“It’s a really nice shirt.”
Sylvia smiled for the first time. “I’ll be the judge of that.”
When Black made it into the office, Roxie stared at her monitor, muttering to herself, her brow beetled. Mugsy was contentedly sleeping, his head resting on the toe of one of her combat boots. She was dressed in a sleeveless blouse, her tattoos on full display, and a pair of black leggings that left little to the imagination. As usual, she didn’t look up when he entered.
“Good morning, Sunshine. What are you up to? Praying? You planning on converting?” Black asked.
“Studying.”
“You? I don’t even want to ask.”
“Then don’t.”
“Okay, what are you studying?”
“Funny, that sounded exactly like what I imagined you asking would sound like.”
“Come on, Roxie. Give.”
“German. I’m studying Deutsch.”
“Ah, right. How about Mugsy? Is he brushing up on his language skills, too?”
“I’ve been researching how to import him. It’s a hassle, but mostly paperwork.”
“They’ll probably want to charge you for an extra seat for the fat bastard. It could get expensive. Might break the bank. I think you should rethink going. Be a shame to run out of money before you even started.”
“Thanks for the support, Mr. Negativo.”
“If they charge by weight, you’re totally screwed.”
“Ha ha. Inside I’m laughing.” Roxie returned to the screen, the conversation done.
“Any calls? Clients stop by to offer me huge cases?”
Roxie brightened. “Now that you mention it…no.”
“Don’t you want to know how my trip went?”
She frowned and issued an exasperated sigh. “Sure. How did your trip go, boss?”
“I hung out with famous models. One of whom was murdered while I was sleeping.”
Roxie raised an eyebrow. “Not with her, I presume.”
“Good guess. Even in Cabo they frown at killing your partner. Although they understand it…”
“Seriously though. How did she die?”
Black did an info dump, and Roxie actually listened attentively. “What do you think? Is it Demille? Costa?” she asked when he was finished.
“I don’t know. Costa couldn’t get out of there fast enough, but that could be a coincidence – the shoot was over, so why waste a whole day? Demille? He was trying to avoid me, and he also was in a hurry to get to the airport. But the truth is that it could also have been Tasha, who was out with them and conveniently left just before Clarissa did. Or any of the crew who weren’t accounted for at that hour.”
“Tasha. The agent who was showing you the ropes? You think she was…dating Clarissa?”
“Not really. I’m just saying that she was there, she left just before Clarissa did, so…I don’t know what I’m saying, really.”
“At least you finally realize it. That’s an important first step.”
“I meant about Tasha.”
“Oh. So much for progress.”
“Do me a favor. Pull up everything you can on Gabriel Costa, Thomas Demille, Tasha – or Natasha – Pushkin. Like the Russian president,” Black said.
“I’m pretty sure you’re thinking of Putin. Vladimir Putin. Not Pushkin, although there are similarities.”
“What kind of name is that, anyway?”
“I can think of presidents with weirder names.”
“Ouch. Point awarded to the woman with the blue hair. Anyway, see what you can dig up. I want to understand their histories, any intersections…”
“Like what cross streets they live near?”
“Don’t lose that sense of humor while you’re freezing to death, starving in the German snow.”
“Mugsy will keep me warm.”
“True, given the amount of gas he generates. You could probably sell the excess and have a thriving business there.”
“Oh, there’s the phone.”
“You realize I’m standing right here, and can hear that there’s nobody calling, right?”
“Are we done?”
Black shook his head. “Hate to tear you away from your new appreciation of Germanic languages. But I could use that sooner rather than later.”
“Yes, Master. I’ll get right on it after I take this call.”
“Phone’s still not ringing.”
The phone rang.
Roxie answered it, listened for a moment, and said, “Sorry. Wrong number,” and hung up.
“You called using your cell. I can see it in your other hand, Roxie.”
“I wanted to make sure the line was working. Can I get back to what I was doing now? Or do you have vacation pictures you want to show me?”
