forest in the desert
by skazka

forest in the desert

skazka

Summary

Jack Vincennes first sees Ed Exley in a stack of dirty pictures.

Or, what you don't know about people you know.

Notes

(Content notes in endnote.)

Imported from Archive of Our Own. Original work id: 8823382.

Chapter 1

The man from Fleur de Lis doesn't look like any actor Vincennes can name, but he's got a face for pictures — sharp bones and hollow cheeks, a bitten-looking lower lip. The first time Jack Vincennes saw him, it was in a glossy photograph from a dirty book — one or two snaps of him twined around a knockout blonde with her rack in his face, and a couple more of him tormenting a bound man or with his mouth wrapped around an anonymous hard-on. Both men appear to be having a good time. A client, maybe — no track marks, no bruises on his body, no drawn-on mask for passive anonymity.

There was one full-body photograph that could be some pervert's idea of art — thin and neat with one hand on the tabletop, hip slightly lifted, eyes insolently fixed on the man behind the camera, nothing on but women's underwear and a venomous smirk. It's a look that makes Jack feel like he's the one naked, like nothing could be more natural.

Bizarre little scenes. Whips and chains stuff with actual production values and the pretense of a little class. Girls tying up girls, men sucking off men. Kinky.

It's not a face he's seen before haunting fruit bars, or getting busted for possession, or in a mugshot book. So it's a client maybe, or a boyfriend, or a clean-cut pimp with a proprietary attitude and an AC/DC streak. When he sees that face next, past the front door of a swank Beverly Hills fuck pad, it looks pleased to see him. The glasses are unexpected.

He's dressed for leisure on a sunny Saturday afternoon, dressed nice — nothing that gives Vincennes even a flicker of envy, but it's enough to make an impression. Newly-barbered, nice-smelling. Jack looks in his eyes and knows where this guy has been.

"Mr. Vincennes. You're the police consultant for Badge of Honor." That recognition gives him a kick, every time. The cocksucker from the photographs is smiling. He has a good handshake.

"Oh, sure. Call me Jack. You're a fan of the show?"

That's not for lack of trying on the Chief's part. He'd have him off the show altogether if they could spare the bad press, and Jack's still stinging. Vincennes turns up the charm by a few degrees to compensate — rubbing at the ring on his little finger when the handshake breaks off, stepping inside.

"Of course."

"I'm just here to ask a couple questions. "

"I'm Mr. Patchett's assistant. He's out for a drive. Please, come in, I was just taking a telephone call."

He walks him through the living room like he owns the place. Which suggests he's more than a secretary, and that Jack knows something Sid Hudgens doesn't. Or that Sid Hudgens isn't telling.

"Would you like me to come back another time?"

At least he's alive — if someone's picking off photogenic sinners they're doing it slowly.

"Don't bother, we've been expecting you. You can come inside and ask your questions. Can I get you a drink?"

"Sure, Scotch and soda.

Nice place to entertain. It's not hard to picture this joint on a Saturday night. Jack watches him while he gets to work. In full color, he's sleekly handsome but no less angular — his eyes are blue, not brown, his hair's a little darker.

"So this must be where Patchett hosts his famous parties."

"Some of the time, yes." The guy hands him his drink, running a few degrees frostier now. "You're still on good terms with Sid Hudgens?"

"I am."

"And as a friend of Sid's, you wouldn't be compelled to comment on any other criminal activities outside the scope of our cooperation." The guy's eyes are big and meaningful, chips of ice.

Jack smiles. He can feel the corners of his eyes creasing. He hopes it looks affable. "No, I wouldn't be."

"Well, then. We'd be happy to cooperate with any questions you might have."

It's hard not to reflexively case the place. Fine furnishings, sexy stuff — paintings, carpet. Lots of flat surfaces. Easy to clean up. Crime scenes past, present, and future have looked just like this place.

Vincennes turns up his own warmth by a few notches. It makes even him feel oily. "Does he have any other business interests I ought to know about?"

"Nothing you won't find in the telephone directory. Construction, aviation, the arts."

"Politics?"

"Not particularly. Is there something wrong with an interest in civic affairs?" He does a good job feigning wholesomeness, but there's something insolent about him — besides trying to put one over on Jack. It's clear this is a joint with certain expectations of protection. Maybe Sid's right — Patchett is twilight, neither here nor there.

"Not at all. I was just wondering. A man with that kind of money to throw around could get pretty far in this town."

"Mr. Patchett is a Los Angeles native. He has a civic interest in seeing this city continue to grow."

Pivot, switch gears. "Who prints your pictures?"

"We have a arrangement with a small family-owned print shop."

"And who poses in your pictures?"

"Actors and actresses. Part-time models. Friends of the photographer. The usual assortment. It's all within the bounds of good taste. Has something happened?"

His eyes are taking Jack apart, running a diagnostic test on what Jack knows — he's not their usual Vice connection, but this guy isn't about to name their usual hookup in case it spoils a good thing. Vincennes mentally runs through the usual suspects —

"You know what, forget I asked. Give Pierce my regards, all right?"

On his way back to the car he sees the figure of Patchett at the end of the driveway, watching him. He's tugging off his driving gloves — but Vincennes turns his head and keeps walking down the drive.

"You shouldn't have come here," Jack says, louder than he meant to. The room is too hot, and too crowded, and he's sweating into his cashmere blazer. He hates this. "If you wanted to arrange a get-together, I can think of a couple places."

"Keep your voice down. Where do you want me to meet you instead, at the station?

It's one of those house parties always about two drinks away from crumbling into an orgy or a fistfight — the real fall-of-Rome stuff happens after dark, but Jack's just there to pay his respects, shaking hands and answering the same half-dozen questions.

Vincennes motions up the flight of stairs, to the second floor. Patchett's joy boy follows him to the landing at the top, overlooking the people below. Not a bad crowd tonight — shining faces, bare shoulders, loud laughter. Nobody he cares to talk to, and somewhere in the crowd is Sid Hudgens, ready to batten himself on Jack like a leech and turn the rest of the night into work instead of play. More bribes for more doomed hangers-on.

Ed's hand rests beside Jack's elbow on the railing, where his sport coat is already beginning to crease.

His thin face is shining and his downward glance over the rail of the staircase is completely guarded. "You asked me the other day if Mr. Patchett had any other business interests besides construction. You can ask him yourself; he's over there rubbing shoulders with the star of your television show."

This isn't the surprise it might be. Vincennes knows things about the leading man of Badge of Honor that could generously be described as shocking, even for Pierce Patchett's social secretary.

(Patchett is older, not bad-looking — dressed for the occasion and looking like a minor mogul. He probably dyes his hair.)

"He didn't introduce himself. You mentioned movies."

"He appreciates talent. Don't you ever get tired of these things?"

Jack holds up his glass. The ice cubes rattle.

"There's a lot to learn at Brett's parties. Just take a look inside Brett's medicine cabinet. He needs more pharmaceutical help to get going than some hospitals."

That part's more or less a matter of public record; Chase had a bad smash-up a couple years ago, but you'd never tell by looking at his face.

"Mm."

"And his lady friend over there in green — she's about to be asked to leave, because she turned up blotto and because she's a union agitator."

"Then why'd they let her in?"

"One of the writers knocked her up."

Ed raises his eyebrows. Jack sets down his glass. "Is that all?"

It's not all.

In the restroom with his back braced against the door, the lock turned, not thinking why's this place got a heavy-duty lock for but knowing — this is where it all happens. All the gossip-rag queer Red extramarital action you can shake a stick at, all the biggest names. If it's good enough for the stars, it's good enough for Jack. Patchett's assistant on his knees, taking Jack in his mouth — not like some bar-crawling piece of ass but like a master, making his blood run cold and his knees lock and his cock stand to attention.

This is a trick. This is a cheap faggot ploy and one he's known before, one he's known well enough to avoid — Badge of Honor cop Jackie V caught with his pants down in homo heist and a hundred other sharp lurid headlines at the click of a shutter, Jack's blood pounding and his dry throat clicking. Ed's mouth is on him, rounding every curve and tugging at his skin. He does it like he likes it, like he's not ashamed, cheeks hollowing and mouth wet — like it's Jack being punished and not himself allowing a washroom fuck. He sucks him off with a raw red mouth and after Jack comes he keeps at it, working sore skin until it practically hurts and the words never make it out of Jack's mouth, words like please — Jack, who doesn't beg, who can't seem to tell him to stop.

Afterward, maybe, there's a flinch of shame in his face as he wipes his mouth and smooths his hair back from his forehead. Maybe Vincennes is seeing things, or misidentifying what he sees. It levels out.

"Is that satisfactory?"

Ed slips his glasses out of his pocket and slips them on again — like a glass wall, throwing up a barrier between buyer and bought. It's different, not paying for it; it feels worse. Jack fastens his belt and combs his hair in the mirror.

"Good enough."

