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William Heinemann
The Penguin Random House Group Limited
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[Hollywood’s] conception of what makes a good picture is still as juvenile as its treatment of writing talent is insulting and degrading.

– Raymond Chandler, from ‘Writers in Hollywood’ (1945)

Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.

– Gore Vidal

The dead guy’s place was in the Canyons, at the end of one of those bronchial cul-de-sacs above Franklin that I can still never find without the GPS. The homes petered out into parched scrub and eucalyptus at the top of the street, where the bungalow I was hunting squatted alone on a knoll like a kid left out of a game. As I parked the truck in the turnaround, the sound startled a gang of mule deer who’d been grazing on the slope across from the house. They hurried away through the undergrowth, into the hills beneath the Hollywood sign. I killed the engine and stared after them awhile, still only half-awake. It was eight-fifteen a.m.

I could tell you about the weather, but this is Los Angeles – you already know about the weather. So I’ll tell you about the bungalow: it was a 1940s Craftsman in avocado, with white trim, leaded windows and a long porch at the top of a steep flight of wooden steps. Cleo Habibi idled in the porch-swing at the summit, flaunting her West Coast dentistry as I clambered to meet her.

Cleo had on her sale-day ensemble: blue jeans to signify the weekend; a grey blazer that says she’s all business. She was hugging her tablet computer. As I reached the top step, she raised a long, black Audrey Hepburn eyebrow and waited for me to catch my breath. I’d achieved consciousness on the couch an hour beforehand, with just enough time to choose between a shower, a shave or a pot of coffee. I chose the coffee.

‘Name’s Marty Kann. Seventy-four. Production designer, retired. Massive stroke. Survived his darling wife Pam by a mere eighteen months.’

She handed me the tablet, and I scanned the items she’d marked for my attention: a Spanish Revival-style tile table; two Bill Curry Stemlite lamps; some vintage movie merch. A respectable inventory.

‘We just dug out a couple Native American baskets,’ she said. ‘Could be authentic; could be from one of those gift shops down at the pueblo. But you should take a look. Mrs Kann was a set decorator. These two had taste.’

Cleo Habibi will as happily unload the home of a dead parking valet as a dead movie star. But whether it’s some Holmby Hills pile or a casita in Highland Park, her commission is a flat 30 per cent, and she is a sucker for nothing – except, on occasion, an English accent. Hence our arrangement: I get a tip-off and first refusal on any promising Californian objets; she gets a good price and half an hour of my scintillating conversation. She’s single with forty in the headlights, just like yours truly. We all get our kicks where we can.

Estate sales are installation art, each bereft home a retrospective, curated by Cleo’s assistant Yolanda and her menopausal minions. They clean, they catalogue, they value, they display. Every Habibi Estates home has the same odour, a blend of industrial-cleaning products disguising the olfactory traces of the departed: their cologne, their last cooked meal, their valedictory bowel movement.

The house was bigger inside than out. The handsome, high-ceilinged sitting room had a view through to the galley kitchen and a Danish drop-leaf table set for six. A side corridor led to the bathroom, two bedrooms and a study. Beyond the dining room, sliding glass doors gave out onto a patio and a once-prim back garden, now browning with neglect.

Cleo was right – these two had taste. The decor may have been dated, but it was composed with an artist’s eye. Each room had its own distinct, detailed vibe like the different rides at Disneyland: the sitting room was an Alpine ski lodge, the kitchen a kitschy roadside diner. The bathroom had hinoki panelling and a bamboo feature, as if transplanted whole from a Japanese tea house.

‘Not at all. Those eighteen months Marty was alone? He did a good job burying all this in garbage. Looked like a flophouse. Smelled like a bar.’

She frowned and looked at the floor, and I figured I’d said the wrong thing. I changed the subject: ‘Let’s start in the kitchen.’

Hollywood can be barren ground for an antique picker; almost no one stays in the neighbourhood long enough to gather a trove of lasting value. But the Kanns had found their homestead and settled. I could tell as much by the microwave oven built into the turquoise kitchen surround; it was the size of a minivan, manufactured no later than the mid-’80s. Old people rarely redecorate, so by the time they finally expire, their properties are amber-clad mosquitoes, deep-storing the DNA of at least two decades previously. I browsed the spines of Pam Kann’s cookbooks: Julia Child, Wok Cooking Made Easy, The Essential Salad Compendium.

The Kanns liked to travel. In one of the kitchen cabinets was a selection of souvenir coffee mugs. The Dr Pepper Museum in Waco, Texas. The John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge in Cincinnati, Ohio. In the open cupboard below, I found the first item worth my time.

