From Black Rooms Read Free Page B

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    Hector Espinoza's house in Laguna Beach. Working in the Corps's Art Division had made Hector rich enough to buy this white Art Deco palace by the sea, while she and her daughter and father al had to squeeze into a two-bedroom condo in Ful erton.
    Just be glad he's willing to see you, she reminded herself as she saw the sign beside the front door's buzzer. DO NOT DISTURB! it shouted. MEETINGS
    BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.
    Natalie had phoned to arrange such a meeting a week ago, but when she pressed the buzzer button three times without a response, she began to wonder if Hector had changed his mind.
    Final y, a heavy Latino man in a baggy black tank top and board shorts opened the door. His tattooed scalp had been shaved more cleanly than his face, and his violet eyes were bleary and red as he scratched crumbs of sleep dust from their corners. "Yeah?" He apparently wasn't awake enough to recognize her in the black pageboy wig and green contacts she wore to evade the Corps Security agents who tailed her. Natalie, too, kept her head shaved, for some of her fussier clients insisted upon having a SoulScan confirm that she actual y summoned the dead artists she claimed to work with.
    "It's me, Hector," she prompted.
    "Boo? Holy crap, is it noon already?"
    "Quarter-past, actual y. I'm fashionably late."
    "Sorry...I spaced." He stood to one side and waved her forward. "Come on in. And pardon the freakin' mess." He led her through several rooms that managed to look both cluttered and barren at the same time. The dining room contained a card table covered with unopened mail and one metal folding chair. The den had a flatpanel plasma TV, a black leather couch, and a shelf unit stuffed with art books, sketchbooks, and files of loose papers and drawings. Stacked pizza boxes and bal ed-up burger wrappers littered the hardwood floors, and empty beer bottles lay scattered like bowling pins. That was al the furnishing Hector had use for--indeed, al he had room for. The rest of the house he surrendered to the paintings.
    Finished canvases leaned against the wal s and armrests of the sofa, some stacked five-deep with sheets of cardboard in between. Works in progress rested on easels erected with the careless arrangement of highway roadwork signs: here a Monet, the vibrant purples and reds of its water lilies stil sticky and shiny with damp paint; there a crucifixion by Raphael, awaiting its fifth glazing. The styles ranged from the dark Baroque
    palette of Velazquez to the drop-cloth paint spatter of Jackson Pol ock's Abstract Expressionism. The place might have been a warehouse for the world's great museums, yet only one artist's work actual y hung on the plain white wal s--Hector's.
    "These some of your latest?" Natalie recognized his signature style: spray-painted scenes of L.A. urban life with the exaggerated cartoon figures of graffiti art. "I like them."
    He shrugged. "Eh! I thought, hel , if no one else wants
    'em, I'l put 'em up myself."
    His offhand tone couldn't quite disguise his bitterness. Natalie knew that serving as a Violet in the Corps's Art Division was rather like being the lead singer in a cover band. The audience didn't care about your originals, only other people's hits.
    "Hope you won't mind if I help myself to some breakfast," Hector said as they entered the kitchen. Teetering piles of dirty dishes shared counter space with jars of paintbrushes that bathed in blackened fluid while waiting to be cleaned. The heavy, refried-bean scent of microwaved burritos mel owed the sharp odors of
    turpentine and stale Heineken that saturated the air. Hector snatched a bottle opener from among the chaos and took a beer from the fridge. "How about it, Boo?
    Want to join me?"
    "No. And I told you not to cal me that," she said, referring to her old nickname. When she was a kid, al the Violets who went to the Iris Semple Conduit
    Academy with her cal ed her "Boo," since everything seemed to scare her. She stil displayed a
    hypochondriac's