Flesh And Blood

so.”

“The junkie she lived with,” I said. “Lance.”

“I asked Ramparts Narcotics to pull up users named Lance. Hopefully I’ll have something soon.”

“You’re talking as if there’s a doubt,” I said.

Silence. “It’s them, and now I’m wondering if my visit signed their death warrant.” Using the singular. Shouldering the blame.

“Someone who didn’t like Michelle talking about Lauren?”

“On the other hand, a girl like Michelle could’ve been into anything. That place she lived, dope was flowing in and out, those tough guys next door. Or someone was watching her apartment, made me for what I am, figured Michelle had squealed. I wouldn’t have noticed – I wasn’t looking out for surveillance.”

I said, “Gretchen knew you were looking for Michelle. She gave you nothing, but Ingrid came up with Michelle’s last name. It’s not a stretch to think Ingrid told Gretchen.”

“Yeah,” he said, with forced calm. “The possibility occurred to me, so I called in a favor, asked one of the other detectives in the office to keep an eye on Gretchen’s movements for the next day or so. So far, it hasn’t come to much. She had a late lunch at the same place, again with Ingrid, went back to her boutique, stayed till three, then got in her little Porsche Boxter and drove to the beach-”

“Dugger’s place?”

“No, no, hold on. She bypassed Santa Monica completely, took Sunset straight to PCH, broke the speed limit all the way to Malibu, turned off at Paradise Cove. One of those big gated estates that front the highway. The top was down on the Boxter, the whole time she was gabbing on the cell phone, looking carefree. Even when she was waiting at the gate she was yapping. It didn’t take long for her to get buzzed in. And my guy didn’t need a map to know where he was. He’d worked security for a party there several times. The Duke estate – the palace Tony Duke built on mammaries. Talk about your Silicone Valley. Apparently Duke hires off-duty cops all the time. Contributes to the police benevolent fund, part of the whole respectability thing. I guess it’s no surprise Gretchen would know Duke. Back when she was riding high, she was on every A party list.”

“Tony Duke,” I said. “Maybe there’s more to it.” I told him what I’d learned from Adam Green.

“You’ve been busy too,” he said evenly.

“I didn’t see the harm.”

“No harm done,” he said. “All this kid saw was some skin shots, he doesn’t know they were for Duke.”

“Shots hidden in an issue of Duke. Tony Duke has a thing for young blondes, doesn’t he? Both Shawna and Lauren fit that bill.”

“I’m sure Tony Duke has blondes lining up to be Treat of the Month, but his rep is for screwing them, not killing them. And why would he go for a call girl like Lauren?”

“No accounting for taste,” I said.

“I suppose, but some college kid’s screenplay fantasies and Gretchen taking a drive to Malibu doesn’t exactly get my heart beating.”

“Malibu’s where Lauren placed those calls to the pay phone.”

“Exactly. You see Tony leaving Xanadu to take calls at a gas station?”

“Can you tolerate more hypotheses?”

“Sure, hit me.”

I gave him my older-man theory, rambled about power and dominance, the vulnerability that Shawna and Lauren might’ve shared.

“Tony Duke,” I ended. “Talk about an older man.”

“So you’re trading Dr. Dugger for the Sultan of Skin?”

“I adapt to changing circumstance. Fifty plus thousand in Lauren’s account would be chump change for Duke. He’d also have a good reason to want her laptop.”

Milo didn’t reply. In the background a siren wail climbed like a slide trombone solo, then dopplered into silence.

“Tony Duke,” he finally said. “Christ, I hope you’re wrong. That’s just what I need.”

“What’s that?”

“Big game, small gun.”

CHAPTER 18

FOR FORTY YEARS Tony Duke had preached the gospel of meaning through pleasure, converting a generation and scooping millions from the collection plate.

The easy life was his creed. For forty years every issue of Duke had splayed that dogma above the masthead.

Over four decades Duke pictorials had grown a bit more daring, but the magazine’s format hadn’t changed much since its first issue: golden-toned, milk-fed female nudity personified by the Treat of the Month, combined with suggestive cartoons, big-brotherly advice on dress, drink, and the acquisition of toys, token ventures into political journalism.

When Duke published his maiden issue, photographic essays of bare breasts, pouting lips, and willing thighs were nothing new. Pinup calendars had been gas station fixtures for years, and “nature pictorials” had occupied a stable market niche since the invention of the camera. But all that was under-the-counter stuff, supposedly for guys in raincoats and lowered fedoras – sex as dirty, in the finest American tradition. Marc Anthony Duke’s revolutionary act had been to veneer the skin rag with respectability. Now Suburban Dad could purchase T & A at the corner newsstand and be regarded as classy rather than creepy.

With its winking scamp logo and gloriously uddered, fresh-faced models, Duke magazine had been a major force in the crumbling of sexual censorship barriers, and Tony Duke had fought his share of legal battles. But his victories in court proved, ultimately, to be market-share defeats as each landmark decision allowed successively raunchier publications to achieve legitimacy. Now, in a world where hard-core porn rentals were the number-one video-store commodity, Duke’s airbrushed sensibilities seemed almost quaint. When Tony Duke hit the papers these days, it was usually because he’d thrown a fund-raiser for some worthy cause.

All this and whatever else I thought I knew about him had been gleaned from the papers: California farm boy morphed to starving bookkeeper to failed Hollywood scriptwriter to the author of a dozen forgettable science fiction paperbacks, then finally to head of the gutsy publishing venture that had earned him twenty beachfront acres and the kinds of toys his readers could only dream about. But the papers printed what you gave them, and no doubt Duke employed a fleet of publicists.

He had to be what – seventy, by now?

Older man.

As far as I knew he’d never been implicated in anything violent. On the contrary, he had a reputation as someone who genuinely loved women. Years ago I’d caught the tail end of a televised interview with him – some biographical feature on a network that deluded itself as substantive. Duke had come across still boyish, if a bit frail. A small, narrow-shouldered, goateed, ludicrously tanned elf of a man with an easy-to-listen-to drawl and friendly brown eyes.

Small brown face under a steel-hued hairpiece. Your eccentric favorite uncle, on shore leave from his latest jaunt to locales exotiques, brimming with ribald anecdotes, naughty jokes, and the unspoken promise that he might, one day, take you with him.

As I watched the steaks sizzle, I continued to wonder. About Marc Anthony Duke and Lauren Teague and Shawna Yeager.

A few years ago, when our house was being rebuilt, Robin and I had rented on the beach in western Malibu. During that year I must’ve zipped past the Duke estate hundreds of times, never thinking about what went on behind those foliage-shielded walls. I had only the faintest memory of a green expanse: palms and pines, banks of devil ivy, geraniums, rubber plants. The gate that had admitted Gretchen Stengel.