“Here’s something else you may not know,” Frank said. I tuned out his monologue as we left the Los Angeles Basin and drove up Lookout Mountain. I needed to focus on the job at hand. Laurel Canyon Boulevard is another of those impossibly narrow, precipitously curvy and overly trafficked two-laners cut through the Santa Monica Mountains. The things you have to go through, driving in Los Angeles. Mountains. Traffic. Flash floods. Mudslides. Wildfires. Coyotes. I’d miss the kid for sure and probably the weather come next February, but I wouldn’t miss the driving. No wonder Mimi didn’t do it anymore.
We made it to Mulholland Drive without plunging over the edge and coasted down the other side into the San Fernando Valley. Frank directed us to the studio in question, which, he informed us, was once home turf for slapstick silent movie king Mack Sennett before his business went belly-up in 1928 and he sold out. Using the studio as our pivot point, we worked our way through the neighborhood in ever-expanding circles. I’ll say this for the Valley. Proprietors of charming and expensive-looking restaurants close to the studios don’t seem to care if there’s a muffler repair shop next door on one side, a head shop on the other, and an end-of-days-looking convalescent home across the street with ambulances hogging all the good spots out front. I guess they figure the parking valets will keep all the grim reality of drugs and engine failure and eminent death from bursting everybody’s expense-account bubble.
Frank saw it first, of course. “Neon palm tree! There! Over there!” he shouted, pointing urgently with his elbow. I pulled over in front of a pink motel named “The Sunset.” Other than its color, it fit Mr. Vargas’s description exactly.
We all got out of the car and stood on the sidewalk, looking. “I don’t remember it being called ‘The Sunset,’” Mr. Vargas said. “I think it used to be called ‘The Blue Hawaiian,’ come to think of it. Mimi’s reason for picking this place had something to do with Elvis, though as I remember Elvis was dead by then already.” He leaned through the arch over the driveway entrance and looked around. “Put some money in the parking meter. I think this may be it.”
While Frank took care of the meter, I put my cell on speakerphone, called the front desk, and asked for Mimi Banning. The desk clerk said there wasn’t anybody registered there under that name. “How about Mimi Gillespie?” I asked. Nada. “M. M. Banning?” I tried after that.
“We have no one registered here under that name, either,” the clerk said. She sounded young, maybe too young to have heard of M. M. Banning. Don’t the kids read The Pitcher in junior high school anymore?
“Do you have a very small woman who’s been staying with you about a week? Middle-aged, pixie haircut, wears cardigan sweaters?” I asked.
The desk clerk wasn’t too young to think something fishy might be going on when somebody calls and offers up as many aliases as I had. “I’m afraid I can’t share any information about our guests with you,” she said. Then she hung up.
I said, “I think Mimi’s in there.”
“Why?” Frank asked. “That woman just said she wasn’t.”
“That’s just it,” I said. “She didn’t say she wasn’t there. What she said was that she couldn’t share information about their guests.”
“The unsaid said!” Frank shouted. “Now I get what Dr. Abrams means when she’s trying to explain ‘subtext.’ What would I do without you, Alice? You’re the best Dr. Watson I will ever have.”
WE HUDDLED IN the shadows just outside the arch, trying to be inconspicuous while we worked out our next move.
“We can’t knock on every door. The desk clerk will notice us,” I said. “We need to narrow the possibilities a little.”
“My mother didn’t come in a car, so don’t try a room with one in the garage,” Frank said.
“Smart,” I said.
“I know,” Frank said. “My IQ is higher than 99.7 percent of the American public’s.”
About half of the carports were empty. “Would it be better to wait until after dinner, when all the guests are parked for the night?” I asked.
“My mother would never open her door for an unexpected guest after dark,” Frank said.
Mimi wouldn’t open the door for an unexpected guest, ever. “Good point,” I said. “So let’s do it now. Where should we start?”
“Room Twelve,” Mr. Vargas said. “I can still see those numbers on the door. When I knocked, I knocked once, then twice. One, two. Twelve. For luck. Fat lot of good that did me.”
Frank took off across the parking lot. I started to go after him, but Mr. Vargas grabbed my arm. “She’s his mother. Let him find her, if she’s in there. If she’s not, well, we’re close enough to rescue him if he needs it.”
We watched the kid knock on the door, once then twice like Mr. Vargas had. When it didn’t open he stepped into the scruffy plantings under the window and bobbed up and down, trying to see in through the shutters. Then he went back to the door and took out his wallet.
“He must be looking for something to write on so he can slip a note under the door,” I said. “I wonder if he has a pen? I may have one.” I scrabbled through my Mary Poppins satchel, looking.