Parishioner Read Online Free PDF Page B

bother?”
    “If you can prove to me that you have a lead on him, and if you give me that lead, I will pay you six hundred dollars and you can buy more cigarettes and chili dogs.”
    “What kind of lead?”
    “You know better than I do, man. Here’s my card. Call me if you think of something.”
    Xavier gave the PI a special card imprinted only with his cell phone number.
    “There’s no name on this card.”
    “You know my name already.”
    “I don’t think I’ll have anything for you.”
    “If you do there’s six hundred dollars in it.”
    The detective pursed his lips, again probably unconsciously.
    Marilee Pepper worked the sixth-floor research center at the main branch of the LA Public Library. Sixty years old, she was at the zenith of her abilities by Xavier’s estimation. Tall, six one, and white like antique ivory, she was all the way gray and serious about her work. Xavier had met her while researching jobs in the Los Angeles labor market. That was when he had just arrived in LA; seventy-two hours or so after he and Swan had slaughtered Marquis Bertrand.
    “Hello, Mr. Noland,” Marilee said. She even smiled, a little.
    “Ms. Pepper.”
    “It’s such a beautiful day, isn’t it?”
    “Every day is beautiful in paradise.”
    They always shared the same words of greeting. It was like the delivery of passwordsunder cover of darkness during a bloody civil war.
    “How can I help you?” the librarian asked.

    Xavier didn’t know exactly where the schematics were stored or how to read them if he had. But Ms. Pepper could call up the right blueprints and maps that would reveal the corner where, twenty-three years ago, there was a suspended stoplight that worked at the intersection of two streets, at least one of which was a boulevard, in Culver City.
    “How’s Mr. Matthews?” Xavier asked, while Ms. Pepper studied the computer screen on the desk before her.
    The severe librarian had a soft spot.
    “He had to have an operation.”
    “What was wrong?”
    “A growth in his abdomen. They said that the only way to tell if it was benign or not was to get it out.”
    “How did he do?” the once heartless gangster asked.
    Remember kindness and repeat it
, Father Frank had preached.
It doesn’t matter if it feels unnatural or forced. Goodness sets its own table
.
    “He’s doing just fine. For the first week he tried like heck to scratch off the bandages but I’d hold him and we finally made it through. It was my first vacation from work in thirty-one years.”
    “That calico has nine lives and you are every one.”
    Marilee Pepper looked up gratefully. Her hard, white, and oval face was brightened by the glow of the computer screen and sentiment.
    “There are four possible intersections,” she said. “Twenty-three years ago four-way signals were in some use. I’ll print out the cross streets.”
    “I really appreciate this, Ms. Pepper.”
    “As do I,” she replied.

    Ecks tried two of the intersections before pulling up to the curb on Lancaster Avenue where it met Kasidis Boulevard.
    There was no individual house standing on the corner of the first two cross streets. If the baby trafficker’s home had been at any one of those intersections it was now rubble underneath an ugly, rectangular apartment building.
    He sat in his car by the curb wondering about architecture and the way planners named streets in Los Angeles County. Avenue and boulevard were big names for such small side streets. He couldn’t quite make out why there was a stoplight there at all. It must have been, he thought, management for the larger streets and people taking shortcuts through the neighborhood. Or maybe a child had been run over and a neighborhood group had pressured the local political machine.
    There was very little traffic at that time of day: little traffic, three gaudy apartment buildings, and a solitary house the lawn of which arched from one avenue onto the other boulevard.
    The stucco apartment buildings had