The next time he sees him, it's through glass, on a rainy night. It's a familiar face cut in profile through the windowpane — silver frames shining, the way he holds his head, the collar of his shirt. Vincennes insinuates himself across the slippery floor and by the time he arrives at the red leather booth Patchett's cute stooge has noticed him. His face is full of something like indignation — but only for a moment. Only a moment.

Jack makes a beeline for his booth, when he sees he's alone — the other diners are few, absorbed in their overcooked steaks. Vincennes hasn't had anything to eat today but antacids and coffee. Some supper.

He's wearing a blue suit, well-cut, and a gray necktie. They're clearing away his plate when Jack slinks in opposite him at the table, dripping.

"How good to see you again. I was just leaving."

"Great. I'm not hungry. How's your boss been keeping?"

"Like usual. Don't you have someplace to be?"

A dark little booth in a joint where the waiters don't bat an eye at Jack insinuating himself at another man's table. They can speak frankly here.

"I dropped in on him earlier. Patchett seems to think highly of you. Like the son he never had."

Jack's voice is caressing, but Ed isn't having it. The look on his face has gone opaque again, but the cocktail glass in his hand is sweating.

"Somehow I doubt it. He's a businessman who knows how to handle merchandise, and I appreciate that. But he's only sentimental about the women in his life."

Of which, Jack would wager, there are plenty. "And how long have the two of you been working together?"

Photographs had smoothed some of the character from his face; there aren't lines in his face yet, but there's no excess of softness either, nothing to evoke bogus jailbait or the boy next door, if the boy happened to live next door to a pervert. He looks even and keen and alert.

"You don't need to be oblique about it. I'm old enough to know what I'm doing. If someone's looking for very young men, he can look somewhere else."

It's difficult to imagine him as a youth — not any more appealing. Jack remembers the tight earnest face of the pretty-boy actor Sid had him rout for grass, the hard bruised sullenness of the average kid hooker. It's impossible to overlay that on the version of Ed from the photographs, let alone the one with him now, watching him. Maybe Patchett's been recruiting full-blown fetishists with their own operations, assimilated them into his sophisticate smut op. Crazier things have happened.

Jack leans forward against the table, feeling it start to slide on the polished floor. The silverware rattle against the place-settings.

Swishes don't look like that, so steely calm and so appraising. They look scared. Somewhere buried under a surface of ice and glass Ed is frightened of him and what Jack Vincennes can do with a badge and a telephone call. Therefore, on some buried level, this guy Ed must be a swish. But the outward man is unbearably clean cut. He goes to a good barber, takes care of his fingernails, has good teeth. He doesn't lisp or sway.

Jack could beat him, easily. He's not anyone's idea of a prizefighter but he knows the tricks of the trade and it would be easy, maybe, to knock that mouth red, to bloody his hair and break his glasses. He could do it without marking his face, he could focus on the body and leave the kind of marks that would keep him out of work for months. On some buried level of his own the thought excites him. He could kill him, easily, and only have to contend with Patchett. When did he become this, anyway? He's not Bud White — thank God for that. He's not that kind of cop, he busts people for grass and fills his pockets as fast as he can. He shouldn't be thinking like this.

"Edward," he begins.

"Edmund."

"There's a kid," Jack begins, but his voice deserts him before he can add, a dead one, down in the morgue. The pretty-boy actor again — Jack blinks away spots, the smell of motel carpet and Matt Reynolds' blood filling his nose. His throat is sticking shut with thirst. He plays with the signet ring on his finger, like a kid, playing for time. "I don't know if you'd know him—"

"Patchett isn't interested in boys, and neither am I. If someone else is, that's not my business."

He's frosted over completely; his voice is low and amiable enough for a table at a restaurant but it pierces through Jack's sentimental recollections like a knife. Jack tries again with a needling boldness, welling up from where he doesn't know.

"But it's Patchett's, isn't it? Whatever you desire."

Ed slides two bills out of his money clip and drops them on the tabletop. His faux affability has blinked out of existence like a lightswitch.

"If you had anything substantial to pursue, you'd have made that clear by now. This isn't police business yet. Goodbye, Mr. Vincennes."

"Can't I be seeing you on a friendly basis? Just us guys?"

"Then you'd need to make an appointment. Good night, Jack."

On the tabletop is another slim black card, with its printed face pressed to the glass, and Jack already knows what it says. On the other side he's pencilled a telephone number, shining black on black.

Guess he's the legendary Pierce Patchett's special boy. About as authentic as a three-dollar bill, with that phony voice, those phony glasses. He'll have to squeeze somebody to shake loose another name than Edmund.

There's a girl in the department he's been meaning to get on the good side of for a while now — a junior edition of Ginger, nothing more than a kid who's trained up to take calls and handle records while brushing elbows with the worst crimes a growing city can cook up. She's abundantly grateful to get out from behind the filing cabinets for a while. And she's a big Badge Of Honor fan.

The girl detective is pert but not pretty; he'll take her out to dinner, deal her a couple on-set anecdotes and be done with her.

He places a call from a public telephone and the voice on the other end is familiar, educated. Jack gets his appointment, all right.

The fairy secretary at home. It's low-key by comparison with Patchett's genteel sprawl and manicured putting green but this address is no dive either, with a big garage and borderline respectable neighbors. In fact the furnishings inside are almost painfully restrained — unremittingly masculine and without exceptions, expensive.

There's bookcases on the walls, for Christ's sakes, just like the ones at Patchett's; Jack makes a mental note to check for more pornography there, either the sister volumes to those same Fleur de Lis shoots or anything else.

It's a nice place. You wouldn't think any kind of sissy lived there.

He's wearing a gray suit this time — somebody liked this kid enough to teach him how to dress, how to draw the eye away from his skinny neck and to emphasize his shoulders instead. Like cut glass, all glittering facets, and nothing like life.

"Don't you have work in the morning?"

"I thought I'd drop in."

Exley steps back, reaching for his pocket. "Do you still smoke grass, Jack?"

He opens a cigarette case big enough for a couple of reefers. The sweet smell still makes Jack's mouth go wet, but he doesn't go out for that stuff any more, Jack Vincennes is strictly straight-arrow — give or take a little.

It's the only incongruous element here that keeps this from being a typical question-and-answer scene — Ed waiting, wary this time.

Somebody told him to say that — an oblique swipe about the movie premiere pot bust back before New Year's, or somebody told him about Jack's bygone taste for mary jane and he's rubbing Jack's nose in an old habit. Or Jack's a prickly ex-hophead who's spent too much time with the oeuvre of Sid Hudgens. He looks profoundly uncomfortable even handling the stuff, and when Jack shakes his head he stows them.

"Thanks, but no thanks, kid."

The man looks only faintly relieved.

Start off friendly, light. Jack paces across the carpeted floor in a lazy circle, and Ed watches him go. He crosses his arms, leaning on the back of an armchair.

"You're a very busy man, aren't you, Exley? You look after Patchett's business interests and you put a squeaky-clean face on a bad business. There's just one thing I can't square."

"What's that?"

"Who ever heard of a hooker with glasses?"

He wants him to falter; he wants it to needle him. But Ed's face is perfectly blasé. "I can take them off if you'd like."

That rich-boy voice. Who tutored him in that? It's a joke, it's all just a big joke.

"You know that I could book you on a dozen different things. Possession, for starters, moving down the alphabet to sodomy. We'd have to fingerprint you. Somebody might get the bright idea to cross-reference with enlistment records."

Exley straightens up. There's something familiar about his bearing, then. "Fingerprints? That's a dirty trick. I thought we had a working relationship with the department, Jack. Was I wrong?"

"You were in the war. They pinned a medal on you and everything. What makes a guy like that start doing this? I wouldn't have figured you on paper for a hooker."

He plays it intentionally coarse — still miles away from the effortless gutter vocabulary of men like Bud White. He wonders what Bud would make of this guy, his manners, his voice, his glasses. He's soft on hookers — by comparison — but only ones with big eyes and sad stories. And he hates fags. All those guys do.

"You don't know what the fuck you're talking about." He sounds like a college kid when he swears, too, and it still hits Vincennes like icewater. His voice is all needles. "I wouldn't expect a tabloid cop to understand why men do the things they do. You'd be better off not thinking about it. At any rate, you couldn't have done it or you wouldn't be here alone. You don't have that kind of time to kill, or the excuse to push it through."

"I'll think of something." It was just a lucky guess, but he's reeling. "Why'd you do it?"

"He was a friend of my father's. Like I said, he's a businessman. After my father passed, he kept track of me and looked after my education. Pierce got in touch eventually, asking if I wanted in on his idea of business. I hadn't known. I said no then. After the war I said yes."

"Well, what the hell did you do before?"

Maybe that question was a mistake. Maybe there was no before. God, this sickens him, this makes him sick. Exley won't look away from him; the set of his face is unreadable. Look at the body, look for some familiar sign — the set of his shoulders is square, tension cuts an electric line down his arms, to his stiff wrists. He's gripping the back of the chair, but not hard. His knuckles aren't jutting out. Just braced.

