Mine is probably the oldest and certainly the worst-built house in the canyon. At one time, it was also the most remote. It was so remote that the death of its original owner, an unskilled hermit who'd slapped it together in the century's teens out of odds and ends and sheer hermetic rage, wasn't discovered until his mummified body was found hanging from the living room rafter almost a decade after he'd tied the knot in his final necktie. As far as anyone knew, he'd been driven to toss his good-bye kiss at the world by nothing more profound than the sight of Old Topanga Canyon Boulevard being paved beneath him.
Beneath the diluted daylight on the deck, I stretched. Joints popped. Kids' joints didn't pop. I guessed I wasn't a kid any more.
A hungry hawk sliced through the sky above me, and I realized I was lying down. It felt too early to lie down. It also felt too late to get up. Given the fact that I had a mild case of the post-coke heebie-jeebies, my first in years, I hadn't expected to be comfortable so soon. My eyes called for a vote. It came out two to one, with me on the losing side, and the eyes closed.
At the moment that my eyelashes converged, the phone rang. This was no tired, cranky, irritated ring like Toby Vane's phone had produced. It was a coloratura soprano trilling, full of hope and spring, the lighter-than-air notes of a diva who's finally been told she can sing after weeks of laryngitis. The phone had rung so rarely of late that I'd taken to waxing it.
On the seventh ring, I made my first big mistake of the day. I got up to answer it. First, though, I had to find it. I had a vague, watery memory of having tried to get Roxanne's number from information the night before, and of having dialed Eleanor when that attempt failed. I remembered turning off my own answering machine in petty revenge when Eleanor's machine had answered. What I didn't remember was where I'd put the phone.
It continued to trill merrily away while I began at the wall outlet and painstakingly traced the cord through many a loop and circumnavigation of my cluttered living room. Finally I lost patience, took the cord in both hands, and gave a sharp pull. The telephone emerged abruptly from one of the bookcases and clattered to the floor, taking Frederick B. Artz's The Mind of the Middle Ages with it. I slapped the book into place while the phone squawked at the floor, then picked up the receiver.
"So?" My voice sounded grumpy even to me.
"Hello?" someone said in a bright and friendly fashion. "Is Simeon Grist there?"
I weighed the pros and cons. "Depends."
"This is Norman Stillman's office calling."
"Mr. Stillman has a talking office?"
"Well, of course not." She sounded vaguely affronted. "I'm a secretary. Mr. Stillman would like to see you."
"About what?"
"I'm afraid I don't know."
"Mr. Stillman can talk, right? Even if his office can't."
"Well, of course."
"Then let him talk."
"He's very busy at the moment."
I gave half a weary eye to the computer screen. A› blinked at me. "So am I," I said. "I've got someone winking at me right now." She paused, and when she spoke again she'd given up on friendly. "I'll see if Mr. Stillman can come to the phone."
"Take the phone to him," I suggested. "It's not heavy."
I knew Norman Stillman, sort of. Everyone in Los Angeles did. A case I'd been working on had required my presence at the "launch" of one of the many television series let loose upon an unsuspecting world by Norman Stillman Productions. I remembered him as a slender, balding man in a nautical blazer who was fond of misquoting the classics. A very rich slender, balding man in a nautical blazer.
"Mr. Grist?" Norman Stillman's voice slithered bonelessly through the line. "We certainly owe you a world of thanks, don't we?"
"Do we?"
"Let's don't be modest, Mr. Grist. This is a delicate time, and you pulled the fat right out of the fire."
"Mr. Stillman." I closed my eyes and rubbed wearily at the bridge of my nose. The room reeled, and I quickly reopened my eyes. "I'm not being modest. I just don't know what you're talking about." Even as I said it, I realized that I knew exactly what he was talking about.
He chuckled lightly, something I've never been able to master. I can do a hearty chuckle when I've had a few strong ones, but a light chuckle is too Noel Coward for me. I was trying to imitate his when I realized he was talking.
". . our boy," he said. "One more problem and we would all have been in very hot water."
"I don't know about you," I said, "but he passed simmer a long time ago."
"He speaks highly of you."
"With the chemical content of his blood, he can't speak any way but highly."
"Now, now," he said. "Let's not be judgmental."
It was too stupid to answer, so I examined the phone cord for knots. Phone cord knots, unlike anything else in the Universe, appear via spontaneous generation.
"I've practically watched him grow up," Stillman said after a beat. "And you can take it from me, at heart Toby's a fine young man."
"I'll bet," I said, "that you called me for a reason."
Stillman cleared his throat of Toby. "Do you think you could be in my office around noon?"
"I don't know. Why?"
"I have a job for you."
I looked out the window, focusing through one of the holes in the screen on the mountains to the south. I had two hundred of Toby's dollars in my shirt pocket and owed $315 for rent. Then, also, there was the possibility of Roxanne. I couldn't very well ask her to pay for a date. At least, not a first date.
"Mr. Grist?"
"I'm here. I don't think I can make it at noon. What about one-thirty?"
"I have a screening at two. Oneish?"
"Okayish. Where are you?"
"Universal Studios. Just give your name at the Lankershim gate and the guard will direct you."
We muttered polite good-byes. If I was to meet him at one, my mental state needed emergency surgery, and the only way I knew how to do that was to run eight or nine hard, sweaty miles. Afterward I would need a long sauna and a good fifteen minutes under a shower before I could hope to regain that boyish glow. It was a full agenda. To my surprise, the day looked a little better.
Feeling righteous, I went over to the computer and snapped it off. It sputtered at me.
I completed my rise from the dead at UCLA in Westwood, where the sauna is hot and the coeds are the daughters of the California girls the Beach Boys warned us about. Iridescent from the sauna, I tossed my running shoes into Alice and pointed her north and east. Since I had a little time and I hadn't dipped into Hollywood in a few weeks, I tracked along Wilshire to Santa Monica and then east on Santa Monica to Highland. Winos dozed on bus benches. Little old ladies using walkers waited for the yellow light before beginning their long toddle across the street and then looked agitated as the horns blared. In the brown-paper-bag sunlight along Santa Monica Boulevard the hookers trolled the traffic for business with their thumbs extended. School was out, and the average age had dropped appreciably.
Highland Boulevard took me over the Cahuenga Pass and then turned mysteriously into Ventura Boulevard. A right onto Lankershim and a dip down the hill, and I was at Universal Studios. I parked Alice between a Rolls-Royce and a Maserati and left her, looking like a bright blue boil in a courtesan's box of beauty spots.
Stillman's office was a cute little million-dollar bungalow shaded by a couple of eucalyptus trees. I got my first surprise when he opened the door himself.