Page 27

“That is passive intelligence.”

She held out a hand for me to shake and then smiled, reminiscent of a child who had just learned a new game.

Not far from the intersection of Ivan Hill Terrace and Lakewood Avenue there was a slender seven-story building covered in pink plaster. The windows were many and small, quite a few of them boarded up. In the hallway vestibule there was a list of business names next to buttons that, one assumed, rang the company concerned. Finley Pettis, photographer, was on the fifth floor. Ardyne Mechanics was on the fourth and Penelope Cosmetics was on the sixth; neither of these businesses answered their rings.

“Pettis,” a man said through the speaker a few seconds after I pressed the button for floor 5.

“Joe Oliver, here to see Malto Lamming.”

“Yes, Mr. Oliver, we’ve been expecting you. Come on up.”

Magically, the two-man elevator door slid open. I got in and the sardine can began its ascent.

When I reached the photographer’s studio, the door opened into a vast room inhabited by two men.

One young man, standing closer than the other, greeted, “Hello, Mr. Oliver.”

He was dressed in comfortable clothes and had a thirty-five-millimeter camera hanging from a leather strap around his neck. “Mr. Lamming is washing up.”

I walked toward the man thinking about old-time Hell’s Kitchen, because the photographer’s space, like that old-time neighborhood, in the day, seemed to have fallen into disuse.

The moment I stepped across the threshold I was grabbed by both arms by two other men whom I hadn’t seen. Before I could resist, I was struck on the side of the head with the camera at the end of an arc of its leather sling. I went down. Then I was lifted into a chair. I wanted to fight back but my limbs had turned into spaghetti. I could feel my wrists and ankles being secured.

When my eyes cleared there were four men, including the man who used his camera as a mace, surrounding me. They were serious men in work clothes. These were all white men. Not one of them smiling or even wondering.

“We gonna ask you some questions, son,” said a thirty-something man who wore a faded blue T-shirt and black jeans. I think he was wearing tennis shoes, but my memory of those moments is not completely reliable.

I looked at him, wondering if he was in charge.

“What’s your business with Mr. Lamming?”

I understood the words, but the answer had gotten lost in the maze of my garbled mind.

The questioner slapped me… hard.

“I’m a private detective,” I managed to get out before he could slap me again.

“I asked about what you wanted with Mr. Lamming.”

“And I am trying to answer. My profession is part of that answer.”

He gave me a three-second stare that might have given a lesser man a heart attack, or at least a case of the runs.

“Go on,” he threatened.

“I was hired by a guy named Arman Babylon to locate his granddaughter, Twyla. Arman used to be the part owner of a New York nightclub called the Carnelian Oyster Bar. There was a new club with almost the same exact name in Santa Monica. I went there because I thought Babylon’s daughter might have been seen by someone.”

The man in black and blue socked me three times. He knew how to hit. I know how to take it.

“Let’s try that again,” my torturer said.

There was the faint sound of a siren in the distance.

Good, I hoped. Smart.

“I’m a private detective,” I said.

He hit me again.