Vic Daniel 6 - As she rides by

of water called the Tijunga Wash where, appropriately, he had a wash.
    “Ah, the ladies,” I said at that point.
    “Chief, what can you do,” he said. “She wants me washed, I wash.” He shuddered at the very memory. I mused once again at the power frail womankind can exert over the most obdurate and determined male. Then he made his way still further northward up Woodman, where he spent the night with his lady friend, presumably a-sipping rum and a-puffing Kools. Two of her friends dropped in during the evening, one with the leftovers of a macaroni casserole, the other with a bottle of blackberry cordial. Then came the dawn, and the rest I knew.
    Well, to make a long story short—or shorter, at least—I drove out and visited the lady; she lived in a small, two-room clapboard house surrounded if not engulfed by monster cacti, with an imposing collection of empties piled up in the garage. She was a short, stocky, moonfaced woman who looked more Eskimo than anything else, and she was not pleased to see me. When I suggested better me than the cops, she said, “Just.” I got a signed statement from her, also from the macaroni-maker next door but one, as to Joe’s whereabouts on the night in question, and the times involved. These testaments would undoubtedly spring Joe as the time of poor Gertie’s death was known to the second, as the high school kid who’d found her and who’d called the cops was with her when she died and from the savagery of the beating she’d taken the coroner had declared there was no way she could have survived more than a few minutes. At which time, I now had evidence, the newly scrubbed Joe was many a mile away.
    So sprung Injun Joe was, and with nary a word of thanks for guess who. And there he was, in the vacant lot, gazing up at me blearily.
    “Morning, chief,” he said finally, nodding in my general direction.
    Then he immediately began slapping all his pockets, as if he was searching for something. “Doggone it, Vic, I’m out of Copenhagen again, can you believe it?”
    So I slipped him a couple of bucks, which he tucked down inside one boot, then he hoisted himself up smartly, gathered up his blanket, and took off briskly for the nearest booze store which, who knows, conceivably might have sold Copenhagen snuff as well as quart bottles of the cheapest and nastiest wine in the world.
    I looked around for King. He was abluting against the trunk of a scraggly-looking tree that had somehow managed to survive the combined assaults of LA smog, acid rain, school kids’ switchblades, and winos’ waste products. While he was so doing, never-endingly, a large panel truck drew up right in front of me, then parked. On the side of the truck there was inscribed the message, “Gilbert’s Fencing & Home Security.” Two large black gentlemen emerged. Both were wearing brown overalls on which was inscribed “Gilbert’s Fencing & Home Security.” They opened up the back of the van and began unloading various materials—heavy link fencing, aluminum posts, rolls of wire, a small jack-hammer, a sledgehammer, a post-hole digger, and so on. King and I watched with considerable interest.
    Despite certain comments from a certain blonde, King had already been trained—and well trained, too—in the basics of survival in an urban environment, trained, may I say, by an expert in such affairs—one V. (for Victor) Daniel. Thus, although only just coming up to eight months of age, he stayed strictly off all streets unless accompanied, knew how to sit, lie down, stay, when it was safe to mooch and when it was not, also which felines he was allowed to chase—i.e., in particular, that mangy, flea-ridden specimen that used to sharpen its talons on my convertible top. But no longer, thanks to my good boy.
    The point is, I didn’t have to keep an eye on him every second when we were out, which meant I had both eyes free to observe the activities of the men from Gilbert’s. It took me no time at all to deduce that what they were doing was preparing to fence off King’s vacant lot. I strolled over to the largest of the two, the one without the baseball cap.
    “Morning.”
    “You don’t say!” His eyes goggled with surprise. “Hear that, Amos?”
    “No, what?” his friend called over.
    “Man says it’s morning.”
    “You don’t say!” his friend said.
    I sighed. “Putting up a fence, I see.”
    “Oh,” he said. “Is that what we’re doing. Thought we were constructing a topless