-headed Israeli nephew to do the actual ripping-off for him. After thanking me effusively, he hung up.
When I got home I put Schubert on the turntable to try to put Walter out of my mind. It worked for a while, until I remembered that Schubert was about Walter’s age when he died.
I began my surveillance of Jane Baker the next day. Sol Kupfer-man was a more logical place to begin, since he was supposedly the villain of this triangle, but I had visions of tailing him to his office in the morning, to some swank Beverly Hills eatery for lunch, and back to his pad at the end of the day. A big drag. Jane Baker was probably more mobile. And she was certainly better looking.
I arrived at my post across the street from Kupferman’s around 8:00 A.M. No one in Beverly Hills gets up before then, except butlers and maids. I had my own car, a ’69 Camaro ra;gtop, and I was all set for a day of sleuthing, wearing a sports jacket and tie, shined shoes, and carrying an assortment of official-looking badges, from “Special Deputy” to “International Investigator.” I had bought them at a novelty shop on Hollywood Boulevard. No repo-man should be without them.
Jane Baker walked out the door at nine forty-five. She more than did her photograph justice. Dressed in a russet cotton-linen pantsuit, her hair tied into a bun, she looked like the prototype of a confident young career woman. As she walked past Kupferman’s Eldorado to the older de Ville, I trained my binoculars on her face. It was hard to picture this slender, efficient-looking woman as the sister of the grubby Fat Dog, yet the resemblance was there: the full cheeks, the widely-spaced eyes, and a certain determined set to the mouth that was sensual on Jane and ugly on her brother.
There was a fair amount of traffic heading south toward the Beverly Hills shopping district—women in Cadillacs and Mercedes on their morning shopping pilgrimages to the boutiques of Fat City—but Jane was easy to follow. We went south on Beverly Drive to Big Santa Monica, then east all the way into Hollywood. It was a pleasant drive. The sky was smogless and the Hollywood Hills were alive with greenery. Jane Baker turned left on Highland and pulled into the parking lot of a Bank of America branch.
I parked three spaces away, gave her two minutes and then followed her into the bank. It was busy, the height of the early morning rush, so it was a few minutes before she got to see a teller. I passed by her on the opposite side of the velveteen waiting ropes and observed the transaction. The teller was counting out a large number of fifties. There appeared to be close to a grand on the counter. Jane stuffed the bills into her purse.
I hotfooted it outside and back to my car, wondering why a Beverly Hills woman would travel all the way to Hollywood to do her banking. And where would Jane Baker be going with a grand in her purse?
She didn’t leave me hanging for long. A minute later she was behind the wheel and gunning it north on Highland. She was harder to tail this time, deftly weaving in and around the morning traffic. North of the Hollywood Bowl she turned onto the Hollywood Freeway. Soon we