“The Germans will have to wait. Get me the info on them all, please. Today would be nice.”
“Sure thing, Bwana.”
Black figured that was the best he was going to get out of her, and elected for a strategic retreat to his office. She would have it done within the hour, he knew, and as he closed the door, his thoughts turned to how to keep her from moving to Germany with Eric. The surefire way would be doing the one thing he hated the most – staking Eric out and waiting for him to screw up, which Black had no doubt he would do. He’d met Eric a number of times and disliked him on sight. He was a swaggering thug with an insulting smirk who clearly thought he was better than everyone else. He’d cheated on Roxie once – once that she’d caught him at. Black had no doubt that he’d done it more often. It was like DUIs. Nobody got caught the first time they drove drunk. It was far more likely they’d get nabbed on the hundredth time. Same applied for Eric.
Which made Black’s life easy.
He checked his emails, fiddled around online, and then placed a call to Demille’s office, where he was told that the great man was out but would return his call whenever he got back. Black pressed the receptionist, but she was as unhelpful as Roxie and gave him nothing but the stock response that she’d leave a message and ask him to call. Black was annoyed by what he perceived as Demille dodging him again, but decided to make the best of it and spend his day dealing with the Eric problem. The sooner he could put a bullet in Roxie leaving, the better.
Black poked his head out of his office. “I asked Tasha for a list of Demille models who were at the New York, beach, and Mexico shoots. We can cross-reference them and get a start on who the common players were. She also said she’d jot down anyone from other agencies she saw.”
“Let me guess. I’m in charge of figuring that out?”
“Nobody’s better than you at that sort of thing, Roxie.”
“Right. Basic pattern recognition that a trained chimp could do.”
“I don’t have time to train a chimp.”
“I think it’s the sweet-talking that I’m going to miss the most.”
Black checked the time. “I’m going to be on a stakeout the rest of the day. Patch any calls through. And send the info to my email when you get it.”
“Hang on. I have a bunch of stuff already. I’m printing it. Give me two minutes.”
He collected his jacket and hat from his desk and returned to Roxie’s station. Mugsy stood, looking like a furry beer keg, walked stiffly to Black, and rubbed against his legs – a maneuver guaranteed to coat his suit with hair that always proved nearly impossible to completely clean off. Apparently satisfied with his performance, Mugsy leapt up onto the couch, curled up in his favorite spot, and was dozing before Black had a chance to complain.
Roxie glanced at Mugsy and smiled. “He loves you. I hope he’ll be able to adjust to a new place.”
Black forced his facial muscles into what he hoped was more grin than grimace. “I wasn’t going to say anything, but I’m going to miss the little rascal no end. It won’t be the same without him. Especially once I get the walls repainted and the furniture burned.”
“Maybe I should leave him here…”
“No,”
Black blurted, and immediately softened his tone. “No, I mean, you’re his life. It wouldn’t be fair to Mugsy.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said, leveling a skeptical glare at him.
“But–”
“Here’s your homework.” Roxie handed him a thick folder. “I think Mugsy’s thinner from that new food. I really do.”
Black considered ten responses, none of them nice, and decided to cut his losses. He glanced at Mugsy with as sweet a look as he could manage without triggering his gag reflex and nodded.
“That’s exactly what I was thinking, too.”
Chapter 10
Sunset Boulevard always depressed Black, but never more than during the day, when its shabby buildings and peeling paint were exposed under the sun’s unrelenting blaze, its nighttime allure revealed to be nothing but a mirage come morning, a figment of the collective youth imagination fueled by alcohol, drugs, and dreams. Eric’s tattoo parlor was shoehorned between a shop that catered to those looking for bondage and discipline leather goods and a T-shirt shop advertising three shirts for ten dollars.
