Upgunned Read Free Page A

constrictive bustier, and little else except her work smile. I noticed her jade-green eyes were contacts. Several pounds of burnished hair like a four-alarm blaze. She waved perfunctorily. “Meetcha.”
    With an exaggerated stage whisper my keeper added, “I don’t think Cognac is her real name, do you?”
    There was also a birdy older man wearing John Lennon spectacles. Hair plugs marched in a straight line across the top of his face like a row of shoe polish–brown cornstalks.
    â€œCognac there is a prostitute,” said the gunman, “and this fellow here we’ll call the Professor, because he’d pop a clot if I mentioned his real name.”
    Indeed, the Professor immediately turned crimson at the fleeting notion of exposure, and coughed artificially to cover his panic. I realized I was probably looking at another ten grand each, for these two.
    â€œAnd in here, you’ll find our special guest star.”
    He led me into the master bedroom. On the California king was a large vinyl body bag containing either a person or two hundred pounds of really expensive appetizers. He unzipped it and unfortunately, shazam, dead man. My gut plummeted.
    Nobody I knew, but somebody I could recognize, and put a name to.
    *   *   *
    You’ve seen Clavius’s work everywhere. If you lived in New York City, you might decide to attend a party or elite gallery function based on whether Clavius might actually show up. If you worked in an upscale office there was probably a Clavius print on the wall, framed in brushed aluminum, and if you’re upscale enough, it would be numbered and signed with his distinctive scrolled “C.” Celebrities queue to his favor. Sous-chefs fawned and prepared off-the-menu vegetarian dishes for him. He occasionally surfaced among luminaries on the news; more rarely on pop rot like E! or Entertainment Tonight.
    Touching the finer things by proxy has always been a big deal in America. Who’s-who has cash value, like getting your hair chopped and dyed at Talia’s in the 90210. Bonus points if Talia comped you.
    Of course, Clavius wasn’t his real name, but that was de rigueur for men of his stature. His few approved photos depicted him as a florid Teuton with a severe crew cut and the penetrating gaze of an ocean carnivore. We met about five years ago at a place called the New World Inkworks, which no longer existed in Los Angeles … as did most things in Los Angeles.
    New World Inkworks was not one of those 24/7 Xeroxeries, but an actual publishing time warp that reeked of the old school: hot glue guns, rubber cement, rubyliths, pasteups, X-Acto knives, and real, live physical layout done on light boards. Its professed specialty was high-end lithographs and limited edition art prints on special acid-free stock, many done for the Getty Museum’s gift shop. The owner, kommandant, and chief ramrod was a man straight out of a Broadway road show of The Front Page named Harry “Boss” Wiley who—yes—actually wore the visor and arm garters you’re thinking of right now.
    Due to the looming specter of digital everything and the need to keep the lights on at New World, Boss had neatly divided his profession to address both high culture and low. He had doggedly cemented a reputation as the go-to guy for artsy-fartsy print work while cultivating an after-hours relationship with more mainstream media. In other words, by day he actualized canonical art for the masses, and after dark he kept his staff comfortably busy with porn, for the real masses. More American than Boss you just didn’t get, as an entrepreneur.
    My own lack of a studio, facilities, portfolio, repute, and walking cash brought me into Boss’s orbit. In one of three back rooms Boss kept a behemoth of a retired Linotype machine, despite the space it absorbed, purely in honor of his romance with print. Next to that Linotype I humped many