I took a stout ceramic figure from the cupboard and set him on the Formica countertop between two stacks of matching crockery. He was ten inches tall and almost as wide, wearing red tails, a green waistcoat, riding boots and a top hat, with a bullwhip coiled at his waist.

I smirked and studied the jar. The glaze was mostly in fine condition, though I could see a fingernail chip on the lid’s inside rim and a hairline crack on the base. He was ugly, but I didn’t much care: I still get that first-kiss thrill anytime I find a piece with a history, lurking in a cupboard or a loft. I wondered whether the Kanns were accidental collectors, or connoisseurs.

‘See that?’ I pointed to the maker’s mark. ‘Kirby Balboa pottery, Newport Beach. Licensed by Disney to make official ceramic merchandise. Dumbo was, what … nineteen-forty? ’Forty-one?’

‘Well, he doesn’t look too bad for seventy-something. I’ll give you two-fifty.’

‘Honest as a bus-bench lawyer,’ said Cleo, who then turned and yelled over her shoulder: ‘Yolanda. YOLANDA!’

Her assistant shuffled into the kitchen wearing a Habibi Estates-branded polo and Marigolds, holding what looked like the dust filter from a vacuum cleaner.

Cleo carried a sheet of red spot stickers, and she slapped one on every piece I picked. In the sitting room was the Spanish Revival-style side table, with six decorative tiles inlaid in walnut, depicting a Conestoga wagon crossing the Sierra, its Stetsoned guide clip-clopping ahead. Minimal wear and tear. Red spot. A rare and elegant Kem Weber Airline chair faced the hearth, reupholstered but otherwise in excellent nick: a mid-century piece worthy of a museum exhibit.

Someone had arrayed a selection of empty picture frames on the mantelpiece. A plastic Christmas spruce stood tilting towards the hearth, adorned with baubles as if it were mid-December. The tree was $15, the decorations $40 for the set.

At the back of the wardrobe in the master bedroom, behind a thicket of wooden shoe trees, I found a gym bag containing tinned food, chlorine tabs, a first-aid kit, a torch and extra batteries: the Kanns were earthquake-ready, just in case The Big One struck. That noodle soup won’t save you now, I thought to myself. I disregarded the clothes and demanded red spots for the Stemlite reading lamps and the Navajo Dazzler rug at the foot of the queen-size bed.

‘These are the baskets I was talking about,’ Cleo said. ‘What do you think?’

Yolanda and her subordinates had filled two coiled juncus baskets with old sunglasses and scents and arranged them side by side on top of the dresser.

‘They look like tat,’ I said. ‘But I’ll take them, see what the boss thinks.’

Cleo emptied the baskets onto the bedspread so I could take a closer look at the weave. I couldn’t say for sure – I just work here – but I had a feeling they were Mission Indian-made, maybe even nineteenth century. That meant a three-figure price tag. I decided I’d been generous to warn Cleo of the cookie jar’s worth.

The second bedroom still bore the unmistakable traces of a teenage Marty Jr: racks of redundant CDs, ranks of plastic action figures and an old games console coated in the accumulated grease of a dozen kids’ fingertips. Peeling bubble-gum stickers papered the chest of drawers. The walls were a map of questionable pop-cultural landmarks, and I tutted as my eye passed over posters for Deadbolt and Axeman, both tawdry comic-book blockbusters from the early aughts.

Americans still think I sound English; to the English, I’m beginning to sound American. Plummy accent, apple-pie vocab.

Marty Kann’s study was snug and neat, the latter of which was likely Yolanda’s doing. Facing the desk was a nearly-new Herman Miller chair with added lumbar support, the essential accessory of the sedentary, 21st-century creative. The shelves bore art books, pulp novels, ancient VHS tapes and a smattering of studio ephemera. On the walls, among the empty hooks where favoured pictures had already been removed, were framed set photos from films on which I supposed he’d earned production credits: some sci-fi, some fantasy, a couple of corny thrillers and an old Kurt Russell movie I’d never seen.

I was a writer in another life, so I have a thing for desks, and Marty did not disappoint. He’d spent at least the last few years of his career behind a single-pedestal, brushed-steel tanker desk, a weighty, purposeful worktop for a man who means it. A Boston sharpener was clamped to one edge, handy for whittling Blackwings. He’d fitted locking castors to the legs, and I could see the ruts in the shagpile where he’d moved it to the far wall to escape the diverting view from his window – a patch of lawn, a lemon tree. I examined the manufacturer’s brand beneath the keyhole on the pencil drawer: McDowell & Craig, Norwalk, CA.

