Flesh and Blood (24 page)

"Michelle."

He kept reciting: "Coroner says an old amputation, they're trying to roll prints off what's left of the right hand, but whatever skin hasn't been broiled is sloughed and messed up and it doesn't look promising. Hopefully, she's got a dentist."

"The day after we talked to her."

"Same thing vis-a-vis prints on the male, but they did find some scorched blond hairs. White male, six foot or so."

"The junkie she lived with," I said. "Lance."

"I asked Ramparts Narcotics to pull up users named Lance. Hopefully I'll have something soon."

"You're talking as if there's a doubt," I said.

Silence. "It's them, and now I'm wondering if my visit signed their death warrant." Using the singular. Shouldering the blame.

"Someone who didn't like Michelle talking about Lauren?"

"On the other hand, a girl like Michelle could've been into anything. That place she lived, dope was flowing in and out, those tough guys next door. Or someone was watching her apartment, made me for what I am, figured Michelle had squealed. I wouldn't have noticed—I wasn't looking out for surveillance."

I said, "Gretchen knew you were looking for Michelle. She gave you nothing, but Ingrid came up with Michelle's last name. It's not a stretch to think Ingrid told Gretchen."

"Yeah," he said, with forced calm. "The possibility occurred to me, so I called in a favor, asked one of the other detectives in the office to keep an eye on Gretchen's movements for the next day or so. So far, it hasn't come to much. She had a late lunch at the same place, again with Ingrid, went back to her boutique, stayed till three, then got in her little Porsche Boxter and drove to the beach—"

"Bugger's place?"

"No, no, hold on. She bypassed Santa Monica completely, took Sunset straight to PCH, broke the speed limit all the way to Malibu, turned off at Paradise Cove. One of those big gated estates that front the highway. The top was down on the Boxter, the whole time she was gabbing on the cell phone, looking carefree. Even when she was waiting at the gate she was yapping. It didn't take long for her to get buzzed in. And my guy didn't need a map to know where he was. He'd worked security for a party there several times. The Duke estate—the palace Tony Duke built on mammaries. Talk about your Silicone Valley. Apparently Duke hires off-duty cops all the time. Contributes to the police benevolent fund, part of the whole respectability thing. I guess it's no surprise Gretchen would know Duke. Back when she was riding high, she was on every A party list."

"Tony Duke," I said. "Maybe there's more to it." I told him what I'd learned from Adam Green.

"You've been busy too," he said evenly.

"I didn't see the harm."

"No harm done," he said. "All this kid saw was some skin shots, he doesn't know they were for Duke."

"Shots hidden in an issue of Duke. Tony Duke has a thing for young blondes, doesn't he? Both Shawna and Lauren fit that bill."

"I'm sure Tony Duke has blondes lining up to be Treat of the Month, but his rep is for screwing them, not killing them. And why would he go for a call girl like Lauren?"

"No accounting for taste," I said.

"I suppose, but some college kid's screenplay fantasies and Gretchen taking a drive to Malibu doesn't exactly get my heart beating."

"Malibu's where Lauren placed those calls to the pay phone."

"Exactly. You see Tony leaving Xanadu to take calls at a gas station?"

"Can you tolerate more hypotheses?"

"Sure, hit me."

I gave him my older-man theory, rambled about power and dominance, the vulnerability that Shawna and Lauren might've shared.

"Tony Duke," I ended. "Talk about an older man."

"So you're trading Dr. Dugger for the Sultan of Skin?"

"I adapt to changing circumstance. Fifty plus thousand in Lauren's account would be chump change for Duke. He'd also have a good reason to want her laptop."

Milo didn't reply. In the background a siren wail climbed like a slide trombone solo, then dopplered into silence.

"Tony Duke," he finally said. "Christ, I hope you're wrong. That's just what I need."

"What's that?"

"Big game, small gun."

18

FOR FORTY YEARS Tony Duke had preached the gospel of meaning through pleasure, converting a generation and scooping millions from the collection plate.

The easy life was his creed. For forty years every issue of Duke had splayed that dogma above the masthead.

Over four decades Duke pictorials had grown a bit more daring, but the magazine's format hadn't changed much since its first issue: golden-toned, milk-fed female nudity personified by the Treat of the Month, combined with suggestive cartoons, big-brotherly advice on dress, drink, and the acquisition of toys, token ventures into political journalism.

