Read Gone for Free Online

and I wondered what had brought Michaela here.
    Her apartment on Holt was a couple of miles away. In L.A., that’s a drive, not a walk. Her five-year-old Honda hadn’t been located, and I wondered if she’d been jacked.
    For real, this time.
    Too ironic.
    Milo said, “What’re you thinking?”
    I shrugged.
    “You look contemplative. Let it out, man.”
    “Nothing to say.”
    He ran his hand over his big, lumpy face, squinted at me as if we’d just been introduced. He was dressed for messy work: rust-colored nylon windbreaker, wash-and-wear white shirt with a curling collar, skinny oxblood tie that resembled two lengths of beef jerky, baggy brown trousers, and tan desert boots with pink rubber soles.
    His fresh haircut was the usual “style,” meaning skinned at the sides, which emphasized all the white, thick and black on top, a cockscomb of competing cowlicks. His sideburns now drooped a half inch below fleshy earlobes, suggesting the worst type of Elvis impersonator. His weight had stabilized; my guess was two sixty on his seventy-four-inch frame, a lot of it abdomen.
    When he stepped away from the overpass, sunlight amplified his acne pits and gravity’s cruel tendencies. We were months apart in age. He liked to tell me I was aging a lot more slowly than he was. I usually replied that circumstances had a way of changing fast.
    He makes a big deal about not caring how he looks, but I’ve long suspected there’s a self-image buried down deep in his psyche:
Gay But Not What You Expect.
    Rick Silverman’s long given up on buying him clothes that never get worn. Rick gets his hair trimmed every two weeks at a high-priced West Hollywood salon. Milo drives, every two months, to La Brea and Washington where he hands his seven bucks plus tip to an eighty-nine-year-old barber who claims to have cut Eisenhower’s hair during World War II.
    I visited the shop once, with its gray linoleum floors, creaky chairs, yellowed Brylcreem posters featuring smiling, toothy white guys, and similarly antique pitches for Murray’s straightening pomade aimed at the majority black clientele.
    Milo liked to brag about the Ike connection.
    “Probably a one-shot deal,” I said.
    “Why’s that?”
    “So Maurice could avoid a court-martial.”
    That conversation, we’d been in an Irish bar on Fairfax near Olympic, drinking Chivas and convincing ourselves we were lofty thinkers. A man and a woman he’d been pretending to look for had been nabbed at a traffic stop in Montana and were fighting extradition. They’d slain a vicious murderer, a predator who’d sorely needed killing. The law had no use for moral subtlety and news of the capture led Milo to deliver a cranky, philosophical sermon. Downing a double, he apologized for the lapse and changed the subject to barbering.
    “Maurice isn’t
courant
enough for you?”
    “Wait long enough, and everything becomes
courant.
”
    “Maurice is an artist.”
    “I’m sure George Washington thought so.”
    “Don’t be an ageist. He can still handle those scissors.”
    “Such dexterity,” I said. “He should’ve gone to med school.”
    His green eyes grew bright with amusement and grain alcohol. “Couple of weeks ago, I was giving a talk to a Neighborhood Watch group in West Hollywood Park. Crime prevention, basic stuff. I got the feeling some of the young guys weren’t paying attention. Later, one of them came up to me. Skinny, tan, Oriental tats on the arm, all that cut muscle. Said he dug the message but I was the stodgiest gay man he’d ever met.”
    “Sounds like a come-on.”
    “Oh, sure.” He tugged at a saggy jowl, released skin, took a swallow. “I told him I appreciated the compliment but he should be paying more attention to watching his back when he cruised. He thought that was a double entendre and left cracking up.”
    “West Hollywood’s the sheriff,” I said. “Why you?”
    “You know how it is. Sometimes I’m the unofficial spokesman for law enforcement