When the back door opened and Nate whistled to him, Wesley entered and saw the tweaker sitting on the couch in the living room looking glum. Viktor was formally reading the guy his rights from a card that every cop, including Viktor, had memorized.

Nate handed Samuel Culhane’s driver’s license to his partner and said, “Run him, Wesley.”

After Viktor had finished with the rights advisement, he said to the unhappy homeowner, “You are not pleased to see us?”

“Look,” Samuel Culhane said, “you ain’t searching my house without a warrant, but I’ll talk to you long enough to find out what the hell this is all about.”

“We must find out where you were on a certain night.”

“What night?”

“Three weeks ago. You were driving your Pinto with a lady friend, no?”

“Hah!” Samuel Culhane said. “Driving with a lady friend? No! I’m gay, dude. Gayer than springtime. You got the wrong guy.”

Persisting, Viktor said, “You were driving on Gower south of Hollywood Boulevard that evening.”

“And who says so?”

“You were seen.”

“Bullshit. I got no reason to drive down Gower in the evening. In fact, I don’t even go out till around midnight. I’m a night person, man.”

“There was a woman in your car,” Viktor said.

“I told you I’m gay! Do I gotta blow you to prove it? Wait a minute, what crime was I supposed to’ve done?”

“You were seen at a mailbox.”

“A mailbox?” he said. “Oh, man, now I get it. You’re gonna try to fuck me with a mail theft.”

Wesley came in then and handed an FI card to Viktor on which he’d scribbled some of Samuel R. Culhane’s rap sheet entries.

Reading, Viktor said, “You have been arrested for fraud… one, two times. Once for counterfeiting. This is, as they say, consistent with the theft of U.S. mail from a public mailbox.”

“Okay, fuck this,” Samuel Culhane said. “I ain’t spending a night in jail till you guys get your shit together and figure out you got the wrong guy. I’ll come right out and tell you what’s what if you’ll go away and leave me be.”

“Proceed,” Viktor said.

“I rented my Pinto for a week to a guy I know. I got another car. He lives down there off Gower with an idiot tweaker who calls herself his wife but they ain’t married. I warned them both, don’t fuck around and do any deals in my Pinto. They didn’t listen to me, did they? I’ll show you where he lives. His name’s Farley Ramsdale.”

Hollywood Nate and Wesley Drubb looked at each other and said it simultaneously and with such gusto that it startled not only Samuel Culhane but Viktor Chernenko as well.

“Farley!”

That goddamn Olive, she never puts anything in its proper place. Farley was still thinking of Olive in the present tense although he knew in his heart that she was in the past. He had to admit there were things he was going to miss. She was like those Bedouin women who walk through minefields while the old man stays fifty yards behind on the donkey and follows in her footsteps. Never less than obedient. Until now.

Finally he found the key cards in the bottom drawer of the kitchen together with the egg timer she’d never used and a badly burned skillet that she did use. They were the best key cards they’d ever stolen, and they had always fetched a good price. Just the right size and color, with just the right mag code to look exactly like a righteous California driver’s license once they slapped the bogus facsimile on the front. He was going to have to find another woman partner to hang around that particular hotel and get more of them. Maybe a halfway classy woman who would never arouse suspicion. He tried to think of a halfway classy woman he might know but gave up trying immediately.

Of course he knew that the junkyard rendezvous was very dangerous and might be a trick of Cosmo’s to kill them, but after he’d told Cosmo that Olive had boogied and Cosmo still wanted him to make delivery, he figured it was probably okay. That fucking Armo wouldn’t dare try to kill him with Olive out there able to dime him to the cops if Farley went missing. Would he?

He might. Farley had never dealt with anyone as violent as Cosmo, so that’s why he’d devised a little plan of his own. Sure, he was going to drive to that lonely junkyard on that lonely fucking road in east L.A., where no white man in his right mind would roam around at night. But he wasn’t stepping one toe out of his car, no way. He was going to drive up, wrong side of the road to that fence, reach out, and grab the paper bag. And if the money was in there, he’d pull into the yard, spin a sweeping U-turn, blow his horn until Gregori came out, toss him the paper bag with the key cards in it, and zip on out of that yard and back to white man’s country-if Hollywood could be called white man’s country these days.

And if there wasn’t a trap at all and Gregori got insulted by his method of delivery and threatened not to do business with him anymore, too fucking bad. Gregori shouldn’t hang with gun-packing Armos like Cosmo. He should stick with thieving, chiseling, blood-sucking Armos like himself. Yeah, Farley thought with waxing confidence as he fantasized about the glass he’d be smoking tonight, where’s the glitch in that plan?

Suddenly he was hungry from all that thinking, but he couldn’t bear the thought of a cheese sandwich. He had a yearning for Ruby’s doughnuts, especially for a couple of those big fat cream-filled, chocolate-covered specials. He found the emergency twenty-dollar bill he had stashed in his underwear drawer, where Olive would never look, then propped up the broken back door as best he could and left for Ruby’s. Like Pablo’s Tacos and the cybercafé, Ruby’s Donuts was one of the last stops on the Tweakerville Line.

He saw a couple of tweakers he knew in the parking lot, looking hungry but not for doughnuts. Come to think of it, this was the first time he’d ever gone to Ruby’s looking for something to put in his stomach. The Hollywood nights were growing more and more strange and weird and scary for Farley Ramsdale, and he couldn’t seem to stop it from happening.

They didn’t really need Samuel R. Culhane to lead them to Farley’s house. A call took care of that. The FI file was full of shakes involving Farley Ramsdale and Olive O. Ramsdale, and it also had their correct address as shown on his driver’s license. Like other tweakers, they were always getting stopped and FI’d. But Viktor pretended that Culhane’s presence was needed just to be sure that if left alone, he wouldn’t make a warning call to Farley.

Driving his Pinto, Samuel R. Culhane did as he was told and led 6-X-72 and Viktor Chernenko to Farley’s house, where he slowed and indicated the house with his left-turn signal. Then he took off for home while the cops parked and piled out of the black-and-white, approaching the house with their flashlights off.

As before, Wesley went to cover the back door. He found it partially ajar, one hinge hanging loose, and propped in place by a kitchen chair. Nate and Viktor got no response and there were no lights on in the house. Wesley checked the empty garage.

“He’s a typical tweaker,” Nate said to Viktor. “Out hunting for crystal. When he finds it he’ll come home.”

“I must arrange for a stakeout,” Viktor said. “I feel very strong that this Farley Ramsdale stole the letter from the mailbox that led to the jewel robbery. Yet it is only a feeling. But I am positive that the jewel robbers are the ATM killers. This shall be the biggest case of my career if I can prove that I am correct.”

“This could be one for the TV news and the L.A. Times,” Hollywood Nate said.

“It is more than possible,” Viktor said.

Hollywood Nate paused for a moment and only one word came to him: “publicity.” He thought about walking into a casting office with a Times under his arm. Maybe with his picture in it.

“Viktor,” he said, “since we’ve been in on this with you so far, how about calling us if the guy shows up? We’d be glad to transport for you or help you search for evidence-whatever. We were there during the grenade trick and we sorta feel like this is our case too.”