"I'm nearly thirty. Old, for a hooker, Pierce retires his girls at thirty. He'll put me out to pasture somewhere and I'll see what I can make of myself."

Jack hadn't done the math right. He'd looked younger. How old had Matt Reynolds been? Barely scraping twenty-five, if that.

Reynolds must have a mother and father somewhere — probably don't even know he's dead. Or he has a kid sister back home who wants to know more about what he did in Hollywood, or there's a mailing address on a file card in some diabolical stash, or he has an unclaimed suitcase sitting in a rat-trap hotel room somewhere that might say something about how he'd been living in the weeks before he died. A lead on what really happened between him and Loew — though the sinking feeling in Jack's gut is that he already knows how it all went.

He can't think about Reynolds now.

Vincennes stops, conspiratorially caressing again: "You could always work in television. Face like yours?"

"Be serious. You're thinking of what you'd have done, but without the scandal sheets to break your fall? You'd have flamed out."

It's difficult to picture anyone further from flaming out. He's cold as ice, poised as a senator and steadier than any fairy Jack has ever known. He's not a drunk, he doesn't shoot dope, he doesn't even smoke tea — that was a prop, a toy gun, something to rattle him with.

"That's a lot of time off the market to account for. What's the story?" Lean in, like you really believe it.

"It's different on paper."

"The girl in those photographs, the blonde who looked like Veronica Lake." (And at a glance in the staff room he'd half thought it was Veronica Lake, you never knew these days. Whatever you desire.) "She seemed plenty interested. Why not take her with you? Call it severance pay."

"You don't know that woman from a few dirty pictures. She's more intelligent than that. When her tenure is up Lynn's retiring to Arizona to sew dresses, and I can guarantee she'll never think about me again."

Jack can picture that too: the two of them, the model couple, unilaterally handsome and glowing like hot metal in the Arizona sun — he'd get sick of her, she'd get sick of him, sickened by where he's been with no right to judge and hating herself for it. Who wouldn't hate him for it?

Vincennes fumbles out a cigarette. Exley lights it for him.

"Come to bed with me." That low, compelling voice again, full of promises.

"What do you think I am, Ed?"

"You're a Los Angeles police officer. Come to bed."

This house is like a bad dream, a pocket of unreal space, it's phony as a movie set — anything could happen here, which is probably the point. Vincennes keeps an eye peeled for anything recognizable as smut-book staging ground. A distinctive bedframe, a set of drapes. A naked girl in patent leather boots. Anything.

Exley takes him apart on the way to the bedroom, unbuckling his wristwatch, unpinning his cufflinks, slipping off Jack's tie bar and loosening his silk tie. His thumb brushes along the border where Jack's collar terminates and his throat begins and the tiny touch is electric. Jack resents it. He's risking so much for this — this is his head on the chopping block, a few good snaps through the curtains or somebody with Jack's own scruples kicking down the door and Vincennes is toast. The way Exley's eyes mark out the exits isn't lost on him, however — checking sightlines before he proceeds.

But they're alone, and they'd better stay that way. Jack stubs out his cigarette, kisses him and kisses him again, voraciously — a hand on the back of his head, prickling the barbered nape of his neck.

Ed strips him out of his coat and his gun, both; his gun sits on the table top like a blemish, holstered. His belt snakes free of its loops in one motion — another man's hands on his zipper, another man's hands tugging past his hips. It must be magic, an hour ago Jack Vincennes was a cop and now he's this, just a guy with his pants down.

Ed's only concession to mutual comfort is slipping off his shoes. He's about to take his glasses off when Jack stays him.

"No, keep them on. I like them."

A minute expression of surprise registers on Ed's face. "Well, sure."

"I'm guessing you don't want to flip a coin for it, do you."

Backing him up against the bed, bringing him down. "And neither do you. The big-shots usually complain about this part."

The decor says: Senators have gotten fucked in this bed, and movie stars. It's easy; it won't kill you. Just lie back and take it; let yourself get screwed.

He leans back on his tailbone and lets him in, feels the cold smooth spread of something greasy between his legs, blunt fingertips circling his asshole like a promise of getting fucked. It still hurts when his fingers penetrate him and the flinch of discomfort makes Jack's balls hitch; if he makes a noise it's over with in a second, and another finger eases into him more readily, gentler and more exploratory. It's better.

He doesn't ask if he's done this before, and Jack has no intention of telling him.

His own hand works at his hard-on with less than complete enthusiasm, until Ed peels them away and pins them back against the pillows with his one free hand — he still thinks of Ed's mouth on him, whenever he jerks off or has to take a piss, the memory of skin — and his head is beginning to throb, another more uneasy pain than being patiently worked apart piece by piece.

It's just a tease, letting him wait for it. But really he's just giving him more time to think — think about him and Patchett, Patchett and Sid, black leather portfolios of illicit smut. Pictures of Exley, sharp and opaque, innocent and vulgar. Think about that, and not what it looks like.

He lowers his mouth — not to swallow Vincennes' cock this time but to mouth over the tip of it. It's an agonizing tease. Jack's breathing starts to sound strange in his own throat. He digs a hand into Ed's shoulder, wrenching up a fistful of his shirt — spasming inside, needy, as Exley fingers him apart on the razor-edge of climaxing right there.

Who's Jack to say he hasn't made mistakes? Cute faces and financially motivated misunderstandings. Christ, it must be 20 years since somebody fucked him up the ass. He was cuter then. You never forget how, like riding a bike.

"Who put you in contact with Pierce Patchett?" He twists his fingers inside him, jerking forward, other arm bracing. "It wasn't Sid. He told you to leave well enough alone."

Jack makes an undignified sound. "Found his card at the scene of a bust. I connected a few dots. It's called detective work."

"What bust?"

"Why the fuck do you care?"

He covers him with his body and Jack jostles against the sheets. His hard-on scrapes against Ed's shirtfront and the sensation is agonizing.

"How do you want this to go?" His voice is honey in Jack's ear, eminently reasonable. "Give me something to work with. We can make it easy for you."

"Or we can make it hard?" Jack arches up against him and hears a burst of something so dry and strange that he can't initially recognize it as laughter. "I'm a cop, remember, I know how this goes."

"I'm sure you do."

"You can tie me up if you'd like."

He's not asking, he's letting him. He's not asking. He could hurt him with impunity and not even answer to Patchett. He could hurt him here and now, but that's not his style. Exley doesn't know that.

"Is that what you like?"

Jack raises his eyes to the heavens, to the headboard, as if it's obvious. Exley kisses him, whispers against his mouth.

"Give me your arm."

He slips Jack's necktie from around his loosened collar, and deja vu hits — it makes Jack think of blindfolds and Bizarre magazine photo spreads.

It's a nice tie. Jack's sort of attached to it. A man's got to have standards. "Hey, cut that out, that's custom-made—"

Visions of it being looped around his throat with one hand and pulled — Badge of Honor cop buys the farm in strange-o sex tryst.

"I know." Ed sets the necktie aside on the nightstand and tugs open a drawer.

Jack jerks upright at the sound and Ed soothes him back down against the pillow, one neat hand bracketing his temple.

"What are you going to do to me?" Mild, blasé, unafraid.

"I thought you'd prefer handcuffs."

He slips the bracelets on Jack's left wrist, almost caring — cool metal, and not cheap, Jack can already tell. The cold edge against the inside of Jack's wrist makes his pulse go quicker. The other cuff ratchets shut around the bedframe — Ed moving over him with pretty face impassive, mildly interested at best. The brush of his body in close proximity makes Jack's cock twitch.

What's this guy doing, playing fake-aloof, acting like Jack's something he scraped off the bottom of somebody's shoe and like he hadn't wanted to fuck him — to be fucked, to let him fuck his mouth. The hysterical Hollywood-bigshot urge to kick and complain and cry out don't you know who I am is alive and well in Jack's palpitating breast. But it's kept in check by the cold fear that Exley does, that he knows exactly who Jack is, and that he thinks nothing of that man. Who knows who else he's fucked, from Clark Gable to Walt Disney.

Male bodies heaving and wrangling at close range, grinding painful; Jack's shoulder just about pops out of joint and Ed soothes him into positions with a steady stream of nail-hard sex talk, precise and filthy. So both of them need this. As a matter of fact, why, Jack's positively helpless — it strikes him funny, that's all, mimicky sex-games that are as phony as anything on television. With a set, and a script, and props, and Vincennes is just a supporting actor.

He lets himself be kissed again — he doesn't know why he lets himself be kissed, desperate and reaching from below with a high-end hooker caressing his throat

"I know you set up Matt Reynolds." Ed's thumb brushes across his windpipe. Jack's pulse jumps.

"The two of you must be pals." His laugh comes out semi-hysterical. "Coworkers, even."

