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Studio. There were five or six of them scattered around town with witch eaves and gnome windows and gurgling pools.
    “Gnarly,” he said, but she wasn’t giving him any credit at all for slang.
    The house was basically a bungalow in river-bottom rock, but someone had found a way to insert cacti into all the pointing between the rocks, and the structure now bristled with little flowering beavertails and fat barrels and phallic stalks craning upward from their niches, and spiny cholla and deep green woolly kegs. The yard too had been pared down to dirt and then covered with rock and cacti so it was hard to see how anyone could get to the door. As a final touch, the roof sloped gradually and it too was a rock garden beset with cacti.
    Despite the unconventional exterior, he could see a blue glow through the oddly shaped window and somebody in there was watching the game.
    “I’m not sure it’s weird enough for a full point.”
    “Daddy! I gave you a point for all those plastic palm trees the city put on Venice Boulevard and that’s not very weird at all.”
    “Especially since they’re all gone now. Okay, you win. We’ll go get some lunch if you don’t mind a quick stop at Mike’s first.”
    “Mike Lewis? I thought he lived up in Pasadena.”
    “When Siobhann left, he took an apartment in Mar Vista that’s closer to the architecture school.”
    Mike Lewis was a social historian who’d had a big vogue five years earlier after releasing a book that had tattled on a lot of L.A. power brokers, but had fallen on hard times and was eking out a living teaching part time at art schools while he waited for the next vogue.
    “You’re grumpy today,” she said.
    “Sorry, Punkin. It’s just lack of sleep. I’ll perk up when I get some coffee. I really am happy to be with you.”
    One Gold ring with a large counterfeited Toad stone.
    — The London Gazette (1679)
    “Have one.” Billy held out the juice glass half full of the amber Gallo Cream Sherry she loved. He knew enough to offer only half, because the point was to get her drunk enough to be voluble and then nudge her toward the subject of his father, but if he made the campaign too obvious she’d talk about the stars in Orion or the wisdom of the Tarot just to spite him.
    She squeezed the glass between her fat palms and took a big sip. It was too strong and too sweet to do more than sip, even for her. In the corner of the living room the old TV was murmuring away with some football game. He had no idea why she had it on. She didn’t know football from lacrosse.
    “I’ll bet nobody with the circus ever watched football,” he said, as if idly.
    She squinted suspiciously at him for a moment and then shrugged. “A few of the muscle types did. Circuses always divide into muscle types and art types and the two don’t usually mix much.” She readjusted heavily on the old sofa and grimaced at some memory of pain in her back.
    “Can I get you something?” he offered quickly.
    “Stop it. You’re always making me feel old.”
    “You were one of the art types, I’ll bet.” He settled onto the leather ottoman with the stars and crescent moon embroidered on it.
    “Most of us in the carny end were artistes. We were attached to the Colonel Wills Foster Mid-American Extravaganza and Circus, but we weren’t of it. Even the circus part was a merger of the old Robert E. Wills Traveling Circus and the Colonel Tom Foster Wild West Show and Fierce Animal Exhibition—they just slapped the colonel part up front for the hell of it. The carny started out as a side show to one of the two. It was before my time, almost back to the Chautauqua circuit. Everything was separate checks, the circus was one account and we had to pay our own nut. Hell, I bet you don’t even know where that expression about the nut comes from.”
    He shook his head, even though she’d told him a dozen times.
    “In the real old days the circus would roll into some podunk town and rent a big vacant