Was this music store, with cracked and taped windows, moldy cardboard cartons piled by the front door, the headquarters of Will Buchalter, a mail who moved like a political disease through a dozen countries?
I remembered a story about the Israeli agents who captured Adolf Eichmann as he was returning from his job in an automobile plant somewhere in South America. One of the agents was young and could not quite accept the fact that he was now face-to-face with the man who had murdered his parents.
'What job do you perform at the auto plant?' he asked.
'I'm one of the chrome polishers. We polish all the chrome surfaces on the new automobiles,' Eichmann answered.
According to the story, the agent began to weep.
The door to the store was locked, but I could see a man moving around behind a counter. The wind was blowing a wet, acrid stench through the space between the buildings. I tapped on the glass.
The man inside waved his hand negatively. I tapped again. He walked toward me, saying the word Closed so I could read his lips. He wore a sleeveless flannel shirt and black jeans that sculpted his sex. His blond hair was coated and waved with gel, his white arms wrapped with tattoos of green and red dragons.
I shook the doorknob when he tried to walk away.
'I'm a friend of Will's,' I said.
'He's gone,' the man said through the glass.
'Open up. I've got to leave him a message.'
'Sorry, we're closed. I don't know how else to say it.'
'Where's Marie?'
'Come back Monday,' he said, and dropped the Venetian blinds down the glass.
I got back in my truck and drove three blocks up the street. Then I circled back, parked at the end of the alley, and walked toward the rear of the store under the eaves of the buildings. A rusted-out trash barrel was smoldering in the rain, and again I smelled a moist, acrid odor that was like the smell of a dead bat in an incinerator.
Just as I reached inside my raincoat for my .45, he stepped out the back door with a sack of trash in his hands. I slipped my hand back out of my coat and fixed a button with it.
'What's with you?' he said.
'I got to be back at the halfway house by dark, you hear what I'm saying?'
'No.'
'Maybe you think you're doing your job, but you're starting to piss me off,' I said.
'Excuse me.'
'Look, I was supposed to connect with him when I got out. I just had six fucking years of putting up with smart-ass watermelon pickers. I'm begging you, buddy, don't fuck up my day any worse than it already has been.'
'All right, I'm sorry, but it don't change anything. I got to lock up. Will ain't here. Okay? See the man Monday.'
He dropped the paper bag into the trash barrel and turned to go back inside. I shoved him hard between the shoulder blades, followed him inside, and laid the muzzle of the .45 against the back of his neck.
'Get down on your knees,' I said.
'I don't know who you are but—'
'You've got a serious hearing problem,' I said, kicked him behind the knee, and pushed him into the counter. His eyes widened with pain when his knees hit the floor.
'Where is he?' I said.
'He don't tell me that kind of stuff. I work for him, he don't work for me. Who are you, man?'
'What do you care, as long as you get to live?'