The Baker Street Letters (9 page)

“I'm probably not supposed to do that,” said the clerk, looking at Reggie expectantly.

Reggie put a twenty-pound note on the counter.

“What's this?” said the clerk.

“Twenty pounds. At current exchange rates, that's well over thirty dollars.”

The clerk studied the note. “You're telling me a pound is better than a dollar?”

“Usually.”

“You don't have dollars?”

“No,” said Reggie.

“Well, I need forty. I don't know from exchange rates; forty, pounds or dollars.”

Reggie put out another twenty-pound note. The clerk put both in his pocket, turned away for a moment, then turned back with a printout of Nigel's stay.

It showed that Nigel had called six numbers—the first five, one right after the other, with no more than two-minute gaps between the placement of each call—and then a twenty-minute gap before the sixth and final number.

Reggie went back to Nigel's hotel room. He made the assumption that the very last in the list must have given Nigel something he was looking for—and he tried it first.

He reached Pizza Premieres, which claimed to deliver pepperoni to the stars.

Nigel might well have been looking for pizza. But that wasn't much help.

Reggie began calling the other five numbers. On the first, he reached something called Selman Productions. The receptionist pleasantly told Reggie that he couldn't speak to Mr. Selman without an appointment, and if Reggie was someone who had to ask, he couldn't have an appointment.

No help there. Reggie tried the next number.

Another production company, and with similar restrictions—no help there, either.

He tried the third and then two more after that. All production companies, all with the same result.

So Nigel had rung up five film production companies in rapid succession—and then, several minutes later, apparently having worked up an appetite with that effort, he'd ordered take-away pizza.

Reggie picked up his luggage again, dragged it back downstairs, and asked the desk clerk if Nigel had left by taxi.

This was apparently a tough one, and the clerk had to think about it.

“No,” he said after a moment. “When he checked out, he was on foot. When he wanted a taxi—that was yesterday.”

“You called the taxi for him?”

“Yeah, probably.”

“You have a preferred provider arrangement with one of the smaller locals, I'd expect.”

“Huh?”

“Do you usually call the same taxi company?”

“Usually get the same cabbie, too.”

“Brilliant. Call him for me, would you? I'll pay the charges.”

“Now that I think about it, might be tough to get the same guy again.”

Reggie laid out another twenty pounds, and the clerk made the call.

Ten minutes later, the taxi pulled up.

“I'm looking for a fare you picked up from here yesterday,” Reggie said.

“I pick up lots of fares. You got a picture?”

“No. Someone who sounded like me.”

“Oh, right. I remember. The other Australian guy.”

“The other British guy. I want to go where you took him.”

“I don't know if I'm supposed to do that,” said the driver.

Reggie sighed and pulled out yet another twenty-pound note.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They drove for forty minutes, moving at a reasonable speed north through the Cahuenga Pass and then slowing to a crawl when they merged onto the Ventura Freeway.

The driver had offered to take an alternate route, over surface streets—but Reggie was not often fooled by such offers from taxi drivers, was not impressed by the boast that they could drive past the studio for
The Tonight Show
, and insisted on the motorway.

A mistake, apparently.

Now, finally, the driver exited the motorway. He made two more turns, covering perhaps a mile, and then came to a stop.

“Why are we stopping?”

“This is it,” he said.

“There's nothing here,” said Reggie.

“Can't help that,” said the driver. “This is where the guy wanted out.”

Reggie got out of the cab.

The air, hot, thick, and lung-tightening, hung in a visible gray haze over the nearby San Gabriel Mountains.

The street was barricaded at all intersection points but one and was thoroughly torn up. The center of it was consumed by a cut-and-cover trench several feet across, like the one Reggie had seen downtown, blocked and covered by wooden barricades and thick plywood platforms.

“Did my brother say where he was going when he got out of your cab?” Reggie asked the driver.

“Why would he tell me? He's not my brother.”

“Which way did he walk?”

“He just stood there, like you're doing. That's where I left him. And I work on the clock.”

Reggie looked to the north, up the street, where an entire city block had vanished into a massive excavation. The site was surrounded by a board fence crowned with razor wire; from the center towered an eighty-foot mustard yellow excavation crane.

The gated entrance was a few dozen yards down the street. But Reggie could see no reason for that to be Nigel's destination.

Reggie looked south. For two blocks in that direction there was nothing but razed, fenced ground, where the original buildings had been leveled in preparation for new construction. But some distance farther was a corporate tower with walls of reflective glass, rising up thirty-odd stories from the floor of the Valley, dominating the skyline like a citadel. It shone dark like obsidian on the shaded side, but bright like steel on the sunlit side, reflecting images of the sage-covered hills and the solidifying layer of smog to the east.

The name of the building glinted in silver block letters on the top floor.

But if that had been Nigel's destination, why would he get out here, a quarter mile away?

“What's in the Paradigm building?” Reggie asked the driver.

“I don't know. Movies, maybe?”

“Take me there,” said Reggie.

