a year from Japan, doing TV commercials for their top-selling beer. He has a line of sports clothes. Lots more. His agents call the non-acting income ‘additional revenue streams.’”
“People just pissing money on him, huh?”
“He’ll never need to shop for bargains.”
When the waitress came to the table, Ethan ordered Moroccan salmon with couscous, and iced tea.
Taking Hazard’s order, she wore the point off her pencil: lebne with string cheese and extra cucumbers, hummus, stuffed grape leaves, lahmajoon flatbread, seafood tagine. … “Plus give me two of those little bottles of Orangina.”
“Only person I ever saw eat that much,” Ethan said, “was this bulimic ballerina. She went to the john to puke after every course.”
“I’m just sampling, and I never wear a tutu.” Hazard cut his last kibby in two. “So how big an asshole is Chan the Man?”
The masking roar of other lunchtime conversations provided Ethan and Hazard with privacy nearly equal to that on a remote Mojave hill.
“It’s impossible to hate him,” Ethan said.
“That’s your best compliment?”
“It’s just that in person he doesn’t have the impact he does on the screen. He doesn’t stir your emotions one way or the other.”
Hazard forked half a kibby into his mouth and made a small sound of pleasure. “So he’s all image, no substance.”
“That’s not quite it. He’s so … bland. Generous to employees. Not arrogant. But there’s this … this weightlessness about him. He’s sort of careless how he treats people, even his own son, but it’s a benign indifference. He’s not an actively bad guy.”
“That money, that much adoration, you expect a monster.”
“With him, you don’t get it. You get …”
Ethan paused to think. In the months he’d worked for Manheim, he had not spoken this much or this frankly about the man to anyone.
He and Hazard had been shot at together, and each had trusted his life to the other. He could speak his mind and know that nothing he said would be repeated.
With such a confidential sounding board, he wanted to describe the Face not only as honestly as possible but as perceptively. In explaining Manheim to Hazard, he also might be able more fully to explain the actor to himself.
After the waitress brought iced tea and the Oranginas, Ethan at last said, “He’s self-absorbed but not in the usual movie-star way, not in any way that makes him appear egotistical. He cares about the money, I guess, but I don’t think he cares what anyone thinks of him or that he’s famous. He’s self-absorbed, all right, totally self-absorbed, but it’s like this … this Zen state of self-absorption.”
“Zen state?”
“Yeah. Like life is about him and nature, him and the cosmos, not him and other people. He always seems to be half in a meditative state, not entirely here with you, like some con-man yogi pretending to be otherworldly, except he’s sincere. If he’s always contemplating the universe, then he’s also confident the universe is contemplating him, that their fascination is mutual.”
Having finished the last of his kibby, Hazard said, “Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Bogart—were they all airheads, and nobody knew it, or in those days were movie stars real men with their feet on the ground?”
“Some real people are still in the business. I met Jodie Foster, Sandra Bullock. They seem real.”
“They seem like they could kick ass, too,” Hazard said.
Two waitresses were required to bring all the food to the table.
Hazard grinned and nodded as each dish was placed before him: “Nice. Nice. That’s nice. Real nice. Oh, very nice.”
The memory of being shot in the gut spoiled Ethan’s appetite. As he picked at his Moroccan salmon and couscous, he delayed bringing up the issue of Rolf Reynerd. “So you said you’ve got one foot on some snot-wad’s neck. What’s the case?”
“Twenty-two-year-old blond cutie strangled, dumped in a sewage-treatment slough. We call it Blonde in the Pond.”
Any cop who works homicides is changed forever by his job. The victims haunt him with the quiet insistence of spirochetes spinning poison in the blood.
Humor is your best and often only defense against the horror. Early in the investigation, every killing is given a droll name, which is thereafter used within the Homicide Division.
Your ranking officer would never ask, Are you making progress on the Ermitrude Pottlesby murder? It would always be, Anything new with Blonde in the Pond?
When Ethan and Hazard worked the brutal murders of two lesbians of Middle Eastern descent, the case had been called Lezzes in Fezzes. Another young woman, tied to a kitchen table, had choked to death on steel-wool pads and Pine-Sol-soaked sponges that her killer had forced into her mouth and down her throat; her case was Scrub Lady.
Outsiders would probably be offended to hear the unofficial case names. Civilians didn’t realize that detectives often dreamed about the dead for whom they sought justice, or that a detective could occasionally become so attached to a victim that the loss felt personal. No disrespect was ever intended by these case names—and sometimes they expressed a strange, melancholy affection.
“Strangled,” Ethan said, referring to Blonde in the Pond. “Which suggests passion, a good chance it was someone romantically involved with her.”
“Ah. So you haven’t gone entirely soft in your expensive leather jackets and your Gucci loafers.”
“I’m wearing Rockports, not loafers. Dumping her in a sewage slough probably means he caught her screwing around, so he considers her filthy, a worthless piece of crap.”
“Plus maybe he had knowledge of the treatment plant, knew an easy way to get the body in there. Is that a cashmere sweater?”
“Cotton. So your perp works at the plant?”
Hazard shook his head. “He’s a member of the city council.”
At once losing his appetite altogether, Ethan put down his fork. “A politician? Why don’t you just find a cliff and jump?”
Shoving a stuffed grape leaf in his maw, Hazard managed to grin while he chewed, without once opening his mouth. After swallowing, he said, “I’ve already got a cliff, and I’m pushing him off.”
“Anybody winds up broken on the rocks, it’ll be you.”
“You’ve just taken the cliff metaphor one step too far,” said Hazard, spooning hummus into a pita wedge.
After a half-century of squeaky-clean public officials and honest administration, California itself had lately become a deep sewage slough not seen since the 1930s and ’40s when Raymond Chandler had written about its dark side. Here in
