have no idea where we were. Blair wasn’t in the mood for a guided tour, and just shrugged her shoulders at every question. Her mind was obviously on the minutes ticking away toward her prized vaginal tuck.
An hour of this, and we pulled up in front of a blindingly white house perched on the edge of what looked like a cliff face, looking down on the valley of Los Angeles. I got out of the car first, eager to relieve my aching ass. The light was beautiful. I never realized, until I was there, exactly why the movie business settled out there. It wasn’t just getting out of New York and living an economic version of the Wild West. Up there, over the smog line, the light had a sharp clarity that would have made a painter cry. Somehow, though, I figured every artist in L.A. was probably down there under the orange, cutting up sheep and making funny boxes and calling that art instead.
I tried explaining the thought to Trix, but she told me about the acquaintance of hers down there who performed his art by breaking into abandoned hospitals and reenacted horrifying nineteenth-century medical procedures with morbidly obese mental patients and strippers covered in blood.
Blair let us into the house. The hallway looked like a four-star hotel lobby. Blair explained that Brom was tied up for much of the day, but wanted us to treat the house as ours until he got home. She gave us the once-over one more time, as if judging how much of Brom’s stuff we could steal, and then took off at a brusque speed, eager for stitches in her nether regions.
Once the door was shut, I made a show of looking around. “Your friend does okay for himself, huh?”
“Brom’s very successful. Takes on big corporate cases to fund pro bono civil-liberties cases. He used to be in New York, fighting Giuliani. Moved out here after 9/11.”
“Good friend of yours?”
“We dated a little bit, I guess. He’s a very good friend, yeah.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Mike, we had this conversation. Are you going to be weird about this?”
“No, no. Just tired. It’s been a bad couple of days, you know?”
“You’re telling me.”
“You’re coping pretty well.”
She grinned and kissed me fast and hard. “Why shouldn’t I? You saved me.”
“Just remember that when your lawyer ex wants to do pro bono in your pants.”
“Beats paying rent. I’m joking. Quit looking like you just shit yourself.”
“I’m going to go exploring for food. If I’m not back in a couple of days, call the police. I may have gotten lost in this guy’s closet or something.”
Chapter 44
Are edamame food?”
“Sure,” Trix called from the living room, about two miles away from me in the kitchen. “It’s a bean. You steam them and have them with rock salt.”
I replaced the bag of green things that had been left artfully on the counter and went back to grubbing around the cupboards in the vast brushed-steel kitchen. Piles of unopened packets and boxes of alien things that could possibly be food, and stacks of books about the Atkins and GI diets. I wasn’t totally convinced that Trix’s friend ever actually cooked in here. Nothing seemed to have been used, and things were arranged for aesthetic pleasure more than utility. This was a guy that ate out a lot.
Since Trix wasn’t in sight, I went through the drawers. A sheaf of bills in the first drawer, each one bearing a Post-it note saying that an assistant had paid it. The sheaf sat a little high, for the depth of the drawer. I pulled the sheaf out. The drawer had a false bottom, a DIY job held in by two clips. I popped the left-hand clip and lifted the thin wooden sheet up. There was a handgun, a new leather shoulder holster, and a slim box of ammunition underneath. The gun’s license documentation was laid underneath it.
I have some knowledge of guns from the Chicago days. I don’t particularly like them. That said, I’ve never met a lot of people in law enforcement or the investigative business who did. Cops tend to view them as tools. Detectives tend to see them either as insurance or, on many occasions, an excuse to be shot at. The guys who like guns are usually the ones found on slabs with ballistics geeks tweezering lumps of pulped metal out of their chests.
I smiled at this gun. It was a Ruger Super Blackhawk, .44 Magnum. I met the famous detective Jay Armes