The Trail to Buddha's Mirror - Don Winslow [5]
“Pendleton’s some sort of biochemist. I study eighteenth-century English Lit!” Neal said. Tobias Smollett: The Outsider in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Neal’s thesis title and a sure cure for insomnia. Except, that is, for eighteenth-century buffs. Both of them would love it.
“I guess all eggheads look alike to the Man.”
Neal tried a different tack.
“I’m out of shape, Graham. Very rusty. I’ve worked maybe two cases in the last two years and I screwed both of them up. You don’t want me.”
“You brought Allie Chase home.”
“Not before I botched it up and almost got us both killed. I’m no good at it anymore, Dad, I—”
“Stop being such a crybaby! What are we asking here? You go to San Francisco and find the happy couple, which shouldn’t be too difficult even for you, seeing as they’re in the Chinatown Holiday Inn, Room ten-sixteen, right there in your file. You get the broad alone, you slip her some cash, and she dumps him. She’s no dope. She knows that money for nothing is better than money for something.
“Then you buddy up to Pendleton, have a few shooters with him, listen to his sob story, and pour him onto a plane. What’ll it take? Three, four days?”
Neal walked over to the window. The rain had let up a little bit, but the fog was heavier than ever.
“I’m glad you have this all figured out, Graham. Are you going to do my research for me, too?”
“Just do the job and come back. You can spend the whole summer here at the Mildew Hilton if you want. You have to be back at school September ninth, though.”
He reached into his case and pulled out a large manila envelope.
“The schedules and book lists for your—what do you call them?—your seminars. I worked it out with Boskin.”
Graham is so damned good, Neal thought. Old Graham brings the prizes with him and dangles them in front of my nose: seminars, book lists…. You have to hand it to him—he knows his whores.
“You’re too good to me, Dad.”
“Tell me about it.”
So there it is, Neal thought. A few days of sleazy work in California, then back to my happy monk’s cell on the moor. Finish my reading, then back to graduate school. Jesus, this double life of mine. Sometimes I feel like my own twin brother. Who’s insane.
“Yeah, okay,” Neal said.
“I’m telling you,” Graham said, “this one is a grounder, easy throw to first, out of the inning.”
“Right.”
So maybe it’s time to come down from the hill, Neal thought. Ease myself back into the world with this sleazy little job. Maybe it’s too easy up here, where I don’t have to deal with anything or anyone except writers who’ve been dead for a couple hundred years.
He looked out the window and couldn’t tell whether he was looking at rain or fog. Both, he guessed.
“Have you heard from Diane?” Graham asked.
Neal thought about the letter that had sat unopened on the table for six months. He’d been afraid to read it.
“I never answered her letter,” Neal said.
“You’re a stooge.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Did you think she was just going to wait around for you?”
“No. I didn’t think that.”
He had left her with no explanation, just that he had to go do a job, and he’d been gone now for almost a year. Graham had contacted her, told her something, and forwarded her letter. But Neal couldn’t bring himself to open it. He’d rather let the thing die than read that she was killing it. But she wasn’t the one who had killed it, he thought. She was just the one who had the guts to write the obituary.
Graham wouldn’t let it drop. “She left the apartment.”
“Diane wouldn’t be the kind to stay.”
“She found a place on 104th, between Broadway and West End. She has a roommate. A woman.”
“What did you do? Follow her?!”
“Sure. I thought you’d want to know.”
“Thanks.”
“Maybe look her up when you get back to the city.”
“What are you, my mother?”
Graham shook his head and poured himself another shot.
“Way I look at it,” he said, “she’s a friend of the family.”
He never should have opened the door.
2
She was a looker, all right, this Lila.
That was her name, or the name she used working conventions, anyway. Neal learned