13

At six the next morning Reacher went up to Neagley’s suite. He found her awake and showered and guessed she had been working out somewhere for an hour. Maybe in her room, maybe in the hotel gym. Maybe she had been out jogging. She looked sleek and pumped up and vital in a way that suggested there was a whole lot of oxygenated blood doing the rounds inside her.

They ordered room service breakfast and spent the waiting time on another fruitless round of phone calls. No answer from East LA, none from Nevada, none from New York, none from Washington D.C. They didn’t leave messages. They didn’t redial or try again. And when they hung up, they didn’t talk about it. They just sat in silence until the waiter showed up and then they ate eggs and pancakes and bacon and drank coffee. Then Neagley called down to the valet station and ordered her car.

“Franz’s place first?” she asked.

Reacher nodded. “Franz is the focus here.”

So they rode the elevator down and got in the Mustang together and crawled south on La Cienega to the post office at the tip of Culver City.

They parked right outside Franz’s trashed office and walked back past the dry cleaner and the nail salon and the discount pharmacy. The post office was empty. A sign on the door said that the lobby had been open a half-hour. Clearly whatever initial rush there had been was over.

“We can’t do this when it’s empty,” Reacher said.

“So let’s find the landlord first,” Neagley said.

They asked in the pharmacy. An old man in a short white coat was standing under an old-fashioned security camera behind the dispensing counter. He told them that the guy who owned the dry cleaner’s store was the landlord. He spoke with the kind of guarded hostility that tenants always use about the people who get their rent checks. He outlined a short success story in which his neighbor had come over from Korea and opened the cleaners and used the profits to leverage the whole strip mall. The American dream in action. Reacher and Neagley thanked him and walked past the nail salon and ducked into the cleaner’s and found the right guy immediately. He was rushing around in a crowded work area heavy with the stink of chemicals. Six big drum machines were churning away. Pressing tables were hissing. Racks of bagged clothes were winding around on a motorized conveyor above head height. The guy himself was sweating. Working hard. It looked like he deserved two strip malls. Or three. Maybe he already had them. Or more.

Reacher got straight to the point. Asked, “When did you last see Calvin Franz?”

“I hardly ever saw him,” the guy answered. “I couldn’t see him. He painted over his window, first thing he ever did.” He said it like he had been annoyed about it. Like he had known he was going to have to get busy with a scraper before he could rent the unit again.

Reacher said, “You must have seen him coming and going. I bet nobody here works longer hours than you.”

“I guess I saw him occasionally,” the guy said.

“When do you guess you stopped seeing him occasionally?”

“Three, four weeks ago.”

“Just before the guys came around and asked you for his key?”

“What guys?”

“The guys you gave his key to.”

“They were cops.”

“The second set of guys were cops.”

“So were the first.”

“Did they show you ID?”

“I’m sure they did.”

“I’m sure they didn’t,” Reacher said. “I’m sure they showed you a hundred dollar bill instead. Maybe two or three of them.”

“So what? It’s my key and it’s my building.”

“What did they look like?”

“Why should I tell you?”

“Because we were Mr. Franz’s friends.”

“Were?”

“He’s dead. Someone threw him out of a helicopter.”

The dry cleaner just shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t remember the guys,” he said.

“They trashed your unit,” Reacher said. “Whatever they paid you for the key won’t cover the damage.”

“Fixing the unit is my problem. It’s my building.”

“Suppose it was your pile of smoldering ashes? Suppose I came back tonight and burned the whole place down?”

“You’d go to prison.”

“I don’t think so. A guy with a memory as bad as yours wouldn’t have anything to tell the police.”

The guy nodded. “They were white men. Two of them. Blue suits. A new car. They looked like everybody else I see.”

“That’s all?”

“Just white men. Not cops. Too clean and too rich.”

“Nothing special about them?”

“I’d tell you if I could. They trashed my place.”

“OK.”

“I’m sorry about your friend. He seemed like a nice guy.”

“He was,” Reacher said.