When Duke published his maiden issue, photographic essays of bare breasts, pouting lips, and willing thighs were nothing new. Pinup calendars had been gas station fixtures for years, and "nature pictorials" had occupied a stable market niche since the invention of the camera. But all that was under-the-counter stuff, supposedly for guys in raincoats and lowered fedoras—sex as dirty, in the finest American tradition. Marc Anthony Duke's revolutionary act had been to veneer the skin rag with respectability. Now Suburban Dad could purchase T & A at the corner newsstand and be regarded as classy rather than creepy.

With its winking scamp logo and gloriously uddered, fresh-faced models, Duke magazine had been a major force in the crumbling of sexual censorship barriers, and Tony Duke had fought his share of legal battles. But his victories in court proved, ultimately, to be market-share defeats as each landmark decision allowed successively raunchier publications to achieve legitimacy. Now, in a world where hard-core porn rentals were the number-one video-store commodity, Duke's airbrushed sensibilities seemed almost quaint. When Tony Duke hit the papers these days, it was usually because he'd thrown a fund-raiser for some worthy cause.

All this and whatever else I thought I knew about him had been gleaned from the papers: California farm boy morphed to starving bookkeeper to failed Hollywood scriptwriter to the author of a dozen forgettable science fiction paperbacks, then finally to head of the gutsy publishing venture that had earned him twenty beachfront acres and the kinds of toys his readers could only dream about. But the papers printed what you gave them, and no doubt Duke employed a fleet of publicists.

He had to be what—seventy, by now?

Older man.

As far as I knew he'd never been implicated in anything violent. On the contrary, he had a reputation as someone who genuinely loved women. Years ago I'd caught the tail end of a televised interview with him—some biographical feature on a network that deluded itself as substantive. Duke had come across still boyish, if a bit frail. A small, narrow-shouldered, goateed, ludicrously tanned elf of a man with an easy-to-listen-to drawl and friendly brown eyes.

Small brown face under a steel-hued hairpiece. Your eccentric favorite uncle, on shore leave from his latest jaunt to locales exotiques, brimming with ribald anecdotes, naughty jokes, and the unspoken promise that he might, one day, take you with him.

As I watched the steaks sizzle, I continued to wonder. About Marc Anthony Duke and Lauren Teague and Shawna Yeager.

A few years ago, when our house was being rebuilt, Robin and I had rented on the beach in western Malibu. During that year I must've zipped past the Duke estate hundreds of times, never thinking about what went on behind those foliage-shielded walls. I had only the faintest memory of a green expanse: palms and pines, banks of devil ivy, geraniums, rubber plants. The gate that had admitted Gretchen Stengel.

Tony Duke had made a fortune knocking down barriers, but he hid be-hind high walls. Milo was right: If Duke was involved it was a whole new game.

I made a salad, mixed iced tea, set the table, tempted Spike outside with porterhouse, and bolted the dog door. Robin came home just as I had everything in place. She looked tired and pale, and her hair was half tied, half loose. A beautiful woman anyway, but I wondered if Tony Duke would've noticed.

"This is wonderful," she said, washing up and pecking my cheek.

I took her in my arms, kissed her face, rubbed her back, ran my fingers through her curls, gently, so as not to snag. The sounds she made and the way she melted against me said I was doing okay, even though most of my concentration was spent blocking out the faces of dead people.

She found a bottle of cabernet that I'd forgotten about, and as we ate and drank my appetite returned. We did the dishes together, took a walk without Spike, holding hands, not saying much. The night was cold enough for visible breath, and the smog had traveled somewhere else. Winter, California style, was finally arriving. I'd check the garden tomorrow, maybe cut back some roses, see what the pond needed. Basic stuff. Concrete stuff. Time to get away from being useless.

When we got back home I got another peck on the cheek and a tired smile. Robin got into bed with a stack of magazines, and I went to my office and switched on the computer.

Marc Anthony Duke's name pulled up sixteen quick hits, mostly press pieces and the official Duke magazine website, decorated with grinning portraits of the man himself and thumbnails of pastied and G-stringed Treats Through the Years that could be enlarged with a click.