Black rolled to a stop on a side street and walked with his laptop under his arm to a Bohemian café across the boulevard from the tattoo parlor, where he resigned himself to spending a few hours while he watched for anything suspicious. Eric didn’t know Black’s car by sight, but he was afraid that Roxie might have described it to him, and it would stick out on Sunset with so few other vehicles parked around it.
Part of him wished he could do what he’d advised Stan not to do to Ernest – break the punk’s legs or send a couple of violent friends around for a chat. But word would get back to Roxie, and that would be the end of his relationship with her. So he had to take a less frontal approach, much as he would have preferred the shortest distance between two points. In Black’s experience scumbags only understood one thing: superior force. As with all liars, cheats, and miscreants, predators in the concrete jungle respected more powerful or dangerous animals. He hadn’t invented the rules, but he understood them.
Since a baseball bat was out of the question, he had to wait for Eric to hang himself. With him planning to leave town, Black’s bet was that he’d be pulling out all the stops to tag whatever honeys came his way while he still could. The likelihood was he’d be doing his act during the day while Roxie was safely at work, leaving him a finite window of opportunity.
Black ordered a cup of drip coffee and settled in with his laptop in front of him, closed, and his file on the spare chair beside him. The waitress brought his drink and he began reading, starting with Gabriel, as that was the dossier at the top of the pile. First came the photos: Gabriel thoughtful. Gabriel brooding. Gabriel smiling. Gabriel, his hair tousled, looking off into the distance. A good-looking man in a Ricky Martin kind of way.
Next were the details on his new enterprise, Costa Brava. Formed six months earlier. Already making waves on the West Coast, representing a host of names, including several Demille alumni. An office in Santa Monica. Plans for a New York office next year. Not bad for a man who’d spent most of his adult life looking dangerous for the camera while wearing underwear. A smattering of press clippings and screen shots from the company’s website rounded out the file.
Finally, slim details on his personal life. Single. Thirty-four. Born in Brazil to wealthy parents, moved to Los Angeles when he was seven, trained in ballet until he was seventeen, when he was discovered and began posing for cash. Joined Demille’s roster six years ago at the peak of his career and stayed with Demille until retiring from modeling a year ago.
The information on Thomas Demille was encyclopedic, covering his fifteen years as owner of the top agency on the West Coast, from his humble beginnings as a trunk-of-his-car agent to his current position at the summit of success. Forty-eight years old, former model with three big New York houses, moved to Los Angeles after an unremarkable career to help start a Hollywood office for his employer. Left that agency a year after moving, in an acrimonious parting of the ways, and within five years had all but put them out of business with his new venture.
Black paged through a sheaf of press clippings featuring Demille at movie premieres, restaurant openings, and award shows, always in the company of a new starlet or model. Handsome, tall, lean, aging well, athletic, and regal, with a strong jaw line and steely gaze.
None of that jibed with Sima’s description of him as a fixture on the Los Angeles gay circuit; then again, after twenty years in La La Land, Black had seen everything, so he didn’t jump to conclusions, and certainly didn’t judge anyone by his press coverage. If he’d had a dollar for every film or television star who was married or in a high-profile relationship with a female celebrity, and whom he knew from being on the inside secretly enjoyed a firmer hand on the tiller, so to speak, he could have been comfortably retired. The entertainment industry was oddly hypocritical, and when careers depended on perceptions, you kept your private preferences out of the limelight.
One photo caught his eye and stopped him – Demille, Clarissa, and Gabriel at a charity for breast cancer, Clarissa’s face flawless, Demille’s exuding the glow only power and money could supply, Gabriel’s smiling, the life of the party. Gabriel had his arm around Clarissa and they looked comfortable together. Perhaps just Tinseltown posing; or maybe something…more?
The final pages were Tasha, and underscored how short her career had been. Tasha barely out of her teens working runways in Milan, jumping in the air for Ralph Lauren, riding a bicycle for Skechers. As she’d aged, more serious work, evening wear and jewelry. She’d been stunning in her youth, and he was reminded of how she would still stop traffic in most restaurants as much with her preternaturally intense cobalt blue eyes as her stunning figure.
