"Who?"
"John Connor. Ever heard of him?"
"Sure," I said. Everyone in the division had heard of Connor. He was a legend, the most knowledgeable of the Special Services officers. "But isn't he retired?"
"He's on indefinite leave, but he still works cases involving the Japanese. I think he could be helpful to you. Tell you what. I'll call him for you. You just go down and pick him up." Hoffmann gave me his address.
"Okay, fine. Thanks."
"And one other thing. Land lines on this one, okay, Pete?"
"Okay," I said. "Who requested that?"
"It's just better."
"Whatever you say, Fred."
Land lines meant to stay off the radios, so our transmissions wouldn't be picked up by the media monitoring police frequencies. It was standard procedure in certain situations. Whenever Elizabeth Taylor went to the hospital, we went to land lines. Or if the teenage son of somebody famous died in a car crash, we'd go to land lines to make sure the parents got the news before the TV crews started banging on their door. We used land lines for that kind of thing. I'd never heard it invoked in a homicide before.
But driving downtown, I stayed off the car phone, and listened to the radio. There was a report of a shooting of a three-year-old boy who was now paralyzed from the waist down. The child was a bystander during a 7-Eleven robbery. A stray bullet hit him in the spine and he was—
I switched to another station, got a talk show. Ahead, I could see the lights of the downtown skyscrapers, rising into mist. I got off the freeway at San Pedro, Connor's exit.
What I knew about John Connor was that he had lived for a time in Japan, where he acquired his knowledge of Japanese language and culture. At one point, back in the 1960s, he was the only officer who spoke fluent Japanese, even though Los Angeles then had the largest Japanese population outside the home islands.