"Hardly. I know you pimped him out to somebody important and he ended up dead."

"Pimping is a pretty strong word. I made an introduction."

Ed strikes him across the face. Not hard, just practiced, a slap like you'd slap an unruly dame. Jack is blinking, breathing heavy, electric, grabbing a fistful of the bedsheets.

Exley pries open his hand, presses his wrist into the mattress. "Did you do it for money?"

"I did it for $50." And I felt like a whore, Jack does not add. The man might not appreciate it.

"Did you kill him?"

"No."

"I believe you. Give me your other arm."

Jack does as he's told, feeling dizzy as Ed grips his wrist, his whole body going suddenly servile. He's painfully hard — tries rutting against Exley's long leg, and is rebuffed, Exley's knee sinking into his pelvis to pin him back in place.

Another cuff ratchets shut. With his arms hooked back he's a grotesque, he's outside himself at last. This is the latest of a succession of bad ideas — going off the reservation and poking around in Patchett's business, taking the card from Matt Reynolds' little black book, not playing this tougher, making the telephone call in the first place. He's not a sex freak and he won't be a sitting duck for some peeper's photo album, but he has no way of stopping himself — not now. They're past that now.

Ed hits him again and Jack angles into it, those photographs blotting at the edge of his vision — women with women, men with men, Ed with strangers, taunting eyes. His dick stands stiff at the horizon of his vision, with Exley thumbing at him to the point of pain — fat and slick, so hard it's painful and fitting tight into a one-hand grip.

Exley's not so buttoned up now either, cruel face fixed and cheeks flushed, shirt coming untucked where Jack's knee had ground against him. His glasses are askew, but he can see Jack just fine. There's a film of steam across both lenses, like car windows on a cool night. It's cute.

He's wrenching a climax out of him and then, impossibly, another; Jack is hurting in his hands, his own come is dripping down between his legs and he's asking him to stop, but not really.

Rallying, weak, wanting a final hurt. "He was just a studio punk—"

"He was a good kid, and you got him killed."

Jack's breathing like a guy who just ran a mile. Exley is just as cold as ice. He finishes him off ruthlessly.

"Yeah, maybe. You don't even get off," Jack says when he can catch his breath again, frankly astonished. He tries to sit up and finds himself boneless, stunned.

"I don't know what you mean." He wipes off his hands. The savagery is gone from his face, but the stripe of color across his cheeks has stayed. Cooling, now.

"Jesus, you're a piece of work. Jesus."

"Clean yourself up. You can take a shower if you'd like." His hands on Jack's wrists are like absolution.

Jack washes his hair and rinses out his mouth before scrubbing himself red with his fingernails. There's a stain somehow, beneath the skin, and all the while the showerhead is scalding him clean and the pipes are rattling away and someone is coming to blow his brains out all over the nice clean tile, Jack knows it. This kind of shit doesn't just happen without consequences. He's been very foolish and said a lot of reckless things and now if it hurts it's nothing he doesn't deserve. He can press two fingers to his rawest places and remember.

There are little red bands around both his wrists, rapidly vanishing. There's a red mark on his cheek that only Jack can feel, and it's still burning. He turns the tap off and listens for footsteps, for splintering wood. He might have lost track of some things, but he knows when he's made a mistake.

There is no man with a gun, coming to blow his brains out. When he gets out of the shower and pads down the hall, Exley has changed his shirt. The suit jacket Vincennes came in with is laid out on a wooden hanger.

Exley is cleaning his glasses with a cloth. Without them he suddenly looks conspicuously innocent. He tucks in Jack's shirttails for him and tells him to call again the moment he needs anything.

So that's something.

Something for something. Ed told him too much and so he took a little more.

Jack takes his girl detective out to dinner and she tells him all about how crazy she is for Brett Chase. She doesn't ask any big thunderbolt questions about Mr. Edmund Jennings Exley. A couple cocktails and his sense of dim gratitude for her discretion has curdled.

He goes home to his empty house and smokes himself sick, until he can feel sobriety creeping in around the edges. This place is nice — furnished with magazine money and television-serial money, in bits and pieces, gifts from grateful friends. But there are nicer places.

The photographs of Ed go missing from Jack's desk. Guys have been coming and going from the evidence lockup all week, gawking the way men gawk, and the risk of high-quality dirty stuff going home in somebody's pocket to adorn a bedroom wall or get shoved under a mattress for safekeeping. No more Ed entwined with that knockout blonde — Lynn, or Veronica Lake.

Another officer catches him rifling through the stacks of smut, tossing the mediocre, sifting for the good, and makes a ribald joke. Jack hardly hears him through the blood rushing in his ears, but he fires off a crack of his own and pushes past him, out the door and down the hallway. His world is getting smaller every day. Everything else is falling away.

At night, Jack lies back and tries to remember. The looseness of Ed's hands around him, the pull of his mouth.

By Monday the cocksucker pics are back in their paper folder in his desk drawer, unwanted. Nobody says shit, not even Ginger. Jack's gently but firmly transferred back to Narcotics with visions of Dudley Smith swirling in his head, uttering dire Irish warnings about the reputation of the department. Something's not right; something's hinky.

Two men in bed. That's something you won't see on celluloid any time soon.

"I don't know why you keep coming back. I'm going to have to start paying you to leave me alone."

Ed fumbles a cigarette out of its case and sticks it between Jack's fingers.Their hands brush. He must think it's a neat trick. Jack offers him the little tray and he holds up a hand.

"You don't smoke?"

"I don't make a habit of it, but that doesn't mean I have to be impolite."

Jack's being a lousy host. It'd be one thing at a hotel, even a more reputable hotel. Jack doesn't do a lot of entertaining and it's unsettling to see Exley there in the midst of his bachelor wasteland. But Exley came and found him — he should ask how, but it's hard to find the inclination.

Exley's success rate so far at getting him into bed whenever the two of them cross paths is hovering somewhere around 70%. Sometimes he leaves marks. Jack doesn't tell him about police business and Ed doesn't ask about it. He asks if he'd like to meet some of the girls, if he wants pictures, if he's sure Ed can't get him anything.

Jack crosses his ankle across his knee, thumbing at his sock. The most titillating part of this, in retrospect, has been pretending to trust one another.

"You can tie me up me again, if that's your style."

Even his most innocent expressions are stamped with smirky qualities. "No. Are you wishing I would?"

In lieu of an answer, Jack smokes, a little sullenly.

"What did he tell you about me? Before I came, I mean, I'm sure the two of you have discussed this at length."

"We haven't. Patchett isn't a fan of me entertaining cops in my spare time. He'd rather keep it professional."

He'll leave a $50 bill in the ashtray for him. "Any cop, or just this one? What did Patchett tell you about me?"

"That you're a reformed dope smoker, you work for that godawful magazine, and you don't play rough. He told me to be nice to you." Exley stretches — the bones shift in his freckled back. You can see his spine, like a long narrow gouge. It's something.

"So when you tied me to a bed and gave me a handjob, that was you being nice."

"It could have been worse. I could have left you there."

"You're making me wish I never met you. This stuff's bad for my career."

This stuff between them — showing up unannounced, telephone calls in the dead of night like some kind of saboteur spy, chasing a fantasy instead of tracking down Mickey C's missing H. His schedule is starting to slip — work melting into pleasure, night life bleeding into his daylit hours, dozing off in the middle of Badge of Honor bullshit sessions. Sex has always been something that came easy to him, a diversion. There are cheaper diversions than this one. Every time is like the last time. It won't stop until it has to stop. He's come to like him.

"Really? It's been great for mine." There's a tinge of sardonic pride in his voice. "I keep Patchett's girls out of trouble and I screw for money. I'm happy to do it."

Prissy sex freak meets celebrity cop. This isn't a side of himself that Vincennes likes.

"So why me? I haven't paid you yet."

"Maybe justice does it for me."

"Sure. Are you sure that's not the Hollywood connection you're feeling?" Jack presses his palm down Exley's naked back. Exley shivers a little under the touch.

Over his shoulder, Ed says, "There's got to be a better way to get your foot in the door than by sleeping with a technical consultant. I haven't even watched your show."

"You don't even own a television." Vincennes manages to stop himself from asking if he'd like one. The atmosphere of give and take has gotten to him.

"Astute observation, detective."

"Did you travel much, before shipping out?"

"Never very far. I went to college, and spent summers in Oregon for a while as a boy. It was nice. We had family in Illinois, but we weren't close."

"Well, me neither." Jack hasn't been further east than Nevada since Hoover was in office. Sometimes he's toyed with the thought of going to New York, some place that isn't a tourist map of prime sinnuendo and personal mistakes. But the thought of doing real work out there changes his mind again. "You weren't in Europe, were you?"

Italy, the Netherlands, North Africa maybe. France. He tries to picture Exley in Paris, frowning at the French.

"The Pacific, Guadalcanal. A lot of guys were dying to go. A lot of them died there. I didn't."

