The Picture Ranch 56

Back at the truck I had a good look round it. Why had Rogers been driving an empty flatbed from San D to Encino? The truck was near ten years old. It had so many dinks it looked like a blind man had been driving it for the last three of them. The body-work might have been green once. It was a ‘31 Ford AA. The flat-bed was filthy. Oil, amongst other fluids, had been spilled on it. Some sacking was tied around one of the side-spars that should have had some hardwood attached to it. The truck hadn’t carried anything on the flat bed for a long time. I went to the cab, Rogers had left the keys. I hadn’t driven anything as old as a Double-A in some time. You never forgot some things, and for me the start-up routine for the old Ford was one of them. I was on the point of just getting in and starting up, when I decided to lift the bench-seat upholstery, just to see if there was anything underneath.

There must have been fifty 1lb Holly Sugar bags in the recess where most drivers would have kept a jack and a tyre-iron. I took out one of the bags. I knew it wouldn’t have any kind of sugar in it. That bag – and what I could see of the others under the seat – had been re-sealed with Scotch tape.

I opened the bag. Dipped a finger in the white powder. Either Jeanne Eagels had come back from the dead and Fatty Arbuckle was throwing her a house party, or someone at The Picture Ranch was dealing in happy powder wholesale. Jammed down the side of the recess was a billfold. Cheap, dime-store leather that looked like it was made from the skin of a groundhog. There were three dollars and a scrap of paper with a name and phone number.

‘Caruso, Encino 316’.

Maybe the powder had come in via the San Diego Destroyer Base. Most military drug smuggling was done by ships from the Battle Force coming back for decommissioning or refurbishment. Not usually on such a scale, although there were lots of places to hide 50 lbs of anything aboard a battleship. Maybe Rogers had some Navy contacts. One fisherman knows another from a long way off, as a Russian hostess had once told me in far-off Shanghai bar. She’d had lots of those proverbs, not all of them made sense, but I remembered another one about fish: ‘Big fish eat the little fish.’ Anyone who was thinking about moving that much of the powdered mayhem was either a very big fish, or someone who had ambitions to be one.

By the time it was full light, I’d released the parking brake and was pointing the beat-up jalopy in the direction of LA and Encino, out the other side. I doubted Caruso was expecting anyone he knew. Anyone could call themselves Rogers; after all, Len Slye had a year-and-a-half before and never looked back.