Vic Daniel 6 - As she rides by

Unfurrowed brow. Sun-kissed epidermis.

    She dropped the mag on the table as if it had botulism, and gave me a look.
    “Of course,” I said hastily, “I hadn’t gotten around to all your inner virtues yet, there were so many I needed a separate sheet of paper.”
    “Know what?” she said, shifting a little closer to me. I closed what little gap remained.
    “What?”
    “Sometimes I wonder.”
    “That’s it?”
    “That’s it.” She favored me with an all-too-brief kiss, which tasted of rum-flavored dentifrice, with just a soupçon of woman added; are you listening, Colgate? Take a tip.
    Over canneloni at Mario’s later she told me about her day and I reciprocated. She complained, not for the first time, that my days always seemed to be more interesting than hers. I responded, as I usually did, by pointing out that (a) she got paid regular, (b) no one ever tried to beat her up, and (c) my days were really as dull as hers but I was the more gifted storyteller.
    Over the profiteroles, she asked me if it had crossed my mind that maybe Tex really did have something to hide, but that it was so well concealed that he was confident a dodo like me would be too dumb to find it. I immediately lied, saying it was the first thing I’d thought of. So what was I going to do, then? I said, what the hell, sugar, I’d probably go through the motions anyway, and two grand still bought a lot of motions in my mileu.
    “And, speaking of motions...” I then suggested hopefully.
    “Homeward, please, Victor,” she said, “is my motion.”
    “Ah,” I said. “Of course, dear. I understand completely.” I paid the exorbitant bill, and out into the night we went.

    And, go through the motions I did, starting the following day, which was a Monday, a hot summer’s Monday, temperature by ten a.m. already in the middle seventies and climbing, and the smog thick enough to be served as an orange milkshake. Before setting off to keep my eleven o’clock appointment with Dick Distler, the Limeys’ exmanager, which I made as soon as I got to the office that morn, I took King out back for his morning ramble, figuring he’d better ramble while he could. There was no sign of Amos ‘n’ Andy, but Joe was there, as usual, dozing against my wall. I was glad to see there was no fencing in place yet, but about half the fenceposts were affixed. Well, they just might become unaffixed some dark night, thought I darkly while my puppy dug away busily at the foot of the tree. After a moment he gave me a guilty look, then began chewing on something. I went over and wrestled it out of his mouth in case it was a chicken bone or something even worse for him, like some ancient Chicken McNuggets. It wasn’t, it was only a bit of an old paper plate with a smear of what I hoped was ketchup on it.
    “If you are going to dig, why don’t you dig up something useful,” I told him. “Like a priceless artifact, for example.” Then I said to myself, “Bingo, baby. B-I-N-G-O! What a smart dog. What a good boy.” King wagged his tail. I felt like doing likewise.
    Distler’s office was on Sunset Boulevard, just past Western; the Hollywood Freeway let me off a short block from it. King enjoyed the drive more than I did, a lot more. Wonder why dogs like sticking their fool heads out of the windows of cars in motion? There was, of course, no place to park nearby, not even a meter, so I finally wheeled into a pay parking lot, tucked my Nash into a spot of shade, left all the windows open a bit for King, poured him some water into his number-two bowl, told him to piss out the window if he had to, told him to go for the throat at the first sign of an intruder, then walked back to the rose-colored, one-story complex where Dick Distler’s office was. And, from the signs on the doors, where a lot of other people in the music business toiled as well, if “toiled” is the right word. Tom could no doubt suggest others, like looted, pillaged, pirated, plundered, purloined, filched, cribbed, and for all I knew, shanghaied.
    I was working my way up the line toward Distler’s when I heard a moan coming from a narrow walkway that separated two of the buildings. In my part of town we would have called it an alley. There were a couple of garbage cans halfway down pretty well blocking the passageway completely; I spied what looked like a leg sticking out from behind one of them. In I went, with some caution. It was a leg, all right, attached to a skinny kid who was