Body Copy - Michael Craven [35]
In less than a minute, he turned ossue into souse, purep into upper, yathap into apathy, and kiptec into picket. Five seconds later, he turned prhopec into chopper. What the timber boss took to work. His “chopper.”
B O D Y C O P Y
Tremaine looked at the stopwatch: fifty-five seconds.
Not bad. Not bad at all. Mind was sharp, ready to figure some shit out. After that, he walked the bulldog, hit the waves, hopped in the Cutlass. He had a meeting with Phillip Cook at the prestigious L.A. Country Club.
Donald Tremaine had never been to the Los Angeles Country Club, but he knew at the very least he was dressed appropriately because he had called and asked and said he was a guest of Phillip Cook’s and inquired as to what he should wear to have lunch at the Grill by the golf course. Collared shirt, short sleeves were fine, and pants, no jeans. He could swing that. He would even throw on a blue blazer for good measure.
He’d put on some khakis, grabbed a short-sleeved dark blue sport shirt, slid into the blazer, and now he was on Wilshire, finishing a smoke in the Cutlass, just about to enter the gates to the club.
His phone rang. He looked at it, at the caller ID. Nina, it said.
“Hi, Nina,” Tremaine said.
“Hi, Donald,” she said.
Donald. He liked that.
Nina was laughing, not guffawing, just laughing, when she said, “I forgot to tell you something about Phillip. Are you already at the club?”
“Just about to enter,” Tremaine said.
“Good, I caught you in time. Phillip has a glass eye.”
Tremaine laughed.
“A glass eye?” Tremaine said. “I’ve never seen one in person before. That’s very Sammy Davis of him.”
“Yeah, it’s absurd. I thought you should know before 109
Michael Craven
you met him so it wouldn’t freak you out. Not that it would. I mean, I’m sure you can handle yourself.”
“Thanks for telling me.”
“Well, I know you have to go.”
“Yeah, I’ll keep you posted.”
Neither one wanted to hang up, but neither one really had anything else to add, either.
Nina said, “Okay, talk to you soon, Donald.”
“Yep,” he said. And he would talk to her soon. Because he’d call her.
The guy at the gate gave Tremaine a little look as he pressed the button to let the Cutlass enter the grounds.
“Park anywhere you want,” the guard told him. That’s when he gave Tremaine the look. The look that said, you probably aren’t going to see any other Cutlasses in the lot.
Especially ones with surf racks and a hang loose sticker on the back windshield. There was no condescension in the look, though. It was more, right on, I like your style, sky blue Cutlass and all. Glad to see a guy driving a heap like that has a reason to be at the prestigious L.A.C.C. Tremaine thought, that’s why he told me to park anywhere.
Probably wants me to pull up close to the club so all the members will have to walk by and see my blue beauty. I’ll do just that, then. Yeah, that guard has probably taken plenty of shit from the members here . . .
Tremaine said, “Thank you” to the guard and cruised through the gate, thinking, it’s a shame today’s the day my fan belt decided to scream bloody murder. Sounds like a choking squirrel underneath my hood.
110
B O D Y C O P Y
Tremaine got out of the Cutlass, straightened his shirt and blazer, and headed over to the sidewalk that brought him around to the back of the clubhouse, where you entered the Grill. The back entrance faced two sprawling golf courses to the west. Tremaine looked around. Beautiful. Magical, even. A giant stretch of lush, green land right smack in the middle of Wilshire Boulevard, in the middle of Los Angeles.
Fairways stretched out in all directions. There were thick trees and streams and perfectly manicured flowers everywhere. How many times, Tremaine wondered, had he driven down Wilshire Boulevard and not even considered what was behind that wall of foliage. That wall of trees that was hiding, at least from a purely aesthetic point of view, an inner-city sprawl of real estate rivaled by no other in Los Angeles. Just based on the location of this joint, right in the heart of town, between Beverly