‘Not a problem,’ I said, brushing my palm across the metal desktop. ‘We can get the lock changed. With a spit and polish, this’ll fetch eight hundred. Will you take four-fifty?’

We shook on it, and Cleo tapped the details into her tablet. Beside the desk were two packing boxes filled with Marty’s pencils and unused sketchbooks; two more with old, rolled drawings. Most of his work had gone to his son or to a studio archive, said Cleo. I offered her fifty clams for what remained, assuming there’d be something in there to frame up and flog to a film buff. A final box held reams of blank stationery, some of it personalised. I admire a guy who still composes his correspondence in longhand. But really, who was going to buy a dead man’s letterhead?

I’ve now and then found major pottery nestling in the grasses of old Hancock Park mansions, but the Kanns’ yard was unremarkable. The planting beds were stripped, the water feature stagnant. I gave the wicker furniture a once-over. Cleo shaded her eyes and watched scrub jays flitting through the bougainvillea.

The back entrance to the garage was down a set of cement steps to the side of the house. The space had been converted into an artist’s studio. Inside, one of Cleo’s employees was arranging easels and oil paints. Canvases leaned in a stack against the wall, the top one smeared with depressive, expressionist stripes of grey, green and taupe.

‘Tell you what,’ I said, inspecting another canvas and finding more of the same, ‘I think you were right about the drinking.’

I turned to find Cleo holding an old, red firefighter’s helmet, partially blackened by fire damage, with the words ‘Engine 13’ on the front.

‘Recognise this?’ she said. ‘It’s the guy’s helmet from Axeman. Guess Marty or Pam must’ve worked on that movie. Did you see it?’

‘I take it you’re not interested,’ she replied, and put the helmet back on its shelf. ‘Your loss. Some geek is gonna love it.’

On another shelf I noticed two leather baseball gloves – one child-sized, one adult – and was momentarily bummed out by the thought that Marty and Marty Jr would never play catch again. A dusty diner neon hung high on the wall, refugee from the scenery of some rock-and-roll period piece: ‘Burgers Fries Shakes’. It looked fixable. Red spot. A pair of small pet crates had been stacked next to packing boxes bearing the Habibi Estates logo, which were stuffed with Life magazines, copies of Reader’s Digest and Marty Jr’s old comic books.

Another shrug. To take too great an interest in the emotional lives of an estate’s late owners – their work, their relationships, their pets – would be to confront the melancholy realities of her business. I could hardly blame Cleo for keeping her distance. She flicked a switch, and the rusty garage door heaved itself open with a scream.

A courier’s note poked from the Kanns’ mailbox, saying Sorry We Missed You. It had started to yellow and curl in the heat. Two senior señoras were already in line at the foot of the porch steps, waiting for the sale to commence at ten a.m. Cleo’s most committed regulars, they glared at me as I emerged from the garage, terminally resentful of the VIP privileges I was afforded by Habibi Estates. I waved to them, teasing. ‘Hello, ladies.’

Across the street, Raúl Gupta was lounging against the truck, eating a breakfast burrito. Specks of scrambled egg garnished his moustache. He was resting both elbows on the bonnet behind him, which merely accentuated the proud thrust of his pot belly. We both have our stomachs, Raúl and I, but mine is the understated paunch of a slender six-footer, concealed for the most part by dark sweaters or fitted shirts. Raúl’s, by contrast, busies itself beneath his too-small logo Ts like a raccoon rummaging through a handbag. Mine is a symptom of age and laziness, his is a fundamental feature. He made a little bow as I approached.

A lot of people in LA rise early for conference calls to New York and London, but Raúl seems to live on Hawaii time. Ever since his Camry had a falling-out with a fire hydrant, he’s also missing a car – and the cul-de-sac was an uphill walk from the closest bus stop. Add to that the leash around his wrist, which was attached to his obstinate French bulldog, and you have a tasting menu of the excuses I was about to hear for his being almost a full hour late.

‘I bought you breakfast,’ he said, and produced a second foil-wrapped burrito from his back pocket, distorted by the curve of his buttock.

The dog sat blinking on the bench seat of the truck as we shouldered the tools of our trade: moving blankets, shrink-wrap, a stair-climbing dolly. We worked through the house methodically, Cleo trailing behind, crossing each item off her inventory. The line of impatient shoppers snaked along the block by the time we clanged down the steps with the tanker desk strapped to the dolly, both of us clinging on like cattle wranglers.

