cartons. A smaller collection than I would have expected.
Milo and I carried all of it into the living room, then I called my pond maintenance people and arranged for them to collect the fish.
When I returned to the pile, Milo and Robin were staring at it. She said, 'I'm going to go over to the shop and get the small tools and the breakable things together- if that's okay.'
'Sure, just be careful,' said Milo. 'Anyone weird hanging around, just turn around and come back.'
'Weird? This is Venice we're talking about.'
'Relatively speaking.'
'Gotcha.' She took the dog with her. I walked her down to her truck and watched as they drove away. Milo and I had a couple of Cokes, then the doorbell rang and he went to get it. After looking through the peephole, he opened the door and let in three men- boys, really, around nineteen or twenty.
They were thick faced and had power lifters' rhino physiques. Two white, one black. One of the white ones was tall. They wore perforated tank tops, knee-length baggies in nauseating color combinations, and black lace-up boots that barely closed around their tree-stump calves. The white boys had their hair cut very short, except at the back, where it fringed around their excessive shoulders. The black's head was shaved clean. Despite their bulk, all three seemed awkward- intimidated.
Milo said, 'Morning, campers, this is Dr. Delaware. He's a psychologist, so he knows how to read your minds. Doctor, this is Keenan, Chuck, and DeLongpre. They haven't figured out what to do with their lives yet, so they abuse themselves over at Silver's Gym and spend Keenan's money. Right, boys?'
The three of them smiled and cuffed one another. Through the open door I saw a black van parked near the carport. Jacked-up suspension, black-matte reversed hubcaps, darkened windows, diamond-shaped bulb of black plastic set into the side panel, a skull-and-crossbones decal just below that.
'Tasteful, huh?' said Milo. 'Tell Dr. Delaware who recovered your wheels for you, after a miscreant scumbag junkie made off with it because you left it on Santa Monica Boulevard with the key in the ignition.'
'You did, Mr. Sturgis,' said the shorter white boy. He had a crushed nose, puffy lips, a very deep voice, and a slight lisp. The confession seemed to relieve him and he gave a big grin. One of his canines was missing.
'And who didn't charge you his usual private fee because you'd run out of trust fund that month, Keenan?'
'Was that a gift?'
'No, sir.'
'Am I a chump?'
Shake of the thick head.
'What did I demand in return, boys?'
'Slave labor!' they shouted in unison.
He nodded and rapped the back of one hand against the palm of the other. 'Payoff time. All this stuff goes into the Deathmobile. The really heavy gear's over in Venice- Pacific Avenue. Know where that is?'
'Sure,' said Keenan. 'Near Muscle Beach, right?'
'Very good. Follow me there and we'll see what you're made of. Once you're finished, you'll keep your mouths shut about it. Period. Understood?'
'Yes, sir.'
'And be careful with it- pretend it's bottles of liver shake or something.'
10
We met up with Robin and loaded her pickup. Watching her shop empty made her blink, but she wiped her eyes quickly and said, 'Let's go.'
We set up a caravan- Milo in the lead, Robin and the dog in the truck, me in the Seville, the van trailing- and headed back to Sunset, passing Beverly Glen as if it were someone else's neighborhood, entering Beverly Hills, and driving north onto Benedict Canyon.
Milo turned off on a narrow road, poorly paved and sided with eucalyptus. A cheerless, white iron gate appeared fifty feet up. He slipped a card key into a slot and it opened. The caravan continued up a steep pebbled drive hedged with very high columns of Italian cypress that looked slightly moth-eaten. Then the road kinked and we descended another two or three hundred feet, toward a shallow bowl of an unshaded lot, maybe half an acre wide.
A low, off-white one-story house sat in the bowl. A long, straight, concrete drive led to the front door. As I got closer I saw that the entire property was hilltop, the depression an artificial crater scalped from the tip.
Canyon and mountain views surrounded the property. Lots of brown slopes and a few green spots, flecked with the lint of occasional houses. I wondered if mine could be seen from up here, looked around but couldn't get my bearings.
The house was wide and free of detail, roofed too heavily with deep brown aluminum tile supposed to simulate shake, and windowed with aluminum-cased rectangles.
A flat-topped detached garage was separated from the main building by an unfenced paddle tennis court. A ten-foot satellite dish perched atop it, aimed at the cosmos.
A few cactus and yuccas grew near the house, but that was it in terms of landscaping. What could have been front lawn had been converted to concrete pad. An empty terra cotta planter sat next to the coffee-colored double doors. As I got out of the car, I noticed the TV camera above the lintel. The air was hot and smelled sterile.
I got out and went over to Robin's truck.
She smiled. 'Looks like a motel, doesn't it?'
'Long as the owner's not named Norman.'
The black van dieseled as its ignition shut down. The three beef-boys exited and threw open the rear doors. Tarped machines filled the cabin. The boys did some squats and grunts and began unloading.
Milo said something to them, then waved to us. His jacket was off but he still wore his gun. The heat had returned.
'Crazy weather,' I said.
Robin got out and lifted the dog out of the pickup. We walked to the front door, and Milo let us into the house.
The floor was white marble streaked with pink, the furniture teakwood and ebony and bright blue velour. The far wall was taken up by single, light French doors. All the others were covered with paintings- hung frame to frame, so that only scraps of white plaster were visible.
The doors looked out onto a yard encircled by a nearly invisible fence- glass panes in thin iron frames. A strip of sod-grass separated a cement patio from a long, narrow lap pool. The pool had been dug at the edge of the lot- someone aiming for a merge-with-the-sky effect. But the water was blue and the sky was gray and the whole thing ended up looking like an off-balance cubist sculpture.
The dog ran to the French doors and tapped the glass with his paws. Milo let him out and he squatted in the grass before returning.
'Make yourself right at home, why don't you.' To us: 'Called London, everything's set up. There'll be a token rent, but you don't have to worry about it until he gets back.'
We thanked him. He dusted off one of the couches and I studied the art. Impressionist pictures that looked French and important nudged up against pre-Raphaelite mythology. Syrupy, Orientalist harem scenes neighbored with English hunt paintings. Modern pieces, too: a Mondrian, a Frank Stella chevron, a Red Grooms subway cartoon, something amorphous fashioned out of neon.
The dining area was all Maxfield Parrish: cobalt skies, heavenly forests, and beautiful blond boys.
Lots of nude male statuary, too. A lamp whose black granite base was a limbless, muscular torso- Venus de Milo in drag. A framed cover from
