The Big Enchilada

and that was why I had decided to let it go for a while, to see if his confidence would return and he’d get careless again. But if I was right, it also meant that he knew about me and could have sent the warning. I decided I’d have to look into it.
    I had another domestic case that was even more charming than the Acker one-—a case of suspected patricide-to-be George Lansing owned record stores, a chain of fast-service restaurants, and bits of a dozen small companies in the entertainment field. He was loaded, and his only son, George II, had been heavily indulged. Not surprisingly, like most spoiled brats of Hollywood families, he was a disaster. Not content with an Alfa Romeo, unlimited credit at the best stores, and an allowance that was larger than what I earn in a good month, two years ago he decided he wanted it all and made plans to kill his father. The attempt was pure fantasy, involving a phony kidnapping and hired gunmen, and it might have worked if the kid had not read too many comic books. As it was, it failed completely, and the father ended up paying off the hit men. If Lansing had any sense, he would have broken the kid’s neck or thrown him in the slammer. But he wouldn’t press charges and all was forgiven. Shit, he didn’t even reduce the punk’s allowance.
    Everything was fine for a while, and then, surprising only his father, the kid got heavily into dope and started hanging around with other rich kids who were involved in some kind of black magic thing. A couple of months ago Lansing started to receive vaguely threatening letters and packages containing gutted cats, goats’ heads, and things like that. He was worried that maybe all of this was leading up to another assassination attempt, and he wanted me to head it off. I told him the best way to do that was to take the kid out into the ocean and drown him, but he wouldn’t hear of it and still thought he could win Junior over. I was just supposed to find out what was going on.
    I started to make some inquiries among George II’s friends, but they closed up pretty quick and got hostile. They all seemed to be like the kid—too much money, with brains rotted from dope—and I would have enjoyed smashing them around a bit, but a good opportunity had never presented itself.
    I had even spent about five days staking out the Lansings’ Beverly Hills house, to see if I could get a line on what was going on, but nothing seemed to be working, and I had to think of something else. There didn’t seem to be much urgency since the father was leaving the country for a few weeks and I doubted anything more would happen until he came back.
    Still, George II’s friends knew who I was, and that strange warning about Domingo could fit in with the comic book black magic that they practiced. But why bother? I wasn’t any threat to them. It didn’t make any sense, but nothing those degenerate brats did made any sense, so I’d probably have to check it out. Maybe this time I could give them a bit of my magic, two hands-full.
    My last case wasn’t even a case. I ordinarily wouldn’t have bothered about it, but it was a favor for a friend of mine, Mel Perdue, who lived up in Oregon. About two and a half years ago his daughter, Linda,- who was not quite fourteen at the time, had run away from home and come to L.A. This is so common as to be a cliché, but it’s never common for the families involved, and it shattered the Perdues. At first they occasionally heard from her, but then nothing. They became more and more worried, and they tried everything—police, social agencies, advertising—but there was no trace of her. Mel made several trips down here to look for her, and on the last one we happened to run into each other. He told me the story and asked me to help. I didn’t see what I could do, and told him so, but he kept begging, me. Hé even wanted to hire me, and I finally agreed to look into it, even though I thought there was no chance that I’d come up with anything. Two years is a long time in a town that can gobble people up and never spit them out. Perdue wanted to pay me, but I told him there’d be no charge unless I found something that would take a lot of time to follow up.
    I usually don’t give freebies, but it seemed to be such a lost cause, and I wasn’t very busy anyway—-and, hell, he was kind of a friend—that there I was going around with a snapshot of a pretty, blond, innocent-looking thirteen-year-old girl, who, if she