As I drove, Milo balanced a toothpick between the tips of his index fingers and radar-scanned the passing world with cop’s eyes. “Been a while since we did this, huh?”
Over the past few months we’d seen each other less and less. I’d put it down to his backlog of cold files and my workload. That was denial. There was mutual isolation going on. “Guess, you didn’t have enough weird ones.”
“Matter of fact, that’s true,” he said. “Just the usual, and I don’t trouble you with the usual.” A second later: “You doing all right? In general?”
“Everything’s fine.”
“Good.” A block later: “So . . . everything with Allison’s . . . things are working out?”
“Allison’s wonderful,” I said.
“Well, that’s good.” He picked his teeth, kept surveilling the city.
His first contacts with Allison had been professional: wrapping up the Ingalls file. She told me he’d been deft and compassionate.
His first reaction upon hearing that we were seeing each other had been silence. Then: She’s gorgeous, I’ll grant you that.
I’d thought: What won’t you grant me? Then I figured I was being touchy and kept my mouth shut. A few weeks later, I cooked dinner for four at my place: a mild March evening, steaks and baked potatoes and red wine out on the terrace. Milo and Rick Silverman, Allison and me.
The surprise was Allison and Rick knew each other. One of her patients had been brought into the Cedars-Sinai ER after a car wreck and Rick had been the surgeon on duty.
They talked shop, I played host, Milo ate and fidgeted. Toward the end of the evening, he drew me aside. “Nice girl, Alex. Not that you need my approval.” Sounding as if someone had prodded him to make the speech.
Since then, he’d seldom mentioned her.
“A few more blocks,” he said. “How’s the pooch?”
“I hear he’s fine.”
A moment later: “Robin and I got together a couple of times for coffee.”
Surprise, surprise.
“Nothing wrong with that,” I said.
“You’re pissed.”
“Why would I be pissed?”
“You sound pissed.”
“I’m not pissed. Where do I turn?”
“Two more blocks, then a right,” he said. “Okay, I keep my trap Crazy-Glued shut. Even though all these years you’ve been telling me I should express my feelings.”
“Express away,” I said.
“That guy she’s with—”
“He has a name. Tim.”
“Tim’s a wimp.”
“Give it up, Milo.”
“Give what up?”
“Reconciliation fantasies.”
“I—”
“When you saw her was she pining for me?”
Silence.
“Whoa,” he said.
“Right turn here?”
“Yeah.”
Light and Space’s neighbors were a plating plant and a wholesaler of plastic signs. The gallery’s warehouse origins were obvious: brick-faced, tar-roofed, three segmented steel overhead doors in front, instead of a window. Black plastic letters above the central door read LIGHT AND SPACE: AN ART PLACE. Stout combination locks secured the outer doors but the one in the middle was held in place by a single dead bolt that responded to a key on Milo’s ring. He pushed, and the metal panel slid upward into a pocket.
“They gave you a key?” I said.
“My honest face,” he said, stepping inside and flicking on lights.
The interior was five thousand square feet or so. Walls painted that vanilla white that brings out the best in art, gray cement floors, twenty-foot ceilings thatched by ductwork, high-focus spotlights fixed upon several large, unframed canvases.
No furniture except for a desk up front, bearing brochures and a CD player. The nearest wall was lettered in the same black plastic used on the outside of the building.
Juliet Kipper
Air and Image
Same title on the brochures. I picked one up, skimmed a few paragraphs of art-speak, flipped to a black-and-white headshot of the artist.
Juliet Kipper had posed in a black turtleneck and no jewelry, her face pallid against a gray matte background. Squarish face, not unpretty under chopped, platinum hair. Pale eyes, deep-set and watchful, challenged the camera. Her mouth was grim—tugged down at the corners. High, uneven bangs exposed a furrowed forehead. Concentrating hard. Or burdened. She’d made an effort to look the part of the troubled artist, or it had come naturally.