“You’ve never met my father, have you? Because you wouldn’t say something like that if you had.”
I kept my mouth shut. I knew heartless fathers. I worked for one. Ciro Castellani was among the worst of them,andapparently a close personal friend of Edgar Beaumont, I reminded myself.
Miller turned over in my arms. “JJ,” he said seriously.
“Yeah?”
“I’m really hungry.”
He stayed in the bed while I looked through my sad stash of old food to see if there was anything we could have. I’d attempted to pull on some pants, but he’d frowned and shaken his head. I’d acquiesced. It wasn’t as though I could refuse him anything normally, let alone now.
“I wonder how hard Roxy is milking this right now,” he said casually, leaning up against the pillows as he watched me move naked around the kitchen. “What did you think of her?”
I found some old ramen packets in the back of a cupboard and set about making them for dinner. “She’s venomous, that one.”
Miller laughed humorlessly, and I could hear an edge of relief to it. “Right?” he went on. “She’s a total megabitch, although she can be really sweet when she wants something. I mean,” he scoffed, “sheknewyou were gay the second she saw you. She was trying to piss me off with all that flirting.”
“She knew I was gay the second she saw me?” I glanced at him. “How?”
For the first time in a long time, Miller smiled. It was just a small baby of a smile, a promise of bigger smiles to come, once he’d gotten through this particular hell, but I was glad to see it. “Wow, I don’t know, maybe the way you bit Chris Booker’s head off for talking to me? She saw all that out near the pool, you know.”
“I didn’t…” I trailed off before I settled on, “That guy was a douche,” and dumped the flavor packets into the noodles. “Anyway,” I said, shoving both bowls into the microwave, “your girl might be a megabitch, but she’s smart, too. She picked a seat that gave her a view of the mirror, and therefore, the whole room. She wanted to watch her back.”
“You think she’s a wiseguy?” Miller asked. He sounded like himself for the first time since yesterday. “Or wisegal, I guess?”
I snorted, waited for the microwave beep, and then brought the two noodle bowls over to the table. “Not her.”
There were women in some Families, especially here in LA, but Roxanne Rochford was an unlikely candidate. She didn’t seem the type who liked to work too hard, for one thing. “She might have friends in the Family, but she’s not one of us.”
Still, I’d ask Freddy to look into it. More than one A-list actress had an “honorable” man as an accessory. New York Families had construction; Vegas Families had the casinos. LA Families? We had The Biz.
Miller dragged himself out of bed and sat down in front of his dinner. “Yeah, I’m not eating this,” he said, pushing the bowl of noodles aside. “And neither are you. It’s, like, carcinogenic.” He whipped my bowl away just as my fork descended.
“Hey—”
He ignored my protest and leaned back in his seat to set the bowl on the countertop in the kitchen. My place was small enough to do that. “We need our strength, JJ. We needvitamins.” He leaned forward on the table, both hands reaching towards me, imploring, his eyes large and pleading.
“I could pick up something for dinner. There’s some vegan hole-in-the-wall in the neighborhood over—”
“Lord, we don’t have topunishourselves. There’s a sushi train five minutes down the road.”
“Are you…sure you want to be seen out?”
Miller gave me a pitying look. “JJ, I really like you, but I’m not gonna pretend that your neighborhood is the mosthappeningplace. No one out here is going to know who I am.”
So we ended up at the sushi place, where Miller took just about every plate that came down the conveyer belt, and I picked the California rolls when they came by, because they were familiar. But it was sure as shit better than ramen noodles that were a year out of date.
“So what do we think about Roxy’s story? That my sister was caught up in something bad?” Miller asked when we were into our second Asahi beers. I swiveled on my seat to face him and got an eyeful of him tonguing a fat pink chunk of sashimi. I watched his tongue, entranced, as it pulled the flesh into his mouth.
I pulled my mind back on track. “Uh,” I said, looking around. No one was listening, but still—”Is this the place?”Is this the time?I wanted to add, given that hehadto still be processing.
“Please, JJ,” he said, picking at the beer label. “I need to keep my mind occupied. When I stop thinking about what happened, I startimaginingwhat happened. The cops told me she was killed with a shotgun and I can’t…I don’t want to think about that. But I can’tnotthink about it. So trying to figure out what happened…”
I put my hand on his and, after a second, he twined one of his legs into mine on the bar stools.
“Okay, well, here’s the thing, Trouble,” I said, the nickname slipping out unbidden. I should cut off the beers, I decided. “When someone says their disappeared friend was ‘scared for their life’ or ‘caught up in something bad’ or ‘in over their head,’ nine times out of ten, the person saying that isalsoinvolved. They know exactly what happened, but they don’t wanna say in casetheydisappear next.”
Miller digested that for a second, along with the mountain of sushi that must have been in his belly by then, and shook his head. “No way. You’re asking me to believe that not only Annie but Roxanne Rochford were—what—drug runners?”
