Into the mike he said, “Close him.”
I stood up. “One thing you can do for me, though. Get a shooter to follow Burgess out of the studio, get a shot of him with his car.”
“Why?”
“Background. Some variety to talking heads.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I saw him drive in. His conveyance surprised me.”
“Yeah?”
“Besides, I want that celestial blue suit recorded for posterity. I’ll be beholden to you if you get me a copy of this interview and the grand exit. Like, today sometime.”
“How beholden?” he asked, gripping my thigh through my jeans.
“Be careful, Jack,” I said. “Anita Hill is a personal friend of mine.”
“Damn,” he said.
Chapter 17
My family, plus one, Sly again, were just finishing dinner when I walked in. Sly had his hair combed back in imitation of Michael, his idol.
“How were things in math today?” I asked Sly.
As always, he turned his foxy face to Michael before he said anything. “Hangin’ in.”
“How are things at home?”
“Food’s shit, but okay.”
“He’s eating regular.” Michael tweaked the boy’s flat midsection. “Look at this belly bag.”
Sly, delighted by the attention, slapped Michael’s hand away. “Faggot.”
Mike reached up for my hand. “Hungry?”
“No.” In the back of my throat I still had the smell of the huevos rancheros Guido had deposited on his floor. I got a diet soda from the refrigerator and sat down at the table between Mike and Casey. “Casey, how was the first day?”
“Good.” She wore sweatpants over her leotard, her hair was still trapped in a tight ballerina bun. Bowser lay on the floor under the table, resting his head on her foot. “My geometry teacher is a major jerk, but the rest of them are okay. Dance is going be really, really hard. But good.”
“I hope so,” I said.
“The L.A. Ballet Company is coming next week for Nutcracker tryouts,” she said, enthusiasm gaining momentum. “I don’t know if I’m going to try out. Mischa says I’m too tall for the Clara part. Everything else is so boring. The snowflakes and sugarplums are really lame. Think I’ll wait until the Joffrey comes in January.”
“Auditions for an L.A. show, I hope? I don’t want you on a tour for another year or two. Or three. Or ten.”
“We’ll see,” she said, picking up her dinner plate. “They probably won’t want me anyway.” Her tone said this was only token self-deprecation. Lack of confidence is not one of Casey’s problems. With Bowser following her every movement, she pirouetted to the sink and rinsed her dishes.
“Wish they’d let me have a dog.” Reverently, Sly stroked the dog’s back. “Hey, Michael, how come you don’t have a cool dog like this?”
“Why do I need a dog, squirt, when I have you?”
“Faggot,” Sly giggled.
“So, Michael,” I said, “were you able to petition the class you needed?”
“No. I ended up with Asian lit just to fill my schedule.” He glanced at Casey, gave me a sardonic smile. “Teacher’s a major jerk. But the rest of them are okay.”
I laughed. “Glad to hear it.”
Casey rolled her eyes. “You are so funny, Michael. Not!”
“Can you play volleyball on your toes?” he asked her.
She sneered. “Of course not.”
“Can you play at all?”
“I’m okay. Good enough to beat you.”
“Prove it.” He gathered his dinner things and stacked them in the sink. “There’s a game out back tonight. Show me your stuff.”
Sly, not to be neglected, chirped up, “I can beat you both.”
“Oh yeah?” Michael wadded the foil from his baked potato into a ball and flicked it to Casey. “See if you can get it from her, squirt.”
In the small kitchen they played keep-away. Casey and Michael, who towered over poor little Sly, teased, feigned, mercilessly held the foil ball out of his reach.
Michael passed high to Casey. She reached for it. Sly hit the back of her knees, pinched her butt, and, when she fumbled the ball to swat him, intercepted the ball and was out the back door with it.
“You little creep.” Casey flew out in pursuit, with Bowser, barking, close on her heels.
Mike reached back from his chair and snagged Michael’s arm before he could get away. “We’re going to go look at a house in South Pasadena before it gets dark. You interested?”
“Can’t. Sly’s still flunking math, needs a tutorial.” He jogged out to catch up with the others.
Mike watched him with a misty-eyed wistfulness saved for transitory pleasures, moments that will too soon pass. He sighed and turned in his seat, smiled at me.
“Quite a kid,” he said.
“The best.” I started picking at his dinner salad. “What’s this about a house?”
“Old place in South Pasadena, belonged to Harriman’s grandmother. Remember Harriman? Works Hollywood vice. So, the house has been vacant for a while. Some snag in probate. He’s offering us a break on the rent if I help him do some work on it, get it ready to sell eventually.”
I tried to hold back mental pictures of some grandma’s dark old house with cabbage-rose wallpaper and antique plumbing. You can live with almost any inconvenience for a short time, but a short time didn’t interest me. I asked, “How long can we have it?”
“Long as we want.”
“Until you retire?”
“Long as we want.”
“Cozy arrangement,” I said.
He leaned back. “I told you, we look after each other.”
I decided to reserve judgment as to how well they looked after each other until I had seen the house.
Mike hadn’t flnished his pork chop. I set aside his empty salad bowl and picked up the chop. He watched me with a dreamy sort of look on his Bogart face.
I said, “How was your day, cupcake?”
“Stimulating. I did the laundry and caught up on my soaps. Drove the carpool, did the marketing, fixed dinner. Usual routine. How was your day?”
“Routine,” I said, moving on to the ends of his baked potato. “I interviewed a murderer in Juvenile Hall, a Black Muslim in the ghetto, and an old psycho cop. Watched a TV taping. Guido you know about.”
“Guido I know about.” Mike picked up the empty serving dishes and turned away from me toward the sink, but not before I saw something dark cross his face: fear, despair, frustration, they all seem to come out of the same emotional pocket. For the last few days, ever since Conklin’s name came up on the news, Mike had become moody, unusually changeable. And quiet.
Mike was scraping dinner scraps into the garbage disposal when I came up behind him and put my arms around him, pressed my hands against his flat middle and my cheek against his hard back.
“Guido’s okay,” I said.
“I know.”
“And I’m okay.”
“I know.”
“It’s you I’m worried about. What makes your face so sad?”
He turned off the water and the disposal and stayed with his back to me, his damp hands covering mine. He said, “I can’t stand being locked out. I want to go back to work. If I had a day-just one single day-I’d get this pile of manure case bagged and delivered and out of our lives.”
“I’m sure you would. But you just told me your people look after each other. Trust them to bag your manure this time. Trust me.”
“There are a lot of things I like you to do for me,” he said in his tough-guy mode. “Working my case just doesn’t happen to be one of them.”
“I’m not working your case,” I said.
“Could have fooled me.” From the mail pile in the corner, next to the basket of market coupons and take-out menus, he pulled a manila envelope like the one Hector had given me a couple of nights earlier. This one was thicker. A yellow sticky note on the front of it said, “Mike, give this to Maggie. Let’s get together soon. Hec.”
“Mash notes?” I said.
“Take a look.”