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2. TUESDAY (no work)

They let me out after the arraignment. I jumped a bus, broke into my apartment for the second time, took a nap, called Kris, and thanks to an extra set of keys under the bumper of my Chevy, drove out to meet her at the USC cinema slide library around 10 o’clock in the morning. This is a sterile beige cement place, sort of an institutional theme park, the theme being quiet pretension.

She sat at a table in front, nipples screaming out from under a white cotton blouse. Kris stays perched a steady thirty seconds ahead of fashion, so I was sure the weird cookie-cutter thing around her neck would soon be in the magazines.

“You freaked Oliver out.” She flipped through a box of old photos. It was the Grauman’s box, Hollywood Boulevard descending into madness.

I sat down, grabbing her legs in my own beneath the table. “What do you mean freaked?”

“Freaked to the fifth. I told him how interested you were in this dildo business and he got all flustered up. He said Mrs. Kane came by, but I know he’s lying. Oliver doesn’t begin to think about opening the doors here until 9:30. He’s just freaked.”

“So what does that mean?”

“He says she took the magical golden photo. Sorry. Supposedly she walked right in and asked for it, if you believe Oliver, which I can tell you is not a winning proposition.”

I had a plot outlined in my head, a structure for the Kane mystery, but I needed some factual basis. “I just want to look through the box. Can I see the other pictures?”

She nodded to his office with a shrug, earrings bobbing with doubt.

His door was closed. A blown-up Xerox of a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon hung from the beveled glass window—I’m NOT Having Fun! I knocked and he sang from within: “No time; make it quick.”

Oliver is an eloquent weirdo. He talks like an actor at a cold reading and looks like a character from the ‘40s—the rakish RAF aviator. His wide masculine face is crossed out with a bristlebrush mustache and in a good mood he’s a merciless teaser.

Today he sat in front of his desk eating yogurt, gripping the plastic cup like it held his beating heart. “If you’re asking about that absurd photograph that held so much fascination for Kris, I certainly do not have it. Mrs. Kane came here early this morning and she took a number of things back with her—mistakenly deposited here, memorabilia of a personal nature, those sorts of things.”

“You seem nervous.”

“Your caring is a balm.” He threw his yogurt into the trash, blue pastels splattering onto the wall. “I have a load of work to do. Don’t even ask me how much, I couldn’t begin to tell you.”

“But do you have other Jack Kane pictures?” A micro-cassette recorder sat in the front pocket of my black Levi’s shirt, and it was on. From here on out it’s always on. I’d begun to record most of my daily interactions under the guise of a writer’s search for truth, information on character, the cadences of speech. To be honest it just made everything that much more real to hear it the second time around from a mechanical device. But I only kept the good stuff. I wanted this to be good so I sidled up a little closer. “The photos?”

“They exist,” he said.

“But can I see them, or no? You can tell me no.”

“I’m not telling you no.”

“You’re not.”

“No.” Oliver wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“Then you’re either telling me yes or you’re telling me maybe.”

“Look,” he said. “We’re not playing poke the monkey here. I’m just worried you might contextualize something in a wrongful fashion, and that this library could potentially be involved in a lawsuit involving gossip or conclusions salaciously entered into, from private materials donated by private patrons.”

“What’s poke the monkey?”

“That isn’t the point. What I’m saying is this: that legally I’m concerned.”

“But what’s poke the monkey? I just want to know.”

“It’s a game from one’s childhood.”

“Not my childhood.” I couldn’t help laughing.

Oliver twisted his mouth up under his mustache. “At this instant,” he said, “we are talking about the photographs. That is what this conversation is about, and in regard to this concern I have, regarding the photographs, I would like to know that you will regard them with the proper amount of—” He cut me off with a forefinger before I could say ‘regard’. “—what I need is an assurance of some certain degree of propriety.”

“But you’ll let me see the pictures?”