Ed takes the cigarette from his hand and sucks in a quick pull of smoke, like a guilty schoolboy. Jack tries to picture him in uniform, and can't. This genteel act is as much a costume as anything else.

"That change your mind any about working for Patchett? All that zest for life."

"The war was a shambles. Men cutting other men open, disobeying orders and mailing trophies to their sweethearts back home in Petaluma. After that nothing two men can do together could bother me. It isn't all ugly. But it can be."

Not exactly a broad-minded plea for tolerance. It makes Jack glad he didn't ask him if he killed any Japs or something back-slappingly overfamiliar like that, because of course he has. Vincennes has heard stories, seen photographs, pretty girls contemplating Jap skulls in the pages of Life magazine. The Army didn't even want Jack. But he gets the picture.

Jack pauses, considering. "Did you have somebody during the war?"

He probably had several someones. He probably screwed his way through the armed forces. Some wayward G.I. over the moon for this kid and his manners, some decorated strange-o interested in conquering virgin territory. Maybe he's dead, this imaginary lover. But Exley just gives him a funny look.

"I don't know what you're asking."

You don't just jump in at the deep end. "There had to have been somebody. Or did Patchett keep you on a pretty tight leash?"

"It wasn't like that — we weren't close. I couldn't reconcile it to myself, my father being so upright and Pierce living like he does. They had a business connection. Now, so do I."

Exley leans back against Jack's shoulder. The back of his hand rests against the inside of his knee, amicably careless.

Jack's breath catches a little at the back of his throat.

"I saw you in those pictures."

"They were just pictures, Jack. I solve problems for women, I entertain guests, and sometimes I get photographed."

It's different then, quick, unsteady. The two of them are nice to each other. When Exley rolls off of him he asks: "Same time next week?"

"Well, not here."

Same time next week. He wants to see him. The full moon makes all the crazies come out, and it makes for one bad night — robbery, rape, arson, a four-alarm fire that chewed up a string of warehouses and left a couple of night watchmen scorched to death. None of it is in Jack's wheelhouse exactly. When Jack comes to call and Exley isn't there — God knows for how long, on a job or going wherever whores go on their day off. To a goddamn boxing match, or to the movies, something. Maybe he's gone and bought a television set. Maybe he wants him to wait.

Their next date: Vincennes is thrumming with agitation, pacing around in Ed's hallway debating the pros and cons of casing the place more thoroughly. He shouldn't be here — there's a queasy fascination in trying to piece together the man from the articles accompanying him. A lot of dull realities underneath the glamor, which comes away as easily as tissue paper. Prop furniture, cigarette-burned Persian rugs. Careless patrons.

Imagine the kind of man who has sex with Ed Exley for money — rich, obviously. Smart, maybe. A sad-sack, certainly, maybe married, with kids. Making up for lost time.

Wall safe in the living room, as he'd suspected — expensive in and of itself, built to hide quality. He slips a couple books off the shelves, probing through the pages with the point of a capped pen to shake loose any contraband, but there's nothing. Nothing especially salty either, no homo paperbacks or so much as a dogeared copy of Forever Amber.

An aggressively modern painting on the far wall, a radio, today's newspapers. A folding chessboard and a tidy stack of envelopes attesting to a correspondence game being played against one Mrs. Frank Brasher of Missoula, Montana. Shaking out another leather folio from off the shelf, he expects to find an envelope bulging with film negatives, or a stack of bills, or another one of those picture portfolios

There's a passport with Exleys photograph and somebody else's name. There's a photograph of a thin young woman standing alongside a taller, even thinner man, looking healthy and bright — a newer photo of a small boy who can only be Ed alongside a man who can only be his father. Vincennes turns them over, face-down, and closes the cover.

He cases the bedroom and finds no remnant of what happened there — Jack doesn't know what he was expecting. Dirty bedsheets, maybe. There's still a tiny black burn on the nightstand from where he'd stubbed out his cigarette. Ed doesn't seem like the kind of guy to keep a diary or a juicy datebook lying around, or a book of old newspaper clippings, or anything, but Jack's been surprised on that account before. A search confirms those suspicions at least partway. There's a black leather-bound calendar with blue pen markings but no names, and a .38 Special in the bedside table.

Sleeping pills and Benzedrine tablets in a dresser-drawer, either recently replenished or hardly touched. There is nothing to suggest the use of other narcotics, or that the resident might be accommodating to those who do use narcotics. Not even a pack of rolling papers. The grass was a prop, like anything else.

In the bottom drawer there's assorted homosexual paraphernalia — hanks of rope, Vaseline, cigarettes and matches, a glass dildo that makes Jack's mouth go dry just looking at it. And two pairs of handcuffs.

Clothes are missing from their drawers, the empty place in a neat row of shoes like a missing tooth. There's suits in the closet, uniforms under plastic that can't all belong to one man, costume pieces. The closet door has loose slats. There's more than enough room for an adult man with a camera, kneeling.

Props, costumes, set, cameraman. Jack starts to experience a certain sinking feeling.

They had a date. Jack is itching in his skin. His head is swimming with the anticipation of more question-and-answer games, but something in the air is rankling, something isn't right — the heavy front door hanging just slightly off-kilter and giving way when he forces the lock, the absence of casual disarray, drinking glasses or ashtrays for visitors' use.

A cool stillness and a reassuring dark, but no one home.

At the end of a short hallway there's a bathroom. Jack's been in there and showered, even contemplated having a shave while waiting for the doom to arrive that didn't. The smooth white door is shut tight, but not locked. When it swings open, moonlight pouring over the top of the drawn curtains, everything is the same. Fresh towels, soap, tile. There's a dark shape next to the bathtub, curled up against the wall.

The first thing he sees is the irregular shape — bent at weird angles, no person would up and lie down like that if they had a choice about it. It's moving and breathing, but only just. And the face — those eyes, the same half-stare on dead Matt Reynolds.

He's done it again, Jack's fucking done it again and fucked it all up royally.

His hair hangs in his face in a bloodied hank and when Jack grabs him by the shoulder Ed bares his teeth at him. One pupil is shrunk down to a black pinprick and the other constricted, a black bead of blood trailing from his right ear. The needle broken off in his arm, red marks on both wrists, a sooty palm and a burnt thumb raised in angry blisters. No sound, except wet shallow breaths.

But no blood on the hallway carpet, no vomit, no —

Tied to a chair and then untied, relocated, shot full of dope, and then what? Somebody sticks him with a hot shot and doesn't finish — or somebody beats him half to death and tries to wake him up after? What? Somebody dumps him here, or he crawls. Jack tries to lift him, but he can't carry him very far.

The telephone in the hallway is shining and black. Vincennes wraps a pocket handkerchief around his hand before dialing, but he drops the fucking phone and his own ears are ringing when the dispatcher connects.

There's a squad car on its way over already. Bad news. Bad, bad, bad. And Jack does what he did then, what he does every time he fucks something up for himself — he splits.

Bump on the head and an arm full of dope, six kinds of scrambled, unable to give a description of his attackers, unable or unwilling — Jack hopes it's the latter. Two black eyes and inflammation of the brain, an assumed name, a private room and a pretty redhead nurse to look after him — bill it to Patchett.

Jack stumbles into work, makes small talk, does his paperwork, all the while feeling like he's wrapped in a heavy blanket that insulates him from all sensation or sound. His heart thuds in his chest. Going through the motions of normalcy, all the glamor of policing, with Hudgens on the phone saying there's nothing in it — the Patchett thing is a bust, it's got nothing to do with narcotics, no action. Jack says Exley's his lead on a Beverly Hills dope racket and he'll give him something juicy if he leaves him alone. Jack says a lot of things he doesn't necessarily mean. Jack stares into a shallow cardboard box of newspaper clippings and tries not to feel dizzy.

Exley checks himself out of the hospital against best advice. He must've found Jack in some directory — he telephones him at home, not at work, and on the other end of the line his voice sounds blurred, faintly anaesthetized. But Jack hears that voice and he hops to it. At least, he reasons, he might meet the guy who's setting him up. They owe him that.

There's a light in the window. Somebody's fixed the locks. Jack is cursing himself with a hand on his gun, overwhelmed again with the same dread — he knows this is a ruse, he knows Exley's number is up, that it's time to face the music.

There's a human figure propped up on the couch. For a moment a set of headlights off the road illuminates it from behind in a yellow flicker.

Ed sits stubbornly upright even though his insides can only be pulp. The split in his cheekbone is leaking a red track through the white gauze.

"Jesus Christ! Hi, Ed."

"Hi, Jack."

Vincennes saunters over and settles in the chair opposite him. Elbows on his knees, just business. The light comes from the lamp on the far wall, dim enough that all the shapes of furniture are murky enough to trip over, sufficiently bright to determine that they are, in fact, alone.

"They told me you were concussed. Shouldn't you be staying put?"

"I got bored."

