He turned and walked away. The flaps of his suit coat billowed. No breeze blew through the plaza. Creating his own turbulence.
SeldomSceneAtoll was listed in West Hollywood, on Santa Monica near La Cienega, and the address turned out to be a genuine office building—two-story, chocolate brick, squeezed between a florist and a strip mall full of cars and short tempers. Milo left the unmarked in a loading space in the mall lot, and we entered the building through a door emblazoned with a NO SOLICITORS sign.
The directory listed theatrical agencies, nutritionists, a yoga school, business managers, and JAGUAR TUTORIALS/SSA in a second-floor suite.
“Sharing space,” I said. “No media empire.”
“Jaguar Tutorials,” said Milo. “What, they train you to become a predator?”
The ambience said none of the occupants had made it to stardom/health/wealth: shabby gray halls, filthy gray carpeting, dehydrated plywood doors, a reek that said quirky plumbing, an elevator whose lights didn’t respond to a button push.
We took the stairs, breathing in insecticide and dancing around sprinkles of dead roaches.
He knocked on the Jaguar/SSA door, didn’t wait for a reply, and twisted the knob. On the other side was a smallish single room set up with four movable workstations. Cute little computers in multicolored boxes, scanners, printers, photocopiers, machines I couldn’t identify. Electrical cord linguini coiled atop the vinyl floor.
The walls were covered with enlargements of framed SSA covers, all of a type: maliciously lit, photos of young, malnourished, beautiful people lolling in body-conscious clothing and radiating contempt for the audience. Lots of vinyl and rubber; the duds looked cheap but probably required a mortgage.
Male and female models, Nefertiti eye makeup for both. Slashes of purplish cheek blush for the skinny women, four-day beards for their male counterparts.
A dreadlocked, dark-skinned man in his late twenties wearing a black and bumblebee yellow striped T-shirt and yellow cargo pants hunched at the nearest PC, typing nonstop. I glanced at his screen. Graphics; Escher by way of Tinkertoys. He ignored us, or didn’t notice. Miniearphones produced something that held his attention.
The two central stations were unoccupied. At the rearmost computer, a young woman in her midtwenties, also plugged in aurally, sat reading People. Chubby and baby-faced, she wore a black patent-leather jumpsuit and red moonwalker shoes, bobbed in time to what seemed to be a three-four beat. Her hair was unremarkable brown, sprayed into a fifties bouffant. She turned toward us, arched an eyebrow—an eyebrow tattoo—and the beefy steel ring piercing the center of the arch flipped up, then clicked down. The loop in her upper lip remained stationary. So did the score of studs lining her ears and the painful-looking little knoblet parked in the center of her chin.
“What?” she shouted. Then she yanked out the earphones, kept bobbing her head. One two three one two three. Waltz of the young and metallic.
“What?” she repeated.
Milo’s badge elicited twin tattoo arches. The outlines of her mouth had been inked in permanently, as well.
“So?” she said.
“I’m looking for the publisher of SeldomSceneAtoll.”
She thumped her chest and made ape sounds. “You found her.”
“We’re looking for information on an artist, Juliet Kipper.”
“What’s up with her?”
“You know her?”
“Didn’t say that.”
“Nothing’s up with her, anymore,” said Milo. “She was murdered.”
The eyebrow ring drooped, but the face below it remained bland.
“Whoa whoa whoa,” she said, and she got up, walked over to the graphics guy, jabbed his shoulder. Looking regretful, he pulled off his phones.
“Juliet Kipper. Did we feature her?”
“Who?”
“Kipper. Dead artist. She got murdered.”
“Um,” he said. “What kind of artist?”
The girl looked at us.
Milo said, “She was a painter. We’ve been told you wrote about her, Ms. . . .”
“Patti Padgett.” Big smile. A not-small diamond was inlaid in her left frontal incisor.
Milo smiled back and took out his pad.
“There you go,” Patti Padgett said. “Always wanted to be part of the official police record. When did we supposedly write about the late Ms. Kipper?”
“Within the last few months.”
“Well that narrows it down,” she said. “We’ve only put out two issues in six months.”
“You’re a quarterly?”