I stood, stretched, said, “Good riddance,” out loud.
Dressing in khakis, shirt and tie, and a lightweight tweed jacket, I drove to West Hollywood.
The Hilldale address Kathy Moriarty’s sister had given me was between Santa Monica Boulevard and Sunset. The house was a graceless box, the color of week-old newspaper, on a thirty-foot lot, shielded nearly to the roof by an unkempt eugenia hedge. The roof line was flat, layered with Spanish tiles painted black. Flat black- it looked like an amateur job, some of the terra cotta showing through in places, the hue that of a poorly dyed brown shoe.
The eugenia hedge ended at a short, collapsing driveway- asphalt struggling with weeds in the couple of feet not taken up by a twenty-year-old, bird-bombed, yellow Oldsmobile. I parked across the street, walked across a dry, clipped lawn packed harder than the asphalt. Four paces took me to a three-step cement porch. Three addresses in black metal letters were nailed to the right of the gray plank door. A piece of adhesive tape, now darkened to the old-paper tint of the house, covered the doorbell ringer. An index card with KNOCK in red ballpoint was wedged between the bell frame and the stucco. I followed instructions and was rewarded, seconds later, with a “Hold On!” in a sleepy-sounding male voice.
Then: “Yeah?” from behind gray wood.
“My name is Alex Delaware and I’m looking for Kathy Moriarty.”
“How come?”
I thought of Milo’s suggestions of subterfuge, decided I had no stomach for that, and opted for technical truth:
“Her family hasn’t seen her in a while.”
“Her family?”
“Her sister and brother-in-law. Mr. and Mrs. Robbins, in Pasadena.”
The door opened. A young man clutching a handful of paintbrushes in his right hand looked me up and down. No surprise, no suspicion. Just an artist’s eye gauging perspective.
He was in his late twenties, tall and solidly built, with dark hair combed back and tied in a foot’s worth of ponytail that dangled over his left collarbone. His face was heavy and soft-featured under a low flat forehead and shelf brows. The gestalt was simian- more gorilla than chimp- helped along by black eyebrows that met in the middle and a wash of black stubble that ran up past his cheekbones, swooped down his neck till it merged with his chest hair. He wore a black polyester tank top emblazoned with the logo of a skateboard company in tomato-red letters; baggy, flowered, orange-and-green knee-length shorts, and rubber beach sandals. His arms were coated with dark, coiling hair just past the elbow. The skin above that was hairless and white and slabbed with the kind of muscle that would pump up easily but looked slack and unused. A dried patch of baby-blue paint stained one bicep.
I said, “Sorry to disturb you.”
He glanced at the brushes, then back at me.
I pulled out my wallet, found the business card I’d taken from Milo last night, and handed it to him.
He studied it, smiled, studied me, and gave it back. “I thought you said your name was Del-something.”
“Sturgis is in charge. I’m working with him.”
“An op,” he said, grinning. “You don’t look like one- at least not like the ones on TV. Guess that’s the point of it, though, isn’t it?
I smiled.
He studied me some more. “A lawyer,” he finally said. “Defense, not prosecution- or maybe some kind of professor. That’s how I’d cast you, Marlowe.”
“Do you work in the movies?” I said.
“No.” He laughed and touched a paintbrush to his lips. Lowering it, he said, “Though I guess I do. Actually. I’m a writer.” More laughter. “Like everyone else in this town, right? But not screen plays- God forbid screenplays.”
His laughter rose in pitch and lingered, hovering on the brink of giddy. “You ever write one?”
“Nope.”
“Give yourself time. Everyone’s got a hot property-’cept me. What I do for a living is graphic art. Airbrush- photorealism to sell products. What I do for fun is
“Interesting,” I said, not sounding very convincing.
“Yeah,” he said cheerfully, “as if you give a shit. You just want to do your job and go home to your lonely P.I. Murphy bed, right?”
“Boy needs a hobby.”
He said, “Oh, yeah,” transferred his brushes to his left hand and held out his right and said, “Richard Skidmore.”
We shook, he stepped back and said, “C’mon in.”
The interior of the small house was prewar budget construction: cramped dark rooms that smelled of instant coffee and takeout food, marijuana, and turpentine. Textured walls, rounded archways, tin wall sconces, all of them bulbless. A brick mantel above a fireplace was piled high with Presto logs still in their wrappers. Thrift shop furniture, including some plastic-and-aluminum-tubing outdoor pieces, was assembled randomly on worn wood floors. Art and its accoutrements- odd-shaped, hand-stretched canvases in various stages of completion, jars and tubes of paint, brushes soaking in pitchers- were everywhere but on the walls. A paint-encrusted easel sat in the center of the living room, amid a mound of crumpled paper, broken pencils, and charcoal stubs. A draftsman’s table and adjustable chair were set up in what looked to be the dining area, along with a compressor attached to an airbrush.
The walls were unadorned, but I noticed a single piece of white construction paper nailed above the mantel. Calligraphic lettering at the center read:
“My novel,” said Skidmore. “Both the title and the opening line. The rest will happen when the old attention span kicks in- it’s always been a problem for me, but hey, it didn’t stop the last couple of presidents, did it?”
I said, “Did you meet Kathy Moriarty through your writing?”
“Work, work, work, Marlowe? How much does Boss Spurgis pay you to get you to be so conscientious?”
“Depends on the case.”
“Very good,” he said, smiling. “
Another appraising glance. I started to feel like a still life.
“Think I’ll use you in my next piece,” he said, drawing an imaginary line in the air. “The Private Eye: The Things He Sees- The Things That See
He lifted several canvases covered with abstract splotches from a pool chaise and dumped them on the floor unceremoniously. “Sit.”
I did and he lowered himself onto a wooden stool directly in front of me.
“This is great,” he said. “Thanks for dropping by.”
“Does Kathy Moriarty live here?”
“Her place is in back. Garage unit.”
“Who’s the landlord?”
“I am,” he said with pride. “Inherited it from my grandfather. Gay old blade- ergo the Boys’ Town location. Came out of the closet twenty years after Grandma died, and I was the only one in the family who didn’t cut him off. So when he died, I got all of it- the house, the Bloatmobile, hundred shares of IBM stock. The art of the deal, right?”