"Nosy neighbor volunteered plenty of info for the timeline. Saw a car peel out of the driveway, heard sounds of a struggle — she said she thought somebody was after your rare book collection."

Ed's squinting past the bag of ice balanced on his cheek, completely confounded.

"Jesus. What did you tell her?"

"I told her somebody made off with your first editions."

Consider the possibilities: pissed-off former client, pissed-off current client. Patchett connection, dope connection, one of Patchett's girls has a boyfriend who takes offense at being managed. Somebody who knew him from the old days. Somebody with a hard-on for needles and a spare set of keys to Patchett properties. Somebody Ed picked up in a bar somewhere.

Exley is wearing a cashmere sweater over his pyjamas and the color of it brings out the color of his bruises. Jack leans forward and rubs at his shoulder gingerly; Ed stiffens, but doesn't pull away.

It feels obscene seeing him in a posture of relative vulnerability — he's still dopey around the edges from whatever they gave him at the hospital, faintly blurred, eyes glassing up. He's trying to fight it, obviously; the way he holds his body changes when Jack comes near him. There's a rifled-looking traveling bag at his feet.

"When you asked me what I used to be before, I never told you. My father was a cop."

"I know. I knew the name."

"So that's that."

Martyr cop's son finds out dear old dad has feet of clay after all. Make a headline out of that. Jack wants to hurry to his side, and can't. It's a delicate situation. Connect the dots — witness the half-packed suitcase, the icepacks, the single lightbulb. Exley's face is fallen; maybe it's the pills, but he looks like a lost kid.

"Going somewhere?" Laid up with the blinds drawn, heaped in blankets despite the temperature. "You know, you should be in a bed someplace."

"I don't like hospitals."

"Not since?" Jack lets the end of the sentence hang in the air leadingly, and gives him a look.

"What, since the war? That was a lot more bearable. I just don't like them."

"I thought Patchett had a line there."

"He did — a plastic surgeon with a star connection. The pair of them go way back. The man's a drunk, and I'd rather take my chances."

This warrants consideration.

"You mean you didn't get cut to look like a movie star. Not anybody in particular."

"Pierce offered to have my teeth fixed. I told him I didn't need it. I have a very good memory, Jack, and I'm good at keeping a calendar."

"I bet you're good at lots of things."

Jack is watching Ed's face — the sharp bones underneath the swelling that's already beginning to go down, the shape of his mouth when he's considering.

"You're wondering what Pierce taught me. He didn't have to teach me very much."

"Hold on just a minute."

Ed pauses, and Jack kisses him — like a real kiss, his hands going to Ed's sides, easing him back as he rises from the chair. Ed breaks it off, rubbing at the scab of his split lip

"Cut that out. It won't get you anywhere."

"What did they ask you?"

"Nobody asked me anything. I was out on a call and they worked me over. Give me a hand with something, would you?"

There's gauze in the medicine cabinet and there's rubbing alcohol under the sink, and iodine. Jack kneels beside him, unpicking the swath of bandages around his wrist and cursing the cumbersomeness of it all. If he knew he'd be playing nurse he'd have taken his jacket off. Exley acts like he's allowing it, mostly. He's thinking about something, or he's rattled.

"Aren't you a cop? Aren't you supposed to be asking me to give a statement? Putting it all together?"

"You may have noticed — I'm not that kind of cop." The kind who sticks his neck out for some abstract concept of justice. The kind who takes things straight to the top. What has the LAPD done for him lately?

"Well, maybe you can give it a try for once."

Something goes click.

He has the gun. That's the first thing Jack should have spotted — with him, there bundled under his blankets, and very much loaded.

"At least try and be reasonable about this." He tries to get up, and the barrel of the gun jabs into Jack's gut, somewhere in the approximate neighborhood of his navel — Ed's hand is on the grip, his finger's on the trigger. Jack's gun is in its holster, too clumsy to draw. "For fuck's sake, Ed."

Exley slides it up about an inch. Point-blank, won't be pretty. It'll do a number on those expensive rugs.

"Listen to me. Patchett's dead." Exley can barely focus his eyes. There's a broken spot criss-crossing the white.

"You're kidding."

"They found him last night out in Beverly Hills. He cut his wrists. It doesn't play right, I know."

"You think somebody did it for him?"

"Or held something over his head to make him do it, but I doubt it. He's a tough man to press."

Jack thinks of the guy with the big white mansion and the putting green, the guy who dyed his hair and had girls cut to look like movie stars and put Ed through college, maybe. He thinks of the missing photographs.

"Slashed his wrists. Jesus."

"I'd rather eat a bullet. Wouldn't you?"

"Whatever you desire. Where did Patchett get the dope?"

"I don't know what he's been doing. He goes over my head about things. I assumed—"

"You're his secretary, what do you mean you don't know?"

"I'm not that kind of secretary, he just likes to suck my cock sometimes. Patchett had a connection with his plastic surgeon — pharmaceutical-grade dope, health treatments, personal attention. That line dried up when Mickey Cohen hit the skids. What did you tell Hudgens about why we were meeting that night?"

"Nothing important." The gun barrel twists, digging into his belly. "Nothing at all — Jesus. I've had enough of the gunplay, if you don't mind."

"If you make this any harder for me, I will shoot you."

"You can't see far enough to aim that thing. Hold still."

His gauze is beginning to come untaped. There's a small runnel of bright red blood trickling down past his eyebrow. There in his pyjamas with his glasses on and a .38 Special between them, ready to go off. But he's not dead; that's another colossal fuckup Vincennes doesn't have to deal with.

Ed grimaces. Jack smooths the loose taped edge of the gauze back into place with his thumb.

"Jack, wait."

Ed sits up and sets the .38 on the coffee table with a satisfyingly heavy sound, and then his hand goes right back to Jack's fly.

"Good call."

Exley embraces him, clumsy and determined, a little vicious. It's like wrangling with a Doberman Pinscher. Vincennes can breathe again. The sweater and glasses slip off all in one, the buttons on his pyjamas mysteriously come unbuttoned — his lean body is pitiable and exciting, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time

"There's nothing wrong with my legs," he says, swatting vaguely at Jack as he tries to maneuver him back against the upholstery. What he wants is to fuck him silly just to prove they're both still alive, but that's no way to treat an injured man.

Just a quiet, quick, expedient fuck — the palm of Jack's hand presses over Ed's mouth and he's not even a little surprised when Exley bites him, making him bubble up in inane unwarranted laughter. Vincennes peels back his layers as he goes, anxious to see him naked — to see the damage without the mess, to reassure him that everything about this man is still within the realm of the familiar. Maybe with some degree of fascination. His body is a queasy landscape of bruises, but Ed must catch him looking, and he diverts him with an aggressive campaign of necking. For a moment his teeth fix in Jack's ear. His hands grip stiffly, but tight.

Why not get right back on the horse? Why let a couple bad knocks keep you from doing the thing you get paid for? Lonely, hurt, pitiable, angry.

"Christ, I hate this," Ed says while Jack is screwing him or trying to — the couch, the carpet, screwing or being screwed, screwing for money, being in pain, the dread of what's coming for him, Vincennes doesn't know. He stops to find out, suddenly dread-struck himself all over again, and Exley presses his mouth to the underside of Jack's jaw. He hasn't shaved in 24 hours. It prickles.

Gingerly, bitter — the sophistication falls away from him and he's a bundle of bruised resentment, tangled up in Jack. The two of them tangled up in each other — Ed's leanness against Jack's solidity, the bitter infusion taste on the inside of his mouth, his cautious tongue tracing Jack's teeth.

Tough to be straight-laced when you're screwing in the living room — one of Exley's long legs kicks out, ungainly in the throes of passion, and nearly knocks over the coffee table. Vincennes balances himself on a forearm, keeping his weight off of bruised ribs and busted wrists, and slips his hand inside Ed's boxer shorts to bring him off.

He'll hold still for that, sure.

"What's black and blue and red all over?" Jack says dryly when the two of them have finished. The heel of his hand rests against a coffee-stain bruise.

Ed squints at him, wary.

"My God, you're unbearable. It'll be alright in a week or two, I've just got a hell of a headache." Exley tries to do up his shirt buttons, but they've done something to his hands. Look at him, all covered in needle welts and bruises from some prick's knuckles. "They shot me up, hoping I'd talk. But that would have been too easy."

"Your boy friend should have tried that before the bump on the head. Guessing you're in no shape to drive away after all?" Maybe he put that together and gave up halfway through. The least a guy can do is unpack his luggage for him.

Exley throws his head back, and takes a big rattling breath. Bad rattle. They fucked up his lung, maybe.

"Listen, Jack, I'm on my way out. I have no reason to stick up for Patchett now."

"Ed," Vincennes says, past the dull knot somewhere in the middle of his chest.

Insurance. It figures — and Jack thought he kept coming back because he felt bad for the guy, or the creep had some kind of personal charisma, or because Jack liked getting his dick sucked outside a public washroom now and then.

