True-Life Adventure

kicked.
    But the murder had been committed in my house, and my house had later been burglarized. That meant someone had committed two outrages against me, Paul Mcdonald. That was why I should care.
    I knew an easy way to find out the answer, but I needed professional help. I phoned Booker Kessler.
    Booker was a little squirt about twenty-six years old, five feet six inches tall, and 135 pounds heavy. He had curly red hair, freckles, and usually a gorgeous woman on each arm. I never saw a guy that did so well with the ladies— he must have been nonthreatening or something. Either that or he was hung like a Clydesdale.
    He wasn’t home. He kept extremely irregular hours, so he could have been any place in San Francisco, but I was betting he was having a long lunch with a lovely. I called Perry’s, the Washington Square Bar and Grill, and McArthur Park, which was where I found him. I told him to wait for me.
    When I got there, he was lounging amid the wicker and ferns in jeans and a T-shirt, looking about twelve. His companion was Asian, permed, silk-jumpsuited, and red-lipsticked. She looked like she was babysitting.
    Booker jumped up. “Paul! It’s great you could join us.”
    “Booker, I need a favor.”
    “Sure. Absolutely. Meet Denise. Denise, this is Paul Mcdonald, the writer I was telling you about.”
    Denise smiled and gave me a look that said she’d be just thrilled to spend the afternoon committing unnatural acts; I didn’t think it meant anything, it was just a way she had when she wanted something.
    “Denise wants to be a writer,” said Booker happily. “Paul, what are you drinking?”
    “Gin and tonic,” I said, and tried to look pleased. I wasn’t. I wanted to get on with business. Booker owed me, but all the same, he was apparently planning to extract a favor for my favor— I was going to have to sit there for an hour or two and give Denise job-hunting ideas.
    Now you might not think an hour would be that important, considering I wasn’t on too tight a schedule, and maybe it wasn’t. But I was impatient and I hated doing dirty work. This was going to be dirty work: I couldn’t tell Denise the truth because Booker wanted me to make her happy and the truth about journalism wouldn’t do that. On the other hand, if I were somehow responsible for her getting a job on the Chronicle, that would make her miserable and I would have it on my conscience.
    I plunged in, hoping she wasn’t talented enough to get a writing job and ruin her life. “What are you doing now, Denise?”
    “Working at I. Magnin. In the cosmetics department. And I’m registered at a couple of modeling agencies, but you can’t support yourself modeling in this town.”
    That boded well. She’d probably never touched a typewriter and never would. I’d met plenty of people like her, people who were unhappy with whatever they were doing— driving a cab or tending bar or being mayor— and thought they’d go into writing one day. They never did and lucky for them— I was willing to bet Denise had made more from part-time modeling in the last month than I had from writing in the last year.
    So I gave her a couple of names of editors to look up, told some hilarious newspaper anecdotes, and didn’t tell her I’d happened to meet Booker on a story. I didn’t think he’d want her to know about that because the story was all about how a kid from the right side of the tracks got into burglary. Booker thought that, in his case, it had something to do with the fact that his mother left his father for another woman about the time he was starting to shave. He was in analysis.
    Anyway, I must have been suitably amusing because pretty soon it was almost the cocktail hour and Denise had another date. Booker did too, but he agreed to put it off for a couple of hours.
    We went to the men’s room while I told him what I wanted.
    “Easiest thing in the world,” he said. “You can do it yourself. See, you just take your Visa card and…”
    “I need moral support.” Also, I didn’t have a Visa card.
    When the Visa people closed my account for nonpayment, I cut my card in a zillion little pieces, smeared them with cat food, and sent them to Visa central. So I was a little short on burglary tools.
    But I wasn’t going to have to tell Booker all that and I knew it. In the first place, he owed me— not only had I set Denise on a new career path, but I’d also posted bond for him once. In the second place, he loved his