Black

Chapter 5

"There was nothing I could help the nice man with. Believe me, I tried," he said as he walked into his office, shoulders slumped. "Did they leave a number?"

"I emailed you. Your mom sounded excited."

"She always sounds like that."

Black signed into his account, peered at the digits, and entered them into his phone. His mother's distinctive, trippy voice chirped at him after three rings.

"Artemus! I'm so glad we reached you. We just got to town!"

He winced at her use of his first name. "That's a nice...surprise. Did I miss where you told me you were coming?"

"You know, it came up suddenly, and your father and I decided we hadn't seen you in ages, so why not hop on a plane and visit? Mix some business with pleasure? We were hoping we could stay at your place for the night. Do you still have the same apartment?"

Black choked down the immediate anger that flashed in his mind at her assumption that she could intrude in his life whenever she felt like it. He knew how she was. This was nothing new. They could afford to stay at the Four Seasons and be chauffeured around by limo, but instead wanted to save the money and sleep on his crappy sofa bed. The resentment he felt about his parents selling their little cottage-industry hobby to a major conglomerate in the mid-nineties, pocketing a fortune, rose like sour bile. Here he was busting his hump to get by, and they'd literally fallen over a multi-million dollar deal for her hand-made organic soap. It was lunacy. And then his nice-but-dim father had decided on a whim to invest most of their newly amassed fortune in Apple - not because he'd performed any analysis, but because he'd thought the logo was cool and he liked the company's philosophy. Perhaps even more rankling for Black, after turning seven million into a hundred, he'd then sold all their stock because of an article he'd seen on Yahoo about the company mistreating some Chinese workers, and avoided a forty percent drop in its value.

For two people living in a time warp, for whom money had no importance, they'd hit the jackpot while he toiled in obscurity, scraping by with next to nothing. Of course they'd offered to lend him whatever he needed, but his pride was such that he'd rather turn tricks at the Echo Park men's room than accept a dime from them.

"Yes, Mom, still living at the Paradise Palms," he said, striving for a neutral tone. His apartment complex, a euphemistically named two-story fifties-era crackerbox boasting one- and two-bedroom dwellings grouped around a hideously maintained swimming pool, was the kind of dump that embarrassed and embittered anyone with a more promising career than fast food service. He'd been calling it home since his limousine business blew up - after he'd appeared at the Grammys with a high-profile pop starlet in the back of his car, overdosed on some powerful cocktail he'd somehow missed while regaling her about a big name music producer he'd worked with back in the day.

The sight of the young ingénue falling out of the limo onto the red carpet and then vomiting all over his pants as he stood holding the door open, face frozen in shock, had pretty much killed the business, as had the lawsuit she and her parents had filed when she'd gotten out of the hospital. Even though it had ultimately been dismissed, his "Limo to the Stars" gig had been forced to close up when the bank cut his meager credit line and repossessed his two limousines, and his trademark stretch hot pink Humvee became the punch line to every Hollywood bad joke.

"We're just around the corner, up on that Sunset Boulevard, having a late lunch - yummy salads at a cozy organic restaurant we found. Would it be too much trouble to ask you to come let us in so we can get settled? We don't have to be anywhere until tomorrow, so we put aside the whole afternoon just for you."

Black glared daggers at the back of Roxie's skull, willing it to explode for having told them that he was open for the rest of the day. Her budding psychic abilities must have been flagging, as were his telekinetic skills, because she continued reading the fashion website she favored without a hint of discomfort.