I put Monica in the Bentley so Lil could take her to work. I refused to hear another word about her seeing Jessica, but I should have acted more laid back. Such rigidity would only make her want to see my ex-wife that much more. Yet I couldn’t even pretend I would talk about it later. I had to let Monica think it was about money, but the truth was that Jessica knew too much. “Just paying her off” might have seemed cheap in the short run, but in the long run, it did nothing to protect me. I had to find a better way to manage the problem, and I needed to buy time with compliance.
My lunch with Eddie Milpas was three blocks away. I called my sister and walked.
“So?” I said.
“She’s not your type,” Margie said. “She has dark hair and a brain.”
“Thank you. I didn’t need your approval.”
“Neither did she. Which I like. I always expected your next one would be on her hands and knees, licking a doormat. That’s not what you got. You got someone bigger than your grip. So, good luck with that.”
“If they put her up on the stand, I’m worried.”
“You shouldn’t be. She looked me right in the eye when she made her claim on the contents of your closet. If the truth is something you need to use, she’ll tell it. But I wouldn’t count on her to lie,” Margie said.
“Monica? No. I’d never ask her to. She’s...” I stopped myself, wanting to use words like clean and pure. They sounded ridiculous. “She’s honorable.”
“God help you, then.”
“I don’t want her talking to Jessica.”
“What did you want me to do about that?” Margie asked as if bored, but I could tell she knew what I was going to ask.
“I want Will Santon’s team back.”
“You want to follow her. After she just got over surveillance equipment in her house. You’re a paragon of sensitivity. Really.”
I stopped outside Karen M’s. I saw Eddie at a window seat. No small thing. A year ago, they would have seated him by the bathrooms. “Do you want her talking to Jessica? Because that woman’s going to lie. She’s going to turn a sexless spanking into a grudge fuck, and then I’m going to be the one licking a doormat.”
Margie sighed. “I gotta tell you, little brother, on the rare occasions you feel something, you go deep.”
“And with respect to that, I’d appreciate your indulgence.”
“Take Santon. But on a personal note…”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t get caught. In case you haven’t noticed, you’re on thin ice already.”
We hung up. Sheila was my favorite sister, but Margie was always a voice of sanity when things got chaotic.
I sat across from Eddie. The window looked over a line of tall bamboo meant to block the sight of Wilshire Boulevard traffic. Eddie looked at the menu, then at me, then back at the menu, as if he didn’t know exactly what was on it.
“Nice tie,” I said as an opener.
“Thanks.” His tone was clipped and quiet. I knew the guy. He was a percolating case of verbal diarrhea unless he was pissed off.
“I hear they’ve changed to locally grown tomatoes,” I said, “so avoid the caprese.”
“I heard the same.”
“There’s a shitstain on your cuff,” I said. He glanced at me, then away. “Are we dating, Ed? Did I just fuck your best friend or get you the wrong birthday gift or something?”
Eddie, reengaged in the conversation, leaned on the window, spreading his arm over the table so he could fuss with a matchbook. “My boss gets back from a trip Friday. Some last minute thing to look at property up north, and he saw the girl I’ve been pushing. But according to him, I’ve been doing it wrong. My whole marketing strategy? Wrong. So he’s managing her. He’s signing her. Personally. Harry Enrich hasn’t personally managed talent in fifteen years.”
“She’ll be happy to hear it.”
“She shouldn’t be. It’s not all skinny ties and burning CDs any more. He hasn’t caught up to MySpace falling apart. She’ll be on his learning curve when he doesn’t even know he has one. That leather corset’s gonna start looking real comfy.”
The waiter came. We ordered quickly. That had apparently been bothering him, and I needed to clear it up. He was burned. The collection of talent was his job, and a singular voice had been pulled from under him. In a city full of hopeful musicians, voices like Monica’s were impossible to come by. Needles in haystacks. Finding another voice he could use could take him a year or a lifetime.
“Ed, listen. I don’t want any hard feelings. But it wasn’t happening your way. I could have gotten Randy from Vintage Records up there just as easy.”
“Randy Rothstein? Please.”
“But I kept it at Carnival out of respect for you.”
He laughed. I admit I smiled as well. The notion was ridiculous. He was up a creek and had a right to be angry. I had the right to not care.
“You went over my head less than a week after you beaned me,” he said. “I had a headache for a day and a half.”
“I apologized.”
Eddie pushed his drink aside as if it was an actual obstacle. “Listen, asshole. If you had a problem with me signing your girlfriend, you could have told me.”
“So you could what? Tell me to go fuck myself? She wasn’t signing with you anyway. Not all decked out in leather and chains.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Ed. She was walking. Who’s going to know it better than me? I saved your ass and hers. Now you can all make money together.”
“I got nothing. Enrich can have her. Without a marketing angle, she can sing like a mermaid and it wouldn’t matter.”
“Mermaids don’t sing. You’re thinking of sirens.”
He shook his head and smirked. “You need to go out and find me another girl who likes to get tied up.”
“I have one for you.” I lowered my voice and leaned in. “Nice voice, but she comes with an angle. Might not be as hot as what you had in mind, but it’s like a slot and a tab. She’s got something already going.”
“I swear to god. Where do you find the time?”
“She’s an artist,” I said. “Think Laurie Anderson but drop dead gorgeous. Plays everything. She can play the spoons and bring you to tears. Has the chops for installation and performance work, knows the art scene.”
“Not as commercial,” he said.
“It’s what I have.”
“You got a name?”
The waiter came with lunch, and I wrote the name on a napkin.