street. I actually took a step back from the force of it. Blair struck out across the street like a native guide, giving the finger to cabs and limos as she strode toward the short-stay parking lot. A neutral silver SUV bleeped hello to her keychain, and she left us to throw our bags into the trunk and clamber in.
“I’m going to have to leave you at the house? I’m running late for my vaginal tightening appointment?”
Trix frowned. “Honey, you’re twenty-one if you’re a day. There’s no way in hell your vagina needs anything of the sort. Besides, everyone’s a different size. It’s just nature.”
Blair turned around in her chair and looked Trix up and down as if considering a circus freak. “Yeah, well. You’re from
Trix looked at me like it was my fault and leaned back in the chair. It was a long drive. On and off freeways, wending up and down ramp roads. My attention would drift, and then I’d look back out the window and have no idea where we were. Blair wasn’t in the mood for a guided tour, and just shrugged her shoulders at every question. Her mind was obviously on the minutes ticking away toward her prized vaginal tuck.
An hour of this, and we pulled up in front of a blindingly white house perched on the edge of what looked like a cliff face, looking down on the valley of Los Angeles. I got out of the car first, eager to relieve my aching ass. The light was beautiful. I never realized, until I was there, exactly why the movie business settled out there. It wasn’t just getting out of New York and living an economic version of the Wild West. Up there, over the smog line, the light had a sharp clarity that would have made a painter cry. Somehow, though, I figured every artist in L.A. was probably down there under the orange, cutting up sheep and making funny boxes and calling that art instead.
I tried explaining the thought to Trix, but she told me about the acquaintance of hers down there who performed his art by breaking into abandoned hospitals and reenacted horrifying nineteenth-century medical procedures with morbidly obese mental patients and strippers covered in blood.
Blair let us into the house. The hallway looked like a four-star hotel lobby. Blair explained that Brom was tied up for much of the day, but wanted us to treat the house as ours until he got home. She gave us the once-over one more time, as if judging how much of Brom’s stuff we could steal, and then took off at a brusque speed, eager for stitches in her nether regions.
Once the door was shut, I made a show of looking around. “Your friend does okay for himself, huh?”
“Brom’s very successful. Takes on big corporate cases to fund pro bono civil-liberties cases. He used to be in New York, fighting Giuliani. Moved out here after 9/11.”
“Good friend of yours?”
“We dated a little bit, I guess. He’s a very good friend, yeah.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Mike, we had this conversation. Are you going to be weird about this?”
“No, no. Just tired. It’s been a bad couple of days, you know?”
“You’re telling me.”
“You’re coping pretty well.”
She grinned and kissed me fast and hard. “Why shouldn’t I? You saved me.”
“Just remember that when your lawyer ex wants to do pro bono in your pants.”
“Beats paying rent.
“I’m going to go exploring for food. If I’m not back in a couple of days, call the police. I may have gotten lost in this guy’s closet or something.”
Chapter 44
Are edamame food?”
“Sure,” Trix called from the living room, about two miles away from me in the kitchen. “It’s a bean. You steam them and have them with rock salt.”
I replaced the bag of green things that had been left artfully on the counter and went back to grubbing around the cupboards in the vast brushed-steel kitchen. Piles of unopened packets and boxes of alien things that could possibly be food, and stacks of books about the Atkins and GI diets. I wasn’t totally convinced that Trix’s friend ever actually cooked in here. Nothing seemed to have been used, and things were arranged for aesthetic pleasure more than utility. This was a guy that ate out a lot.
Since Trix wasn’t in sight, I went through the drawers. A sheaf of bills in the first drawer, each one bearing a Post-it note saying that an assistant had paid it. The sheaf sat a little high, for the depth of the drawer. I pulled the sheaf out. The drawer had a false bottom, a DIY job held in by two clips. I popped the left-hand clip and lifted the thin wooden sheet up. There was a handgun, a new leather shoulder holster, and a slim box of ammunition underneath. The gun’s license documentation was laid underneath it.
I have some knowledge of guns from the Chicago days. I don’t particularly like them. That said, I’ve never met a lot of people in law enforcement or the investigative business who did. Cops tend to view them as tools. Detectives tend to see them either as insurance or, on many occasions, an excuse to be shot at. The guys who like guns are usually the ones found on slabs with ballistics geeks tweezering lumps of pulped metal out of their chests.
I smiled at this gun. It was a Ruger Super Blackhawk, .44 Magnum. I met the famous detective Jay Armes at an investigators’ conference once. He had hooks for hands—his original hands had been blown off by a box of railroad torpedoes when he was a kid, and legend had it that he’d gotten a pistol built into one of the hooks— frightening hair, and a jacket that hurt my eyes. He’d been shot at by a .44, and he said that the joke about the Super Blackhawk, back in the fifties when it was first launched, was that it was a great gun for holding up trains. You just fired the gun at the train and it stopped. It’s a huge, heavy piece of blued metal, a six-shot revolver—not an I-need-a-gun-to-protect-my-property kind of gun. The long barrel, the great big bullets, and the sheer weight of the thing damping off the recoil makes the Super Blackhawk an extraordinarily accurate, one-shot-stopper of a gun. Even if that huge damn bullet somehow doesn’t kill you, the rocket force of the impact kicks you clean off your feet. These days, it’s mostly used as a hunter’s handgun. Though God knows what you’d hunt with it. Anything smaller than a rhino would probably splatter like God himself reached down from the clouds and punched it in the head.