“I’m not trying to forestall anything .” We looked at each other. Oliver reached below his desk for a pair of shoe boxes, holding them out at arms length, eyeing me with annoyance. “I think I said what I have to say.”

It was true all right; Oliver was freaked.

Mrs. Brennie Kane—and she kept his last name even after the divorce—was a thorough woman with an inordinate lack of photographic skill. I saw the life of Jack Kane in polaroids and bad 35 from their marriage in ‘69 to the divorce of ‘82. Kane had the face of a small town car dealer: square, dark, with one single confident eyebrow, as straight as a Kansas highway. You know him from the TV show, from the ever more slipshod series of films, but in candid there was something more photogenic—a nasty sort of amiability, the way a bastard smiles when he decides you’re on his side. The wide mouth, slightly wavy black hair, the flared confident nostrils—Kane was the personification of a young Richard Nixon in the body of a wasp JFK. I sat across from Kris and flipped through the moments of his marriage.

Kris had placed the photos in rough chronological order based on clothing styles and facial deterioration. I saw his wife, little Brennie Kane, a 19 year old dancer, post-hippie. She filled out pretty quickly after their first and only child. I watched Kane move up through radio to his big break as the young rebel in that Roger Corman sci-fi film, Young Rebel: Spaceman .

Then came the series in ‘74—Jack Kane, the personification of American joke cracking confidence, the downed fighter pilot in that wackiest of wacky Nazi concentration camps—black bomber jacket, smirk, quick repartee as he trumps the flustered Nazis, ready like a picador. We’d won the war, why ride on that Jewish rigmarole? This was different anyway; this was a celebration of the American spirit. He was the American spirit, though Viet Nam questions hunched nearby, unanswerable shaggy guests at the doorway to our consciousness. There was a simple beauty to the Nazis: they knew how the game was played, unlike those diffident gooks. Gassing Jews, annexing Poland, here was a good old-fashioned American fight, the proper validation for our basic need to kill.

That smirk etched a home for itself in our egos, and it must have done a job on Kane every morning in that bathroom mirror, because here history took a spill.

The series ended on that famous high note, the two hour episode where Kane takes over the camp, when we finally save the world together, finally speak the word Holocaust as he opens the gas chamber doors to the thankful hand-kissing of the anorexic groveling Jewry.

Kane hit a springboard off that fame, right into the eighties, decade of cinematic revenge. His biggest movie, his only hit, Naked Justice , broke water in 1980, and critics have yet to properly measure the wealth of that cultural birth. Hate was the rage, as he paved that bloody road for Stallone, for Schwartzenegger. Kane’s depiction of a spit-on Nam vet flying home to settle his score with those archetypally slant-eyed little heroin dealers struck a vein in the American psyche.

But trailblazers reap not the reward. Those rumors from the set, diva turns from the sanctity of his sound-proofed trailer; gossip dragged him down. I think even Kane realized he’d begun the traditional mortgage of one’s image to self parody. Or maybe he didn’t yet know; maybe he still hadn’t an inkling of the precipice on which he crept. Either way, the blow came fast and hard. Critics called Wild Breed—Return to Nam , a wild bore.

And then came the fall: drunk and in love after a mysterious five month disappearance, bursting into our living rooms with his own special version of the career-destroying Nixon tapes—a Barbara Walters interview gone sour. Kane seemed shifty and bitter under her looping softball questions. And two more sequels lead him down that demographic cul-de-sac: Hard Attack and Red-Eye to the Kremlin , patriotic anti-communist diatribes funneling what few fans were left into the meaningless bloodshed of his final celluloid stop sign, Dead or Dead .

Then of course he was clubbed to death with that famous blunt object, rumors of sexual causitives so delicately implied. Undetermined jealous boyfriend; the case was left to smolder.

But Brennie Kane’s record stopped on the high point of his career, just after Wild Breed . She was thrown to the wayside shortly thereafter, divorce settlement hamstrung when Kane somehow managed to spend nearly every penny he owned during that five month disappearance with the twenty year old daughter of an American attaché to Thailand.

