by Stuart Woods
“Sounds like a girl in the picture,” Larsen said.
“You bet there is, and he won’t bring her home to meet us. What kind of a girl would that be?”
“I wouldn’t worry too much about it,” Larsen said. “He’ll either get over it, or he’ll bring her home.”
“I live for the day,” Moscowitz said. “Did you call the office to find me?”
“Yes.”
“Jenny answered the phone. That’s my wife; she runs the business end, raises hell if my bids come in too low.”
Larsen felt very much on the wrong track. This guy didn’t square with the alienated types who became stalkers. “Mike, what sort of day do you work?”
“Me? I’m at work by seven, and Jenny and me, we don’t get home until seven, so it’s a twelve-hour day most days, and all too often on Saturdays. Once in a while, when we get a little gap between jobs and we’re a little flush, we take a couple of weeks off, but it doesn’t happen all that often. Lenny there gets a few years under his belt, maybe I can relax a little.”
This guy didn’t have time to be a stalker. “Mike, can we sit down somewhere and talk for a minute?”
“Don’t you want to see the house?”
“Maybe later; this isn’t about work.” Larsen showed him the badge.
Moscowitz waved a hand at the stairs in front of them. “Step into my office.” He took a seat on a step.
Larsen sat down beside him. “This is in confidence, okay?”
“Okay.”
“One of your clients, Chris Callaway, is being annoyed by somebody.”
“How annoyed?”
“Seriously annoyed. I can’t go into detail, but there’s some reason to be concerned about her safety.”
“She hasn’t been out to the house in Malibu for weeks. Something to do with this annoyance?”
“Sort of.”
Moscowitz nodded. “Most clients aren’t willing to build a house on the phone. I knew it must be something. Who’s annoying her?”
“We don’t know; that’s why I’m talking to you.”
“Why me?”
“How many subcontractors are you using on Chris’s house?”
“The usual—framer, plumber, electrician, alarm guy, roofer, drywall guy, whatever it takes.”
“Can you give me a list of them, please?”
“Sure, I guess so.” Moscowitz took a battered address book from his briefcase and read out a dozen names and addresses while Larsen took notes.
“How many of these have had any contact with Chris?” Larsen asked.
“All of them, I guess, except the roofer and the drywall man. She hasn’t been out there since they started work.”
“Any of them drive one of those?” Larsen asked, pointing through the open door at the van.
“Probably,” Moscowitz replied. “It’s a pretty popular vehicle in the trade.”
“Anybody you can remember?”
Moscowitz shrugged. “Tell you the truth, I don’t notice cars much. Just about everybody who works for me drives a van or a pickup. Guys have got tools and stuff to carry, you know?”
“Has anybody who’s worked for you on the Callaway house asked a lot of questions about Chris?”
“Sure, most of them; they all know she’s a movie star. I mean, they don’t go around drooling after her; they’re pretty cool, but they like it that they’re working on a movie star’s house. They go home and tell their wives and friends, you know? But these guys have worked on movie stars’ houses before. They’re not knocked out.”
Larsen nodded. He opened his notebook to his list of vans. “Any of these guys work for you? Michael James O’Hara; James B. Corbett; James M. Rivera; Marvin B. James?”
“None of them rings a bell,” Moscowitz said. “Who are they?”
“Guys who own Ford vans like yours and have James in their names. Anybody work for you named James? Either first or last name?”
“Jimmy Lopez, my plumber. He’s on your list, there, as Lopez Plumbing Contractors.”
“What’s he look like?”
“Six two, big, maybe two-twenty, pot belly, black hair and mustache, about fifty.”
“That’s not my man.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“This guy is medium height and weight, medium brown hair.”
“Like me?”
“Like you, but younger.”
“Isn’t everybody?”
Larsen laughed. “This is beginning to sound like a dry hole.”
“Sorry, wish I could help.”
“You can. If anybody shows up at the Callaway house who fits the medium description and who drives either a gray Ford van, like yours, or a red motorcycle, I’d really appreciate a call.” He gave the builder a card.
“Okay,” Moscowitz said, handing over his own card, “and if you get serious about your house, call me.”
“I’ll do it. Anybody whose grandfather worked with my grandfather can’t be all bad. And it may be sooner than you think.” Larsen shook hands with the builder and left.
Lenny Moscowitz came down the stairs and stood next to his father. “Was that about work?” he asked.
Moscowitz shook his head. “Nah. That was a cop.”
The boy didn’t speak for a moment. “What’d he want?” he asked finally.
“Checking up on who works for me. Cops are always checking up.”
“Did you tell him what he wanted to know?”
“Nope.” Moscowitz tore Larsen’s card in half and dropped it over the banister into a cardboard box full of rubbish.
“Pop, what is it with you and cops?”
“Kiddo,” Moscowitz said, punching his son playfully in the gut, “if you had grown up in the sixties, you wouldn’t have to ask.”