To look at us you’d think Raúl was the one out of shape, but after we’d hefted the desk into the truck, it’s me who was wheezing, sweaty as a Coke from the freezer cabinet. I let Raúl secure our haul, while I wrote out a cheque to Habibi Estates and Cleo addressed the queue from the porch balustrade: ‘Ladies, no large handbags near the jewellery! Gentlemen, no fighting over the Frank Sinatra records …’

Raúl hopped from the tailgate to the tarmac. ‘Gimme a minute,’ he said, and he jogged back towards the garage. I pondered the people in line. The two old maids vied for pole position: eternal rivals bonded by a mutual respect, the McEnroe and Borg of weekend antiquing. Behind them, a heavyset Latino gentleman with untidy facial hair; a pair of old hippies, or else ageing studio execs in mufti; a woman dragging a toddler in a tutu, perchance lost en route to a child beauty pageant; a speckling of hipsters, one straight-facedly sporting a fedora.

Once they were inside, the competition could be fierce. Cleo’s customers were not above switching price tags. Some would secrete costlier items around the house and return to buy them for half-price after the midday markdown.

I watched as a station wagon pulled up and spewed out three generations of suburban soccer mom. They joined the line behind a guy with a mobility walker, whom I fancied wouldn’t even make it as far as the front door. Many of Cleo’s most loyal customers were only a few bridge hands from the grave, but as their health faded, the urge to hoard burned ever brighter. Good news for Cleo: when they shuffled off a year or two hence, she could sell the same old rubbish all over again.

As the shoppers finally climbed the steps to the bungalow, Raúl returned from the garage with his arms full. Under his left was one of the pet crates; under his right, one of the packing boxes filled with magazines.

Rather than teach his pet to defecate outdoors, Raúl had papered his floors with newsprint, and then repeatedly failed to admonish the animal when it crapped all over the condo. Now the wretched creature would only perform a bowel movement if it was hunkered down on a copy of California Sunday. Hence the magazines. The little dog stared inscrutably at us both.

‘He has mucho skills,’ said Raúl. ‘He is a crime deterrent. He is a fantastic listener. And he sucks in women like a goddam shoestore.’

Raúl ignored that and held out the crate for the dog to nose. ‘Look what I got, buddy. Now you can travel anywhere. The world is your oyster!’

‘Isn’t that like sleeping in a dead person’s bed? What if it’s haunted by a cat?’

Cleo strolled to us across the turnaround. I held out the cheque, which she folded into her blazer pocket.

‘AAAwww! Is that a French bulldog? Is he yours, Raúl? What’s his name?’

‘Because imagine me standing in the middle of a park with my empty dog leash, yelling “Burgers! Burgers!” …’

She considered the image in silence for a second, and then tipped her head back and laughed, grabbing Raúl’s arm to keep her balance. Raúl nodded triumphantly at her amusement. ‘And that,’ he said, ‘is why I called him Burgers.’

Cleo recovered and sighed and dried her dark eyes delicately so as not to smudge her mascara. She bent over to ruffle the dog’s ears.

The truck is a customised Dodge cube, circa 1985, with bouncy suspension, duff a/c and half a million miles on the clock. It has the words ‘Bart’s Olde California’ and a phone number stencilled along the side. Bart has added some other personal touches over the years, like the ladder rack and the running board. The faulty mechanical tail-lift is long gone, and in its place Bart has jerry-rigged a retractable stepladder to save his AARP knees from hopping on and off the tailgate.

He ought to have traded the vehicle in years ago but, being an antique dealer, he’s disinclined to replace anything that still functions.

The cab smells like the ’80s: cigs, stale Nescafé, synthetic fibres. Hell, it even sounds like the ’80s. The radio’s bust and can only find KCRW for seconds at a time, but there’s a cassette player and a handful of Bart’s old tapes in the glove compartment with the paperwork and the peppermint Altoids. We’ve a choice of Graceland, After the Gold Rush, Running on Empty or – Raúl’s favourite – the original Broadway cast recording of Les Misérables. The lyrics to ‘I Dreamed a Dream’ are baked into my subconscious, like the unwanted raisins in an oatmeal cookie.

I fought hard with the stick and the wheel to squeeze out of the turnaround, now that the truck was heavy with furniture and the shoppers’ parked cars had congested the kerbs. Cleo stood in the door of the garage, smiling wryly at my efforts. Looming at her shoulder, as uncomfortably close as a tailgating lorry, was the heavyset guy with the scruffy facial hair. He was holding the Axeman helmet, and he watched with narrowed eyes as we rolled away.

‘Sure. If Paul Giamatti were ten years older, a foot taller, twenty pounds heavier and had another guy’s face.’

