Spiral

a glass and chrome door with three apartment-style mailboxes inside it. The middle one showed a piece of masking tape with ”M. Eisen, Ltd.,” so I climbed the flight of stairs to the second floor.
    There was only one door, a plastic faux-grained plaque not quite centered on it but reading ”M. Eisen, Ltd.” as well. Knocking, I wondered why the manager of even a faded rock group couldn’t spring for at least a second plaque downstairs.
    A muffled ”It’s open” came through the door, so I turned the knob. A man was sitting at the secretarial desk in the outer office, a threshold behind it leading to an inner one. I recognized the hair transplant from the video of the birthday party that Sergeant Lourdes Pintana had shown me back at police headquarters. It looked like nursery rows of Christmas trees, planted at identical intervals.
    Eisen glanced up at me. ”Yeah?”
    I went through the formalities anyway. ”Mr. Eisen?”
    ”No, Mick Jagger. The fuck are you?”
    I realized that it hadn’t been so much the door muffling his voice as the voice itself. There was a breathy quality to it that wouldn’t carry five feet in an empty church, even though he didn’t seem older than fifty or so. Eisen looked thinner than he had in the video. I’d always heard that the camera adds ten pounds, but in this case, the subtraction made the guy almost emaciated, the name spiral over a tornado logo on his black T-shirt almost completely covering his narrow chest.
    ”My name’s John Cuddy. Nicolas Helides thought I should talk to you.”
    ”Oh, the private eye, right?”
    ”Right.”
    ”Tranh told me I might get a visit. How come you didn’t call, let me know you were coming?”
    ”Thought I’d just drive over.”
    ”Yeah, but why not use your cellular from the car?”
    ”Tranh told you he’d given me a cell phone?”
    Eisen blinked. ”No. No, he didn’t. I just—shit, man, everybody who’s anybody has one now.”
    ”I wonder if we could talk about Veronica Held.”
    A frown this time. ”You know, my lawyer doesn’t think I should be talking to you at all.”
    ”But Nicolas Helides does.”
    The frown evolved into a shrewd grin. ”John, I like a man knows when he has leverage for negotiating.” Eisen glanced behind him. ”Let’s go into my office. I can’t stand the fucking clutter out here.”
    The desk Eisen rose from sported folded correspondence and waxy faxes, eight-by-ten photos and tape cassettes. ”Secretary out sick?”
    ”Huh?” he said over his shoulder as he led me through the inner doorway.
    ”Your secretary. He or she out sick for a while?”
    ”Oh, I don’t have what you’d call a formal secretary. Got this single-mother chick, used to work for a temp agency, but she got tired of having to go to different places all the time. So I pay her less to come here more. Only one of her yard-apes is sick with something, so I’m up to my ass in shit from people I don’t even know.”
    ”I’m surprised they can find you, Mitch.”
    Eisen waved me to a seat before collapsing as heavily as his weight would let him into a high-backed judge’s chair behind a desk at least as cluttered as the one we’d just left. ”Find me?”
    ”Without any advertising downstairs.”
    ”Oh, that doesn’t stop the wanna-bes. I could change my name and move to Tahiti, and I’d still be getting demo tapes recorded in somebody’s fucking garage.”
    ”You ever find new clients that way?”
    ”What, off the street, so to speak?”
    ‘Yes.”
    ”Once in a great while.” Eisen pursed his lips, which somehow caused the hair plugs to march like a drill team toward his forehead. ”Was how I found Spi Held, tell you the truth. Or how he found me.”
    ”And when was this?”
    ”Back in seventy.” Eisen swung in his chair, waving this time at the wall of photos to his left and my right. ”That’s us, whole first row there.”
    I followed his hand gesture to a vertical line of framed shots, some posed, some candid. Most had a younger, heavier version of Eisen in them, with four even younger men around him. I recognized Buford Biggs despite the Jimi Hendryx Afro and husky build. I also recognized the fat, bald one called Gordo, but you would have been hard-pressed to pick the man Lourdes Pintana identified to me as Spi Held, and the fourth man with dishwater-blond hair falling onto his shoulders was clearly not the young drummer I’d seen in the video of the party.
    I said, ”Who’s the guy with