“You don’t have to tell me,” I snapped, “who the fuck Carl Hall was.”

Goddamn. The most dangerous columnist in D.C. knew I’d been in the thick of the events the night “Steve” had been caught and the ransom money reclaimed…short by three hundred grand.

“The job pays two thousand dollars and expenses,” Pearson said. “I have the two thousand in cash, in my safe. Right here, right now. Or is the A-1 Agency, with its various branches coast to coast, so successful now that you can sneeze at a mere ‘two grand’…hmmm?”

Two thousand in cash. Everything in this damn mess was cash. Even when I was dealing with the most notorious tightwad in the nation’s capital.

“When can you work in an L.A. trip, Nathan?”

“Soon,” I said.

* * *

Bunker Hill had once been home to the wealthy of Los Angeles, but the rich and powerful had long since moved on, leaving it to the poor and helpless, the neighborhood’s formerly magnificent Victorian homes subdivided into shabby apartments whose inhabitants clung to the leaning walls like poison ivy on a trellis.

Angel’s Flight, the funicular railway carting passengers 315 feet up and down the sheer slope between Hill and Olive Streets, had once been a grand tourist attraction and even now its two orange-trimmed-black cars transported several thousand a day, though their cable screech was like screams of pain.

These days it took a reckless tourist to brave the blighted neighborhood. A slum clearance project had begun several years ago, and now the top of the once fashionable hill had been lopped off, razed of its Gothic two-stories to make way for planned plazas and possibly even skyscrapers that would tower over the hill they crushed along with its ethnic mix of pensioners and poets, dope dealers and drunks.

A street over from where the Angel’s Flight would have done me some good, I went up steep cement stairs as cracked as the skin of the old men in rockers on the wide porches of leaning gingerbread houses where even the most foolish Hansel or Gretel would never risk entry. My destination—the Hillcrest Hotel—offered monthly and weekly rates and was not without its luxuries: it boasted hot and cold running water.

The cranky old heavyset gal behind an excuse for a check-in desk pointed up toward the second of the hotel’s two floors, where (she said) John Hagan lived in apartment 2B.

“Or not to be,” I said to her.

“Huh?” she said.

Even I can’t charm all the ladies.

“Is he in?” I asked.

“It’s not my turn to look after him.”

I jerked a thumb at the adjacent open stairway. “You see him go up?”

“No. He drives cab some. Might be in, might not.” She leaned on her elbow; fat settled around the bone on the filthy scuffed counter, lending support. “Anything else I can do to make your life any fucking easier?”

Somehow she did not sound sincere. I gave her a “no thanks” anyway and went up creaky stairs whose last shellacking had not bothered with cleaning the dirt off first. Of course I hadn’t been dusted off either since the old desk gal’s shellacking.