"I gotta go home and mull this over, Nelson," Lynn said wearily. "The guy's a foreigner: husky, bald, resourceful. I wonder if he has a big pink birthmark on his forehead?"
Chapter 8
One slice wheat toast no butter, a small grapefruit juice, a multivitamin, two cups of coffee. Breda hadn't altered that breakfast since she'd moved to the desert. That, coupled with all the bike riding, and measuring red meat portions by their atomic weight, had gotten her back into a size six where she intended to stay.
But she had to remain longer at the breakfast table since moving from Los Angeles. Now she had to read the local paper for potential business information, as well as the L. A. Times. The local obituaries were grim. The desert valley had one of the state's highest per capita incidences of AIDS victims. The obituaries would usually begin: "After a long illness . . . And survived by longtime friend . . ."
Being a single woman she often thought about AIDS, but in the months she'd been in the desert it wouldn't have mattered to her personal safety if the whole male population had hepatitis.
Working to get her house and her business established had left Breda little time for men. She'd had drinks with a few, and dinner with a Palm Springs lawyer whom she'd met through another attorney client, though it wasn't actually a date. They just went to the same place after a meeting, and had sat at the same table, and he'd paid. He'd called her several times, but she learned he was married. Breda didn't have time in her life for complications like that.
She finished writing a letter to her daughter, Lizzy, stacked the breakfast dishes in the sink, checked the time and hurried to the bathroom to brush her teeth. A silk jumpsuit, blue to match her eyes, and white flats seemed okay for this day's work. She had a "shopping" job she had to do in the afternoon, if she could find the time.
Shopping to a P. I. meant loss-prevention work. Breda had been hired by a downtown department store to investigate the sales clerks. The store had been having some unexplained losses in the sportswear department, and three clerks were suspected. For over a week Breda had been trying to give two hours a day to the shopping job but hadn't spotted anything unusual.
She hated shopping jobs but hated another job even more, and one of those too was on her calendar. She'd been retained to investigate the bartenders at The Unicorn, a restaurant recently opened on south Palm Canyon Drive. The owner of The Unicorn had hired a new bartender who wore a Rolex and a diamond ring, and this alone had worried the boss, who was sure that one of his bartenders was ripping him off.
Breda told her client that he should be glad that the new bartender had the Rolex and ring because it meant that he'd already stolen the money to buy them from somebody else. She told him that if he wanted an absolutely honest deal from a bartender he'd have to make the guy work in a Speedo swimsuit, follow him every time he went to the john, and hire someone from Chicago to search his body cavities at closing time.
Breda decided that she'd give the saloon job to Lynn Cutter and take over the Clive Devon surveillance that morning. She couldn't bear the thought of sitting in a gin mill like a daytime barfly, avoiding the moves of local lotharios so old they were moldering.
She drove to Clive Devon's Las Palmas home and found Lynn in his car half a block away drinking coffee. He'd parked in the opposite direction this time so as not to alarm gardeners, maids or other servants who might get curious. This time he spotted her in his rearview mirror before she opened his car door.
Without so much as a good morning, Lynn said, "It's too bad I'm not an Augua Caliente Indian. Just think about it. I could get drunk and raise hell anywhere I want, and keep the law out by claiming I live on sacred ground. I could plug the cracks in my walls with five-dollar bills. I could use my spa to barbecue cows in. I could have Kevin Costner speak up for me if anybody tried to throw me in jail, and no one would dare say I was a drunk, or even dumb. They'd say I'm an Indian. I wish I was a Palm Springs Indian. I'd never have to worry about money again."
"What brought all this on?" Breda asked.
"This job you gave me," Lynn said. "I met a guy last night, a little policeman from the south end, they call him Dirty Hareem. And he informed me we're in the middle of some kind a smuggling conspiracy. Or at least, Clive Devon might be. And I don't need a thousand scoots bad enough to jeopardize my pension by getting involved in whatever it is."
"Explain, please."
"Have you heard or read anything in the past couple days about some smuggler jumping out of a private plane long enough to do a soccer demonstration on some deputy?"
"Sure. It was on all the local news programs."