I had only consumed half of my warped breakfast burrito; the remainder sat wrapped in one of the cup holders. I could sense Raúl sizing it up. Burgers perched on his lap, peering over the dashboard.

Raúl had torn some pages from one of Marty Kann’s old subscriptions and laid them in the base of the pet crate, which sat between us on the bench seat. Now he slid the burrito from its foil wrapping and put it inside, tugging a morsel of chorizo from the tortilla and offering it to the dog. Burgers sniffed it, licked it, and then allowed himself to be led into the crate by the nose. Raúl closed the cage door behind him. I could hear Burgers masticating over the rattle of the engine.

‘So I put your name on the guest list for Blowing Up at the Lo-Ball,’ said Raúl.

‘Huh,’ I said again, eyes on the road. ‘So what is it, like an open-mic night?’

‘An open-mic night? Who do you think I am? It’s Blowing Up! It’s one of the city’s top comedy nights. Read LA Weekly once in a while, asshole.’

In the two years we’d worked together, I’d avoided ever seeing Raúl’s stand-up act – mostly out of fear: fear he’d be bad; fear he’d be good. The fear is laced with envy, that he possesses the cojones to stand alone before a crowd and invite their judgement. The Lo-Ball was high stakes – his biggest gig to date – and he was uncharacteristically anxious. I’d yet to decide whether I could bear to attend.

‘Headliner gets a share of the door. I get free drinks. But if I do good, Verne says he’ll make me a regular.’

We paused at a Stop sign on Beachwood. I pulled my e-cigarette from my jeans pocket and puffed on it. E-cigarettes are to cigarettes what The Godfather Part III is to The Godfather Part II, but you can only hock so much phlegm before you start to get spooked by the prospect of lung cancer.

‘Whatever you say, Sir Lucky. I just think: if you’re gonna quit, then quit.’

This ‘Sir Lucky’ nonsense? I am the second son of a minor English aristocrat and his American trophy wife. Pater’s proper title is Alistair Kluge, Viscount Wonersh, which makes me the Hon. Lucius Kluge: Honourable, Lucky, Clever. Are any of those adjectives accurate? Everything’s relative.

Raúl Gupta is how this fish-out-of-water comedy becomes a buddy flick. Part Chicano, part Gujarati, all Angeleno: Eastern flavours swaddled in SoCal culture, like a Korean taco. At law school he played percussion for a post-post-punk band, which gave him an appetite for the limelight that, at twenty-nine, remains unsatisfied.

‘I cover a lot of topics,’ Raúl replied. ‘Dating, dog ownership, coffee culture, Asian-American enterprise, my parents. But I can’t just do you a bit in the frickin’ truck. Besides, the element of surprise is a crucial tool in a comic’s arsenal.’

I inhaled another hit of liquid nicotine. ‘Did you compose that mantra yourself, or do they teach it in Comedy 101?’

He turned to look at me, less than impressed. ‘Do you act like a douchebag on purpose?’ he said. ‘Or does it come naturally?’

I grinned: I do it on purpose. I swung the truck onto Franklin, squinting as the mid-morning sun cut through the cab like a reprimand.

Bart’s Olde California is in Los Feliz, at the intersection of Hollywood and Hipster. Around here, gentrification can be swift and merciless; the Korean nail bar next-door recently became a vegan café. So far, the store has stayed afloat on the rising rents, but not even Bart has sandbags enough to stem the flood of design boutiques and gourmet burger joints. In the car park out back, I eased the truck into the space next to my jeep – a ’74 Bronco: one of the last good years. Thanks to that breakfast burrito, the cab now stank of dog poop. I left Raúl to clean up and went inside.

The store takes up 3,500 square feet of prime Los Angeles real estate, approximately 3,450 of which are occupied by antiques. If you walked in off the street by chance, you’d think Norma Desmond and Charles Foster Kane were having a garage sale. Furniture fills the floors and art the walls, illuminated with mixed efficiency by lighting features from every era since the birth of the electric bulb, which is just barely younger than the state of California. Whether it’s Spanish Revival, Mission or Monterey, if it has a place in the history of the Golden State, then it falls within our purview.

A groovy mid-century boomerang table is stacked atop a Colonial chest. Art Deco kitchen cabinets are clogged with hand-painted Catalina plates. A high-backed wooden Windsor chair sits alongside an Eames recliner, like a college kid and his grandfather watching Monday Night Football in the man-cave. One wall is smothered in old signage; the neons have to be lit on rotation to keep a lid on the electricity bills. Customers are greeted at the door by our mascot, Oscar: a life-sized fibreglass ostrich whom Bart claims once graced the grounds of Lucille Ball’s Beverly Hills estate. He’s about the only thing in the store that’s not for sale.