"I don't have a lot of time. If you'd quit handling me like I'm the dame in some detective story, you'd let me tell you. It was your boss, not mine. He had plenty of motivation and I handed him the opportunity."

Vincennes blinks, dully. His eyes feel like they've dried up in his head. "What?"

"One of your pals. Captain Dudley Smith. They were working on something and it went south."

"You've got to know how you sound right now."

"Pierce had insurance on him, he's got insurance on everybody, and of course he didn't like that. He wanted to retrieve any useful information before rubbing out Patchett. They wanted bank box numbers, street addresses."

"But you didn't break. You didn't tell him anything."

"I didn't because I couldn't. Smith's pet thug got carried away. I couldn't have told Smith anything if I wanted to." Exley rubs at his fucked-up jaw. "But I didn't want to. I don't think I would have."

Jack shuts his eyes and sees pictures. "What'd he look like? The thug."

"Big. White male, dark hair, built like a ton of bricks. He had a mark on his face, and a raised scar on his shoulder. I remember that. I'm not sure why."

"Oh, Jesus. Did he call him by name?"

"He might have." His eyes crease shut for a second, like he's trying to remember. "I don't know. I was spitting teeth by then."

"Dudley has his hands full with the Nite Owl job. Couple of hopped-up Negro youths shot up the place, wasted a retired cop. LAPD's baying for blood. He wouldn't—" But Vincennes knows he would. His irritation is choking him. "He just doesn't waste his time on that kind of thing."

Smith's got enough on his plate without chaperoning Bud White and beating on sissies. White took a pounding for Bloody Christmas and now he's spending his paid leave shacked up with some chippie and prowling the streets of Los Angeles, forlorn. Jack heard through the grapevine he has supper three nights a week with some little Mexican girl he feels sorry for. Sentimentality and violence, one hell of a combo. It's not inconceivable that he'd get a little done on the side.

"Vice is big business. Smith's bruiser came by after the Nite Owl killings, and he's fucking one of Patchett's girls, I don't know what she's squeezing him for. Protection, maybe. But what do I know?"

"Look, I'm going to need more than that. That's a pretty serious—"

"We haven't been seen together. Patchett didn't press the issue and I wasn't about to."

He's been in Jack's house. His promise of discretion isn't worth shit. Anybody could know.

"You mean, there's no pictures."

"When would I have had the chance?"

"Sid's been covering for Patchett. I think they share a taste in blackmail material. You've had plenty of opportunities, with that bedroom rig you've got going."

Exley pinches the bridge of his nose.

"I didn't fuck you for blackmail. I did it because I like to fuck men. Does that satisfy you? He knew me, Jack. He knew my father, too, and I imagine he's pretty disappointed in how I turned out. Smith doesn't know I've been discharged from the hospital yet, but he'll find out pretty quick. He doesn't know about you and me, either. He thinks you're still bent out of shape about Matt Reynolds."

This makes him buckle. "I am. And so are you."

"So sentimental. I know you were there that night. I heard you come in. You're a coward, Jack, but you're alright."

Alright is alright.

Vincennes spreads his hands. "All right. So your so-called dirty cop Dud Smith shows Bud White pictures of you nailing Lynn, gets him riled up."

"I don't know. Lynn doesn't have a lot of patience for the jealous type when she's off the clock. She thinks highly of him. I know that."

"Maybe your mystery man made out like you did more than screw her. Bud White has a sore spot over woman-beaters."

"Oh, sure," Ed says, flatly dismissive in a way that sets Vincennes back on his heels.

"Maybe you did. All I have to go on is souvenir pictures. How do I know what happened in between snaps? But that's not important."

"I didn't," Ed says, flushing. "You know I wouldn't. Jack, you're kidding me."

And for a moment Jack wonders — what it would take to make a guy like that snap, if deep down a man who screws men couldn't be the worst kind of woman-hater. Whatever he is, Jack keeps coming back. He could have said adios that first night, switched on the charm and went and found some girl — any girl.

"He wouldn't know."

"How do I know you're not part of it?"

"You don't. And I'm sorry."

That hangs between them in the air for a few moments. An apology from Jack is as good as a term of endearment. That's all he's wanted to say for some 48 hours — he's sorry, he's sorry, Christ he's sorry, sorry for Matt Reynolds and for all of it.

"Who would have put him up to it?"

"I can think of a few people."

"Matt Reynolds was killed after giving the Los Angeles district attorney head. Is that the kind of thing your boss pulls on a regular basis?"

"This was a special case." The disgust in his voice is palpable. "Patchett doesn't have men and women killed. Reynolds was still in a kind of trial stage. If you're broken up about him I can give you his mother's address. Just don't go doing him any favors telling her what he got up to in California."

Patchett wanted information — he set up a squeeze and then killed off Reynolds rather than put up with the hassle. Or the DA thought Matt was in on it and took it out on the only guy involved he could touch. Maybe Matt Reynolds heard too much. Maybe he just objected to being somebody else's photo op again. It doesn't matter. The kid is dead.

"Did you ever fuck Loew? Nobody ever tried to rub you out." Before this week, at least.

"I knew him, past tense. Back in '47; he broke it off when his first bid for DA didn't take. And no, nobody rubbed me out."

"Somebody found out about the two of you? Maybe applied a little pressure?"

"Not exactly. He found out he didn't like losing."

"Like he didn't know before? I find that hard to believe."

"It wasn't a long engagement. Don't read too much into it."

He'd have been how old then, exactly — not more than twenty-four, and with that face? Jack can picture it easily — two ambitious monsters sizing each other up, pragmatic fucking and then the kiss-off. But six years is old news.

"You know he's a Jew, don't you?" When Vincennes joined the department it was almost a full year before he learned Ellis Loew's first name was something other than Jewboy. Back then he thought it was funny. People still call him that and worse. They just do it behind his back these days. If the guys found out about this — well.

"Really? You don't say." Ed shifts beside him, rearranging his long legs. Jack can't quite get a read on his expression beyond cool informality. "I never knew."

"Sarcasm isn't an attractive quality, or so I've been told."

"Does that make a difference? He's a Republican, Jack, and a pragmatist. A lot like you, actually."

"Jesus, that bad?"

It takes a moment to realize Exley is laughing — the sound's still unexpected. He has a nice laugh, all things considered.

"If that bothers you, I don't know if we'll have much of a working relationship. I deal with all kinds of people. Anybody important."

It didn't bother Jack; it couldn't. All he wants to know is the score. "Sure. And am I important?"

"It's been good having you around, Jack," Ed says dryly. "I like you."

"Your own personal attack dog." Who came when he called.

"You really think? I thought you styled yourself too smart for that. With all you do, you still think you're better off than me. At least when I screw somebody it's face-to-face."

"And in front of a camera?"

Ed colors slightly, beneath the smudgy bruises. "I don't know what you mean. But I could say the same for you, Mr. Hush-Hush Magazine."

Jack presses the side of the kid's hand to his mouth, less of a kiss, more of a gesture. Ed's fingers flutter.

A hell of a mind with nowhere to go. Trapped in place by long-gone weakness and angry about it. Some part of him likes the work he does, or he'd be putting up more of a fight — setting up powerful men, finding out their secrets, applying pressure. And maybe the rest of it too — playing social secretary to Fleur de Lis, and more, contemptuous of the work he does but good at it.

Switch places, and where would they be? Ed Exley's stratospheric rise in the ranks of the LAPD and John Vincennes' short sad career as a wilting gigolo.

On the couch and not in the bedroom, it's almost ungainly — Ed flat on his back like the doctor ordered, Jack gingerly settling in beside him to spare his bruises, keeping his weight off.

Neither of them will make the first move, and so neither of them move — Ed thumbing at Jack's chin, the temple-piece of Ed's glasses poking into Jack's shoulder. It's absurd — Vincennes trying to move in and Exley batting at him in annoyance, until he rolls off onto the carpet.

"You shouldn't take yourself so seriously."

"Why shouldn't I?" Bloodshot Exley, squinting down at him past the furniture.

"It's not good for your health. A guy's got to be able to laugh at himself."

"I'm not in a position to fix this, and it's all wrong. Spend the night, won't you? Please."

Jack falls asleep there on the rug with his back to the couch — he knows these swank furnishings from a studio warehouse, he's seen it in some picture, it's just been rearranged.

When he wakes up, Ed is still there, and the gun is still there, and the suitcase is still there, murky shapes in the dark. It's not morning yet. It can't be. But they don't have much time. 4:30 is sunrise someplace.

When Jack switches on the lamp, Ed presses a hand over his eyes and sucks a sharp breath through his teeth.

"You look terrible."

Says the guy with two black eyes, though the icepacks seem to have helped a little. Jack feels like death; the inside of his mouth tastes like the outside of a pill. "Gee, thanks."

