Maybe Pierce Schwinn had followed all that, come to respect Milo for holding his own. Offered Milo a perverse gift.
Normally, nothing heated Milo's blood like a good cold case. But this was a rethaw from his own past, and perhaps he'd gotten careless and turned himself into prey.
I thought of how Paris Bartlett had targeted Milo, ignored me.
Meaning I had room to move.
The timing was perfect, the logic exquisite: What were friends for?
CHAPTER 21
Alone, at his crappy little piss-colored desk, the washer churning the clothes he'd just loaded for background noise, Milo felt better.
Free of Alex, he felt better.
Because Alex's mind could be a scary thing- cerebral flypaper; stuff flew in but never left. His friend was capable of sitting quietly for long stretches when you'd think he was listening- actively listening the way they'd taught him in shrink school- then he'd let loose a burst of associations and hypotheses and apparently unrelated trivialities that turned out too often to be right-on.
Houses of cards that, more often than not, withstood the wind. Milo on the receiving end of the nonstop volleys, felt like a wobbly sparring partner.
Not that Alex pushed. He just kept supposing. Suggesting. Another shrink tactic. Try ignoring any of it.
Milo had never met anyone smarter or more decent than Alex, but hanging with the guy could be draining. How many nights' sleep had he lost because one of his friend's suggestions had hooked a barb in his brain?
But for all his bloodhound instincts, Alex was a civilian and out of his element. And he'd failed to mature in one regard: had never developed a proper sense of threat.
In the beginning, Milo had attributed it to the carelessness of an overenthusiastic amateur. It hadn't taken long to learn the truth: Alex got off on danger.
Robin understood that, and it scared her. Over the years she'd confided her fears to Milo- more nuance than complaint. And when the three of them were together and Alex and Milo lapsed into the wrong type of conversation and her face changed, Milo caught it quickly and changed the subject. Strangely enough, Alex, for all his perceptiveness, sometimes missed it.
Alex had to realize how Robin felt, yet he made no effort to change. And Robin put up with it. Love is blind and deaf and dumb… maybe she'd simply made a commitment and was smart enough to know it was damn near impossible to change anyone.
But now, she'd gone on that tour. And taken the dog. For some reason that felt wrong- the damn pooch. Alex was claiming to be okay, but that first day Milo'd dropped in, he'd looked really bad, and even now, he was different… distracted.
Something was off.
Or maybe not.
He'd poked a bit at Alex's resistance. Playing shrink to the shrink and why the hell shouldn't he? How could you have a real friendship when the therapy went only one way? But no luck. Alex talked the talk- openness, communication blah blah blah, but in his own articulate, empathetic, ever-so-disgustingly civilized way, the guy was pain-in-the-ass, dead-end immovable.
Now that he thought about it, had Alex ever been deterred? Milo couldn't remember a single instance.
Alex did exactly what Alex wanted to do.
And Robin… Milo'd offered his smoothest reassurances. And he supposed he'd done a decent job of keeping Alex out of harm's way. But there were limits.
Everyone stood alone.
He got up, poured himself a vodka and pink-grapefruit juice, rationalizing that the vitamin C counteracted the oxidation, but wondering how closely his liver resembled that medical journal photo Rick had shown him last month.
Erosion of hepatic tissue and replacement with fatty globules due to advanced cirrhosis.
Rick never pushed either, but Milo knew he wasn't happy with the fresh bottle of Stoli in the freezer.
Switch channels: back to Alex.
Other people's problems were so much more engaging.
He walked half a mile to a Budget Rent-a-Car on La Cienega and got himself a fresh blue Taurus. Driving east on Santa Monica, he crossed into Beverly Hills, then West Hollywood. Not much traffic past Doheny Drive, but at the West Hollywood border the boulevard had been narrowed to one lane in either direction and the few cars in sight were crawling.
West Hollywood, The City That Never Stopped Decorating, had been digging up the streets for years, plunging businesses into bankruptcy and accomplishing little Milo could see other than a yawning stretch of dirt piles and ditches. Last year, the ribbon had been cut on a spanking new West Hollywood fire station. One of those architectural fancies- peaks and troughs and gimcracks and weird-shaped windows. Cute, except the doors had proved too narrow for the fire engines to squeeze through, and the poles didn't allow the firefighters to slide down. This year, West Hollywood had embarked on a sister-city deal with Havana. Milo doubted Fidel would approve of Boystown nightlife.
Among the few businesses the roadwork couldn't kill were the all-night markets and the gay bars. A guy had to eat and a guy had to party. Milo and Rick stayed in most nights- how long had it been since he'd cruised?
And now, here he was.
He found himself smiling, but it felt like someone else's mirth.
Because what the hell was there to be happy about? Pierce Schwinn and/or a confederate had manipulated him into warming up Ingalls, he'd accomplished nothing but had managed to screw up royally.
Attracting attention.
Playa del Sol. That toothy putz Paris Bartlett. First thing he did after ditching Alex was to check city records for a business registration on Playa. Nothing. Then he ran Bartlett through every database he could think of. Like that could be a real name.
Taking a giant risk because what he'd told Alex had been true: As a civilian he was forbidden to use departmental resources, he was treading felonious water. He'd put up a firewall by using the ID numbers of other cops for the requests. Half a dozen IDs of cops he didn't care for, jumping around different divisions. His version of identity theft; he'd been collecting data for years, stashing loose bits of paper in his home safe because you never knew when your back was gonna be against the wall. But if someone tried hard enough, the calls could be traced back to him.
Clever boy, but the search had been futile: no such person as Paris Bartlett.
Which he supposed he'd known right away, apart from the moniker having a phony ring, Bartlett, all hair and teeth and eagerness, had had that actor thing going on. In L.A. that didn't necessarily mean a SAG card and a portfolio full of headshots. LAPD liked guys who were good at pretending, too. Channeled them into undercover work. Nowadays, that meant mostly Narcotics, occasionally Vice when the word came down to run yet another week or two of hooker rousts for public relations.
Years ago undercover had meant another Vice game, a regularly scheduled weekend production: Friday and Saturday night operations put together with military lust. Staking out targets and delineating the enemy and moving in for the attack.
Bust the queers.
Not naked aggression, the way it had been back before Christopher Street, when gay bars were ripe for routine, big-time head-breaking. Most of that ended by the early seventies, but Milo had caught the tail end of the department's fag-bashing fervor: LAPD masked the raids as drug busts, as if hetero clubs weren't fueled by the same dope. During his first month at West L.A. he'd been assigned to a Saturday night bivouac against a private club on Sepulveda near Venice. Out-of-the-way dive in a former auto-painting barn where a hundred or so well-heeled men, believing themselves to be secure, went to talk and dance and smoke grass and gobble quaaludes and enjoy the bathroom stalls. LAPD had a different notion of security. The way the supervisor- a hypermacho D II named Reisan who Milo was certain was tucked deeply in the closet- laid out the plan, you'da thought it was a swoop on some Cong hamlet. Squinty eyes, military lingo, triangulated diagrams scrawled on the board, give me a break.