Free Shamus In The Green Room by Susan Kandel

it was located. It was built in the forties by Lloyd
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    Wright (Frank’s son) out of triangular segments of glass,
    framed by aged redwood timbers. Wright used thirty- and
    sixty-degree angles throughout because they occurred natu-
    rally in snowflakes, crystals, and tree branches. It was so po-
    etic, that idea.
    I swung open the heavy door.
    The chapel was empty.
    Not unusual for a Wednesday.
    I was halfway down the aisle before I realized what I was
    doing. That would be walking down the aisle. By the time I
    stopped in front of the altar, my legs were feeling pretty shaky.
    I looked through the glass at those trees. Pine? Pepper? My
    knees started to give out. The branches seemed as if they were
    grabbing at me. I couldn’t breathe. I’d been imprisoned inside
    a crystal. Was this what Lloyd Wright was going for? Or was
    this me? Jayne Mansfield had stood on this very spot. I won-
    dered how she’d felt on her wedding day. She wore pink lace
    and Mickey’s ten-carat diamond, but they still didn’t make it
    till death do us part.
    Gambino had wanted to buy me a diamond. But I’d had a
    diamond the first time around, and we all know how that
    worked out. So I chose an emerald instead. It was tiny but per-
    fect. I looked down at my hand and my breathing started to re-
    turn to normal. I even broke into a tiny smile. Then, a tourist
    in a visor and shorts with many pockets bounced over cheer-
    fully, asking if I’d please move because happy as I seemed, I
    was standing in the way of his picture.
    It was time to go anyway.
    Back to the car.
    The traffic had cleared.
    Back down the hill.
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    In search of Maren and Lisa.
    They would have gone this same way, I was sure of it. But
    where exactly? All I saw were cargo cranes dotting the skyline,
    a stream of 99¢ Only stores, a handful of taquerias, and fi-
    nally, a sign reading: Come Back to San Pedro.
    I hung a U-turn at the next corner. A block later, I drove
    past a sign reading: Welcome to San Pedro.
    They say the second time’s the charm.
    In Hammett’s day, San Pedro was a center of union activ-
    ity. Today, not only was it the home of the biggest cargo
    terminal in the United States, it was also the port of Los An-
    geles’s world-cruise center. At any given moment, thousands of
    retirees were plunking down their life’s savings to sail on ships
    departing from one of its numerous berths, where they’d be
    stuffed full of rich food that would hasten their deaths, not
    to mention those small cabins with notoriously bad air circu-
    lation.
    All this I learned from the woman manning the desk at
    Limo San Pedro. I didn’t need a limo, of course, but their
    blinking neon sign (“Serving lax at reasonable prices”) struck
    me at the time as amusing. Also, there was a parking space out
    front. At the mere mention of the word tattoo, the woman
    whipped off her pale blue cardigan, her “Hi, I’m Ruth” button
    clattering noisily to the floor, and showed me her fairy tattoo.
    It was large. After I’d admired it sufficiently, she directed me to
    the tattoo parlor on the corner of Mesa and Pacific, which she
    said had been there forever.
    Tattu du Jour, however, was not the place I was looking for.
    It was run by a young man from Paris who’d made a typing
    mistake when applying for his Fulbright and had wound up at
    Cal State Long Beach instead of UCLA. Turned out he liked
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    the sea air and cheap rents, and had always dreamed of having
    his own business. He kept saying, “Be calm,” to me, which I
    thought was a little rude, but as it turned out he was telling
    me to go to Beacon Street. There were a couple of tattoo par-
    lors there.
    No luck at ACME Deluxe Tattoos. The owner was out and
    the help was surly. He looked at me like I was crazy when I
    asked how long they’d been in business and if they kept any
    kind of records.
    The place next door didn’t appear to have a name, although
    there was a sign over the register, handwritten in ornate,
    Gothic