But, I realized, slipping the lid back onto the box, if these pictures were donated by Mrs. Kane, what was she doing with a photo of her husband and another woman? Where did the dildo shot come from?

Kris had a lunch date with a professor who was no longer allowed to administer grades, but I pressed her to call Brennie Kane for an appointment; an appointment for me. They’d already talked once before, much against Kris’ will, and after 20 minutes of affirmative grunts into the phone she pencilled Brennie’s address onto the back of a photograph—Jack Kane at a Jack Kane look-alike contest at a Red Onion in Marina Del Rey.

9:00 sharp, she wrote underneath, mouthing the words, ‘you owe me’, grunting again soon after with an encouraging “Uh-huh, Mrs. Kane; that’s terrible.”

I taunted Kris silently, then meandered off to the main library, pouring through the stacks for some background on a Jack Kane conspiracy. With a few hours work the murder began to take shape in an aging book called Roman Gossip , rumours of a gold dildo surfacing in the Vatican with a 13th Century pope. It was crazy of course, like life. But to shrink from the world’s insanity for creative logistics is just cowardice. I took down as many of the facts as fit the need, then left to go find Anna at the airport.

Days before she was to dump her boyfriend for me, he dumped her first. And this was not, as I’d thought, a stroke of luck. It was the first little pop in the great personal implosion that sucked poor Anna straight off to New York, into the momentarily comforting arms of the only man she’s ever loved, a musician named Tod, who I’m told has beautiful hair. At any rate, the state of our relationship—hers and mine not mine and Tod’s—was something that presently needed to be ‘discussed’.

Anna is short, but you don’t immediately notice. It’s a matter of perspective really, as if she’s standing far away and just seems short in comparison to those things nearby that you can actually reach out and touch. Her face is full of snubby little curves, an Appalachian cragginess worn away in a billion years of soft erosion. It’s the sort of face you remember in profile or in pieces, from the set of her thick mouth to the tilt of a thick eyebrow. She’s always smiling and has a smile for every emotion. She smiled when she saw me that morning as she crept out of the gate with her new laptop computer, just enough to telegraph the horror.

It may have been the Tagamet she took for her stomach or the problems with her most recent boyfriend who had begun to date an info-mercial actress. It may have been the trip to New York to see the only man she’s ever loved. “I think I had a nervous breakdown.” Anna broke into her sentence with a sincere little laugh, “because I really feel weird. And I couldn’t stop crying. I had a sort of a mental collapse, and now I’m...”

“Rebooting?” I started the tape recorder.

“Rebooting, exactly.”

“So you’re getting better, you’re feeling happy?”

“Well, no, I’m not feeling happy, but I’m not feeling...”

“Miserable.”

“Yeah.” She touched my hand with a finger, then quickly moved it away.

Anna is white all over and her hair is reddish brown from a box. I watched it catch the setting sun as we lay on her bed that afternoon, ignoring the MTV, Anna packing a silver pipe from the bag of marijuana she’d carried onto the plane. “I’m excited about my new contact at the office.” She spoke in reverse, inhaling. “A forty-eight year old junky and she’s working at a law firm!” Then exhaling: “It really gives you hope.”

I took off my shoes and stretched out, setting her new laptop between us on the bed, cords writhing into a tangled morass at the outlet. “Can you ask the lady if she can get any of those weird drugs I was talking about?”

“The DDT?”

“No, that’s an insecticide; we want DMT.” I pulled shirt tails down over my crotch as Anna stretched to lay her pipe on the dresser, toes grabbing onto me for support. She showed me her new computer and we toured the online world, this nationally telegraphed hometown. It was like a giant electric high school annual, the boys and girls of all America out there over the net, typing out an identity in some personal Turing test of the soul, dreaming of their futures, blindly groping for a handshake from what might only be the echoes of their own imagination.

