The Monkey's Raincoat Read Online Free PDF Page A

was a deeppurple, coal red in the west behind black palm-tree cutouts. I drove south on Laurel Canyon, up the hill toward home.
    I had very much wanted to turn up some good news for Ellen Lang. But good news, like magic, is sometimes in short supply.

4

    It was eight o’clock when I pulled into the carport. I put the eggplant in the microwave to reheat and ate the antipasto while I waited. Oily. Sonny’s had gone downhill. The little metal hatch I’d built into the door off the kitchen clattered and the cat walked in. He’s black and he walks with his head sort of cocked to the side because someone once shot him with a .22. I poured a little of the Wheat beer in a saucer and put out some cat food. He drank the beer first then ate the cat food then looked at me for more beer. He was purring. “Forget it,” I said. The purring stopped and he walked away.
    When the eggplant was ready I carried it and the beer and the cordless phone out onto the deck. The rich black of the canyon was dotted with jack-o’-lantern lit houses, orange and white and yellow and red in the night. Where the canyon flattened out into Hollywood and the basin beyond, the lights concentrated into thousands of blue-white diamonds spilled over the earth. I liked that.
    I’m in a rustic A-frame on a little road off Woodrow Wilson Drive above Hollywood. The only other house is a cantilevered job to my east. A stuntman I know lives there with his girlfriend and their two little boys. Sometimes during the day they come out on their deck and we’ll see each other and wave. The boys call my place the teepee house. I like that, too.
    When I bought the house four years ago I tore off the deck railing and rebuilt it so the center section was detachable. I detached it now, and sat on the edge of the deck with my feet hanging down, eggplant in my lap, and nothing between me and Out There. The chill air felt good. After a while the cat came out and stared at me. “Okay,” I said. I poured some more of the Wheat beer on the deck. He blinked, then lapped at it.
    When the eggplant was gone I called the answering machine at my office. There were three messages from Ellen Lang and one from Janet Simon Ellen Lang sounded scared in the first two and teary in the third. Janet Simon sounded like JanetSimon. I called Ellen Lang. Janet Simon answered. It works like that sometimes.
    â€œMort came back and tore up the house. Could you come over here?”
    â€œIs she okay?”
    â€œHe was gone when she got here. I made her call the police but now she’s saying she won’t let them in the house.”
    â€œWant me to pistol-whip her?”
    â€œDon’t you ever let up?”
    Apparently not. It took me eighteen minutes to push the Corvette down the valley side of Laurel, up onto the freeway, and over to Encino. Ellen Lang lived in the flat part above Ventura Boulevard in what’s called a sprawling California Tudor by realtors and Encino Baroque by people with taste. Janet Simon’s pale blue Mustang was on the street in front of the house. I pulled into the drive behind a Subaru wagon, cut the engine, and went up to the door. It opened before I could knock. Ellen Lang was pinched and thin behind her glasses, more so than this morning. She said, “I called you. I called and called and you weren’t there. I came to you so the police wouldn’t get involved and now they are.”
    Janet said, “Oh, for God’s sake, Ellen.”
    I had one of those dull aches you get behind the eyes when your beer drinking is interrupted.
    Ellen Lang said, “Well, it’s Mort’s house, isn’t it? He can do what he wants here, can’t he? Can’t we call the police back and tell them it was a mistake?”
    I followed them like that into the living room.
    Every large piece of furniture had been turned over and the bottom cloth ripped away. Books had been pulled off the shelves and cabinets