Chapter 1
What does it make you feel like?" Mrs. Rhonda Devon asked, as the private investigator studied a painting hanging over the mantel: figures in repose by the banks of the Seine, all done in the remarkable brush dots of Georges Seurat's pointillism.
"A cup of coffee."
"Coffee? Why?"
"It makes me think of cafes and truck stops all over this desert."
"Why in the world do you say that?" Rhonda Devon asked. She took the P. I.'s cocktail glass to the bar. Behind her the sun was setting west of Mount San Jacinto, cooling down the unseasonably hot desert valley very quickly.
"In every single truck stop and cafe there's a Dot behind the counter. I must've had a thousand cups of coffee served by waitresses named Dot, more dots than you have in this painting."
Rhonda Devon chuckled and brought the P. I. another diet Coke in a cocktail glass. "What else does it make you feel?"
"Poor. I've heard of this artist. The painting's worth more than every house I've ever owned."
"Possibly," Rhonda Devon said, gesturing palm upward toward the sofa by the Seurat.
The P. I. didn't like the sofa's silk floral print, nor the Chinese Chippendale, nor the lacquered nesting tables. The massive old Spanish Colonial house cried out for some masculine bulk.
"I usually ask clients to come to my office for the first interview," the P. I. said, sipping the freshened drink.
"Why did you make an exception for me?"
"You're rich."
"Do you treat rich clients better than poor ones?" Rhonda Devon asked coyly.
"Absolutely. I mean, I would, except poor people don't go to P. I.'s."
"Have you been in business long?"
"Only long enough to get in the yellow pages."
"That's how I chose you, the yellow pages. I liked the name of your firm: Discreet Inquiries. Sounds like a massage parlor."
"How would you know about massage parlors, Mrs. Devon?"
"I used to work in one."
It was best to let that one zing past. The texture of the rosy damask wall covering would absorb the ricochet. The damask was also wrong, the P. I. thought.
Rhonda Devon smiled into her cocktail, then picked up the onion with a plastic toothpick and sucked it provocatively before dropping it back into the gin to bathe a while longer.
Then she chuckled again, and the P. I. wondered how they learn to do that. Regular people guffaw or snicker or giggle.
You even meet a few who chortle, but rich people, they chuckle. Chuckling 1A. They must learn it at boarding school and pass it around.
"We could sit here all evening and you'd never ask, would you? I took a job as a masseuse in order to research a paper in social science when I was an undergraduate. It was fun. I learned a few tricks."
When she said it she sucked on the onion again and smiled. That time there was almost certainly a sexual connotation.
It was easy to see the former undergraduate when Rhonda Devon smiled. The intervening years hadn't been hard on her but why should they be? She probably had a personal trainer to keep the belly hard, and a hairdresser to keep every strand of gray from that honeyed Marilyn Quayle flip, and a weekly visit to a manicurist probably took care of those long graceful fingers, two of which wore diamonds that could bail out Lincoln Savings.
The P. I. was wondering what it would be like to be this rich, when Rhonda Devon said, "Your answering service told me you're an ex-police officer."
"Apparently, they do listen to instructions once in a while. I was twenty years with LAPD. Thought it might be impressive for callers to hear about it."
"You cant be old enough for that," Rhonda Devon exclaimed.
"I'm old enough." Then, seeing she wasn't satisfied, said, "I'm going on forty-three."
"And you're right back into police work."
"This is nothing like police work Mrs. Devon," the P. I. wanted to say, thinking of the garbage work, such as interviewing witnesses for criminal defense lawyers; that was particularly hateful for an ex-cop. Virtually all defendants brought to trial were about as innocent as Josef Stalin, so most of the defense work consisted of trying to persuade them to cop a plea. This made the local criminal lawyers happier than it made the prosecutors, because the court-appointed lawyer got paid without lifting a finger. The local courthouse, like all others in the U. S., was more cluttered than a dressing room at the Folies-Bergere, so in a sense, it was doing what LAPD detectives did: offering tickets to the slam and hoping the defendants would buy.
But all the P. I. said was, "It's sorta like police work. At least sometimes."
"Why didn't you go into another line of work?"
"Well, if I could dance I'd try ballet but crime and crooks are all I know. Depressing, isn't it?"