Passing trade can be put off by our prices – but hey, we’re an antiques emporium, not a junk shop. And business is sufficiently brisk, because everybody likes to mix their Ikea clutter with something singular: a Gucci belt to hold up their Gap slacks. Besides, people here are positively awestruck by anything remotely old. The framed 1899 Bison Brewing Co. lithograph that hangs on the wall behind the cash register would be one of the youngest items in my father’s house; to Californians it might as well be a cave painting. For most Angelenos, our selection of 1920s Gladding McBean lamps with hand-stained glass shades are as ancient as two pieces of flint struck together to make a spark.

People once came to Southern California for their health, believing the blue skies and the sultry Santa Anas could cure their tuberculosis, their pneumonia, their conscience, their insomnia. But really, they were just coming here to die. And if our catalogue is anything to go by, they kept right on coming.

Bart Abernathy’s ancestors were forty-niners, which makes him that rare thing, a sixth-generation Californian. He turned seventy a while back and started to stoop, though you’d never guess his age from his glowing umber complexion. He has a wardrobe full of billowing silk Aloha shirts. It’s possible they were briefly on-trend in about 1976; I’m too young to recall. Today’s was turquoise, with a sea-life pattern: starfish, orcas, octopi. I found him trying single-handedly to move a mahogany dresser into a new spot.

‘Seriously, Bart. You’ve got to stop doing the heavy lifting,’ I said. ‘You’re going to give yourself another hernia.’

‘Well, if it isn’t the Lone Ranger,’ Bart replied, plucking a handkerchief from his trouser pocket to mop his brow. ‘Where’s Tonto?’

‘Mid-century, mostly. An Airline chair – haven’t seen one of those in a while. And some juncus baskets that I want you to check out.’

I wouldn’t go so far as to call Bart a mentor, much as he’d like me to. But I enjoy earning his approval, and he enjoys bestowing it. Together, we shoved the dresser up against the wall next to a display case filled with old bowie knives. Bart took a moment to compose himself after all the exertion, and then retreated to his swivel chair behind the cash register.

The back door swung shut with a bang as Raúl came in, carrying Burgers and cursing to himself. He set the bulldog down and it trotted to the beanbag at Bart’s feet, where it keeled over and dozed.

‘It’s Sasquatch Pete,’ Raúl replied. ‘Says we have to move the truck again. Says his delivery guy can’t get into the spot. Asshole.’

Sasquatch Pete owns the new café next door. He is the biggest, most irritable vegan east of the 405, and he’s always complaining that our truck is too large for the car park. This, by the way, was never a problem for the Koreans.

‘Well,’ said Bart, ‘God forbid Pete should ever go without his tempeh bacon.’

Bart put on the pair of spectacles that dangled from a string around his neck. He prodded the computer keyboard on the desk by the register, as if assessing its ripeness. ‘Raúl,’ he said, ‘I have an email here from a gentleman in Boulder, who is looking to purchase one of the Juan Camilo watercolours. I hoped you might be able to arrange the logistics before lunch.’

Bart has only recently bowed to the imperatives of the internet, and he still has difficulty achieving anything more complex online than sending an email. So it falls to Raúl to maintain our website and mail-order operation. Frankly, without gentlemen in Boulder, the store might struggle to keep its head above water. But just as Raúl was leaning down to read the email in question, we were interrupted by a flesh-and-blood customer.

When it opens, the front door to the store plays the first six notes of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, not entirely in tune. Raúl glanced over my shoulder as it chimed, and I saw his face drain of indignant thoughts about Sasquatch Pete, to be replaced by something like rapture. I turned to appraise our latest client.

The girl at the door was a genuine bowel-churner: her features astoundingly symmetrical; her long hair a lustrous cappuccino; her buns tight as a cashmere sweater after a hot wash. She was tucked into yoga pants and a pink designer sweatsuit top that looked as fresh as if it had never absorbed a drop. I’ve spent long enough in LA to be sceptical of such network primetime beauty. These days my tastes tend towards premium cable: I like a crooked tooth or untended eyebrows, women with a complex allure that creeps up on you like Season One of The Wire, until you can’t help but watch to the end. All the same, I could see why Raúl’s jaw had gone slack.

She wafted into the store past Oscar the ostrich, her brown eyes wide and deep, fingering the antiques furtively. Bart spoke first, since Raúl and I were both just staring: ‘Can we help you with anything, my dear?’