“Wait!” Anna suddenly slammed the computer shut on a frisky paramedic from San Dimas. “I forgot about the Vicodan!”

She’d been to a psychiatrist in New York. “Can you believe it?” Anna gave me three, popping six herself from an amber vial. “I paid him seventy dollars and he told me to get more exercise.” She’d struck her revenge in his bathroom cabinet, stockpiling medication after he invited her for dinner and a bit of unscheduled physical therapy. She took another two when she thought I wasn’t looking.

Thirty minutes later she asked me to scratch her back, and artfully, as if it were part of some opiated Vegas lounge ballet, we segued into a kiss.

Then Anna shook me off, ran to the bathroom, closed the door, opened it, ran out, pushed me onto my back and sat on my stomach. She held my head and kissed me. “I like you so much.”

“That could be a good thing...” I held her thin hands in my own. They were like quivering sea creatures left out on the beach to dry, needing something; I couldn’t tell what.

“But I don’t feel I’m able to convey what I want to convey.” Anna looked away, her hands asking me questions.

“And what do you want to convey?”

“You see, I don’t know.”

“Well, tell me what you’re thinking.”

“I do; but I can’t.” She rolled onto her side then leaned up for a kiss, stopping an inch away. “I just hope you know I really like you, and that you mean a lot to me even though I’m not...”

“Even though you’re not.”

“I’m not capable of being human at the moment.” She tilted her head like a wobbly ball. “And I just don’t,”—wobble—“I just really hope that you know that it isn’t any reflection on you,”—wobble—“and that if the timing were different that I think we could... “

I turned my right pocket closer, taping spitefully.

“Is that a statement to be leading you on or something?” Anna scratched her head. “—I don’t mean it to be that way, and I feel like it’s so self-centered to even say, ‘am I leading you on?’—because that’s so bullshit. How dare I assume that you even want to be... AUGH!” she screamed. And that is how she screamed, just like Charlie Brown, though she was Lucy. I was Charlie Brown.

“How dare I assume that you even want to be,” she said, “but whatever, augh, see ! I get all confused when I try to talk. Let’s just take drugs.”

“No,” I said quietly. “You’re acting perfectly sensible. It’s just in reference to something I can’t identify.”

“But I don’t think it’s what I mean to say...” She scratched at her face, looking at me or looking past me, looking through me to something confusing where my body used to be. Concern sat in her eyebrows and her mouth.

“You see,” I cleared my throat. “Anna. You confuse me when you tell me something and then immediately say that it isn’t what you actually meant to say, because then whatever I get from what you’ve said I have to assume is the opposite of what I should have. And so I’m put into the position of having to understand you and then not to believe it.”

“Well maybe it is what I meant to say. I need more water.” She ran to the tap and we kissed for the rest of the MTV news. Her hands crept down my pants, teasing hands, hands on my body begging me not to believe her.

This time I pulled away. “It’s good for you to tell me things like you just did, so I don’t get the wrong idea.”

“But I also don’t want you to get the wrong idea in the opposite direction.” Anna laughed quietly. “I guess that’s being vague again. Can’t I really want you and not be able to have you at the same time?” We were side by side on the bed now, a music video screeching against consumerism as partially nude girls bent over.

“If that’s what you’re into,” I said. “Some people need to be denied or they’re not happy.”

“But it isn’t like this is who I am normally,” she said. “It’s just what is going on with me right now—and coincidentally has been since I met you.” She broke into giggles, nuzzling up against my chest.

“Look, I think I understand. And even if I don’t, my understanding will mesh with what you’ve said, even if it’s not identical to the understanding you intended me to have. Does that make sense?” Somehow I always ended our conversations trapped inside her grammar.

“Wait,” she said, “My brain is prioritizing..”

“What I’m saying is, whatever I get from what you say may not be what you want me to get, but I think the end results may be indistinguishable. What I mean is, I don’t expect anything. I mean we don’t have to fuck.”

