But in this shuffle, Eden had gotten lost. She was the seed that had started it all, but then she had been pushed aside, ignored, while the players squared off to pursue their own aims.
Monks got behind the Bronco's wheel and punched a number on his cell phone. While it rang, his gaze fixed on a welded patch on the opposite door panel, where on a rainy evening last fall, a 9-millimeter bullet had exited while he lay huddled on the floor, with one hand on the steering wheel and the other frantically jamming down on the accelerator, trying to escape the ambush he had driven into.
After four rings, he got the answering machine of Stover Larrabee, a private detective and Monks's partner in insurance investigations.
"I need a favor, Stover," Monks said. 'There's a young actress named Eden Hale. It looks like she's going to figure into my life, so I'd like to know more about hers."
Monks paused. "Did I say 'There is'? I should have said 'was.'"
Chapter 6
In Stover Larrabee's darkened office, a computer screen was showing a video. A pretty young woman, wearing a fiery red wig and nothing else, was down on all fours, mouthing the erection of a panting man with a weight lifter's torso. Another, similarly built, young stud mounted her from behind, pelvis slapping her rump with rabbitlike quickness. Her muscles were tensed, displaying their fine definition, and her breasts shimmied with each impact. Her eyes were closed, not with faked passion, but rapture that seemed real. All three players had tattoos in evidence, including one of a snake-wrapped apple on the woman's left buttock.
"That her?" Larrabee said.
"Yes." Monks had not been certain during the clip's opening moments. Eden Hale – starring as Eve Eden in the video – had obviously been a few years younger when she had made this, and she looked a lot better on-screen than she had last night in the ER. But when her tattoo came into view, that clinched it.
Monks saw now how striking she was physically. Her body was strong and yet graceful, waist and hips forming a perfect hourglass, legs long and tapering. Her not-yet-augmented breasts were pear-shaped, not large, and like most women's, a little uneven – lovely by his standards, but not the symmetrical jutting orbs that many men worshiped. But the bar to real beauty was the way her face looked from certain angles – nose somewhat thick at the bridge, and cheekbones protuberant, giving the impression of coarseness. It had probably not helped her acting career.
"Seen enough?"
Monks nodded. Larrabee clicked the video off and lifted the shades on his third-story windows. They were many-paned, old enough for the glass to have rippled from settling, and etched with grimy salt from the storms that blew in from the Bay they overlooked.
Neither man spoke for a moment. There was a sort of guilty weight in the room. Monks had no objection to seeing attractive women unclothed, nor to the occasional glimpse of pornography. But watching someone who had just died in his hands had a ghoulishness to it.
"She was a rising star, huh?" Larrabee said. He was burly, forty-five, with a mustache and roosterlike shock of dark hair.
"That's what her fiancé said."
"What was your take on him?"
"Some kind of small-time operator."
"Pimp?"
"On that edge."
Monks leaned his shoulder against a window jamb and stared out toward the Bay. Larrabee's immediate neighborhood was a holdover from industrial days, when this part of the city had belonged to factories and shipping. But a few blocks south, gentrification had come in big-time, with expensive high-rise apartment buildings and fancy plazas. Sunlight flashed off the glass and metal of the cars crowding the Embarcadero. Flocks of pedestrians were drifting toward the afternoon Giants game at Pac Bell Park, with the masts of the China Basin yacht fleet spiking the skyline behind it.
"Lots of creepy people in that porn world," Larrabee said. "You remember Iris?"
"Sure." Iris had been a girlfriend of Larrabee's a few years ago, a stripper at the North Beach clubs. She had some things in common with Eden Hale, Monks realized: physical beauty, breast surgery, and a stage name – Secret.
"There were always guys after her to make porn loops," Larrabee said. 'They create a fan club. Seems that men get a lot more interested in watching a girl dance if they've seen her horizontal. She draws bigger crowds and higher pay."
Monks knew that Iris had left San Francisco, and Larrabee, for Las Vegas and a better career. He decided not to ask whether porn loops had figured in.
The Internet references Larrabee had found showed that Eden Hale had had several roles as a mainstream actress, bit parts in soaps and sitcoms. She had also made a few adult films. Someone had seized on the connection as a marketing ploy – the thrill of watching a legitimate actress, even a comparative unknown, having sex. A search of her name brought up several items along the lines of: watch eden hale get a facial… A credit-card number and a few clicks of the mouse would then deliver action like they had just seen, with the star billed in the film credits as Eve Eden.
'This girl must have had money, huh?" Larrabee said. "Maybe her family?"
"I don't know. Why?"
"Because that guy D' Anton doesn't take on anybody who doesn't. But if she was rich, why would she do the porn? For kicks?"
Monks had not thought about that, obvious though it was. "I don't know anything more about her."
"I'm sure there's more to her story," Larrabee said. "I can keep looking, if you want."
"I don't think so, Stover. It's not like it matters. Just me being sappy."
"Well, let me know if there's anything else." Monks said thanks and left. There wasn't anything else, but to wait – for Roman Kasmarek's appraisal, for the medical examiner's autopsy, and to find out if the beating Monks had taken over the past hours was going to continue.
Chapter 7
Afternoon sunlight filtered through the tall windows of Julia D' Anton's studio, illuminating slowly drifting particles of limestone that settled onto the dusty old hardwood floor. Her strong fingers worked at the stone with a wooden mallet and the hand-forged iron chisels she had brought back from Tuscany more than twenty years ago.
The block was one-quarter life size. Julia had started by sketching a live model, then roughing out the sculpture in clay. Now the model was back, to lend living nuance to the flow of the stone. Her name was Anna somebody, a softly pretty and somewhat sulky girl in her late teens, full-bodied and large-breasted. In the past, Julia had preferred working with marble, and women with lean, well-defined musculatures, but now she did not want to look at either – maybe ever again.
She had been shaping the face with small tooth chisels, trying to render expression from the blank oval. It was not going well. Her hands were getting tired. When that happened, they started to tremble and lose control. Anna was posed nude, sitting up, with her legs curled beside her. Her face was turned in profile and down, as if she were contemplating a flower in the garden where the sculpture would probably end up. She looked like she was almost asleep.
Julia gave the chisel a delicate tap along the bridge of the nose. A hairline crack appeared, a tiny fault in the stone that she had not seen. She pressed a fingertip over it, but she knew already that it could not be repaired. She thrust the clawed chisel in and gouged out a chip the size of a small nailhead. It would mean a restructuring of the entire face. Hands shaking now with anger, she slammed down the tools on the workbench.