“A cynic like you, I’m sure you did.”
“And I didn’t know then that he had a lifetime habit of ripping off older men.”
“Well, now you do.”
I replayed my conversation with Christopher Nordine. “I think he cares about you,” I said.
“And so do I, about him. But a sociopath-you know about sociopaths?”
“I’ve met a few.”
He beamed at me. “Interesting, aren’t they? They can hold two completely conflicting views simultaneously. Like politicians. Or saints.”
“The multiple murderer Emil Kemper,” I said. “Talking to the psychiatrists, he said, ‘When I meet a pretty girl, part of me is saying what an interesting girl. I’d really like to get to know her. And part of me is wondering how her head would look on a stick.’ ”
“I don’t think Christy wants to see my head on a stick,” Max Grover said seriously.
“Probably not. Emil Kemper was a special guy.”
“But still, let’s say Christy wants to kill me. Let’s say part of him says, ‘Oh, I love Max. He’s been so good to me.’ And another part of him is saying, ‘That disgusting old man, there’s nothing but his rotting body between me and his money.’”
“You don’t believe that.”
“Of course not. But think about it. First he hires a detective to tell me that my life could be in danger, and then he kills me. A self-fulfilling prophecy. Like most prophecies, actually; prophecies are no big deal. Makes him look good, wouldn’t you say?”
“Especially since he’d be the obvious suspect.”
“The will,” Max Grover said. “He told you about the will?”
“First thing.”
“Very prompt of him. A bit Victorian, the will. Still, people have killed for less.”
“But, as I said, you don’t believe it.”
Grover rattled the ice cubes in his glass and pressed its sweating surface against his cheek. “Not at all.”
“Then why bring it up?”
He wiped the moisture from his cheek and dried his hand on his blue shirt and smiled at me again. “I’m just having fun,” he said. Then he reached out the bejeweled hand and tapped me on the knee. “I see a wedding in your future.”
I fingered the ring in my pocket. “You certainly do,” I said.
3 ~ Point-Blank Lohengrin
Weddings seemed to be the theme of the day.
I’d grabbed the latest batch of mail on my way down the driveway to the car, and I thumbed through it as I sat outside Max Grover’s house, waiting for a breath of relatively cool air to bumble into the car through the open windows. It came as no surprise that marriage was a profitable enterprise for what economists like to call service industries-travel agents, department stores, florists, insurance companies-but I’d never realized what a boon it was for paper manufacturers and four-color printers.
YOU TIE THE KNOT, WE’LL GIVE THE BASH, prodded a group of professional merrymakers based in Santa Monica, couching their message in words of one syllable, thoughtfully printed in type big enough to read through cement. People of many ethnic backgrounds and several religions celebrated with decorous abandon in the accompanying color photographs. In one shot, the female guests were wearing saris: market research at work. YOUR MARRIAGE WILL LAST FOREVER, predicted another brochure optimistically; SHOULDN’T YOUR PHOTOS? This one was hawking a sort of stainless-steel album that would preserve the visual record of your nuptials against fire, flood, earthquake, and, by implication, atomic attack.
A third, less romantically, urged me to give thought to a prenuptial agreement. “All of us at Schindler amp; Spink share your joy at having found love,” it began before getting down to business. “In California, the
land of community property…” Beneath that, on a loftier plane, was a fanfold with an idealized drawing of a lamb on it, exhorting me to bring Christ into my new home: MAKE YOUR RELATIONSHIP COMPLETE.
Beneath the brochures was what I’d been looking for, my one and only tie, fresh from the cleaner. The last time I’d seen it, it had looked like the entire Mafia had used it for a tablecloth. When I unwrapped it and put it on, sweating uselessly against the dry heat, I was pleased to note that most of the spaghetti stains had vanished. Blooming yellow in the rearview mirror and knotted in a single Windsor, it almost made me look respectable.
Okay, I thought, starting the car, I’d done what I was asked. It had turned out exactly as I’d thought it would, and I was pleased that I hadn’t taken any of Nordine’s money. Max Grover’s house had been on my way to the real business of the day.
Max had been a surprise, though. From Christy’s description, I’d expected a gay version of the pathetic sixty-five-year-old movie executives who rent themselves a new eighteen-year-old every week. Instead, Max had revealed himself to be much more complicated. Cheerful, confident, and manipulative, he lived more dangerously than his insurance company probably would have liked, but he seemed to do it because he actually believed he could help people. I had once believed the same thing.
Both Max and the junk-mail hucksters had seen a wedding in my future, but I was certain none of them had seen anything even remotely resembling the wedding I was going to.
I parked in a public lot downtown, near Parker Center, and hiked to the lobby, where I was issued the standard crack-and-peel badge, the kind that leaves stickum on your lapel. Since I could wash my face more easily than I could wash my lapel, I stuck the badge on my forehead. I thought it made me look festive.
“You must be for the wedding,” said the weary-looking female cop at the desk.
“I’m the best man,” I said proudly.
“Yeah?” she asked. “In what group?” She made a note and waved me past. “Elevator to your left, down three stories, get off at P.”
A pistol range was an odd place for a pair of cops to get married, but Al Hammond and Sonia de Anza were an odd pair of cops, and the LAPD pistol range was where they’d met. He was the cop I’d picked for a friend when I decided to ignore my various postgraduate degrees and become a private detective, and she was a distractingly beautiful Hispanic whom Al had discovered while his divorce from wife number one, Hazel, was cranking its way slowly through the courts, a marital version of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. Hazel had taken everything, including their child, Al, Jr., but Al had gotten Sonia. I’d met Al, Jr., the kind of child anti-abortion activists never mention, and I thought Hammond had gotten the better deal.
The elevator doors opened onto a wave of noise and a sea of LAPD blue. Across the room was a tight huddle of Latinos in civilian clothes, whom I recognized as the bride’s family. They looked as abandoned as the Last Platoon, surrounded by Saracens. The sea parted before my brown suit as though the color might be contagious, and I saw the groom sweating aggressively in my direction.
“Get over here,” he bellowed, waving a Gold’s Gym arm.
I did as I was told, proud of not breaking into a laugh. Hammond, now a lieutenant of detectives, hadn’t been in uniform for years, and he obviously didn’t have a tailor. The blues fit him like a sausage skin, just before it splits in the frying pan. Hammond was big in a way that turned defendants’ best friends into prosecution witnesses in moments, but I’d never realized that he had love handles. Now I saw that he had love handles so pronounced that they formed blue parentheses around his middle.
He followed my gaze down to his midsection and turned even redder. “Uniform shrunk.”
“Congratulations, Al,” I said, hugging him in the approved New Age fashion. He backed away from the hug, an Old Age cop, and I resisted the urge to kiss him on both cheeks. “Where’s the bride?”
His red face creased into a topography of previously unsuspected fault lines. “In hiding, like some federal fugitive. You know, I’m not supposed to see what she’s-”
“Al,” I said, “we both know what an LAPD uniform looks like.”
The faults crinkled and threatened to collapse inward. “Do I know anything about women?”