Below Sunset, in the apartment complexes and small houses that stretch south on the flats to Santa Monica Boulevard and beyond, is the workaday Boys’ Town. The classic old apartments, high-ceilinged and spacious, that housed the stars of the thirties and forties, and the postmodern concrete steamships disguised as condominiums house a politically significant community of gays and lesbians who haul themselves out of bed every day to face the same kinds of jobs that wear people out in Dubuque, Medicine Hat, and Little Rock. They count other people’s change in stores, cash other people’s checks in banks, sell ugly shoes for other people’s feet, deal in second trust deeds on other people’s property, fix watches, clean teeth, and dispense medicine. And when the day is done, many of them go home and dispense care and love to people who need them. People who are sick or dying.
In the past I’d attended community meetings here, I’d hauled friends to Alcoholics Anonymous and Cocaine Anonymous meetings here. I’d seen gatherings delayed for moments of silence in remembrance of the just dead. I’d seen guys who looked like the Masters of the Universe come into rooms supporting men who were almost transparent with illness. I’d seen those transparent men rise to give love and support to the healthy-looking ones as they wrestled with their addictions, and I’d come back months later to see the healthy ones weep over the transparent ones who were no longer there. I’d seen courage and heroism.
To the casual glance, West Hollywood looked prosperous and happy, and it was happy, most of the time, for most of the men who lived there. They’d fled communities in the heartland, in the wheat belt, in the Bible Belt, in other belts less appealing than the thirty-one-inch variety that seemed to circle most of the waists in Boys’ Town. They’d established the City of Gratified Desire, a place where they could lead the lives they wanted to lead. Like everyone else did.
The Fig Tree fronted on Sunset, looking out onto the street through plate-glass windows etched with trailing branches and leaves. The clientele, visible through the frosty foliage, was almost exclusively male, almost exclusively young.
Two days ago-the day Christopher Nordine had first come to my house-Max had taken the Farm Boy into The Zipper. The receipt from The Fig Tree was dated two days ago. The kid had been described as a “tourist,” and I was willing to bet that Max had been giving him a guided tour of West Hollywood’s hot spots.
As much as I wanted to go into The Fig Tree, it wasn’t a sound idea. Spurrier’s men would have accessed Max’s credit-card records first thing, and if the Sheriffs hadn’t already been here, they would be soon. Spurrier had been very convincing about not wanting me anywhere near the case.
So I sat at the curb, letting Alice idle for fifteen minutes or so, pushing my sore back into the upholstery and thinking about Christy. Spurrier again, and thanks for the thought, Ike. He’d chosen Christy as the Boy Most Likely, and it would have made a lot of sense to someone who hadn’t met him. The heir threatened by a new affection, the long-term planner hiring someone to establish in advance his fear that Max’s life was in danger. He’d shown up at my house with a gun in his hand the night following Max’s death: second thoughts? Panic? Get rid of a potential witness?
Against all that, I had my conviction that his grief for Max had been real.
But there was also the fact that someone had been in Max’s house when I was there, someone Max hadn’t wanted me to see. Not Christy: He wouldn’t have been there when I was coming, not if he was afraid to talk to Max about the Farm Boy himself. He would have waited a few hours to give Max some time to absorb it all.
Since there was a reasonably hygienic phone booth on the corner, I left Alice to the mercies of the parking patrol and called Marta Aguirre, the housekeeper, again. I got the same indignant lady, with the same indignant mix of Spanish and English. Marta wasn’t around and wasn’t ever likely to be around, and why didn’t I get a job or something and stop bothering people in the middle of the day?
Max’s message-another therapist’s column, sent over the phone lines to Jack’s computer more than twenty-four hours after his death-needed attention, but that would be better left until dark. Ike Spurrier was the type who might get touchy about people wandering around in sealed crime scenes.
That left Mom.
I don’t know when my parents got old. It seems to me that they’d been vital and vigorous, kicking and carping their way through advanced middle age, until one Saturday morning when the light slanted just wrong through their living-room windows and I found myself staring, almost open-mouthed, at two senior citizens. Since then I’d listened to the commonplace complaints, watched the hearing aids appear, picked up prescriptions, chafed impatiently as my father drove more and more slowly, until the car began to go unused for months at a time, and come to realize for the first time in a largely optimistic life that things don’t always get better. The houses-we’d lived in what seemed like dozens-had dwindled to a small apartment in Santa Monica, and the luggage they’d hauled all around the world had become furniture, stacked in the living room with a thick piece of glass over it to serve as a coffee table.
My mother was sitting in the chair in which she’s spent much of her adult life, a high-backed, regal affair that is continually being reupholstered in a shade of blue indistinguishable to me from any of the previous blues. My mother, though, is capable of distinguishing among blues in much the same way Eskimos are said to be able to do with snow, and the current shade, she assures all who ask, is the most pleasing yet. Since it was early in the day by her standards-only three-fifteen-she had the Los Angeles Times spread out at her feet and about twenty of her daily sixty cigarettes pronged down and lipsticked in the cut-glass ashtray at her side.
“You’re late,” she said, leaning forward and scanning the obituaries. “Cripes, but people are dying young these days.”
“I made a few stops,” I said, “trying to squeeze in as much life as I can before the ax falls.”
“You lack focus.” She peered down at a particularly large obituary, ornamented by a photograph of a woman who had probably planted a great many fringed geraniums in her all-too-brief day. “You run around like a chicken with its head cut off. It’s the family curse.”
“I thought the family curse was drink.” She obviously wasn’t going to slip into maternal mode anytime soon, so I took the initiative and kissed her cheek. Bending over brought both the bullshot and the sore back into play. “Coffee on?”
“I made an upside-down cake.” She flicked the newspaper noisily with her index finger and made a clucking noise. “Only sixty-three.”
I crossed the small living room to the kitchen. “What the hell is this, hot water?”
“Caffeine’s bad for you,” she said complacently. “Especially if you lack focus. The Chinese drink lots of hot water. Ask Eleanor.”
“I’m going to close my eyes and name the presidents, and when I get to Madison there’ll be real coffee in this pot.”
She heaved a sigh, preparatory to getting up. “I spoiled you,” she said.
“It was the piano lessons,” I said, sticking my finger into the upside-down cake.
“I never gave you piano lessons. Take your finger out of there this minute.”
“That’s what I mean.” My finger was sticky, brown, and sweet with caramelized sugar, a taste that took me back to a time when I had barely been able to reach the counter. “If you’d forced me to take piano lessons, I might have developed some character.”