Poodle Springs

She finished her wine. Willie poured some more. He was not a boy to miss the main chance, old Willie. She needed another cigarette. I took one out of her pack on the bar and lit it and handed it to her. Maybe I wouldn't have made a good manservant. Maybe I would have made a good gigolo. Maybe I didn't want to think about that. Maybe that hit too close to home.

"I used to pose for Larry, you know."

"I can believe that," I said.

Val nodded and stared at me. "Wasn't that long ago I still looked good with my clothes off."

"I can believe that too," I said.

"Well, I did."

"Larry usually take women's pictures with their clothes off?"

"Sure," Val said. "Larry looked at more nudes than my gynecologist."

She was pleased as hell to have said that and laughed and wheezed until she got coughing and I had to beat her on the back to get her to stop.

"Wise old Dr. Larry," she gasped. "Used to peddle the stuff around the boulevard when it was harder to get. Now he wholesales it, I guess. I don't know. Who cares about dirty pictures anymore. You know?"

"Get 'em on any newsstand," I said. "Did he do any legit photography? Fashion stuff?"

Val repressed a belch, touched her fingertips to her lips automatically.

'"Scuse me," she said brightly. The jukebox moaned out another sad country ballad. The old couple in the booth got up and stumbled out, arms around each other's waist, her left hand in his back pocket, her head on his shoulder. Val was still smiling at me.

"Did he ever do fashion stuff?" I said.

"Who?"

"Larry."

"Oh, yeah, fashion stuff." She paused a long time. I waited. Time is different for drunks.

"Nooo," Val said. "He never did none. He said he did, but I never saw any or knew about anybody he photographed."

She had trouble with photographed.

"Where'd Lola live?" I said.

"Lola?".

"Yeah."

"What about her?"

"Where'd she live?"

"Kenmore," Val said. "222 Kenmore, just below Franklin."

"She in any trouble lately?"

"Naw, Lola, she was fine. Had some alimony checks coming in every month. Me, I got to go to court to get mine. I'm in court more than the judge, for chrissake."

"Nobody mad at her or anything?"

Val gri

"Jes' Larry," Lola said.

"Because of the fight they had."

"Un huh."

Val drank some more wine. Some of it dribbled down her chin. She paid it no mind. She was singing along now softly to the mournful music.

"You wa

"They're good dancers," I said.

"You don't have to," she said, "if you don't want." She was swaying a little to the music.

"As long as it's slow," I said. I stood and put out my arms. She slid off the stool and wavered a bit, got centered and stepped in close to me. She was wearing enough perfume to stop a charging rhino, and it hadn't come in a little crystal flagon. She put her left hand in mine, and her right lightly behind my left shoulder, and we began to move in the empty barroom to the lonesome country sound.

"Ain't supposed to be dancing in here," Willie said from behind the bar. But he said it weakly and neither of us paid him any attention. It was dim in the bar and most of the light reflected off the bar mirror and the bright array of bottles in front of it. We danced among the tables and along the booths, down toward the front where a little sunlight filtered through the dirty windows. In addition to the old cooking smell there was the fresh, delusive smell of booze that made the air seem cooler. Val put her head against my shoulder as we danced in a slow circle around the room, and she sang the song that we danced to. She knew the lyrics. She probably knew all the lyrics to all the sad songs, just like she knew just how many four-ounce glasses of white wine you got out of a half-gallon jug. The music stopped. The quarters she'd put in were used up, but still we danced, with her head on my shoulder. She sang a little more of the song and then she was quiet and all the sound was the shuffle of our feet in the empty room. Val started to cry, softly, without moving her head from my shoulder. I didn't say anything. Outside on Sunset somebody was power-shifting a car with dual exhausts and the snarling pitch changes bored through our silence. I danced Val gently past a table and four chairs and as I did she suddenly went limp on me.

I spread my feet and bent my knees and slid both my arms around her under hers and edged her to a booth. She was as limp as an overcooked noodle, her legs splayed and dragging. I bowed my back and heaved her into the booth and arranged her with as much dignity as she had left. Behind the bar Willie watched without comment.

"No need to help," I said. "She can't weigh more than a two-door Buick. I'll be fine."

"Drunks are heavy," Willie said.

I got out another twenty; they were getting scarce in my wallet. I walked over to the bar and gave it to Willie.

"When she comes around," I said, "put her in a cab."

"When she comes around," Willie said, "she's going to want to drink another gallon of white wine, until she passes out again."

"Okay," I said. "Then let her do that when she comes to."

"You spending an awful lot of dough on an old wino floozie," Willie said.

"I got a rich wife," I said.

I paid the bar bill with my last twenty and went out of there into the hot, hard, unkind sun.

21

Number 222 was on the left side as you drive up Ken-more toward Franklin. It sat up on a small lawn, its front door barely visible under the overhang of the porch roof. It was one of those comfortable cool bungalows with big front porches that they used to build at about the time that L.A. was a sprawling comfortable place with a lot of sunshine and no smog. People used to sit on those porches in the evening and sip iced tea and watch the neighbors water their lawns with long loping sweeps of a hose. They used to sleep with the front door open and the screen door held with a simple hook. They used to listen to the radio, and sometimes on Sundays they'd take one of the interurban trains out to the beach for a picnic. I parked around the corner on Franklin and walked back.

The lawn had gone to hell in front of the place. The grass was so high it had gone to seed. The house needed paint and the screen had pulled loose in the front screen door in several places and the screening had curled up like the collar points on an old shirt. The front door was locked, but the frame had shrunk up so that it didn't take much to get in. I put my shoulder against the frame and the flat of my hand against the door and pushed in both directions at once and I was in.

The place smelled like places do that have been closed up empty for a while. To the right through an archway was the sitting room. There was a couch there, half sprung, with a crocheted throw on it, turned back as if someone had been under it and just gotten up. Opposite was a big old television set on legs. On top was a square apothecary jar full of small colorful hard candies, individually wrapped in cellophane. The thin blue Navaho rug on the floor was worn threadbare, and a coffee table made of bent bamboo was shoved over near the head of the couch. There were some movie magazines and a true romance magazine and an ashtray full of filter-tipped cigarette butts. The late afternoon light as it sifted through the dusty muslin curtains picked up dust motes in the air.

The cops would have seen all this. They'd have looked at everything like they do, and anything that mattered would be down in a box in property storage with a case tag on it. Still, they didn't know all the things I knew, and I was hoping I might see something that wouldn't have meant anything to them. It wasn't in the sitting room. I moved to the kitchen. It had gotten dark. I snapped on a light. If the cops had a watch on the place they'd have seen me come in and would be here by now. The neighbors would just think I was another cop.