“Well, I think you deserve to expect something,” she said. “And I think I should be different, even though I’m not, because....”

“Because what?”

“Because I would like to be?” She looked around the room. “You’ve got me really horny.”

“Fuck you.” We bit each other and I kissed her. We moved around sideways and she began that little cat moan with every exhalation, that midsummer moan when the lights all fail and the fan overhead creaks to a stop. It was a Tennessee Williams moan, and we were in Louisiana and she was the foreman’s wife. “I’m so horny,” Anna pushed me away. “—But I’m fucked up emotionally right now. If I have sex in person it’ll push me over the edge.”

“If you say it, it makes sense.” I searched the floor for my shoes, kicking over a stack of her annotated rock magazines.

“You’re not going are you?” Anna reached for her pipe.

The Vicodan kept me from driving off an overpass. I sailed down the diamond lane to Fairfax and climbed onto my futon, unable to masturbate or even think. It was eight-thirty and the evening hadn’t begun.

Then I remembered the meeting with Mrs. Kane. Work is life’s great sublimator after all; I ran back out to the car and fished under the seat through a twelve pack of mashed beer cans for the Thomas Guide. As it turns out, Brennie Kane lived in Silverlake, five minutes from Anna’s apartment.

In the beginning of any personal project grandiose dreams drift me off in a fugue state reverie, drafting spontaneous quips for the talk show hosts of my roller coaster ego. I pontificate in a silent daze on the meaning of my work. It’s disgusting, but I try to keep it hidden.

The drive to Brennie’s apartment was no different. This story would be about belief, the hopelessness therein. It came because I had nothing else to believe in, except this girl who believed in nothing, who in fact had fallen in love with nothing and chased it scandalously through the night.

I wanted to make these people—and I only had one so far, Brennie Kane—I wanted her to believe in an absurdity as empty as my own. I had to show this random human, not that I was as good as she, but that she and all the rest were just as stupid as me.

Nearly every house in Silverlake could be called ramshackle, so let me add some descriptive ambiance. Brennie lived in a pink stucco two story ‘spanish villa’ enthused somehow with the trappings of an east coast sensibility. There was an attic, probably a basement, and foliage blocked a view from the street. The house looked down from the crest of a hill onto the blinking skyscrapers of downtown LA. The night was dark orange and there were two stars out in the sky. One of them was a helicopter.

She opened the door before I had a chance to knock.

“I saw you coming!”

The first thing I noticed beside her white teeth was the boozy red nose; it had grown in the years since she’d stopped taking pictures. Brennie had dark well-groomed hair and a dark complexion. She was an amalgam of big features stuck haphazardly onto a small frame, all eyes and mouth and hair, none of the pieces quite content to stay in one position. Actually, she looked a lot like a sheepdog with black grannie glasses. She was a child of the ‘60s. It was 1997.

“You’re Mrs. Kane?”

“In name only. What can I do you for?” Brennie Kane once had what was called a wacky sense of humor, now only the skeleton was left to give structure to her pathos. She wore a blue shapeless robe from some earlier decade and stepped from foot to foot in a pair of ancient slippers bursting with fluff. I paused for a moment taking it in, and when she saw me staring at those dirty beige blobs on her feet she did a quick little soft-shoe routine. “You like ‘em? And some people say Pick’nSave don’t have any bargains.”

“Kris, my friend from USC, called and made an appointment for nine I think? To talk about... things?”

“I can’t deny it,” she said. “You’re Dick, right?”

“Richard. Randy actually.”

“Fast mover. Feeling randy already?” Brennie had faces for different emotions, different takes , and when she said this she made one for me, a wide-eyed open-faced grin. It seemed more a facial tic than any response to our conversation; I had the feeling she didn’t much get out of the house.

I made some non-committal murmur, and Brennie’s various features one by one seemed to converge around the area of her nose. The humor disappeared. “There’s a little problem, Randy boy. I think you know I made that appointment under false pretenses.”

