For the past year Trapp had done his best to wear down Milo- a gay cop was as irregular as they come. Closed-minded but not stupid, he went about his persecution with subtlety, avoiding deliberate gay-bashing. Choosing instead to designate Milo a “sex crimes specialist” and assign him to every homosexual murder that came up in West L.A. Exclusively.
It isolated my friend, narrowed his life, and plunged him into a roiling bath of blood and gore: boy hookers, destroyed and destroying. Corpses moldering because the morgue drivers didn’t show to pick them up, for fear of catching AIDS.
When Milo complained, Trapp insisted he was simply making use of Milo’s specialized knowledge of “the deviant subculture.” The second complaint brought him an insubordination report in his file.
Pushing the issue would have meant going up before hearing boards and hiring a lawyer- the Police Benevolent Association wouldn’t go to bat on this one. And unremitting media attention that would turn Milo into The Crusading Gay Cop. That was something he wasn’t- probably never would be- ready for. So he pushed his oars through the muck, working compulsively and starting to drink again.
The Porsche disappeared down the drive but I could still hear its engine pulsate in a chugging idle. Then the creak of the car door opening, padded footsteps, the scrape of the gate. Finally Trapp drove away- so quietly I knew he was coasting.
I waited a few minutes and stepped out of the foliage, thought about what I’d seen.
A captain checking out a routine suicide? A West L.A. captain, checking out a Hollywood Division suicide? It made no sense at all.
Or was the visit something personal? The use of the Porsche instead of an unmarked suggested just that.
Trapp and Sharon involved? Too grotesque to contemplate.
Too logical to dismiss.
I resumed my walk, climbed up to the house, and tried not to think about it.
Nothing had changed. The same high banks of ivy, so tall they seemed to engulf the structure. The same circular slab of concrete in lieu of a lawn. At the center of the slab, a raised circular bed rimmed with lava rock housed a pair of towering cocoa palms.
Beyond the palms a low-slung one-story house- gray stucco, the front windowless and flat-faced, shielded by a façade of vertically slatted wood and marked with over-sized address numerals. The roof was pitched almost flat and coated with white pebbles. Off to one side was a detached carport. No car, no signs of habitation.
At first glance, an ugly piece of work. One of those “moderne” structures that spread over postwar L.A., aging poorly. But I knew there was beauty within. A free-form cliff-top pool that wrapped itself around the north side of the house and gave the illusion of bleeding off into space. Walls of glass that afforded a breathtakingly uninterrupted canyon view.
The house had made a big impression on me, though I didn’t realize it until years later, when the time came to buy a home of my own and I found myself gravitating toward a similar ecology: hilltop remoteness, wood and glass, the indoor-outdoor blend and geologic impermanence that characterize canyon living in L.A.
The front door was unobtrusive- just another section of the slatted façade. I tried it. Locked. Looked around some more and noticed something different- a sign attached to the trunk of one of the palms.
I went over for a closer look and squinted. Just enough starlight to make out the letters:
FOR SALE.
A real estate company with an office on North Vermont, in the Los Feliz district. Below it another sign, smaller. The name and number of the salesperson. Mickey Mehrabian.
On the market before the body was cold.
Routine suicide notwithstanding, it had to be the fastest probate in California history.
Unless the house hadn’t belonged to her. But she’d told me it did.
She’d told me lots of things.
I memorized Mickey Mehrabian’s number. When I got back to the Seville, I wrote it down.
8
The following morning, I called the real estate office. Mickey Mehrabian was a woman with a Lauren Bacall voice, slightly accented. I made an appointment to see the house at eleven, spent the next hour thinking about the first time I’d seen it.
Something to show you, Alex.
Surprise, surprise. She’d been full of them.
I expected her to be flooded with suitors. But she was always available when I asked her out, even on the shortest notice. And when a patient crisis caused me to break a date, she never complained. Never pushed or pressured me for commitment of any sort- the least demanding human being I’d ever known.
We made love nearly every time we were together, though we never spent the night together.
At first she begged off going to my place, wanted to do it in the backseat of the car. After we’d known each other for several months she relented, but even when she did share my bed, she treated it as if it were a backseat- never completely disrobing, never falling asleep. After waking up several times from my own postcoital torpor to find her sitting on the edge of the bed, fully dressed, tugging her ear, I asked her what was bothering her.
“Nothing. I’m just restless- always have been. I have trouble sleeping anywhere but my own bed. Are you angry?”
“No, of course not. Is there anything I can do?”
“Take me home. When you’re ready.”
I accommodated myself to her needs: rut and run. Some of the edge was taken off my pleasure, but enough remained to keep me coming back for more.
Her pleasure- the lack of it- preyed on my mind. She went through passionate motions, moving energetically, fueled by an energy that I wasn’t sure was erotic, but she never came.
It wasn’t that she was unresponsive- she was easily moistened, always willing, seemed to enjoy the act. But climax wasn’t part of her agenda. When I was finished, she was, having given something to me, but not her self.
I knew damn well that it wasn’t right, but her sweetness and beauty- the thrill of possessing this creature I was sure everyone wanted- sustained me. An adolescent fantasy, to be sure, but a part of me wasn’t that far past adolescence.
Her arm around my waist was enough to make me hard. Thoughts of her trickled into idle moments and filled my senses. I put my doubts aside.
But eventually it started to nag at me. I wanted to give as much as I was getting, because I really cared for her.
On top of that, of course, my male ego was crying out for reassurance. Was I too quick? I worked at endurance. She rode me out, tireless, as if we were engaged in some sort of athletic competition. I tried being gentle, got nowhere, switched and did the caveman bit. Experimented with positions, strummed her like a guitar, worked over her and under her until I dripped with sweat and my body ached, went down on her with blind devotion.
Nothing worked.
I remembered the sexual inhibitions she’d projected in practicum. The case that had stymied her: communications breakdown. Dr. Kruse says we have to confront our own defense systems before being able to help others.
The attack upon her defenses had brought her to tears. I struggled to find a way to communicate without breaking her. Mentally composed and discarded several speeches before finally coming up with a monologue that seemed minimally hurtful.
I chose to deliver it as we lay sprawled in the back of the Rambler, still connected, my head on her sweatered breast, her hands stroking my hair. She kept stroking as she listened, then kissed me and said, “Don’t worry about me, Alex. I’m just fine.”
“I want you to enjoy it too.”
“Oh, I do, Alex. I love it.”
She began rocking her hips, enlarging me, then wrapping her arms around me as I continued to swell inside of her. She forced my head down, smothered my mouth with hers, tightening the pressure of her pelvis and her arms, taking charge, imprisoning me. Arcing and swallowing, rotating and releasing, heightening the pace until the pleasure was squeezed out of me in long, convulsive waves. I cried out, gloriously helpless, felt my spine shatter, my joints come loose from their sockets. When I was still, she began stroking my hair, again.