But the gang thing intrigued Milo and when he drove by the lots and took a look at the attendants, he saw shaved heads and skulking posture. Tattoos conspicuous enough to be visible from the curb.

CHAPTER

31

What I’d seen of Vance Coury’s demeanor synched with the profile of a domination rapist: surly, hypermacho, eager not to please. The supercharged ambience in which he operated fit, too: big engines, flashy paint, the photos of submissive fellatrices tacked to the walls of the garage. The mutilated Porsche.

A corrupt father completed the picture: Coury had been raised to take what he wanted. Throw in some like-minded buddies, and Janie Ingalls had been a rabbit in a dog pit.

Junior hadn’t been interested in my patronage. Did he really regard the Seville as a hunk of junk? Or did those parking lots pay the bills and the auto-customizing business was recreational? Or a front . . . all those gang boys.

I headed for the city and thought about the bisected Porsche. Evisceration on display. The joy of destruction. Maybe I was interpreting too much, but the few minutes I’d spent with Coury had left me wary and creeped-out, and I kept checking the rearview mirror well past Mulholland.

Back at home, I imagined the party scene twenty years ago: Janie’s encounter with Coury, amid the noise and the dope, the flash of recognition—pleasure for Coury, horror for Janie.

He moves in and takes over. The King’s Men join in.

Including a King’s Man who seemed different than the others?

The images Nicholas Hansen’s gallery had posted on its website were still-lifes. Lush, luminously tinted assemblages of fruit and flowers, rendered meticulously. Hansen’s work seemed galaxies away from the ruined sculpture assembled on the Beaudry on-ramp—from any brutality. But art was no immunization against evil. Caravaggio had slain a man over a tennis game and Gauguin had slept with young Tahitian girls knowing he’d be infecting them with syphillis.

Still, Nick Hansen seemed to have taken a different path than the others, and deviance has always fascinated me.

It was nearly three, maybe past the New York gallery’s closing time, but I phoned anyway, and got a young, female voice on the other end. The first time I’d contacted the gallery, I’d talked to an older woman and hadn’t left my name, so here was a chance for some new dissembling.

I shifted into art-speak and presented myself as a collector of old masters drawings who’d run out of the sunlight-free space such treasures demanded and was considering switching to oils.

“Old masters oils?” said the young woman.

“A bit beyond my budget,” I said. “But I have been impressed by some of the contemporary realism that’s managed to assert itself among all the performance pieces. Nicholas Hansen, for example.”

“Oh, Nicholas’s wonderful.”