“Me? I know that?”

“I didn’t realize you were one of those scandal show toads.”

“Excuse me?” I said. “I work at Copymat.”

Brennie ‘smiled’, clutching at a line of soup stains down her robe. “If you’re snooping here for those mythical dirty photographs Jack was supposed to have with Barbara Streisand or Julie Newmar and all that, it was all lies, from top to bottom.”

“I wasn’t here for the Julie Newmar.” I stepped to the side a bit, hoping she’d move over and invite me on in.

“They found some videos he made, with some of the local talent you might say.” Brennie held a breath, looking away for a moment. “But the cops took all that.”

“There was just one picture,” I said. “That one out at the library?”

Her face was hard now, features quietly migrating into the bitter tableaux they’d been trying to avoid. “I didn’t realize Jack and Lena the floozy were still in my collection. I tore that bimbo to shreds with my own little toofies this morning; right down the disposal with the rest of the trash.”

I moved in closer, pushing my own depression into the room. We had a silent jousting right there, my faithless angst against her embittered self-pity. “Behind them, Mrs. Kane,” I tried to sound hopeful. “Behind your husband and that woman there was a long phallic object... sort of a gold penile...”

“You mean a wee-wee?”

“A dildo, okay? Know anything?”

“Frankly, she said, “I’m trying these days, very unsuccessfully, to forget about Jack altogether. And I see what you’re thinking; I used to look better. He actually loved me once. Maybe that tells you what a psycho he was. But you people come up like once a year, and you take the little memories I have saved in the back of my head. Then you turn them all to shit for five minutes at 7:30. All I’ve got left is this house he gave me, and it’s falling down around my head. The roof leaks and it hasn’t rained in months. —you’re really bumming me out...”

Brennie moved back to shut the door and my hand whipped out to block it. I hated her then, suddenly, the way we hate all the sick and the lame little creatures, the beggars who wear their pain like a badge of honor, hoping our pity will earn them a living.

She was proud of her loss. Worst of all, Brennie Kane was proud of her husband, a man who’d scammed his way out of a decent alimony, spending every penny. He was killed by some jealous boyfriend and now the woman he’d left behind would always somehow believe she was in his heart that day he died. She was lying to herself and I couldn’t let her live with that.

“You ever hear of Innocent IV?” I said.

“What?” It was the first honest expression Brennie had made yet: confusion.

“Innocent IV,” I said. “You ever hear of him?”

“I don’t listen to rap music.”

“He was a pope.”

“Well, I’m Jewish.” She pointed to her nose with that wacky miserable grin.

“He was pope in the year 1243, assassinating his way into the job. My point is that he had a mistress, a Moorish mistress taken in the crusades.”

“Wait. I’m on Candid Camera , right?” Her giddy bug-eyes looked behind me. I was too manic now to care.

“I am serious, Mrs. Kane. I know it’s wild, but this pope made a cast of his genitalia in solid gold. Gold from the third crusade of 1189. It was a good will gesture, because he gave it to his mistress when he went away. But it disappeared with this woman, and the rest nobody knows. But there were rumors in the entertainment industry linking this thing to your ex-husband, Mrs. Kane. The whole Paramount business, the Dawn Steel thing. Maybe you heard of it, maybe not. I think Variety said something. But when I heard about your photograph, you can imagine I was surprised...”

She stared at me.

“That’s a lot of gold, Mrs. Kane, regardless of whether or not it was erect when...”

And the door slammed shut in my face.

As it was closing, during that brief window of rejection, her brittle voice rang out: “I’ll call the police if you’re not off my property in thirty seconds.”—bang .

So I stood there for a moment, staring at the plain wood veneer, wondering exactly where my plan could have been subverted, and feeling all those dreams of fame so quickly fade away. I walked down the driveway to my car.

And I noticed the Saab.

