Not A Girl Detective (21 page)

And yet, if I hadn’t still been working at D’Amico’s

a year later, I never would’ve met Roger, the handsome Princeton grad student from Newport, Rhode Island.

And if Roger hadn’t had a father he wanted to punish

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(turned out I was the punishment), he wouldn’t have

come down to Asbury Park for the weekend. And if he

hadn’t been hungry for pizza (it seems obvious, doesn’t it?), I wouldn’t have had Annie. And if I hadn’t altered my master plan to raise her and help Roger get started in his career, who knows where I’d be? I certainly

wouldn’t be writing biographies of dead mystery au-

thors. That, ironically, only came about because of

Roger’s chief character defect. He was a shirker.

I could’ve said ass, but I’m a lady.

Early in his battle for tenure at the University of

Chicago, Roger—currently the world’s second leading

authority on James Fenimore Cooper, much to his cha-

grin—was assigned a course in American popular liter-

ature, fondly known as “Shit Lit.” Since I was the one who regularly cleaned up his shit, he’d doled out the research to me. Let’s just say he lived to regret it. I spent weeks digging into police procedurals. I was so thorough I surprised even myself—not to mention one of

Roger’s colleagues with her own imprint at a small

press. My first book contract about killed him. He liked me a lot better when I was hostessing at the faculty club.

Anyway, some things still made me feel young and

dumb. Being at UCLA, for example. Getting slapped

around by a coed. But here I was, just the same.

The art library was nearly empty. Maybe college stu-

dents didn’t use libraries anymore. Maybe they did

everything online. I found the section on surrealism, borrowed an available trolley, and loaded it up with

books on Salvador Dalí.

I loved research. I’d learned by watching Roger, then doing everything the opposite way. It was a lot like

shopping. Your senses are on high alert. Your pupils

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shrink to pinpricks. Nothing escapes your notice. You are searching for the clever juxtaposition. The creative solution to the recalcitrant problem. Take Adrian’s emphasis, during World War II, on pockets, plackets, and goring to create interest in lieu of techniques that would have cost rationed fabric. There’s a creative solution. If you stumble upon a piece by Adrian, consider yourself lucky. Or a peplum jacket from the fifties, maybe in a nice mohair and cashmere. Lilli Ann, a California label, did some gorgeous ones. Nothing, and I mean nothing,

camouflages childbearing hips better than a peplum.

I sat down at the nearest open carrel and pulled a

heavy book from the stack on the trolley. It must’ve

weighed ten pounds. I shook my head in disapproval.

Good research involves culling the telling detail, not accumulating them willy-nilly. I heaved the book onto the table and it fell open to a double-page spread of a painting from 1938.

It was lovely, a sepia-toned image of a young

woman, almost Vermeer-like in its stillness. The

woman’s head was bent reverently over a letter. Not

what you’d expect from Salvador Dalí. I stared at it

awhile. Then, suddenly, it dissolved into an image of a man with a heavy mustache and beard, sort of Sigmund

Freud crossed with William Shakespeare. The big dad-

dies. The title of the painting was
The Image Disappears
. There was a quote from the artist: “We see what we have reason to see, especially what we believe we

are going to see.”

I flipped back to the front and started reading. Dalí was born May 11, 1904, in Figueras, a small town in

Spain, though he liked to claim he was born not once

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but twice. This was because he was not the first Sal-

vador Dalí his parents had. The first died as a baby. The second arrived exactly nine months and ten days later.

Creepy. That was Dalí’s life in a nutshell.

He was a teenage prodigy known for his bizarre out-

fits as well as his uncanny ability to fake any style: im-pressionism, pointilism, purism, cubism, futurism. It was when he began experimenting with surrealism in

the late 1920s that he finally came into his own.

His dreams became raw material. He made paintings

of angelic babies eating bloody rats, disembodied

heads being attacked by ants, flaccid limbs, melting

watches, drooping tigers, and gelatinous everything.

Everywhere were double images and concealed self-

portraits. Favorite fetishes included keys, nails, zippers, and teeth. And his audience couldn’t get enough.

Pale as a cadaver, his mustache waxed to perfection,

he became a master of self-promotion. He designed

shirts, fabrics, ties, calendars, ashtrays, oyster knives.

André Breton, the leader of the surrealists, eventually turned on him, calling him by an anagram of his proper name, “Avida Dollars.”

His phobias multiplied as fast as his successes. He

was afraid of everything. He couldn’t buy shoes be-

cause he feared exposing his feet in public. On his first crossing to the United States, he never took off his life vest. He was so shy that he once addressed the public in a diving suit and almost suffocated when he couldn’t

remove the helmet.

I was riveted. I wanted to keep reading. But personal edification wasn’t the goal. I had to maintain focus, a key axiom of shopping and scholarship alike. What did 188

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any of this have to do with anything? Nothing. I was

looking for some esoteric clue that wasn’t there. After all, there was one perfectly plausible, perfectly logical answer to the question of why Salvador Dalí’s name

kept cropping up. Edgar Edwards was an art collector.

He had an interest in buying work by Salvador Dalí.

Asher Farrell and Mitchell Honey were art profession-

als. They had an interest in making that possible. They were doing their homework, that was all. That had to be it. And it made perfect sense, Edgar’s attraction to this particular artist. Dalí was strange; Edgar was strange.

Dalí loved practical jokes; Edgar did, too.

I walked back to my car swinging my purse around

and around in circles. Okay. So Dalí was a dead end.

Back to square one. Shit. Too bad Lois hadn’t panned

out. But how could I have expected anything from her?

She and Marlene were hopeless.

I pulled out of the parking garage and turned onto

Sunset Boulevard, going east.

