My office was on the corner of Garfield Place and Hollywood Boulevard right in the heart of Little Armenia. The rent was cheap and so were the clients. At night, the street out front was littered with drug dealers and prostitutes. Daylight drove them back into their hiding places, but the stench of their existence was always there. Like I said, the rent was cheap.
I was working late on a Tuesday. I'd just completed a final report for some poor sap who had married a stripper from one of the local dives. She was doing it all over town and sucking the life out of his bank account. The eight by ten glossies would buy him a get out of marriage free card. I don't like divorce work, but it pays the overhead.
The seventh race at Hollywood Park caught my interest as I perused the Racing Form. A lightly raced colt named Diction Thority had faded badly at six and seven furlongs after breaking his maiden at a mile. Tomorrow he'd be stepping up in class to a grade three handicap at a mile and a quarter. But this animal was bred for distance and it was predictable that he would fall apart in the stretch at the pace of the shorter races. The fifteen to one morning line appealed to my gambling nature.
I counted my bankroll, locked up the office and walked half a block up Garfield to my apartment. It was a one-room flat with a bathroom and a kitchen. The neighbors were quiet and the rent was cheap.
The refrigerator contained two slices of pizza, a rotten head of lettuce, a forty-ounce bottle of Millers High Life and a half empty carton of pork fried rice from two weeks ago. I ate the pizza, drank the beer and went to bed.
