I was back in my car, emerging now from the canals onto Washington Boulevard. As I passed the In-N-Out Burger, I gave the big neon sign a longing look. A look that said, We will dance again soon, friend.
I thought: What next, what next? Craig Helton, the ex–business partner, hadn’t called me back, and it didn’t look like I’d be able to talk to him today. Hmm. I decided to head home.
I live in Mar Vista, a modest, but to my eye beautiful, neighborhood filled with treelined streets and Craftsman houses just inland from Venice Beach. Mar Vista is underappreciated, a hidden gem—qualities I love in a neighborhood, and in a person. It sits at just the right place in the city too. I can take Venice Boulevard to the beach, or the other way, to the freeways, or all the way downtown, if I need to, say, go talk to a perfect-haired, granite-faced police detective and I don’t feel like dealing with the 10.
I pulled into my house, a Craftsman at the end of a cul-de-sac, that I’ve remodeled over time. I knocked down lots of walls and vaulted the ceiling so that now I have essentially one room, spacious in both square footage and height, that serves as most of the ground floor, encompassing the kitchen, a living-room area, and a dining-room area. A small guest bedroom and a bathroom are the only other rooms downstairs. My bedroom sits above the garage, the only room on the second floor.
I’d knocked down the walls in my house mostly to provide enough room for proper play at my home Ping-Pong table. It occupies, beautifully and perfectly, one corner of the big downstairs room. But I also knocked down the walls because I just like the way a room looks and functions when it’s open, with various areas within it, like a hotel lobby.
I got the feeling that my girlfriend was inside my house. After twelve or so years as a detective, you can sense certain things. That, and her car was in my driveway. Oh, and I’d called her and told her to come over as well. And she’d texted me when she’d arrived . . .
Her name is Nancy Alvarez. She’s an ER nurse at the Santa Monica Medical Center. She’s half Mexican. Her father emigrated from Mexico City, her mother from Kansas City. Nancy grew up in the Valley not far from where I grew up, but I never met her as a kid. I met her when I was in the ER after getting the shit kicked out of me by two heavies who didn’t want me to find out what their boss did for a living. Old case.
Nancy has long brown hair and brown skin and brown eyes and a very calm demeanor. But if you catch her eyes just right you can see that underneath that calm demeanor, some kind of storm is raging. But not in a bad way, or an angry way. In a way that is good. In a way that tells you she has intense feelings about things, and an equally intense sensitivity. But her demeanor almost always remains calm, and she’s calm in her delivery of statements too. And that, combined with the thoughtful, articulate way she expresses things, always makes me like her more. That’s important. The way someone expresses themselves, the way someone says things, articulates things, can have a lot to do with whether you like them, or love them.
I find her really funny too. Sometimes she says things, calmly, that kill me. And of course other times she gives me shit when I deserve it. Which I enjoy as well. Not right when it’s happening but later, when I think about it. But back to that intensity-lurking-underneath thing. That quality is connected to something else I really like. She’s often serious and is, at her core, quite responsible. I know, so romantic, right? But it’s true. There’s something about that that I’m really drawn to. When she gets her bills, she opens them up and pays them. When we meet somewhere, she’s always there, right on time. Which, obviously, I appreciate. When she has things to deal with at work, she doesn’t avoid the problem. She goes in and deals. I guess what pulls me in about this is that it means she respects herself. She’s not a mess, some kind of pretty picture with a disaster lurking underneath. And she’s not pulling that unimaginative act where people confuse certain types of cavalier behavior with being charming. Nancy cares about doing something right simply because she just innately feels it’s the way to go. All of this, for me, heightens her sexiness. Amplifies her foxiness. Makes me think she’s even more attractive.
I found Nancy in the big main room. She walked toward me as I walked in and we kissed. But before we could even speak, my phone began buzzing in my pocket. Nancy nodded, like, It’s okay, get it. I looked at my phone. Craig Helton, the ex–business partner.
“John Darvelle,” I said cleverly.
“Hi, John. This is Craig Helton calling you back.”
I explained who I was and then what I wanted, to talk to him in person. He said, fine, come to his office tomorrow. Tomorrow was a Sunday. Craig informed me that he was an insurance agent—health insurance—and he liked to go in on weekends to catch up on things when no one else was around. Needless to say I understood, and I told him that. We made a time. He gave me the address. We hung up.
Later, Nancy and I were having dinner at my little dining table. She’d brought over some chili that she’d made. It was outstanding. Delicious. And I love meals that are all in one bowl, as a general rule, which perhaps made it more delicious.
She said, “A guy came in today who had run over his own foot with a lawn mower.”
I said, “I’m working on a case where a guy was walking out of his house one morning and took a bullet that blew his whole chest open.”
Nancy looked at me and said in her calm, sexy voice, with absolutely no smile, “Pass the salt.”
I laughed really hard.
After we were finished with dinner, I sat on a chair in the bathroom of my bedroom and Nancy zipped my head down with my Oster head shaver. She’s really good at it, better than I am. Makes it even, crisp, perfect. And, involuntarily, she adds a sensual touch, her left hand resting on, sometimes lightly squeezing, my left shoulder. I sat there, closed my eyes, and listened to the buzzer as she moved it all over my head.
BZZZZZZ. BZZZZZZ. BZZZZZZ.
Later, back in the main room, sitting on the couch, Nancy having a glass of red wine, me having a Budweiser, she said, “So you think that taking the case with the old lady somehow led to you getting the case you’re on now? Shot-in-the-Chest-in-the-Morning Guy?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Hmm,” she said. “You don’t think that when you get started on something, literally anything, you’re just making yourself busy, so you’re not thinking as much about what’s not happening, and that way, when something good does happen, it just sort of seems like the initial thing caused it?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
“I don’t either,” she said calmly and smiled.
And then she asked, “So how do the two guys who came to your office to threaten you fit in to your theory?”
“They don’t. That happened because I decided to let Heather Press be.”
Nancy thought for a second and asked, “Well, do you think the mean-old-lady case is connected in any other way to the one you’re on now?”
“Now that’s debatable,” I said. “No, that’s more than debatable. That’s unlikely. Very unlikely. But I guess, like a lot in life, you never know.”
“Right,” she said. “You never know.”