“No.”
An oddly cold chill coursed through me as I processed this. “You’ve never been below the restaurant?”
“No.”
“And no one else knows who the guy in the iron mask is?”
“No one. At least, not the other squires. We don’t hang out much with the knights.”
“And you tried looking into this yourself?”
“I did.”
“And what happened?”
“I was told that if I was ever seen near the elevator again, I would be fired.”
“So why are you calling me?” I asked.
“I want you to find out who the man in the iron mask is.”
“Why?” I asked.
This time there was a lot of silence, and I found myself shaking my head. In this business, you never knew who was going to call you. The homeless man continued weeping. In my mind’s eye, I saw my son’s burned flesh. His burned and smoking flesh.
Finally, the guy on the phone spoke. “Because I think the man in the iron mask needs help.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think—and this is the part where I know I sound crazy—that he might really be a prisoner.”
“Not crazy,” I said. “Batshit crazy.”
I heard him breathing on his end of the line. Breathing hard. Raspy. He’d gotten himself worked up. Finally, he said, “Do you want the job?”
I thought about it—and thought about my past few crazy cases, both of which involved creatures of the night—and said, “What the hell. Crazy is right up my alley.”
Chapter Two
Roxi and I were sitting on her balcony.
We were looking out over Los Feliz, which is a sort of borough in Los Angeles, except they don’t call them boroughs here, and I can never pronounce Los Feliz right anyway. Whenever I try to pronounce it right, I get corrected, and if I try to pronounce it another way, emphasizing the ‘e’ in Feliz, I get corrected again. I’ve decided there might just be something wrong with me.
“How do you pronounce Los Feliz?” I asked Roxi again, who was now my girlfriend of a couple of years, God bless her patient heart.
“Not the way you pronounce it,” she said. She was sipping on a glass of chardonnay with her feet crossed over the balcony railing. Three stories below, a steady stream of people swept up and down Vermont Avenue. Toward, undoubtedly, a slew of trendy restaurants.
“No one pronounces it the way I pronounce it,” I said. “Apparently, I’m the only one in Los Feliz who can’t pronounce Los Feliz.”
“Los Feliz,” she corrected, emphasizing the ‘e’ in a way I thought I just had. “And you’re not the only one who can’t pronounce it. People who just move here can’t pronounce it; that is, until they learn how to pronounce.”
I sighed in a manner that suggested I gave up, which I don’t often do for anything, especially cases.
Roxi grinned and reached out and touched my thigh in a way that always sent a shiver through me. And just as the feeling coursed through me, I fought it back. What right did I have to feel shivers, or pleasure of any kind?
I didn’t. Not now. Not ever.
Roxi must have sensed me recoil, even if slightly, and gently withdrew her hand. How and why she stayed with me was still a perplexing puzzle that I had quit trying to understand nearly two years ago. If I hurt her feelings by recoiling, she didn’t show it. She knew me better than most—perhaps better than anyone. She knew I was damaged goods, and she knew what she had gotten herself into. Instead, she took a sip from her chardonnay, re-crossed her legs and asked what case I was working on.