The Picture Ranch 68

It was getting dark, the whole block was lit up already. Rickshaws that had starred in The Good Earth were filled with tourists “all the way from Ashtabula” and slowed us down to a crawl. I felt like I’d been awake for a year. The rag top was down on the Packard. It had rained most of the way. People gawked at us from the sidewalk, not quite believing how much Moose made us look like we were cruising China City in a clown car. We pulled up outside The Yellow Screen. The lights were on, but it didn’t look busy. We left the automobile beside a fire hydrant, with Moose standing guard, just in case the local flatfoot tried to make something of it.

I tried the door. It was locked.

‘You stay here with Moose., I’ll go around back. Kitchen doors are always left open, if the cooks can get away with it.’ I pointed down the alley.

Naturally, Miss G was right behind me when we saw the light spilling out of a kitchen that was empty and very quiet.

‘No shooters,’ I said, but it made no difference, Eleanor had her pea-shooter out of her purse and her jaw set. So we went inside.

The gas was lit on the range, a pot the size of a small armchair had boiled over. It had contained enough rice for a hundred weddings. Cleavers and knives were scattered on every surface. One cleaver was stuck in a rack of ribs. There were dry goods and vegetables all over the stone floor.

‘Maybe they’re out catering for Joe Ardizzone.’

Miss Grafenberg rolled her eyes and then pointed at the entrance to the restaurant, before putting her finger to her lips.

I went through the door gun-barrel first. The restaurant wasn’t empty, but you couldn’t say it was full of life. There was a lot of blood for just two corpses.  

The maître d’s white shirt was mostly red, the same colour as the blood on the tiled floor. Since it was still pooling under one of the tables, I figured he hadn’t been shot too long before. The Thompson had made a few holes in the décor, including the Anna Mae Wong photographs. The other body was dressed in the regulation cheong-sam and tied to a chair. It wasn’t one of the waitresses we’d seen last time. The wig was askew. The boy was about sixteen and the make-up wasn’t very good. It was even worse than Luise Rainer’s. He hadn’t been shot. Somebody had tried the death of a 1000 cuts, but the poor kid hadn’t lasted much past thirty-five, a dozen of which were to his face.

‘It’s not…’ Miss G didn’t finish the sentence.

And although it could have been, I said, ‘No, no it isn’t.’