Jonathan Kellerman - Private Eyes

“Interesting,” I said, not sounding very convincing.

“Yeah,” he said cheerfully, “as if you give a shit. You just want to do your job and go home to your lonely P.I. Murphy bed, right?”

“Boy needs a hobby.”

He said, “Oh, yeah,” transferred his brushes to his left hand and held out his right and said, “Richard Skidmore.”

We shook, he stepped back and said, “C’mon in.”

The interior of the small house was prewar budget construction: cramped dark rooms that smelled of instant coffee and takeout food, marijuana, and turpentine. Textured walls, rounded archways, tin wall sconces, all of them bulbless. A brick mantel above a fireplace was piled high with Presto logs still in their wrappers. Thrift shop furniture, including some plastic-and-aluminum-tubing outdoor pieces, was assembled randomly on worn wood floors. Art and its accoutrements- odd-shaped, hand-stretched canvases in various stages of completion, jars and tubes of paint, brushes soaking in pitchers- were everywhere but on the walls. A paint-encrusted easel sat in the center of the living room, amid a mound of crumpled paper, broken pencils, and charcoal stubs. A draftsman’s table and adjustable chair were set up in what looked to be the dining area, along with a compressor attached to an airbrush.

The walls were unadorned, but I noticed a single piece of white construction paper nailed above the mantel. Calligraphic lettering at the center read:

Day of the Locusts,

Twilight of the Worms,

Night of the Living Dread.

“My novel,” said Skidmore. “Both the title and the opening line. The rest will happen when the old attention span kicks in- it’s always been a problem for me, but hey, it didn’t stop the last couple of presidents, did it?”

I said, “Did you meet Kathy Moriarty through your writing?”

“Work, work, work, Marlowe? How much does Boss Spurgis pay you to get you to be so conscientious?”

“Depends on the case.”

“Very good,” he said, smiling. “ Evasive. You know, this is really great, your dropping in like this. It’s why I love waking up in L.A. You can never tell when some SoCal archetype will come knocking.”

Another appraising glance. I started to feel like a still life.

“Think I’ll use you in my next piece,” he said, drawing an imaginary line in the air. “The Private Eye: The Things He Sees- The Things That See Him. ”

He lifted several canvases covered with abstract splotches from a pool chaise and dumped them on the floor unceremoniously. “Sit.”

I did and he lowered himself onto a wooden stool directly in front of me.

“This is great,” he said. “Thanks for dropping by.”

“Does Kathy Moriarty live here?”

“Her place is in back. Garage unit.”

“Who’s the landlord?”

“I am,” he said with pride. “Inherited it from my grandfather. Gay old blade- ergo the Boys’ Town location. Came out of the closet twenty years after Grandma died, and I was the only one in the family who didn’t cut him off. So when he died, I got all of it- the house, the Bloatmobile, hundred shares of IBM stock. The art of the deal, right?”

“Mrs. Robbins says she hasn’t seen Kathy for over a month. When’s the last time you saw her?”

“Funny,” he said.

“What is?”

“That her sister would hire someone to look for her. They didn’t get along- at least from Kathy’s POV.”

“Why’s that?”

“Culture clash, no doubt. Kathy said the sister was Pasadena Whitebread. The kind who’d say uri nation and defe cation. ”

“As opposed to Kathy.”

“Exactly.”

I asked him again when he’d last seen her.

He said, “Same time Whitebread did- about a month.”

“When’s the last time she paid her rent?”

“The rent is a hundred a month, which is stand-up comedy, right? Couldn’t get into the whole landlord thing.”

“When’s the last time Kathy paid the hundred?”

“At the beginning.”

“Beginning of what?”

“Our association. She was so happy to get something that cheap- and it includes utilities because everything’s metered together and it’s too much of a hassle to have it changed- she came up with ten months’ worth right at the beginning. So she’s paid up through December.”

“Ten months. She’s been living here since February?”

“Guess so- yeah. It was right after New Year’s. I used the garage apartments for a party- artists and writers and terrific fakers. When I was cleaning up I decided to rent one of them and use the other for storage, so I wouldn’t be tempted to throw another party next year and hear all that bad dialogue.”

“Was Kathy invited to the party?”

“Why would she have been?”

“Being a writer.”

“No, I didn’t meet her till after the party.”

“How’d you meet her?”

“Ad in the Reader. She was the first to show up and I liked her. Straight on, no bullshit, a real no-nonsense Sapphite.”

“Sapphite?”

“As in Lesbos.”

“She’s gay?”

“Sure.” Big smile. “Tsk, tsk- looks like Sister Whitebread didn’t brief you thoroughly.”

“Guess not.”

He said, “Like I said, culture clash. Don’t be shocked, Marlowe- this is West Hollywood. Everyone here is either queer or old or both. Or me. I’m into chastity until something monogamous and heterosexual and meaningful comes along.” Tugging the ponytail: “Don’t let this fool you- I’m really right-wing. Two years ago I owned twenty-six button-down shirts and four pairs of penny loafers. This”- another tug-“was to make the neighbors more comfortable. I’m already dragging down the property values, not letting them bulldoze and put up another Spa-Jacuzzi-Full-Security.”

“Does Kathy have a lover?”

“Not that I saw, and my guess would be no.”

“Why’s that?”

“Her persona projects as profoundly un loved. As if she’s just come off something hurtful and isn’t ready to juggle with razor blades again. It wasn’t anything she said- we don’t talk too much, don’t run into each other much. I like to sleep as much as I can and she’s gone most of the time.”

“Gone this long?”

He thought. “This is the longest, but she’s usually on the road- I mean, it’s not weird for her to be away for a week at a time. So you can tell her sister she’s probably okay- probably doing something Miss Pasadena doesn’t really want to hear about.”

“How do you know she’s gay?”

“Ah, the evidence. Well, for starts, the stuff she reads. Lesbo mags. She buys them regularly- I find them out in the trash. And the mail she gets.”

“What kind of mail?”

His smile was a wide, white pin-stripe on wooly stubble. “Not that I go out of my way to read it, Marlowe- that would be illegal, right? But sometimes the mail for the back unit gets put in my box because the carriers don’t realize there’s a unit back there- or maybe they’re just too lazy to go back there. A lot of it’s from gay groups. How’s that for deductive reasoning?”

“After a month you must have quite a bit of it collected,” I said.

He stood, went into the kitchen, and returned a moment later carrying a sheaf of envelopes bound with a rubber band. Rolling the band off, he examined each piece of mail, then held on to it for several moments before passing the entire collection to me.

I fanned it and counted. Eleven pieces.

“Not much for a month,” I said.

“Like I said, unloved.”

I inspected the mail. Eight pieces were computer-addressed postcards and advertisements made out to Occupant. The remaining three were envelopes addressed to Kathy Moriarty by name. One appeared to be a solicitation for funds from an AIDS support group. So did another, from a clinic in San Francisco.