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Zusatztext 73375365 Informationen zum Autor Timothy Hallinan Klappentext Quick-talking burglar Junior Bender gets blackmailed into starting a new career as a private investigator for crooks in this hilarious Hollywood mystery Junior Bender, a burglar with a magic touch, is being blackmailed into taking on a new freelance job. One of LA's biggest crime bosses is producing a porn movie that someone keeps sabotaging; Junior's job is to figure out who's responsible and keep the movie on track. The trouble is, he's not sure he can go through with the job, blackmail or no blackmail. The actress lined up to star in the film, Thistle Downing, is an ex-child star who now lives alone in a drug-induced stupor, destitute and uninsurable. This movie would be scandalous fodder for tabloids around the country. Junior knows what he should do-get Thistle out and find her some help-but doing the right thing will land him on the wrong side of some scary people.If I’d liked expressionism, I might have been okay. But the expressionists don’t do anything for me, don’t even make my palms itch. And Klee especially doesn’t do anything for me. My education, spotty as it was, pretty much set my Art Clock to the fifteenth century in the Low Countries. If it had been Memling or Van der Weyden, one of the mystical Flemish masters shedding God’s Dutch light on some lily-filled annunciation, I would have been looking at the picture when I took it off the wall. As it was, I was looking at the wall. So I saw it, something I hadn’t been told would be there. Just a hairline crack in the drywall, perfectly circular, maybe the size of a dinner plate. Seen from the side, by someone peeking behind the painting without moving it, which is what most thieves would do in this sadly mistrustful age of art alarms, it would have been invisible. But I’d taken the picture down, and there it was. And I’m weak. I think for everyone in the world, there’s something you could dangle in front of them, something they would run onto a freeway at rush hour to get. When I meet somebody, I like to try to figure out what that is for that person. You for diamonds, darling, or first editions of Dickens? Jimmy Choo shoes or a Joseph Cornell box? And you, mister, a thick stack of green? A troop of Balinese girl scouts? A Maserati with your monogram on it? For me, it’s a wall safe. From my somewhat specialized perspective, a wall safe is the perfect object. To you, it may be a hole in the wall with a door on it. To me, it’s one hundred percent potential. There’s absolutely no way to know what’s in there. You can only be sure of one thing: Whatever it is, it means a hell of a lot to somebody. Maybe it’s what they’d run into traffic for. A wall safe is just a question mark. With an answer inside. Janice hadn’t told me there would be a safe behind the picture. We’d discussed everything but that. And, of course, that— meaning the thing I hadn’t anticipated—was what screwed me. What Janice and I had mostly talked about was the front door. “Think baronial,” she’d said with a half-smile. Janice had the half-smile down cold. “The front windows are seven feet from the ground. You’d need a ladder just to say hi.” “How far from the front door to the curb?” The bar we were in was way south of the Boulevard, in Reseda, far enough south that we were the only people in the place who were speaking English, and Serena’s Greatest Hits was on permanent loop. The air was ripe with cilantro and cumin, and the place was mercifully lacking in ferns and sports memorabilia. A single widescreen television, ignored by all, broadcast the soccer game. I am personally convinced that only one soccer game has ever actually been played, and they show it over and over again from different camera angles. As...