He got in the cab and rode the quarter mile to the Paradigm tower. It would have been a bit of a walk from Nigel's drop-off point, but perhaps he had gotten out at the wrong spot by mistake.

They drove south past the two blocks that had been flattened for new construction. In the next block—immediately adjacent to the reflecting tower—construction was already complete, and the new businesses here were apparently flourishing. There was a huge car park and a café that had customers queued up clear onto the pavement.

Reggie paid the driver to wait and got out of the cab at the tower entrance. He entered the lobby, and on a hunch, he pulled out the phone list from Nigel's hotel and carefully perused the building's roster for the production company names Nigel had called.

Nothing. There was no match. It was a bust.

Reggie had the driver take him back to the point where he had dropped Nigel. He got out and looked across at the massive excavation site.

“What are they digging?” he asked the driver.

“Subway terminal,” the driver said. “Seen enough?”

“No,” said Reggie. “Wait for me.”

Reggie crossed the street, his footsteps reverberating on the wooden planking, to the entrance for the construction site.

The excavation pit was more than fifty yards across and at least a hundred in length, with sheer vertical sides. The perimeter was fenced, but through the gate Reggie could see a
construction bungalow. He walked through the gate, heading toward the bungalow.

A pleasant young woman in an orange hard hat and security guard's vest stopped him and asked if she could be of assistance.

Reggie said he wanted to see the foreman. The young woman didn't ask why; she just gave Reggie a quick visual once-over, then turned and went right back into the bungalow.

In an instant she appeared again in the doorway, pointed in Reggie's direction, and then stepped aside as a tall man, face deeply tanned and lined from the sun, came charging down the steps.

He was as much as sixty years old, Reggie judged from the white hair showing under the hard hat, but he could have been much younger from the energy in his stride.

“I'm Sanger,” he said, sticking out his hand, “and you are . . . ?”

Reggie gave his name. Sanger had a grip like stone.

“What station are you with?”

“Excuse me?”

“I put out a statement this morning. You want more, here's your quote, and get it right: ‘Shit happens.' End quote. You want this on tape, you wait till I break for lunch. That's in about six hours. Unless I get busy. Right now I'm due in the pit. Excuse me.”

Sanger began to walk away toward the excavation, and Reggie followed quickly.

“I'm not a reporter,” he said as they strode toward the edge of the pit.

“You're not from Channel Seven?”

“Do I look like a television reporter?”

Sanger stopped and appraised Reggie quickly. “Yes,” he said. “Except for that thing on your forehead.”

“I'm not.”

“Sound like one, too. CNN?”

“I'm not from a news agency of any kind.”

“This is not about Sunset Boulevard?”

“I'm just looking for someone,” said Reggie.

Sanger paused. “You'll have to excuse me,” he said with a sort of sheepish grin. “I've had reporters up the wazoo, and I guess I'm beginning to see 'em behind every rock.”

“That would be annoying.”

“It is. Every damn little thing gets reported. Last week someone broke in here and figured it would be fun to pour five pounds of damn sugar into the mole's gas tank. Standard high school prank, but it made the five o'clock news. Then two nights ago an underground water main ruptures next to the new tunnel between the downtown and Hollywood sites, creating a sinkhole clear across Sunset, and some poor hooker tripped and mussed herself falling in. That made the five o'clock, the six, the ten, and the eleven o'clock news.”

“Of course,” said Reggie. “Nothing gets media attention like water-damaged hookers.”

“Yeah, and I just hope she doesn't sue me for missing a night's work.”

Sanger looked down into the construction pit now, whistled to workers below, and a motor connected to the platform whirred into gear. “So who did you say you're looking for?”

“My brother, Nigel Heath.”

“Don't know the name.”

“I think he might have come here yesterday.”

“For what?”

Reggie had no good answer. “He was looking for work, I suspect.”

“All we're hiring is subsoil engineers. That what he's looking for?”

“Possibly.”

Sanger leaned casually against the precariously low guardrail. He looked Reggie up and down. “Your brother's a sandhog?”

“We don't call them sandhogs at home.”

“What do you call them?”

“Subsoil engineers.”

Sanger put two fingers to his lips and let out a loud and commanding whistle.

The young woman in the orange vest hurried over.

“You see somebody looks like this guy yesterday?” said Sanger.

“Hmm.”

“Or sounds like him?”

“Well, I don't know until I hear—”

“He means a British accent,” said Reggie, “like mine.”

“Oh, yeah. There was this guy I caught running around between the cars.”

“Uh-huh,” said Sanger. “And was that just his way of asking for a job?”

“I don't think so. He said he was tracking a hit-and-run. Or something like that; he was kind of evasive about it. I threw him out.”

“Yeah, thought so.” Sanger gave Reggie a hard look, and then he said to the guard, “Do the same for this one.”

“Thank you for your time,” said Reggie, and the security guard escorted him to the gate.

Sweating from the afternoon heat, Reggie got in his taxi and told the driver to take him back to downtown L.A.