‘Oh heeeeey,’ she said, cocking her head and unleashing a smile that could choke the life from a less jaded man. ‘I’m actually looking for a desk? Or like a table you could use as a desk? But probably like a “desk” desk, y’know? My friend recommended you guys. And I went to CB2 and Design Within Reach or whatever, but I really wanted to find something that had some, like, character?’

The girl had the soft, high voice of a cartoon princess, her words cascading over one another and her sentences curving exponentially ceilingward as they neared their conclusion. Bart, scenting the whiff of a major sale, shuffled out from behind the register. ‘A desk? How wonderful! For yourself, I presume …?’

She nodded. ‘Yeah – for writing? Because I normally do like emails or whatever at the kitchen table or by the pool or on the couch but I have like this new project I’m working on and I really figured it was time, y’know, to have a place to really, like, write or whatever?’

‘Oh, I don’t know if I should say,’ she replied, suddenly coy. But she couldn’t help herself, and she arranged her features into something like seriousness. ‘It’s a book, actually?’ she said. ‘Of essays. Like, life-lessons? Kinda for young women? I mean, at first I was thinking I would, like, write it at one of those like writers’ retreats in the desert or the mountains or whatever? But then I said to myself, “No, I should so do this at home,” because then I can totally like focus on my life and all the things I’ve been through, y’know?’

‘How wonderful,’ Bart said again, and he gestured towards the front of the store. ‘Did you happen to notice the Spanish Colonial trestle desk that’s displayed in the window? It has some tremendously intricate, carved—’

‘Oh I diiiid,’ she interrupted him, in a tone that I took to mean: Nice try, Grandpa. ‘I totally did. But really, I’m like looking for something a little more …?’

‘Modern!’ Raúl spluttered, seizing the moment a little too eagerly to be cool.

‘Ex-actly,’ the girl replied, drawing out the word and dipping it in vocal fry as she angled the warm rays of her attention towards him.

He turned abruptly and strode out through the back door. The girl gave me a bashful smile as she edged past and pursued him.

Allowing Raúl to make a sale on his own – especially to an attractive young woman – is a risk. By the time I got out to the car park, he’d yanked open the back of the truck to reveal Marty Kann’s tanker desk. It faced outwards from the truckbed, proud as the prow of a battleship, built to cleave the seas of creativity. The girl put her hands to her chest, which, by sheer coincidence, was precisely where Raúl hoped to put his own.

‘Omigod you guys, I loooove it,’ she said. ‘It’s so … like, retro? Like, out of an old movie? I mean, I can totally see it in my house with my laptop and my books and like an Anglepoise or whatever? Seriously.’

‘It’s a fabulous piece,’ said Raúl, nodding in agreement. ‘That’s a … Hey, Lucky, who made this desk?’

‘Right,’ said Raúl, as if he’d known all along. ‘McDowell and Craig. Big designers. Very influential.’

Beautiful people can be spectacularly credulous. That’s what happens when the world is always willing to reinforce your self-esteem with half-truths.

I wasn’t sure I’d be happy for the tanker desk to leave us so quickly, nor to see it wasted on this particular customer. She didn’t strike me as the type to spend her days toiling alone over a blank piece of paper. This was a desk that required commitment.

‘It’s missing the key to the pencil drawer,’ I said, in a vain attempt to dissuade her. ‘You’d need to get a new lock fitted. And you might want to lose the castors, too. They’re not original.’

Raúl has devoted endless YouTube hours to schooling himself in pick-up artistry. To my knowledge, this has made him no better or worse at manipulating members of the opposite sex, but it has made his pronouncements on the subject all the more insufferable. He tossed me a look that said: I’ll take it from here, my man. Unable to watch any longer, I went back inside.

When the girl returned from the car park several minutes later, she made directly for the door, stopping beside Oscar only to turn, wave and say, ‘Thanks so much, guys; this was so amazing?’ Bart and I gazed wistfully through the window as she slid into a soft-topped Mini Cooper that was parked at the meter outside. Raúl came in after her, flourishing a scrap of paper like a full bingo card.

He thrust the note under my nose to display the digits she’d scrawled on it, which began with an 818 area code.

‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘Did she give you her number because she wants to share a milkshake, or because you managed to sell her the desk?’

‘Alright, alright. She bought the desk,’ he said, rolling his eyes and reaching into his pocket to pull out a folded cheque. ‘But … She also said that she might come to my show Saturday night.’

I snatched the cheque and made to put it in the cash register, but not before glancing at the girl’s swoopy handwriting. ‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘This is for eight hundred dollars. Didn’t I say the desk was twelve hundred?’