I’d passed by it on up to her door, parked in the driveway just inches beyond the sidewalk—champagne grey, public radio bumper sticker, pink triangular decal in the rear windshield: something here wasn’t right.

So I drove ahead about fifty yards, turned off the lights, and watched in the rear view mirror, methodically not thinking of Anna. I spent a full five minutes in quiet contemplation of that which is not Anna, which spelled backwards is still Anna, and which in a mirror looks very similar, as if it were written in Russian.

But then the front door opened, Oliver on the stoop against the bearlike silhouette of Brennie’s fuzzy bathrobe.

He nodded with a curt wave at the elbow, then made straight for his car and drove off.

This time she wasn’t expecting me.

“Hello, Mrs. Kane,” I said. “I thought we could talk more openly now that Oliver left.”

Her features had lost their resolve, roaming about in a muted panic as she looked me up and down. “What is it you really want? Really .”

“I just want to talk about your husband.” Not your ex-husband, not the bastard who ruined your life. Your husband. There are a few rare moments when I do know what to say.

Brennie nodded abruptly, squinting in a halfhearted attempt to express some reservations she felt she ought to have. Then with a tilt of her woolly head, she tromped on into the humid tangle of her dark and musty den. My recorder is voice activated. I followed her in.

“I don’t want to hear any more bull pucky,” she said, not looking back. “Just tell me what you know. Tell me what you really know.”

“First I want you to show me the picture.”

She’d lit the den with forty watt bulbs, almost a dozen screwed into almost a dozen porcelain lamps, their bases molded into the shapes of almost anything: dogs, revolutionary warships, a French royal couple spooning on a swing. I suppose they were collectables, maybe even worth something, but they formed tiny glowing dioramas around the room, each stylized into near unrecognizability. I felt as if we were sitting in some bankrupt museum of the future.

Brennie dropped her heavy body into a blue vinyl easy-chair and gripped the armrests, waiting as if I’d come with news of her death. I was too busy at first to say anything at all, eyes darting back and forth around this coral reef of kitsche. A parakeet burbled complacently from a brass cage over her head.

Brennie’s face was thrown half into shadow by the doily-covered shade to a lamp on a foldout TV tray; the socket rose up from the head of the Ancient Mariner, cast of course in porcelain. A glittering albatross hung Christlike from his neck. Brennie had the photo ready under her robe. She spun it to me like a frisbee.

The essentials were there: Jack Kane in leather jacket and shorts, a beautiful blond with eyes as lively as tin, and behind them in plane view, temptingly out of focus, sat a long gold dick on a polished wood base.

Brennie stared out into the space between us with her big muppet eyes, absent-mindedly kicking over a stack of regency romances. “I never noticed it before,” she said. “I always hated that creature so much, there wasn’t much else for me to see except her. But Oliver was so worried.”

The room smelled like ten years of darkness, ten years of slowly accumulating refuse. Brennie Kane had surrounded herself with the skeletal remnants of the decades that had given her peace. Now they smothered her, a lava lamp dark in the corner, paintings smoke-tinged and murky of those street kids with their giant poignant eyes. Bean bag chairs were mashed into crevices in the teetering piles of knick-knacks, caulking the holes in this surround-sound image of a mind grown slowly unhinged. From somewhere behind all that primary color chaos came the soft unsettled scuttling of tiny claws against cardboard.

“Oliver told me you worked for Hard Copy .”

“Nope. Copymat. I told you that.”

“So I suppose you’re one of those treasure hunters.” Her eyes were so big now, even bigger here in the twilight of the forty watt bulbs. “I imagine you know my story. After Return to Nam he grabbed that girl out of some ambassador’s party and drove straight through to France.” Brennie was so eager to tell me her story; I couldn’t have stopped her if I’d tried.

She leaned forward and her robe ballooned out, breasts hanging down like a pair of shaved testicles. “I was screwed,” she said. “Royally. But I imagine you know that. If you didn’t think I’d go along, you wouldn’t have bothered to knock, would you? You’re too smart for that.”

