“Mousse or gel?” said Shimoff.
“Quite possibly. No sideburns, he clipped them way up here. Pug nose, possibly even smaller than I showed.”
“Possibly broken?” said Shimoff. “Fits with the football build.”
“Good point,” she said.
“Pug as well as high-bridged.”
“Not as high as Milo’s but definitely on the high side.”
Milo measured the space between his nose and upper lip with two fingers. Shrugged.
Robin said, “His ears were really close-set.” She frowned. “I keep remembering things I omitted. He had no lobes. And they were a little pointy at the top. Right here. Elfin, I guess. But there was nothing cute about him. The lips I got pretty accurately: the upper really was this thin. Almost invisible and the lower was full.”
Shimoff picked up a pencil. “Wish they were all this easy.”
He worked slowly, meticulously, stepping back from the drawing to take in a long view, rarely erasing. Forty minutes later, two likenesses had materialized. To my eye, stunningly accurate.
Robin said, “What do you think, Alex?”
“Perfect.”
She studied the drawings. “I’d lift her eyebrow a bit on the right side. And his neck could be a little thicker, so there’s a bulge where it feeds into his collar.”
Shimoff tinkered, sat back, appraised his work. “Beautiful girl. Now back to Picasso.”
Milo said, “Picasso looks finished to me.”
Shimoff smiled. “You are spared the pain, Lieutenant.”
“Of what?”
“Being an artist.”
Milo called LAPD Public Affairs from the Seville, put the phone on speaker.
“Got a couple artist renderings I need on the media A-sap. A Jane Doe 187 and a possible suspect.”
The P.A. officer said, “One second,” in a voice that said nothing mattered less.
For the next four minutes a public service announcement on domestic violence took the place of live speech.
A new voice said, “Hi, Lieutenant Sturgis. This is Captain Emma Roldan from the chief’s office.”
“I was just on the phone with—”
“Public Affairs,” said Roldan. “They passed along your request, it will be prioritized appropriately. You should be notified as to its disposition by noon tomorrow.”
“All I asked was for a couple of drawings to be—”
“We’ll do our best, Lieutenant. Good night.”
“Anyone else calls P.A., P.A. handles it. I call P.A., you handle it.”
“Chief’s standing orders,” said Roldan. “You get extraspecial treatment.”
The next morning at ten thirty, just as I set out for Gretchen Stengel’s place, Milo called in.
“Princess’s face will be flashed on the news tonight but no dice on Black Suit. I have failed to establish sufficient cause linking the two of them and unnecessary exposure of an innocent individual could have dire legal consequences. Let’s hope she pulls up some tips. One thing for sure, she ain’t royalty. If Homeland Security can be believed.”
“No princesses on holiday in SoCal?”
“Just the ones born in B.H. and Bel Air. They did send me passport photos of young women loosely matching the description, I followed up and everyone’s alive. I faxed Shimoff’s drawing of Black Suit to the security companies. Nada. All this futility’s making me hungry. You up for lunch?”
“When?”
“Now.”
“I’ve got an appointment at eleven.”
“Seeing patients again?”
I hummed.
“Got it,” he said. “Much as I enjoy your company, the gastrointestinal tract will not hold out, so we go our respective ways. Sayonara.”
ittle Santa Monica Boulevard turns into Burton Way past Crescent, so cruising by the Fauborg on the way to Gretchen’s was preordained.
Two jagged crumbling stories stood where there’d once been four. A skyscraping crane hovered above the ruins, a steel mantis poised to strike. The colossal machine idled as hard hats purchased nutrition from a roach coach. A man wearing an orange
“Do something for you?”
“Just looking. I was here the other night.”
“What was it, some kind of old-age home?”
“Something like that.”
“Real piece a shit,” he said. “Going down like paper.”
Gretchen’s building was four intact stories of sage-green, neo-Italianate exuberance dressed up by gnarled olive trees planted in gravel.
I was buzzed up to Gretchen’s top-floor unit without comment. She waited in her doorway, wearing a pink housecoat and fuzzy white mules and breathing with the aid of an oxygen tank on wheels. A plastic tube dangled from her nostrils. She pulled it out and it hissed like a snake. Showing me brown, eroded teeth, she gripped my hand between both of hers and squeezed.
Her skin was cold and papery. The housecoat billowed on a wasted frame but her face was bloated. What remained of her hair was white lint.
I’d researched her last night. Despite the passage of time, she pulled up more hits than ten years’ worth of Nobel Prize winners. Various bios listed various birth dates but each put her at barely into middle age. She looked seventy-five.
“Beauty fades,” she said, “but obnoxious lingers. Come on in.”
Her living room was twice the size of Alex Shimoff’s but ten times as many toys piled in the center gave it the same cramped feel.
Walking three steps to the nearest couch winded her. She stopped to reinsert the air line.
She eased herself down on the sofa. I pulled a facing chair three feet away.
“House call from a shrink, this has to be a first. Or maybe I’m being my old narcissistic self and you do this for everyone.”
I smiled.
“Don’t do that,” she said. “Give that blank, neutral shrink smile and make me sweat for every damn sentence. I’m working against a bit of a deadline.” A sharp, white knuckle rapped the side of the tank. “Pun intended.”
I said, “No, I don’t do it for everyone.”
She clapped her hands. “So I
Where the room wasn’t snowed by toys it was bland furniture, generic rugs, floral prints on the walls where crayon drawings weren’t taped. Drawn drapes turned the space a gray one shade darker than Gretchen’s complexion.
“Chad’s artistic,” she said. “Smart, too, I lucked out in the sperm department. They used to use med students as donors, now, who knows? All I learned about my personal masturbator is that he’s of English-German descent, taller than average, and free of genetic diseases. For the first year I kept imagining him—different hims, actually, the images started flipping like cards. What I ended up with was Brad Pitt mixed with Albert Einstein. Then Chad
