Self-Defence

up.'

'Have you heard from him since?'

'No. I tried him a couple times from here, no answer.' He looked at his watch. 'Maybe I should try again.'

There was a pay phone up the hall. He called, waited, and came back shaking his head.

'Poor kid,' he said, looking at the door to Lucy's room. 'Puck said she'd been through some kind of rough jury duty and was pretty freaked out, but I had no idea she was this… vulnerable.'

He buttoned his jacket. Tight around the waist. 'Too many business dinners,' he said, smiling ruefully. 'Not that I imagine she's had it easy. Did she tell you who our father is?'

I nodded.

He said, 'I don't know if she's had any contact with him, but if she has, I'd be willing to bet that's at least part of her stress.'

'Why's that?'

'The man's a total and complete sonofabitch.'

'Have you had contact with him?'

'No way. He lives here- up in Topanga Canyon, big spread. But that's a call I'll never make.' Unbuttoning his jacket. 'When I first started in the business, I used to have fantasies of his going bankrupt and me buying his land up cheap.' Smile. 'I've been in counseling myself- got divorced last year.'

'What happened twenty years ago?'

'Pardon?'

'You said the last time you saw Lucy was twenty years ago.'

'Oh. Yeah, twenty, twenty-one, something like that.' He squinted and scratched the side of his nose. 'I was nine, so it was twenty-one. It was the summer my mother decided to go to Europe to take painting lessons- she was an artist. She drove us- my sister Jo and me- down to L.A. and dropped us off at Sanctum. That's the name of his place in Topanga.'

'I've heard of it- a writer's retreat.'

'Yeah. Anyway, here she is, dumping us on him, no advance notice. He was about as happy as getting a boil lanced, but what could he do, kick us out?'

'And Lucy was there too?'

'Lucy and Puck. They came up a couple of weeks after we did. Tiny little kids, we didn't know who they were; our mother had never told us they even existed, only that he'd left her for another woman. As it turned out, their mom had died a few years before, and the aunt who had taken care of them had gotten married and dumped them.'

'How old were they?'

'Let's see, if I was nine, Puck would have had to be… five. So Lucy was four. We looked at them as babies, had nothing to do with them. Tell the truth, we resented them- our mother was always bad-mouthing their mother for stealing him away.'

'Who took care of them?'

'A nanny or some kind of baby-sitter. I remember that because they got to sleep with her in the main house while Jo and I had to stay in a little cabin and basically fend for ourselves. But that was okay. We ran around, did whatever we wanted.'

'Twenty-one years ago,' I said. 'That must have been right after Sanctum opened.'

'It had just opened,' he said. 'I remember they had this big party for the opening, and we were forced to stay in our cabin. Along with plates of food. Tons more spread out on these long white banquet tables, leftovers for weeks. I used to sneak into the kitchen and swipe pastries. I gained ten pounds- that was the beginning of my weight problem.'

People shouting or maybe they're laughing… and lights like fireflies.

Another glance at his watch. 'Well,' he said, 'good to meet you. If there's anything I can do-'

He turned to leave.

'How long will you be in L.A.?'

'I was supposed to fly back tonight. Do you think- is there a chance Lucy would want to meet me?'

'Hard to say, right now. She's pretty out of it.'

'Yeah, I understand,' he said sadly. 'I wonder where Puck is, why he didn't show. Here.'

Pulling out a crocodile billfold, he removed a business card and gave it to me.

THE ALPHA GROUP

Kenyon T. Lowell

Senior Vice President,

Acquisitions

(415) 547-7766

'I've got meetings all day, but I probably can stick around till tomorrow morning. If she does want to meet me, or if you hear from Puck, I'm staying at the Westwood Marquis.'

'Do you have Puck's number handy?'

'Right here.' An identical card came out of the wallet. On the back was a Valley exchange, written in blue ballpoint.

'Let me get some paper and copy it down,' I said.

'Take it,' he said. 'I know it by heart.'

10

He left and I returned to Lucy's room. She was still sleeping, and I gave my name to the ward clerk along with a message for Dr. Embrey. Then I phoned West L.A. Detectives and got Milo at his desk.

'What's up, Alex?'

'Lucy tried to kill herself last night. She's out of danger, physically, but still pretty knocked out. I'm at Woodbridge Hospital, out in the Valley. They'll be keeping her here.'

'Fuck. What'd she do, cut her wrists?'

'Stuck her head in the oven.'

'You find her?'

'No, her half brother did. Lucky for her he stopped by looking for the other brother and saw her through the window, on her knees in the kitchen. Talk about Providence.'

'Her drapes were open and she's got her head in the oven? What was it, a cry for help?'

'Who knows? She never dropped any hints to me. Still, I'm trying hard not to feel like an idiot.'

'Jesus, Alex, what the hell happened?'

'It's complicated. More than you could ever imagine.'

'And you can't tell me.'

'No, in fact, I need to. But not over the phone. When can we get together?'

'Coming back into the city?'

'Yup.'

'Gino's in forty-five.'

***

Gino's Trattoria is on Pico, not far from the West L.A. station: checkered tablecloths, hanging Chianti bottles, rough wines.

Even during the day, the place is murky, lit by table candles in amber globes that are never washed. The one at Milo's rear corner table illuminated him from the bottom, accentuating every crater and lump, giving him the look of a gargoyle with chronic back pain.

He was wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and dark tie. Even at that distance I could tell his hair was freshly cut- military clip at the sides, long and shaggy on top, to-the-lobe sideburns that were hip, now, and against department