A single page summary of her stint as one of Demille’s agents, a listing of the talent she managed, a bio that told him nothing he didn’t already know, and that was it.
He finished his coffee and looked out the window at the shop. Inside, he could see Eric’s distinctive white-trash profile talking to a prospective customer – male, unfortunately. Black quickly lost interest and turned his computer on, after ordering another coffee and getting the WiFi access code. He was browsing Demille’s obviously expensive website, thinking about how crap his own looked, when his phone rang.
“Black.”
His mother’s distinctive voice echoed from the earpiece. “Hello, honey. Did I get you at a bad time?”
Black briefly considered answering in the affirmative. “No, not at all. I have a few minutes. But Mom? Are you on your headset? Because there’s an echo.”
A loud crackling forced him to hold the phone away from his ear.
“Is that better?” she asked.
He listened intently. “Mom? Say something.”
“Like what?”
“Anything. So I can see if I can hear you better.”
“Oh, I hate it when you put pressure on me like this.”
“Okay, that’s better.”
“What is?”
“The echo.”
“Oh. Fine, then. How are you, Artemus?”
He cringed at her use of his first name, which he hated and never used, and debated correcting her, but decided it wasn’t a battle he felt like fighting today. “Tip top. Never better. And you?”
“Oh, as well as can be expected. You know.”
“What does that mean? Is something wrong with you? With Dad?”
“No, nothing we know of. Why? Do I sound strange to you?”
Black tried to remember a time when his crazy mother hadn’t sounded off to him, but bit his tongue. “No, you sound great. What’s going on in your life?”
“Nothing much. I’m painting some. That’s been fun. And your father’s taken up model boat building. That keeps him occupied.”
“Great.”
“I was just having tea with some of my friends, and they were saying they hadn’t heard any stories about you in a while, and that got me to thinking th
at we haven’t seen you in all kinds of forever. Not since your birthday.”
“That wasn’t that long ago.”
“Six months.”
“Like I said. Seems like only yesterday.”
“So anyway, I called your office and talked to that Roxie, and she told me she was moving to Munich! How exciting is that?”
“It would be even more exciting if she wasn’t moving to Berlin, I suppose.”
“Oh, right. Munich, Berlin, it’s all kind of over there, right? A long way away.”
“Yes. She’s planning to move in a few weeks.”
“Isn’t that something? She’s so brave. I would never leave Berkeley, you know? Imagine going to a foreign country, with different customs and language and all.”
“Roxie is a free spirit, all right.”
“We’re thinking we should fly down there and have a big night out with you and Roxie before she takes off.”
Black slowly counted to three, as Dr. Kelso had advised him to do when he was becoming annoyed. One one-thousand, two one-thousand…
“That’s nice of you. But I’m on a big case right now, and I might not be around.”
“Nonsense. You’re always around.”
“Not lately. I was just in Mexico. I may have to fly to New York next,” Black lied. “It’s been crazy.”
“Mexico! Oh, sweetie, I’m glad I didn’t know. All I see on the news is how dangerous it is there with the drugs and the shootings and everything. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep…”
Black considered Stan’s reporting of an average night on the homicide beat in L.A. or the San Francisco East Bay, where his parents lived, and contrasted it to the pool party he’d attended at a four-hundred-dollar per night beach hotel.
“Well, I managed to make it out of there without any bullet wounds. I count myself lucky. Although a girl was killed only a few feet from my room,” he threw in, unable to resist.
“Oh, my God. But you’re okay? That could have been you.”
No, Mom, not unless I was a supermodel with a heroin jones. “Like I said, I’m fine. Never better. All in a day’s work. Really. How’s Dad?”
“Please. Chakra. He’s fine. Puttering around, going a little stir crazy since we sold the candle business.”
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