The rain didn’t so much fall as it seeped out of the gray L.A. sky, a greasy drizzle that made the city look like it was sweating out last night’s bad decisions. My office, on the third floor of a building that had given up ambitions of grandeur around the time of the Big One, felt like the city’s confessional. The only problem was, nobody ever left feeling absolved. Especially not me.
She walked in without knocking, as if she owned the place. Maybe she did. Women like her tended to own whatever they were standing in. She was a swirl of expensive perfume and quiet confidence, wrapped in a dress the color of a fresh bruise. Her hair was blonde, not the sunny kind that belonged on a beach, but the pale, cool kind that belonged in a bank vault. Her eyes were the color of money, and they sized me up like I was a bad investment she was about to make anyway.
“Mr. Riley?” Her voice was low and smooth, like whiskey over ice.
“That’s what it says on the door,” I said, motioning with my half-empty glass to the chair that wasn’t holding up a stack of old case files. “The door’s lying about the ‘Investigations’ part, though. Lately it’s been more ‘Sitting and Staring.’”
She didn’t smile. She sat, crossing a pair of legs that could make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window. “My name is Isabella Sterling. I need you to find my husband.”
Sterling. Of course. Alistair Sterling owned half of downtown and had his hand in the other half. Shipping, construction, a piece of a movie studio. He was the kind of man who didn’t get lost; he got misplaced, usually in the company of a starlet young enough to be his daughter.
“When’d he go missing?” I asked, leaning back. The springs of my chair groaned in protest.
“Three days ago. He was supposed to be at a meeting with city councilman Richmond. He never arrived.”
“The police have a whole department for this sort of thing. It’s free.”
“The police,” she said, her voice dripping with disdain, “would create a scandal. Alistair is a prominent man. I require discretion.” She slid a monogrammed envelope across my desk. It was thick with the kind of green that solves problems. My kind of problems. Like overdue rent and an empty bottle of bourbon.
I picked it up. “Discretion costs extra.” I looked inside. There was enough to keep me discreet for a month. “Alright, Mrs. Sterling. Tell me about Alistair.”
She painted a picture of a devoted husband, a shrewd businessman, a pillar of the community. It was a nice picture. The kind you hang in a gallery. But I’d been around long enough to know the real masterpieces are usually hidden in the cellar, covered in dust and blood.
My first stop was Sterling’s office. It was the size of my entire apartment, with a view that made the city look clean and orderly. His secretary, a pinched-face woman named Doris, told me what she’d told the cops who hadn’t been called: Mr. Sterling was a man of routine. He’d left for his meeting and that was the last she saw of him. I snooped around his desk. Everything was neat. Too neat. A man on the verge of disappearing usually leaves a mess. Under a blotter, I found a small matchbook. Not from a fancy club or restaurant, but from a dive bar downtown called ‘The Blue Dahlia.’ It wasn’t Alistair Sterling’s kind of place. Which made it exactly my kind of place.
The Blue Dahlia smelled of stale beer and regret. The bartender had a face like a roadmap of bad neighborhoods. I showed him Sterling’s picture.
“Yeah, I’ve seen him,” he grunted, wiping a glass that would never be clean. “In here a few times last week. Kept to himself in the back booth. Met with a fella.”
“What fella?”
“Small guy. Nervous type. Looked like a bookie who’d lost his own book.”
He didn’t have a name, but he had a lead. And a thirst. I nursed a bourbon and thought about a different case, years ago. A girl named Eleanor. She’d hired me to find her brother, a sweet kid who’d gotten mixed up with the wrong people. I found him, alright. Face down in the L.A. River. The people who put him there didn’t like me asking questions. They worked me over in an alley, left me with three broken ribs and a permanent distrust of smiling strangers. It was a reminder that the truth doesn’t set you free; it just gets you a private room in the morgue.
I shook the memory away. It was as useless as a screen door on a submarine. I spent the next day chasing down Sterling’s business dealings. Everyone I talked to sang his praises, but their eyes told a different story. He was playing hardball on a new waterfront development deal, pushing people out, people who didn’t like to be pushed. One of those people was a low-level mob enforcer named Frankie ‘The Fixer’ Gallo. Frankie was known for making problems disappear. Permanently.
I found Frankie at the Santa Anita racetrack, watching the ponies run. He was a big man in a suit that was trying too hard. He saw me coming and a smirk played on his lips.
“Riley. Still chasing ambulances?”
“Looking for a missing person, Frankie. Alistair Sterling. Heard you two had some words about the waterfront.”
His smirk vanished. “We had a business disagreement. It was settled.” He turned his attention back to the track. Two of his gorillas moved in, boxing me in. They smelled of cheap cologne and violence.
“Heard he was meeting with a nervous little guy before he vanished,” I pressed. “A bookie, maybe?”
Frankie’s eyes narrowed. “You’re barking up the wrong tree, shamus. Go back to your hole before you get hurt.”
It was a clear warning. It was also a confirmation. I’d hit a nerve. As I walked away, I felt their eyes on my back, like two hot pokers. That night, they came for me. They waited in the alley outside my apartment, two shadows detaching from the darkness. I got in one good punch before a sap came down on the back of my head. The world exploded in a flash of white, then faded to black.