I scanned for a while, learned only one new fact: Two years ago Tony Duke had gone into "ultraleisure mode" and passed the day-to-day operations of Duke Enterprises to his daughter Anita. The accompanying PR photo showed an indigo-robed Duke posing proudly with a sternly attractive brunette in her thirties wearing a strapless black evening gown. Anita Duke was taller than her father by several inches, a shapely woman with smooth, bronze shoulders and nice teeth displayed by a tentative smile that appeared anything but happy. Described as "an investment banker with a Columbia University MBA and ten years experience on Wall Street." "These will be years of market growth and consumer-sensitivity for Duke Enterprises," she predicted. "Soon we'll be moving full-force into cyberspace."

I searched for something less laudatory, found a couple of Bible Belt organizations listing Duke Enterprises as "a tool of Satan." Then some paeans from fans—do-it-yourself stuff, with Tony Duke featured high on most-admired lists. From one of these I learned that Duke had been widowed two decades ago and remained single until four years ago, when he'd hooked up with a former Treat with the improbable name of Sylvana Spring ("the girl who tamed Tony!"), with whom he'd sired two children.

Any taming, though, had been short-lived. Duke and Sylvana had concluded an "amiable divorce" last year. The kids were proof, claimed the admiring webmaster, of "Tony Duke's Eternal Virility—eat your heart out, Viagra-chompers! Beautiful Sylvan and the rugrats still live in a guesthouse right their on T.D.'s palatiol Malibu spreadorama! The Man is ultra-gennerous and too-cool!"

Then pages of downloaded cartoons and centerfold photos, copyright infringements I supposed Duke tolerated. One unlined, doe-eyed, pouty-lipped face after another, sponge-rubber buttocks, geometrically barbered pubic triangles. And breasts. Peach-toned and pink-nippled, identically upswept, pneumatic in a way that Nature had never conceived.

I logged off, returned to the bedroom. Night chill had seeped in, and Robin was wearing a flannel nightgown, buttoned to the neck.

"I was just about to get you," she said. "Ready to go to sleep? I am."

Her hair was pinned, and she'd scrubbed her face clear of makeup. Her eyes still looked tired, and her lips were chapped. A tiny pimple that I hadn't noticed before had sprouted on her forehead. I got into bed, rolled next to her, smelled toothpaste breath, the merest eau of perspiration. As she began to stretch away from me, I kissed her, touched her.

She said, "I look horrid—wasn't planning to ..."

Then she sighed, hiked up her gown, drew me to her, held me tight. She was wet when I entered her, came quickly, chewed on my nipple, and rocked the pleasure out of me. When her body peeled away from mine, she was already asleep. I lay there on my back, feeling the thump of my heartbeat, feeling alone. She began snoring lightly, and her hand snaked across the bedsheet, touched my arm, found my index finger. Her pinkie curled around the digit and held on.

Deep in slumber but gripping my finger hard.

Not daring to move, I waited for sleep.

I awoke the next morning knowing I'd dreamed but struggling to retrieve the details. Something to do with a party . . . palm trees, blue water, naked flesh. Or was I imagining that?

I took a very hot shower, dressed, made coffee, and brought it to Robin's studio. She was goggled and gowned, about to enter the spray booth with a new mandolin, feigned patience when she saw me. After a few minutes of sipping and chat, I let her be and returned to the house. Thinking about parties again. Tony Duke's lifestyle. The kind of opulence that might attract a girl like Lauren. Would be even more of a lure for the Olive Queen of Santo Leon. Had Shawna Yeager covered for a bash at the Duke estate with a story about going to the library?

I drove to the U, hurried into the research library, checked out spools of L.A. Times microfiche, and searched the social calendar for mention of any parties thrown by Tony Duke over the last year.

Nothing.

Given Duke's reputation that seemed odd, and I retrieved the previous year's worth of spools, covered another six months with still no mention of bashes or fund-raisers at the Malibu estate.

Maybe there were certain parties Tony Duke kept out of the papers. Or maybe, finding himself a father again, the King of the Easy Life had changed his ways.

I kept searching, finally found something nearly two years ago. A "star-studded" benefit for a free speech organization that had earned Duke two paragraphs in the social pages and was accompanied by photos of The Man, gaggles of Treats, and various screen-famous faces—a plastic surgeon's bragging session. Anita Duke, too, standing behind her father wearing a conservative dark pantsuit and that same edgy smile as she looked down at her father.