Avida Dollars. That was really good. I wondered if

you could come up with any good anagrams for Edgar

Edwards.

“Rage” was in there. “Dada,” too. Also “sad.”

Poor dead Edgar. None of this should have happened.

If Edgar’s name had had an
l
in it, you could’ve spelled out “raw deal.”

2 2

It was almost eight P.M. Gambino would be here

any second.

I shimmied into a pair of black leggings and a pink

off-the-shoulder sweater. The mirror was behind me. I turned around and studied my reflection.

All ready for the remake of
Flashdance
.

Next I tried a Halston ivory cashmere tunic and

matching palazzo pants.

I looked like a milkman.

A striped shirtdress from the forties made me look

like a USO volunteer. The addition of stiletto ankle

boots made me look like a demented USO volunteer.

But maybe that was okay. I was getting bored.

Tut, tut. A girl cannot afford to be complacent. There was always my fuchsia sari dress; the matching stole

was big enough to use as a tent if we decided to camp out. Or my sheer metallic cowl-neck ensemble, a must

for the shy girl coming out of her shell. But since I wasn’t shy, it seemed redundant. Then it came to me.

You can never go wrong with Azzedine Alaïa.

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I pulled the long-sleeved black dress off the hanger. I remembered the afternoon I bought it, after catching

Roger in bed with one of his grad students. It was a

thick, semigloss knit with a low square neckline and a seam running up the center of the back that gave new

meaning to the phrase “lift and separate.” And separate we did. He had an excuse, like always, but that was the day I finally gave him the boot.

I wriggled into the dress and twisted my neck to get

the rear view. I could live with it. The sixties were difficult for me to pull off, with all those straight up-and-down lines, but the eighties, now those were good years for shapely women like myself.

A car door slammed. I slipped a lipstick into my

purse, and opened the front door.

Gambino, freshly shaven and in a dark sports jacket

and jeans, was standing there with a bouquet of red

roses.

“Did the guys tell you to do that?” I asked.

“If I did everything the guys told me to do, I’d be in a lot of trouble by now.”

“I think you’re already in trouble.”

“I am?”

“You’re looking more and more like husband mate-

rial.” Shit. I didn’t say that. “I didn’t say that.” Shit.

“Say what?” He was grinning from ear to ear.

“Stay here while I stick these in a vase.”

“Am I taking orders from you now?”

“Any complaints?”

“Nope.”

I found a black lacquered vase under the sink, but it had several chips. It was over. Ditto the wildflowers Lael had picked for me. I pulled them out of my tall

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crystal vase, dumped the brackish water, filled the thing with clean water from the tap, and arranged the roses.

Impulsive. Unrestrained. Rash. Only a fool says everything that’s on her mind.

We drove to Nancy Olsen’s cabaret show in silence.

Finally, Gambino said, “Do you want to talk about it?”

“About what?” I asked, opening my window.

“About what you said before.”

“No. The light’s green.”

He hit the gas. “Do you want to talk about anything?”

“The weather.”

“It’s cold out. Why’d you open the window?”

I closed the window. The traffic got bad around Hy-

perion. We were stalled for a while behind an old yellow Pontiac.

“Why don’t you put the siren on? Isn’t that one of the perks of your job?”

“Cece.”

“Okay.”

“Can we talk about it soon?”

“It what?”

“Us. The future. We need to talk.”

“Okay.”

“When?” he asked.

“In one week.”

“Seven days?”

“Seven days.”

“Make it six, and you have a deal.”

“Deal.”

He pulled into the driveway of the Witching Hour,

which was located in a former body shop on a back al-

ley in Silver Lake.

“You take me to all the best places,” I said.

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“I thought you were taking me.”

“Does it matter?”

“Nope.”

Inside, the walls and ceilings were painted black. It was Sunday night, but Saturday night had evidently

lived on. There was broken glass on the floor, dirty cups on empty tables, and a hostess with matted platinum-blond hair who seemed to have just emerged from a

coma. With great effort of will, she seated us at a small table near the stage. An Asian girl who looked about

twelve took our drink order. As she walked away, I

caught a glimpse of her tattoo poking up over the back of her leather shorts. It was a royal flush.

“Do I need a tattoo like that?” I asked, still pouting a little.

“You, babe, have everything you need.”

I rewarded him with a lip lock.

“So what happened to our drinks?” he asked after a

while.

The room was starting to fill up. Maybe the waitress

was overwhelmed. She should’ve probably been home,

practicing her multiplication tables or something.

“I’ll check.”

I walked over to the bar and waited. There were two

guys in lumberjack shirts standing next to me. I thought I heard them talking about Nancy Olsen.

“Do you know what time she comes on?” I asked.

“Why? You in a hurry to get out of here?” asked the

taller one. The shorter one just leered into his beer.

“No,” I said. “I’m with the gentleman over there.” I

pointed toward Gambino.

“The cop?” asked the tall one.

I nodded. They made themselves scarce. With our

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drinks in hand, I returned to the table. Gambino was

deep in conversation with the hostess. When she saw

me coming, she disappeared.

“What’s with her?”

“She wanted to know how to get rid of the hookers

that hang out in the back of the parking lot.”

“How do all these people know you’re a cop?”

“People know.”

The lights dimmed as the musicians came out. A guy

on keyboards, another on drums, and a third with an

electric guitar. They sat down and the stage went black.

Then a white spotlight shone on somebody’s teeny-tiny form. Nancy Olsen. What a piece of work. She was

wearing her tartan minikilt, her tank top, and a spiked dog collar with a chain that circled around her body

several times and hooked onto one of her motorcycle

boots. She scowled at the audience, which I think

meant hello. Then the guitar started screeching and she started wailing.

What followed was the weirdest performance I’ve