Lynn went down on the cool tile for a minute, examining a crumbled line of grout from a roach's-eye view. He raised up, wiped his mouth on a monogrammed towel, and picked up the extension: a Sports Illustrated phone shaped like a sneaker.
Speaking from the supine position, he said, "I'm dying."
"I can call back in thirty minutes."
"They'll be pulling a sheet over me," he moaned. "Look, lady, it ain't easy talking into a tennis shoe. Whaddaya want?"
"Well, Detective Cutter," she began, then thought it sounded stiff and formal. So she said, "Whadda your friends call you?"
"I don't have any." He was feeling more bile bubbling and rising. "But mother calls me Lynn. Kiss her for me. I'm all through."
"Lynn?"
"Yeah, Lynn! I know! Marion Morrison didn't like a girl's name and changed it to John Wayne! I know! Lynn's not a common name but life wasn't easy for a boy named Sue, was it? Now, lady, will you tell me what the hell you want this time a morning?"
"It's one o'clock in the afternoon, Lynn."
"Morning, afternoon! Kee-rist, have a heart!"
"Can I drive over and talk to you? I have something to discuss that might be to our mutual advantage."
He paused, then said, "Save your gas. I ain't about to jeopardize a disability pension by doing favors for private eyes, okay?"
"Hey, I wouldn't jeopardize your pension," she said. "We're in the same society. Society of the badge."
"Used to be. You ain't carrying a badge no more. Far as I'm concerned, you're just fuzz that was. Like just about every other P. I. I ever met. Fuzz that was."
"But I'll always be a cop at heart," she said. "How about a brief meeting?"
"I gotta go," he said. Then it occurred to him. "How'd you get my number?" He wobbled to his feet, weaved a bit, and considered peeing in the bathtub.
"I'll tell you," she said, "if you'll meet me for lunch."
"Lunch?" He'd only raised his voice to twelve decibels, slightly louder than the sound of human breathing, but it sounded like a concussion grenade. When he turned on the faucet he heard Chinese New Year.
"How about a drink?" she asked. "Let's meet in one hour and have a drink. Whadda you got to lose?"
"The Furnace Room," he said, spotting an empty cognac bottle on the counter beside one of the bathroom sinks. The only thing he remembered clearly was that what's-her-name drank every drop of booze in the house. "You'll love the joint. It's about as bright and cheerful as Gotham City. Can we hang up now? This conversation's going on longer than the Lebanese civil war."
When it was time to shave, Lynn Cutter gave up on trimming his mustache, but held the mansion-owner's electric shaver in both shaking hands and mashed his face up against it. The quiet hum of the shaver sounded like underground nuclear testing. After a hundred mashes or so, he was shaved. Sort of.
Breda Burrows was one of those people who grinned when she was irked. When she was really mad the grin widened. Once, when she was working patrol on Hollywood Boulevard she had occasion to grin especially wide after a pimp named Too-Slick Rick, sitting in his Cadillac Eldorado, said to her, "Honest, I don't make these street ladies work for me. I wouldn't lie to you, cross my heart, Officer. On my momma's grave."
And then Too-Slick Rick thought it would be real slick and real cute to cross a heart. Hers. He reached out the window of his pimpmobile, and with a manicured right index finger-longer than a broomstick and fitted with two diamond rings set in a bed of sapphires-he crossed her heart. Right under her LAPD shield. Right on the nipple of her left tit.
She spread out that grin till it stretched from Hollywood and Vine to the Chinese Theater, and said, "On your momma's grave? And does your momma have room down there for one more, chump?"
Suddenly she leapfrogged. She vaulted up and sat down on his extended arm, the way a stuntperson vaults into the saddle over the rump of a horse.
Too-Slick Rick played teeter-totter, with his elbow acting as fulcrum. His head shot up, smashing his mauve fedora flat against the ragtop. Cad. Breda's partner said that the elbow made a sound like a steel hull powering through polar ice, only louder. Too-Slick Rick didn't beat up any of his girls for a couple of months, not with his left arm anyway.
And the pimp didn't lodge a formal complaint against young Breda Burrows, whose partner told her that if you're going to maim some motherfucker make sure the motherfucker is a motherfucking pimp, because they seldom rat you off to those motherfucking headhunters at Internal Affairs.
When Lynn got to The Furnace Room Bar and Grill, the neighborhood regulars were already on their way to oblivion. It was one of those generic smoky restaurant-saloons with hideaway nooks, walnut paneled walls and red vinyl booths. They mostly served red meat and garlic toast. And brand-new customers felt like they were back home in Indiana the first time they walked through the door.