Body Copy - Michael Craven [8]
Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme two door, and drove to Venice. He was going to wait until he’d read the police reports before he talked to Nina, but he had a question that was ready to be asked now, just not to her face. It was seven, dusk, almost dark, and still quite a bit of traffic as he took the Pacific Coast Highway south, through Santa Monica into Venice, the great, the one and only, Venice, California. Expensive these days, really expensive, but man, still the best. Still had that bohemian feel, bright-colored California beach bungalows right next to the more modern architecture of the too-big-for-their-lots houses that the rich people had built. It made for an odd combo, the inva-sion of money into Venice. You’d see a brand-new Beemer parked right next to an old-school VW Thing with a bunch of surfboards on its roof. Tremaine wondering, will the dough eventually strip it of all its charm? Strip it of every last bright blue shack with some guy with a three-foot beard living in it, sitting on his porch playing the flute in a housedress and cleats, yelling at passersby about hidden messages in Blue Oyster Cult lyrics?
Impossible. Some of that would never go away, Tremaine hoped. You could certainly still feel the history, see the real locals crawling the streets, feel them looking at you all wild-eyed as you entered their turf. Tremaine thinking, they especially didn’t like it when you surfed their waves.
He smiled thinking about that, knowing he got welcomed into their breaks because of his history.
He called information and said, “Venice, California.
Nina Aldeen please. And I just need the address.”
Got it. 424 Rialto. A great street, one of the most charm-24
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ing, very close to where he had lived with his ex-wife. It still made him a little sick to think about it, to examine even just a moment of their cohabitation.
Still.
He drove right past Nina’s house. Looked at it, though, as he went by, tried to glean with a quick—real quick—look whether anyone was home.
Tremaine parked two blocks away, behind a caramel-colored ’89 Chevy Chevette and in front of a sparkling silver Lexus. He got out and began heading back toward Nina Aldeen’s house.
Tremaine thinking, why did Nina say there was more than one reason to look into this, then pretend that she didn’t? Is there something there, something she isn’t telling me?
True story. Tremaine had a client once, in his early days, Jeff Creswell. Real early days, right after Tremaine had gotten his P.I. license and his license to carry a firearm.
Jeff came to Tremaine, hired him to follow his wife, said she was cheating on him. From the beginning, Tremaine sensed something off in Jeff, something troubled, something dishonest. But he took Jeff at his word and took the case. Mistake. Here’s what happened. Tremaine followed Jeff’s wife, Trudy, to a hotel. Trudy went in the hotel with a man. Through the lens of his camera, in the window of the hotel room, Tremaine could see violence. Trudy’s body being slammed up against the window, the blinds being pulled and torn. In an instant, Tremaine was in the room.
Instead of finding the man beating up Trudy, he found the man, Trudy, Jeff, and briefcase full of cocaine. Jeff’s plan was to shoot Tremaine, take the blow, then tell his suppli-25
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ers that two men had come to the hotel to steal the coke, and that he had gotten one of them, but the other one had gotten away with the blow. Then Jeff and Trudy and the guy posing as her lover would take the coke, sell it, get rich, and retire. Jeff wasn’t very smart. Tremaine shot him in the shoulder, took his gun, and called the cops.
As a result, when Tremaine thought a client was bullshitting him, was hiding something, he was careful. Very careful. Because not listening to himself in the past had almost gotten him killed by a half-wit criminal named Jeff.
Was Nina looking into this for some other reason?
When she said “one of the reasons,” was that a slip-up? A window into something darker? Had her rich, successful