I went home and sat in my sweatbox in the Valley with a pint of bourbon and a bowl of ice. I plugged in a cheap Japanese fan and let it blow my thoughts around awhile. The last thing I remember before falling on my bed was calling Monica Fulbright to tell her answering machine that Carmen Luzano had failed to keep the appointment. Then I had the kind of dreams where big black birds try to pluck your eyes out and you wake up with the sheet knotted around you like a vine.

CHAPTER SIX

It was all I could do to fry an egg in the morning. The egg stared up at me accusingly. I threw it in the sink. It was hot in the apartment. I made rye toast, which was dry and stuck in my throat. My head hurt. I had an enormous hangover, so I stumbled around the kitchen banging cabinets while I made coffee, the real kind with chicory in it. It’s the only thing that’s still Southern about me. Also, one of the few things that work on this kind of hangover. The only gratitude I could muster that morning was that in fleeing my family, I had been able to escape the curse of one of those bad Southern accents. I had managed to leave mine at the Arizona state line.

I put the coffeepot on the table in the dining room, got the newspapers, sat on the stained gold carpet the landlord refuses to replace and started to look for a play starring the dead woman. There are a lot of Equity waiver places in town, so I figured I could find her—if she was an actress and if she was in a play. Using all four of the papers—the Times, the Examiner and the two local freebies that run kinky-sex ads and all the alternative-entertainment listings—I made my own list. By the time I finished, it was nearly noon. There were forty-one theaters, not including a church doing a production of Pygmalion. Three of the theaters had all-male casts, one on Crenshaw was called the Black Ensemble and most of the rest seemed to be doing tired sitcoms about infidelity on Midwestern college campuses. Again I wondered who this woman called Cathy or Carmen was. After what I’d seen, it was hard to imagine her as a fresh-scrubbed coed. Eleven of the theaters were actually in Hollywood, and only two had shows opening that weekend.