Thankfully, she pulled her robe shut, looking away in defeat. “He must have had a million in the bank, maybe more. After France he’s suddenly broke? And what’s the judge going to do to the man who saved the Jews? He was such a wasteful little gutter rat nobody doubted for a moment he could blow it all. Marseilles. Bon Apetite! But I knew he hid it somewhere. The bankruptcy? He did that to spite me, after I drove his Lambourghini into the pool. How was I supposed to know it was leased? After what he did, do you think I even cared?”

A thousand tearful confessions melted into that minute’s dark reverie—Brennie wasn’t talking to me, she was talking to God. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she gave that speech every day at this time, just Brennie, her parakeet, and the pair of ragged claws behind the cardboard.

I looked at the photo again, then back to her. She loved Jack Kane and it was hopeless. I loved Anna and it was stupid. Would she thank me for showing her just how hopeless and stupid it could get?

“You know,” I said. “I could be mistaken about all this.”

But she didn’t hear me.

Too much interference came through from that wall of memories behind her. “He sent me that picture when the divorce came through. Sure I slept with his lawyer, but he knew I wasn’t involved. That was spite. If he gave up the floozy, I told him I’d come back. So he sends me the picture. Twice in the same shot! I should have known he’d screw me; that girl and my money in the same fritzin’ picture! I can’t believe I never noticed it.”

Then she turned back to me, eyes wide under dark brows. Those eyes seemed so needy, as if they wanted me to come and save them from the torment of her face. “I don’t care about Oliver, not for nothing. If you can locate that gold thing. I can’t think about it, but that’s your offer, right? You’d find it for me?”

“You can’t trust rumors,” I said.

“Jack must have bought it while our marriage was legal, during that five months before the divorce, driving through France. How else could he blow a million and a half? The statute of limitations isn’t over yet, Randy. If I can prove he bought that before the divorce, half is mine. Alimony is the only decent thing going in this state.”

I stood, embarrassed. And she stood too, holding herself steady against the shade of the Ancient Mariner, tilting a sliver of light over the face of her glasses. Glowing hemispheres shone in either lens, like burning white eyes.

“Mrs. Kane, maybe this isn’t such...”

“I thought you were full of shit when I slammed the door,” she said. “But Oliver made me think.”

“But...”

“Don’t apologize,” she said. “I’ve come to respect greed. When it’s honest.” She shuffled up to me, leaving a trail of kapok from her booties. Brennie’s skin in the dim light had the look of an old orange. She looked a lot like Garrison Keillor. “What’s the price of gold now? The dinkie would be worth three or four million, right?”

“If it were real.”

“So you guessed right,” she said. “You know exactly to the letter how desperate I am. I won’t try to hard-line you. You’re too smart for that.” The money wasn’t important. What she wanted was her husband back, if only just a piece.

“You locate it for me,” Brennie said. “You get a straight thirty percent; we can put this down in writing. This’ll be the one damn time in my life Jack can do something good for me. Are we in agreement? I like things definite; I’m a definite woman.”

Could I tell her I’d made it all up just to tape her reaction? Would that have been any less cruel?

And besides, you can’t turn that kind of money down. Even if it isn’t real.

“Sure,” I said. “You got yourself a deal.”

Brennie Kane held me prisoner to her memories for another 45 minutes. Her life, I gathered, could be defined by a sharply drawn curve that left zero the moment she walked out on an apathetic father and returned to zero ten years later with the disappearance of her apathetic husband. And against my better judgment I felt sorry for her, not through her cries for my pity, but when that simple happy personality of the sixties showed through her misery like the smudged face of a hopeful child in the misty bathroom mirror of her cramped and stifled self. I left, promising to call soon, taking from her the name and number of my next victim, Mr. Thomas Tirston of Orange County. He was a mid-level marketing exec for the lottery commission, involved with their advertising accounts.