I woke up on the floor of my office. My head felt like a drum, and someone was playing a solo on it. My jaw ached, my ribs screamed, and the room was a wreck. They’d tossed the place, looking for something. What, I didn’t know. I dragged myself to my desk, fumbling for the bottle in the bottom drawer. The whiskey burned a trail down my throat, clearing some of the fog. As I sat there, tasting blood and cheap liquor, I thought about the war. On a beach in Guadalcanal, I’d learned that you never see the one that gets you. You’re just walking, and then you’re on the ground, and the sky is spinning. This felt a lot like that. I was in a war I didn’t understand, and the bullets were already flying.
I called Isabella Sterling. I told her I was off the case. It was too hot, too dirty. I could hear the panic in her voice, thin and brittle under the cool facade. She offered me more money. Double.
“It’s not about the money anymore, Mrs. Sterling,” I said, though it mostly was.
“Please, Mr. Riley,” she begged, and for the first time, she sounded genuine. “There’s more to this. Alistair… he kept a private ledger. A little black book. He recorded everything. Every deal, every bribe. It’s… compromising. For a lot of powerful people. I think that’s what they’re looking for.”
Suddenly, it all clicked into place. The nervous bookie. The warnings. The beating. Sterling wasn’t just missing. He was a liability that had been erased. And he’d left behind a stick of dynamite.
“Where’s the book?” I asked.
“I don’t know. That’s why I need you. He has a private safe, somewhere in the city.”
Against my better judgment, I was back in. The book was the key. It wasn’t about finding a missing husband anymore. It was about finding the one thing that could blow this whole corrupt city wide open. I started with the bookie. A few questions in the right places gave me a name: Leo Finn. I found him hiding in a cheap motel in Burbank, looking like a ghost. He was packing a bag in a hurry.
He didn’t want to talk, but the desperation in my eyes—or maybe the .38 I was holding—changed his mind. “Sterling was being blackmailed,” he stammered. “He was paying off Councilman Richmond. For years. It was all about the zoning permits for the waterfront deal. But Sterling got tired of paying. He was going to use his ledger to expose Richmond and the whole ring.”
Councilman Richmond. The man Sterling was supposed to meet. It was a setup. I left Finn to his panicked packing and headed for City Hall, but I was too late. The evening paper was already on the stands. Councilman Richmond had been found in his car by the pier. A suicide, the paper said. A bullet to the temple. Cops on the take don’t commit suicide. They get retired.
I knew where the safe was. It had to be somewhere nobody would look. A place so public it was private. Sterling owned a dozen properties, but one stood out: a small, failing bookstore in Pasadena he’d bought for his wife as a gift years ago. A sentimental gesture. The perfect hiding place.
The store was dark when I got there. I picked the lock on the back door and slipped inside. The air was thick with the smell of old paper and ink. In the small office, behind a framed photo of Isabella, was a wall safe. It wasn’t complicated. The combination was her birthday.
Inside, there was no money. Just a small, black leather-bound book. I had it. I had the dynamite.
I wasn’t the only one who had figured it out. A floorboard creaked behind me. I turned, my hand on my gun. It was Isabella Sterling. She looked pale in the moonlight slanting through the dusty window. And she wasn’t alone. Frankie Gallo stepped out of the shadows behind her, a nasty grin on his face and a cannon in his fist.
“Thank you, Mr. Riley,” Isabella said, her voice as cold as a morgue slab. “You’ve been very helpful.”
“It was you all along,” I said. The pieces fell into place with a sickening thud. “You and Frankie. You wanted your husband’s empire. But he wouldn’t let go. So you had him removed.”
“Alistair was a sentimental old fool,” she hissed. “He was going to ruin everything with his silly book and his conscience. This city was built on secrets, Mr. Riley. It’s a foundation I intend to preserve.”
“And I was the patsy you hired to find the evidence against your partner in crime after you’d already killed your husband,” I said, looking at Frankie. “A little insurance to keep him in line.”
Frankie chuckled. “Smart guy. Too smart.” He raised his gun.
What he didn’t know was that I’d called an old friend on the force before I came here. A detective named Miller, one of the few who wasn’t on anyone’s payroll. I told him if he didn’t hear from me in an hour, he should come have a look. I’d been talking for ten minutes. I just needed to talk for a few more.
“So what happens now?” I asked, holding up the book. “You kill me, take the book, and you both get what you want?”
“Something like that,” Isabella said, a flicker of triumph in her eyes.
That’s when the sirens started, a faint wail in the distance, growing closer. Panic flashed across Frankie’s face. He looked at Isabella, then at me. In that moment of hesitation, I dove behind the heavy oak desk as he fired. The shot splintered the wood where my head had been. I came up, my own .38 barking twice. Frankie staggered back, a look of surprise on his face, before collapsing in a heap.
Isabella didn’t scream. She just stared at the body, then at the ledger in my hand. Then the police were crashing through the door, Detective Miller in the lead.
“Drop it, Riley!” he yelled.
I put my gun on the desk and pushed the ledger towards him. “It’s all in there, Miller. Everything.”
They took Isabella away. She didn’t even look at me. I walked out into the cool Pasadena night. The rain had stopped. The air was clean for a change. I had a hole in my coat, a new collection of bruises, and a check from a dead man’s wife that would probably bounce. It was a hollow victory. The ledger would implicate a few people, but the machine would keep running. The city’s foundation of secrets was still solid. I went back to my office, poured myself a drink from the bottle I kept for emergencies, and watched the neon lights blink, painting the ceiling with colors that promised everything and delivered nothing. Just another night in the City of Angels.