‘Yeah, I gave her a twenty-five per cent discount. For the lock and the polish.’

‘Four hundred dollars! Learn some bloody arithmetic, Raúl. We paid Cleo five hundred and fifty bucks for that desk!’

‘So? That’s a two-hundred-fifty-dollar profit.’ He tapped his temple with his forefinger. ‘Arithmetic, Sir Lucky.’

I suppose the look in my eyes suggested imminent violence, because Bart chose that moment to intervene. Truth is, he’ll sometimes cut up to 40 per cent off a price tag, but only when he wants to get rid of a dud piece.

‘Now, Lucky, Raúl is correct. At least we made a profit – and a new client.’

‘Bart,’ I said, ‘the rent just went up! We can’t afford this kind of thing.’

‘Well, no. That is true. But let’s consider this a teachable moment. Raúl, you know you really ought to get a second opinion from Lucky or myself, if ever you want to offer a discount.’

‘Okay,’ said Raúl, finally chastened. ‘Sorry, boss. Oh – there is one other thing. I said we’d deliver it to her in Calabasas.’

I spontaneously combusted. ‘Calabasas? Christ. Might as well be Bakersfield.’

Calabasas is deep in the Valley, and to get there would mean piloting the truck along at least one highly undesirable freeway.

‘Said we’d deliver it tomorrow. Dude, do you still not know who that was? That was Whitney Blair.’

‘Y’know, Lucky, a person can do two things at once. Speaking of: she did a sex tape! Check it out …’

He took out his smartphone and thumbed at it feverishly until it started to make dirty noises. He turned the screen to me, beaming. There indeed was the girl, Whitney, on all fours on a suede sofa in a non-specific contemporary sitting room: white walls, laminate flooring, tacky art. She was naked but for her lipgloss and buttery make-up, staring past the camera as some ripped dude, his head cropped out of the frame, pistoned her from behind. Her tanned, rigid breasts swung from her chest like church bells – ding, dong – as she moaned and gurned, half in pain, half in ecstasy: the internet’s unnerving, ubiquitous sex-face.

I could almost hear Raúl’s mind go to work on his personal soft-porn fantasy: the furniture mover derives sexual favours from the television star as he delivers her new desk. In fact, he probably derives the favours on the desk.

Raúl called the clip a sex tape, but there surely had to be a third person in the room, filming – plus maybe a soundman – which to my mind made it a common or garden porno. I thought about how hard it is to get a stain out of suede.

Raúl flicked off the video as Whitney’s yelps began to increase in urgency. Burgers had stirred from the beanbag, perhaps mistaking the smartphone for a puppy in distress. Bart removed his specs and dabbed his brow with his handkerchief. ‘My golly,’ he said, his voice a little unsteady. ‘Is it time for lunch?’

Shaking his head, he sank into the chair behind the register and reached for the Tupperware tub that contained his tuna sandwiches, an old soul being steadily eroded by the tides of the twenty-first century.

When I got home, there was another car in my spot. I left the Bronco parked on the street and strolled up the path at the side of the house, carrying a bag of limes and a still-cool six-pack of Tecate.

I live in the one-bedroom guest cottage behind a restored jigsaw Gothic in Angelino Heights. The big house is venerable as they come in Southern California, with round-end shingles, high bay windows and a wide wooden porch with a hand-carved balustrade. The guest cottage is a newer build but blessedly in keeping. I’ve a deck at the back in the shadow of Downtown, an outdoor grill, a patio set and some potted cacti: the dream of the suburbs, in the heart of the city.

The car in the driveway was a charcoal-grey Audi convertible. I didn’t recognise it, but it was a brand-new model, so that didn’t mean much. My landlord is a retired record exec who got out of the music biz just before it tanked and now spends most of the year at his ranch in Ojai or his ski lodge in Jackson Hole. A pair of women’s designer wedges lay discarded in the passenger-seat footwell, so I guessed it had to belong to one of his daughters, or his latest girlfriend. I was wrong.

Abigail Musker was sitting with her bare feet up on one of my patio chairs, close-reading a screenplay on her Kindle. She wore a sleeveless linen blouse, white denim trousers and crimson toenail varnish. Her sunglasses were on her head, holding her fair hair out of her eyes. She didn’t hear my approach over the white noise of the 101 freeway, so I gave her a start when I spoke.

‘Abby Musker. What could possibly bring you this far east of West Hollywood?’

Abby looked me up and down, likely considering the significance of the six-pack, the stubble growth and the sweat patches on my shirt.

Also by Tim Walker

TIM WALKER

SMOKE OVER MALIBU

PART ONE

SIR LUCKY

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