"There's a coffeepot in the kitchen. Do you think you can manage it?"

Vincennes snickers.

"I can manage. You stay put."

In the end Jack has no idea how to operate the chrome-glass nightmare of engineering in Ed Exley's kitchen — there's nothing familiar about it and Ed has to limp out to the kitchen in his bare feet, hugging a monogrammed robe around himself, to straighten out the glass carafes. He must've dredged it out of the suitcase. He looks like Howard Hughes after a plane crash.

There's eggs in the icebox along with an uninspiring selection of groceries — familiar bachelor sights. Exley fries him an egg and Jack eats it on toast while staring down a Cubist masterpiece. The canvas is the real deal, and it doesn't look any better in the dark.

Look at the two of them, playing house. Boiling water and salting eggs like the world's not ending.

How far does this go — how far can he go, knowing what he knows now? So Smith braces uncooperative fairies in his spare time, that doesn't prove anything. So another homo actor with delusions of stardom gets the gay blade in a hot-sheet motel. He's not cut out to be a crusader, he didn't get into this line of work to make a stand on organized crime — this is business.

Patchett's in with Smith, Smith wants to clean up his associations and do Loew a favor — squeeze Ed, clean out Patchett, ice them both. He does Patchett.

Exley's drumming his fingers against the coffee cup. His face is a mess of bruises and two of his front teeth are chipped. He's still perversely handsome.

"Who do you plan to tell first?"

Sure, first. He'll drop in on Dudley Smith and his four fair Irish daughters demanding to know who gives him the right to make a little scratch on the side selling dope.

"Do I seem like an informer to you? I'm not wading into this shitstorm."

"Then say you're leaving the force to consult full-time. Say you're working on a novel. Get the hell out of here, Jack, and keep an eye out."

"It's not that easy."

All the doors being a cop has opened for him — what else is he supposed to do with himself?

"Then find a girl and marry her. This isn't going to stop unless you follow it through."

"For fuck's sake. Who said anything about testimony? Who am I supposed to tell?"

"You know, Jack, there's a world outside Los Angeles." Ed rises up from his chair, gripping the table's edge for balance.

Vincennes leans back in his seat, watching him. "And what the hell would I do there?"

Ed turns his back on him, raking his fingers through his hair and letting the robe fall away.

He starts to get dressed — finding a shirt, a belt, socks, shoes. All of his motions are awful and stiff and determined to the point of comedy. Fingers that don't quite bend managing buttons and laces, scabs tracking bright red blood on white cotton. The decent thing to do would be to help, but Ed must see it in his face upon approach, and waves him off.

"I'm leaving tonight," he says, buttoning his cuffs. "It'd be in your interest to do so as well."

"Let me know how that works out for you."

"I won't have to. You're going to drive me."

In the garage is a steel-gray coupe registered under another name — Exley tells him not to worry about it but the .38 makes another appearance and Vincennes has that sinking feeling again, like he's halfway to a hostage situation, to getting his brains blown out on an unpaved road. There's a smart way out of this — like he can't overpower a concussed invalid — and a stupid one. Exley is fueled by wild accusations and sheer stubbornness. If he wants to blow the lid off this story, let him. Let him do it far, far away from Jack if he likes; shockwaves travel fast in California.

Drive a few hours, watch the sky slip into pulp-yellow daylight and cast off night. Exley doesn't even want the radio on; it makes his headaches worse. In ten years this landscape will all be different — cut and sculpted by millionaires and the descendants of Mickey Cohen, whoever rises from the confusion to take California.

There's a road map in the glove compartment. Ed slides on a pair of dark sunglasses that offset the bruises.

Drive all night until they reach some town Jack's never been to before — down the coast, to a failed syndicate town where the steamroller of fresh construction has yet to reach. Exley motions for him to pull over, by a small town bank on a half-built-up street. The facade stands out chalk-white — ostentatiously grand and irredeemably ugly. The surrounding storefronts are mostly dark. Inside, somebody's turned on the lights.

There's still time to turn back. There's still time to profess high and low that this is official business and not a homo honeymoon tour, to shift the blame on Hudgens, to put the fear of God in Patchett's surgeon pal and make the best of a bad job. Say Exley's an informant, trading dirt on his girls and their vices for protection. If it's good enough for studio stars it's good enough for the common man. All the facts, all the names. Or he could throw in his lot with another professional.

Exley in sunglasses looks like a complete terror. He returns with a bankers' box tucked under his arm. Jack rolls down the window and leans out.

"The last of his personal papers?"

"Hardly. I took a trip out to Beverly Hills when I heard he might be prepping to leave town; he had another wall safe, just like mine. They'd take it in for evidence and have someone saw the back off. There were a few choice negatives stored there, Pierce Patchett exclusives that hadn't been developed yet. I tried to burn them, and when it didn't take I defaced them." His thumb worries at the blistered spot on his palm. Scorched. "Turns out Patchett and I had the same idea."

"The warehouse fire?"

"Primo smut, up in flames. And two men dead because a millionaire was in a hurry."

"What's going to happen to Patchett's girls?"

"They'll get their pension payout and scatter. Some of them will keep the racket going, I'm sure. They'll do fine."

"It's a shame to see you go so soon. You seem like a good man to know."

Exley laughs. "If you want to keep a finger on the pulse of the Los Angeles queer underworld, you mean. And now wanted in connection with a possible murder."

"Whatever you did, don't tell me about it. I don't care."

"That's very kind."

It's impossible to tell whether the kid is sarcastic or whether he's sincere. The bruises make it hard to tell.

"So, should I start on the walk back?"

"Keep it, ditch it, it's yours. I'll get a ride someplace."

"How generous."

"There's an airfield not far from here where they don't ask personal questions."

If he were a woman, a kiss might have passed between them, but he's not, so it won't, not on an empty street in California. Vincennes can see his eyes behind the dark glass, the broken streak of red running from rim to corner in the right one, another souvenir from a beating. But there's the same frost clarity there.

"You know, you can look me up any time."

"I'm sure I can. Goodbye, Jack."

He presses a wad of cash around the hard edge of the door. Vincennes holds up the banded stack of bills, measures it between thumb and forefinger. "What's this for?"

"You might need it. Buy yourself something nice, I don't know."

Great. Big sister to the guilty $50 Sid slipped him. And that's showbiz; look the other way for a price, and for a ten-spot I'll hold the door on your way out. There's lots of options here. He can hurry back to Hudgens with his tail between his legs and spill every dirty detail he knows, praying for clemency. He can take his badge and drive back to Los Angeles, he can kick up a fuss or he can lie quiet and play dumb until Dudley Smith comes for him. If he knows about Ed, he knows about the two of them.

He's made more stupid choices in the past two months than he's ever permitted himself before. He can't make it right for Matt Reynolds.

Washed-up actor, washed-up politico turned house dick for a bunch of failed actresses. You lead one luckless homo has-been to his death and let another one walk free — free as he'll ever be, criminal record scant or scrubbed, maybe his prints aren't even on a file card anywhere after all. It doesn't balance out. It's never going to hold up in a disciplinary hearing, or in any courtroom in the country. And he doesn't want to see him go. Doesn't want think of him holed up in Mexico someplace, trying to rally, and failing.

He doesn't say, "Goodbye, Ed." The words stick in his throat. He doesn't even ask if he can carry his suitcase for him.

Call it a wash. Vincennes has already washed his life away, little by little. He has no wife, no family. Next week he may not even have a job. At least he'll have pictures.

He drives him to a fenced dirt lot and watches him walk away, committing to memory the shape of his shoulders beneath his jacket, the nape of his neck, the way he limps and holds his arm as if he's not in pain.

He watches him walk away, until Exley turns the corner, and Jack is left looking at nothing — off into the sterile dark, alone

End Notes

Content notes: casual homophobia (language, slurs, attitudes); casual racist language; allusions to canonical police violence, antisemitism, racism; mention of historic war crimes; prescription and non-prescription drug use; head injuries; violence; discussion of legal guardian/ward relationships; nonconsensual drugging; addiction and recovery; canonical character death; discussion of suicide.

This fic was liberally and conspicuously BS'ed, since I don't have anything like Ellroy's patience or proficiency with geographical detail, but Paul Freeman's listing of defunct California airfields saved my ass and was a very neat read. (Even though that scene in the final version is literally one line, way to go, self.) Among other aspects, Ed's military service background and Jack's old drug habit are ripped off drawn from the L.A. Quartet (which I hope is okay) but I've played fast and loose with everything else. It was incredibly fun trying to rearrange this film's moving parts, albeit with mixed results, and exploring an alternate take on Ed as a character. Your letter had a wealth of incredible prompts but hooker!Ed was one I couldn't resist -- happy Yuletide, scioscribe!

("What you don't know about people you know" was a 1955 cover tagline from the real-life Hush-Hush.)

Thanks to T. for putting up with my endless bullshitting and thanks to E. for putting up with my terrible chatter.