“Sunrise prayer session?” I said. “Milking the cows with guys in suits?”
“Cleaning the stable while guys in suits rate my performance. Gonna have to find a clean tie.”
“Is the topic Mate?”
“What else. They’ll demand to know why I haven’t accomplished squat, I’ll nod a lot, say ‘Yassuh, yassuh,’ shuffle off.”
Mate had been butchered fairly close to my home, and I set out at seven-thirty. The first leg of the trip was ten minutes north on Beverly Glen, the Seville fairly sailing because I was going against traffic, ignoring the angry faces of commuters incarcerated by the southbound crush.
Economic recovery and the customary graft had spurred unremitting roadwork in L.A., and hellish traffic was the result. This month it was the bottom of the glen: smug men in orange CalTrans vests installing new storm drains just in time for the next drought, the usual municipal division of labor: one guy working for every five standing around. Feeling like a pre-Bastille Royalist, I sped past the queue of Porsches and Jaguars forced to idle with clunkers and pickups. Democracy by oppression, everyone coerced into bumper-nudging intimacy.
At Mulholland, I turned left and drove four miles west, past seismically strained dream houses and empty lots that said optimism wasn’t for everyone. The road coiled, scything through weeds, brush, saplings, other kindling, twisted upward sharply and changed to packed, ocher soil as the asphalt continued east and was renamed Encino Hills Drive.
Up here, at the top of the city, Mulholland had become a dirt road. I’d hiked here as a grad student, thrilling at the sight of antlered bucks, foxes, falcons, catching my breath at the furtive shifting of high grass that could be cougars. But that had been years ago, and the suddenness of the transformation from highway to impasse caught me by surprise. I hit the brakes hard, steered onto the rise, parked below the table of sallow dirt.
Milo was already there, his copper-colored unmarked pulled up in front of a warning sign posted by the county: seven miles of unfinished road followed, no vehicles permitted. A locked gate said that L.A. motorists couldn’t be trusted.
He hitched his pants, loped forward, took my hand in both of his giant mitts.
“Alex.”
“Big guy.”
He had on a fuzzy-looking green tweed jacket, brown twill pants, white shirt with a twisted collar, string tie with a big, misshapen turquoise clasp. The tie looked like tourist junk. A new fashion statement; I knew he’d put it on to needle the brass at this morning’s meeting.
“Going cowboy?”
“My Georgia O’Keeffe period.”
“Natty.”
He gave a low, rumbling laugh, pushed a lick of dry black hair off his brow, squinted off to the right. Focusing on a spot that told me exactly where the van had been found.
Not up the dirt road, where untrimmed live oaks would have provided cover. Right here, on the turnoff, out in the open.
I said, “No attempt to conceal.”
He shrugged and jammed his hands in his pockets. He looked tired, washed-out, worn down by violence and small print.
Or maybe it was just the time of year. September can be a rotten month in L.A., throat-constrictingly hot or clammy cold, shadowed by a grimy marine layer that turns the city into a pile of soiled laundry. When September mornings start out dreary they ooze into sooty afternoons and sickly nights. Sometimes blue peeks through the clouds for a nanosecond. Sometimes the sky sweats and a leaky-roof drizzle glazes windshields. For the past few years resident experts have been blaming it on El Nino, but I don’t recall it ever being any different.
September light is bad for the complexion. Milo’s didn’t need any further erosion. The gray morning light fed his pallor and deepened the pockmarks that peppered his cheeks and ran down his neck. White sideburns below still-thick black hair turned his temples into a zebra-striped stunt. He’d gone back to drinking moderately and his weight had stabilized – 240 was my guess – much of it settling around his middle. His legs remained skinny stilts, comprising a good share of his seventy-five inches. His jowls, always monumental, had given way