I punched the button and sat in the relative darkness. There is no silence quite as plaintive as that of an empty house when the television turns off. Now that the media were no longer mistreating me, I felt left out.
The back cushions on the couch, strewn by Preston, jarred loose a recollection of Genevieve. Before we'd watch a movie or an opera on PBS, she'd pull apart the whole damn couch like a kid building a fort, and rearrange it to her liking, which usually entailed transforming it into a faux-suede nest, elevating her like Cleopatra on the barge. From her regal perch, she studied me now with those imploring French eyes.
"I'm working on it," I said. "Everyone has setbacks. Remember Waterloo?"
She vanished at the ring of my cell phone.
"Who's the mack daddy?"
"Barry Bonds?" I guessed.
A sound of disgust. "Chic Bales, that's who."
I told him about Richard Collins, the innocent, pot-smoking Home Depot felon.
"Don't despair, Chicken Little. I got us a spray artist. We ride at first light."
After the call I stared at the couch, but Genevieve wouldn't reappear. I didn't blame her. I was lousy company, and I might have shoved a boning knife through her rib cage.
Upstairs I dozed sporadically, finding myself wide awake at 1:00 a.m. The Genevieve hour. Each whistle of the wind was a screen being slit, every creak in the house a foot set cautiously down. Turning on the lights before me, I retrieved spare cuts of plywood from the garage and hammered them across the broken windows in my front door.
Back in my bedroom, I lay in the darkness, surrounded by familiar shadows.
You have to accept whatever comes, and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best that you have to give.
I'd looked stupid. It wasn't a first. I'd spent the evening spinning my tires. Not like I had anything better to do. I'd played a card with Cal I could've saved for later. So what? I had more up my sleeve. Tomorrow could bring a graffiti-artist eyewitness, another body, a rise in the ocean that left us all breathing through snorkels.
For Genevieve, for Kasey Broach, for myself, I was committed. I was in the plot. After blood, sweat, and tears would come an ending, favorable or not.
For the first time since I'd awakened in that hospital bed, I slept soundly.
I met Chic in a part of Compton that had been revitalized, meaning the crackheads looked better fed.
He leaned over my window and said, "Genevieve's father invested in a company that owned a boutique that Kasey Broach once bought soap at. They bought car tires from the same wholesaler, Broach in person, Genevieve through her mechanic at Lexus."
"What's that give us?"
"Nuthin' worth marking on the scorecard." He grinned. "Database guy is good at digging stuff up, not necessarily good stuff. We'll see what else he comes up with. I don't think there's gonna be much between the two of them it's a connection between Broach and you that would smell like pay dirt to me. If it links Genevieve, too, trifecta." As we crossed the street, Chic flicked his chin at the warehouse up ahead. "That's our boy's art studio there."
"Art studio?"
"That's right. And don't go embarrassin' me and callin' it graffiti."
"What do I call it?"
"Aerosol art."
"Naturally."
We entered to find a large woman behind a reception desk, blowing on a set of fingernails that doubled the length of her hand. She looked up, eyebrows raised as if we'd shoved in on her in a changing room.
"Engelbert Humperdinck here's lookin' for Bishop," Chic said, jerking his head in my direction, "but he didn't want to come down alone because he's afraid you all might put him in a cannibal pot."
"One o' them black ones?"
"Uh-huh."
"Lemme go get it." She pushed back from the desk and disappeared through a metal door. Her voice came amplified through the walls. "Bish! Folks here to see you!" We couldn't make out the response, but we heard her say, "Then sit reception you own damn self."
She reappeared, holding the heavy door for us to pass through. She eyed me as I passed. "He a cop or a buyer?"
"He a writer," Chic said.
She snorted. "Which restaurant?"
We entered the warehouse proper. Aside from a desk in the far corner, several cardboard boxes, and a rotund naked black man, the room was empty. The man was giving us his generous backside, facing an enormous canvas, marked with splotches, that was strapped to the far wall. Paint dripped from his fingertips, streamed down his broad calves.
I looked at Chic, and he shrugged. We crossed the vast space, admiring the blown-up photos adorning the walls distinctive graffiti art on trains, billboards, even a few cop cars. The cardboard boxes were full of spray-paint cans, tips and nozzles, night-vision goggles flecked with backspray.
