“Gee, thanks. And you are …”
“Stanwyck.”
“Stanwyck what?”
“Just Stanwyck.”
“Ah,” said Milo. He dropped the sleeve, faced her, did one of those moves that makes him taller than you think possible. “Don’t they require two names for booking?”
The girl’s lips tightened into a little pink bud. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”
“Where’s Gretchen?”
“At lunch.”
“Late lunch.”
“Guess so.”
“Where?”
Stanwyck hesitated.
“C’mon, Stan,” said Milo. “Or I’ll tell Ollie.”
Her eyes filmed with confusion. “I don’t run her appointment schedule.”
“But you do know where she is.”
“I get paid to be here, that’s all.”
“Stan, Stan.” Milo sniffed the air conspicuously. “Why make this complicated?”
“Gretchen doesn’t like attention.”
“Well, I can sure understand that. But fame is like a dog with an unstable temperament. You feed it, think you’ve got it under control, but sometimes it bites you anyway. Now, where the hell is she?”
“Up the block.” She named the trendoid eatery.
He turned to leave.
Stanwyck said, “Don’t tell her I told you.”
“Promise,” said Milo.
“Yeah, right,” said the girl. “And you’ve got a Porsche and a house on the beach and won’t come in my mouth.”
We made our way past the valets, up brick stairs, and through a low picket gate to the front patio, turning the heads of the see-and-be-seen crowd. Lots of free-floating anxiety and ponytails on heads that didn’t deserve them, big white plates decorated with small green food. Some high fashion, though quite a few people were dressed worse than Milo. But at much higher cost, and everyone knew the difference. The maitre d’s were two white-jacketed, black-T-shirted sticks, both too busy to stop us. But one of them did notice us enter the inner dining room at the rear.
The room was low and dark and cheap-chic, noisy as a power plant. As we made our way among the tables, I heard a man in a five-hundred-dollar Hawaiian shirt urging a waiter, “Speak to me of the crab cakes.”
Gretchen Stengel sat at a corner table opposite a sleek young woman with blue-black skin. A blue liter of esoteric water stood between them. The black woman picked at a salad, and Gretchen twirled a crayfish on a toothpick.
No problem recognizing the Westside Madam; three years ago she’d been evening news fodder for months, and, but for a few age lines, she hadn’t changed much.
Sunken cheeks, lemon-sucking mouth, stringy brown hair, skinny upper body but broad-beamed below the waist. An ungainly waddle as her lawyers hustled her to and from court. Brown eyes that claimed injury when they weren’t shielded by dark lenses. Today the glasses were in place—oversized black ovals that blocked expression. It would have been easy to ascribe her pallor to the twenty-five months she’d spent behind bars for income tax evasion, but she’d been pale before then. Floppy hats, kabuki-white makeup, and the omnipresent black glasses fed rumors that she hated the sun. Interesting choice, if it was one, for a girl growing up at the beach. Then again, most daughters of Pacific Palisades corporate lawyers don’t grow up to be pimps.
Gretchen Stengel had been raised on two acres overlooking the ocean, attended the Peabody School and summer camps designed to pamper, vacationed at private villas in Venice and chateaus in southern France, flown the Concorde a dozen times before entering puberty.
Rocky puberty. Her arrest led to journalistic archaeology of the Stengel family and discovery of childhood learning problems, drug and DUI busts, and half a dozen abortions beginning when Gretchen was fourteen. At twenty she dropped out of Arizona State, having never declared a major. Unsubstantiated stories had her starring in a series of bottom-feeder porn loops featuring a variety of partners, not all of them two-legged.
Prior to her arrest none of her teenage problems had leaked out of sealed records, nor had she been disciplined by the system. Mildrew and Andrea Stengel were senior partners at Munchley, Zabella and Cater, a downtown firm with a wide reach. After leaving college Gretchen moved back home to a guesthouse at their estate, attending openings of bad art and premieres of films that lost money, hanging out with the sweating throng of Eurotrash that filled Sunset Plaza cafes. Telling anyone who cared to listen that she was working on a screenplay, had a deal pending at one of the big independent production companies.