Morning found Holland March asleep, still fully dressed from the night before, in his blue serge suit, silk tie, patterned shirt. He was submerged to the neck in lukewarm water in his bathtub. It had been properly warm when he’d gotten in, a few hours after midnight, but had cooled since. He had been out drinking and had come home alone.
He woke to the sound of his daughter’s voice coming through the loudspeaker of his telephone answering machine, a new device he’d hooked up just the week before, which eliminated the need for the answering service he’d used until then. That was fifteen dollars a month he could stop spending. Holly was saying something over the recording of his voice, which was reciting, “You have reached March Investigations. This machine records messages. Wait for the tone, and speak clearly.” There was a beep. Then a pause. Then Holly started in again.
“This is your daughter speaking,” she said. “Thursday, as you may remember, is my birthday. Please give accordingly—”
March put one hand on each side of the tub and heaved himself up. He glanced at his fingers—pruney. Very, very pruney. And what was that on his palm? He looked more closely. Written across his right hand in permanent marker, the handwriting unfamiliar but feminine:
You will never be happy
“—also, I hope you didn’t forget you’re supposed to be working today. Because, you know. Bills.”
March heard the phone go click. Then another beep and the whirr of the cassette tape advancing.
His temples throbbed.
Work.
Yeah.
He started unbuttoning his sopping shirt.
* * *
Gas lines were good for one thing: they gave you time to catch up on the news. On the radio of his beat-up Mercedes convertible, some lady reporter was at the L.A. Auto Show, interviewing an industry rep named Bergen Paulsen who clearly just wanted to bullshit with her about the new makes and models they’d be showing off at the big opening night event, but she wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein rolled into one, peppering him with questions about emissions and smog control and yadda yadda yadda. Meanwhile, the newspaper March had grabbed on his way out the door was reporting on the progress of those killer bees that were supposedly coming up from South America to end life as we knew it. Those fucking bees had supposedly been coming for years now, newspapers had been scaring people about them since Nixon was in office, and had they ever shown up, even one of them? At least the smog you could see out there.
March looked at the smog.
Yep, it was hanging over the city like a white quilt that had spent too many years on a smoker’s bed. You looked at the air and pictured it going into your lungs and it was enough to make you sick. At least he couldn’t smell it anymore, not since that dickhole he’d been tailing last summer clocked him in the back of the head with a board studded with rusty nails. Was it the rust that did it, or just the concussion? The docs didn’t know. Would his sense of smell return someday? Maybe. In the meantime, smog didn’t stink, and neither did the gasoline everyone was lined up to buy, but you know what? He couldn’t smell roses either, and his wife was dead. So.
March reached under the front seat, retrieved a battery-operated electric razor, Holly’s gift to him last Christmas, and clicked it on. Went to work on his stubble, let the noise of the motor drown out the honking of the cars around him as they inched angrily toward the pumps. Somewhere up front, near the head of the line, two drivers had gotten out of their cars and were shouting at each other. Fists were getting waved in faces. You might think, with an energy crisis going on, people would save their energy. Maybe even band together or something. Help their fellow man. But, no. People were still mean, and petty, and unforgiving. And a good thing, too, as far as March was concerned, because if that ever changed he’d be out of a job.
As it was, nearly half his business had gone away, the result of California implementing no-fault divorce. No longer did you need pictures of your hubby screwing his secretary, or your wife schtupping the milkman, or you know, vice versa, before a judge would let you call it quits. And just like that, half the private cops in California were out of work. Probably leading to more than a few divorces, which were simpler now, so, there you go, silver lining. But the point was, if you wanted to make a living as a private eye these days, you had to hustle for it. Which was why March had become such a frequent visitor at the place where he’d met Lily Glenn, the Leisure World retirement park, where his buddy Rudy ran security. Rudy was happy to fund his losing bets on every nag that ran at Santa Anita with the ten percent March kicked back to him any time one of the residents hired him to find a missing spouse or whatnot. It was easy work. Most of the time the missing spouse could be found resting in an urn on the mantelpiece, his demise having conveniently been forgotten by his loving wife of fifty-seven years.
And maybe Mrs. Glenn’s sighting of her beloved niece, writing at a desk in her house several days after she died in a car crash, fell into this category. People saw what they wanted to see, especially when they were on four or five prescriptions and peered at the world through bifocals. It would be easy enough for March to generate a report saying he’d looked into it, conducted a thorough investigation, and, no, Misty really was gone, so sorry. Mrs. Glenn would have a good cry and get over it, and her fee would pay for Rudy’s latest flight of fancy at the track, the laundry bills for March’s blue suit, and maybe even a birthday present for Holly. A good day’s work all around.
But.
But—sometimes people weren’t just seeing things, even old people, even nearsighted old people. And the fact was, that license plate number she’d dutifully written down? It was a real number, registered to a real car, and what were the odds she could pull something like that out of her wrinkly ass?
Which left March with a goddamn quandary. Namely was he going to track down this Amelia Francine Kuttner and her mystery car and ask what she’d been doing in the deceased’s house? Or was he going to say fuck it and go back to sleep, in a proper bed this time, either his own or, preferably, one belonging to a woman of the female persuasion?
Later in the day it would’ve been a toss-up. But it was early still and bars wouldn’t be open for a while yet, and women wouldn’t show up in them for a while longer, and he’d taken Lily Glenn’s money, not that that meant much, but it meant something, maybe. And damn it, he was curious now. What was this Amelia doing in a dead porn star’s house?
He pulled up at last to the Arco station at the end of the line, and made a decision he’d live to regret.
* * *
The tag number had led to an address (thank you, Officer Mulroney), a dive in West Hollywood, up a flight of stairs from a doughnut shop that insisted on spelling its wares “DONUT,” which March fucking hated. The spelling, not the doughnuts. The doughnuts were fine, he ate a couple and called it breakfast, then climbed to the landing.
He looked left and right before kneeling in front of Amelia’s door and eyeballing the lock to see if it was the simple sort he could pick. It turned out to be the even simpler sort he could open just by turning the knob. Inside, anything that could ever have been stolen clearly already had been. The place was picked clean. A mattress on the floor had no sheet on it, no blanket, no pillow. Even so, March was briefly tempted. But he moved on.
The bathroom had one lonely toothbrush lying on the rim of the sink. The kitchen was empty except for a rusty fridge humming in one corner. He checked the freezer compartment, because you never knew, people had been known to keep valuables in their ice cube trays, but this chick didn’t. She did have an untouched pint of Baskin-Robbins rum raisin, which March would’ve taken a crack at but, no spoon.
That was it, three rooms, no furniture to speak of. The closet was bare. Nothing taped to the walls. He was on his way out the door when something occurred to him and he went back to the mattress and lifted it by one corner.
At first he thought the little rectangle adhering to the underside was a label, but it slipped off, came fluttering down, landed on the floor like a fall leaf. A business card.
March picked it up.
THE EROTIC CONNECTION, it said in cheerful bubble letters, shiny with foil stamping. And written in ballpoint ink on the back, Tue 6pm.