The Straight Man - Roger L Simon Read Online Free PDF Page B

little gizmo under the dash. It's kind
of a rolling disguise."
    "Clever, clever."
    "Not clever enough for us, though, was it?"
I pulled into a mini-mall, parking right in front of a brightly lit
7-Eleven.
    "Sit tight."
    "Sure thing, Bull Drummond."
    Bull Drummond? That was from the Golden Age of the
Nickelodeon. I got out of the car and walked into the liquor store,
then went straight out the back way without even a sideways glance at
the irritated clerks. Outside, I quickly pulled an old baseball cap
out of my hip pocket and a pair of nonprescription horn-rimmed
glasses and moved quickly around the block, crossing the boulevard at
the next light. As I expected, a somewhat battered cream-colored
Toyota was parked about forty yards down at the proper vantage point
to see all the exits from the mini-mall. A hefty dark-haired guy in
his fifties, probably an ex-cop, was seated in the driver's seat,
tapping impatiently on the steering wheel.
    I approached casually, made a mental note of his
license plate, then crossed the street about thirty feet from his
car, returning to the back of the 7-Eleven, where I took off the hat
and glasses, bought a sixpack of Harvey Weinhard (with a receipt for
Emily Ptak), and returned to the car. The Toyota followed me all the
way out to Venice and then back to West Hollywood after I had dropped
off Sonya. It remained outside my apartment for a half hour. By then
it was one-thirty. I turned off my lights and went to sleep.
    The next morning I called my DMV contact to check out
the Toyota. It usually took him about fifteen minutes to get back to
me with his packet of information, so I made myself some coffee and
stared out my kitchen window down the Strip past the same billboards
for AIDS and the California Hunger Project. About a mile off, the
Astro House glowed gold in the morning light. A classic Art Deco
mini-scraper from the twenties with a spire like the Chrysler
Building and a site that dominated half of Los Angeles, it had fallen
on bad times, its original bas-reliefs flaking and its ornate windows
boarded up or smashed. If someone ever bothered to fix it up, it
would've been a masterpiece. But in this era of dying gays and
starving Africans, I wouldn't have given it top priority.
    The Toyota, a 1973 Corolla, was the fully owned and
sole vehicle of one Stanley Burckhardt. He had one moving violation
for running a stop sign in 1984 and was listed on 2380 Sixth Street
in Los Angeles. I dialed him straight off. The phone answered: "Peace
of Mind Insurance. Can I help you?"
    I hung up immediately. Peace of Mind Insurance.
Obviously one of my colleagues and, just as obviously, a specialist
in unsavory domestic matters—divorce, adultery, X-rated motel
surveillance—everything, in short, that makes a private eye feel
like a seedy schmuck. This was going to be easier than I thought.
    I pulled up in front of Burckhardt's office about a
half hour later. It was on a run-down part of Sixth just shy of the
Miracle Mile district, as if whatever saint decreed such matters had
said, "The miracle stops here!" and the blocks and blocks
of shiny mirrored high-rises were suddenly interrupted by a 1915
vintage lump of neo-Victorian sooty brick called the Fallbrook Arms.
My son Simon and his buddies could have improved it with a little
graffiti.
    I ignored the flaking plaster and urine-scented
corridors and marched directly up to Burckhardt's office on the
fourth floor, barging in on him so quickly he didn't have a chance to
get his maple bar out of his mouth and put away his copy of Penthouse
Forum.
    "What's the matter?" I said. "Couldn't
you afford someone for your morning run or were they just better than
you are? You know, some of us work in the daytime. In fact, some of
us work at libraries or at the courthouse or the registrar of voters
or the Hall of Records. Of course, some of us don't work at all!"
I was pouring out a lot of vitriol at this small-time loser and I
didn't particularly like it. It had the