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RBB [voiceover]: Up to that moment, I had that rare sensation, which has come over me only twice in my life, that a Palm Court jazz band was in my skull playing Cole Porter love songs. The moment that Namagomi mentioned the name "Jason Cranky," however, I could feel the bandleader shrug and sigh, and see him motion to his musicians, who then without missing a beat struck up Bernard Herrmann's music to the "shower sequence" from PSYCHO.
I didn't want to overreact. It was, after all, New York City, right in front of City Hall, which was crawling with cops, So I decided to play it cagey....
RBB: So ... Jason Cranky sent you?
NAMAGOMI: Nobody sent me. I read the newspapers on-line, Professor. You're big news in L.A.
RBB: Twenty-four hours ago I was a broken-down private detective who had just lost his biggest case, his office, his secretary, his license, and was about to lose everything else. That purple bastard took away everything I had!
NAMAGOMI: And gave you a reasonable facsimile of the life you used to have before that one came apart and forced you to relocate to L.A. and become a private detective. Why do you think he did that?
RBB: To get rid of me, goddamnit!
NAMAGOMI: Or maybe because he felt sorry for you and wanted to give you another chance to be the man you used to be and could be again?
RBB [voiceover]: I didn't want to think about that, because if I did I'd have to confront everything that had gone wrong such a short time ago, everything that forced me west to L.A., to that airless office with the dusty file cabinets and the two-inch-wide view of the Pacific Ocean. Losing the woman I loved ... losing the career I loved ... losing all that had ever mattered to me ...
A newsvender was staring curiously at us, his turban crisp and white in the afternoon sunlight and, with, his well-trimmed beard, proclaiming his Sikh ancestry. I remembered that the Sikhs were fearsome warriors, which reminded me of a former friend whose fate was a mystery to me ... Wulfgar ...
This was getting hard to take. I decided to shift ground and go on the offensive.
RBB: You have a hell of a lot of nerve probing into my life, dredging all that garbage up, figuring out which of my buttons you're going to push next. Why are you here? What do you want from me?
NAMAGOMI: I was wondering whether your new lease on life meant that you were restricting yourself to cases over one hundred years old, or whether you might --
RBB [voiceover]: Suddenly, her voice faltered, and to my amazement I saw tears in her eyes. As she touched them with a handkerchief, I sniffed warily, knowing that actors often concealed a piece of raw onion in a handkerchief to help them through playing emotional scenes. But her handkerchief smelled only of a delicate perfume, and given that I had already smelled that perfume on her, I knew that she wasn't exploiting any kind of allergy she had
RBB: ...whether I might... -- what?
NAMAGOMI: ... help me.
RBB [voiceover]: I cursed under my breath. Goddamn it all to hell, but I could never withstand the appeal of a woman in distress. And the elegant, lithe woman standing before me was clearly in distress. It quivered through her noble voice; it shone in her dark, piercing eyes. I felt helpless -- as if I were crawling into a web -- but I knew that if I turned her away, I'd never be able to look at myself in a mirror again.
RBB: OK, lady, let's find someplace quiet to sit down and kibits.
[END OF CHAPTER TWO]
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