CHAPTER
30
Danny Devere left the CBS Television Studios in Burbank at three-thirty, exhausted. He had been doing hair since six A.M.—a three-part miniseries with lots of women—and all he wanted now was to get to Chris’s and stretch out on a sofa. When he stopped at the gate to wait for traffic, his brakes felt a little spongy, and he made a mental note to add this symptom to the list of items to check when he next had the car serviced. He headed toward Beverly Hills.
Danny was forty, and the first thirty years of his life had not been easy. Born in a hardscrabble industrial town in western Pennsylvania, he had known he was different from most other boys from the age of five, but he had been smart enough to keep it to himself. Finally, at the age of fifteen, driven almost mad by the necessity of maintaining a heterosexual facade and keeping his sexuality a secret, he had lied about his age, joined the navy, and for the first time found other young men who felt the same way he did, and who didn’t bother to keep it a secret, at least when they were off duty. But he had also found that, no less than in Pennsylvania, he would have to be tough enough to defend himself against those men who, although they loved a blow job aboard ship, loved just as much to do a little queer-bashing when on liberty. He had lost a good friend in a men’s room in Manila, when four of his shipmates had entertained themselves by kicking the boy to death. From that time on, Danny didn’t wait for others to start fights; instead, he started them himself, and at the slightest provocation. After a few of these, his shipmates trod lightly around him.
For this reason, and because of his native courage, Danny had never feared Admirer, as he had learned not to fear any bully. He abhorred guns, but since the day he had bought one for Chris, he had carried a very sharp folding knife secured to his ankle with two stout rubber bands. He knew from his experience in liberty ports how to use it, and although he had never killed anybody, he knew exactly how to do it. He had already decided that, given the opportunity, he would kill Admirer, and with the greatest of pleasure. He entertained fantasies of showing the man various of his severed appendages.
He had been driving uphill for some minutes now, and as he crested the mountain ridge that separated the San Fernando Valley from B
everly Hills, another sports car overtook him and cut in front of him too quickly, forcing him to brake hard. The brakes held for a moment, then let go completely. He found himself headed down a steep and winding Beverly Glen with his braking foot to the floor, quickly gaining speed.
Danny was an experienced, even expert driver, and although he was alarmed, he did not panic. He shifted the automatic transmission down a notch, then into the lowest gear, which slowed his acceleration, and looked for a driveway, a hedge—something that would stop the little car without killing him. Then there was a metallic snap and the car gained speed again. He whipped the gear lever back and forth, trying to find park or reverse or any gear that would slow him down, but the transmission was now useless, and Danny knew the only thing that would stop the car was a solid object.
The most inviting solid object available, because it was moving in the same direction, was the sports car that had recently passed him, and Danny did something wholly unnatural: he aimed at the car’s rear bumper, hoping a same-direction collision would at least slow him down.
The driver of the sports car, however, interpreted the situation differently. Glancing into his rearview mirror and seeing Danny’s convertible closing on him from behind, he inferred an angry motorist who had been cut off and who now wanted to catch up. The sports-car driver sped up, relishing the race.
“What are you doing, you idiot?” Danny said aloud as he saw the little car accelerate. It was a good time to remember that, as usual, he had not fastened his seat belt. He struggled with it and gratefully heard it snap home.
Traffic was light at this time of day—at least, as light as it got—and the two cars had the upper part of Beverly Glen momentarily to themselves. Danny had driven this road hundreds of times over the years, and he knew every bend; but he was unused to the bends coming at him so quickly. He tried to think ahead, and he realized that at the bottom of this hill was Sunset Boulevard, if he managed to get that far. After that there was a dogleg left, then UCLA and hundreds of students on foot. His heart sank. If he couldn’t find a way to stop the car before Sunset he was going to have to do something noble.
The sports-car driver now figured he had a maniac on his hands. He was doing better than seventy down this mountain, and the guy was still right on his bumper. He took his hands off the wheel for a moment and raised them in surrender, then started to brake. For his trouble, he got a firm clout from behind. Terrified now, the driver grabbed the wheel and tried to get out of the maniac’s way. He cut too sharply to the left, and his car went into a flat spin.
Danny passed the sports car, which was momentarily pointed in the opposite direction, and glimpsed the car briefly in his rearview mirror as it completed a turn of approximately seven hundred and twenty degrees, then stopped. “Lucky bastard,” he said aloud. “If I had that kind of suspension I’d try that, too.” The good news was that his collision with the little car had taken a good fifteen miles an hour off his speed, but that was now building again. Suddenly Danny knew what he was going to do. There was traffic coming up the mountain now, but no car in front of him for another mile. At the end of that mile, he remembered, was a driveway that left Beverly Glen at a slight angle, and at the bottom of the driveway was something that might possibly save his life.
He tried not to look to his right, because the drop-off was precipitous, and at the bottom were dozens of houses, tightly packed. If he went off the road to his right, he would have a short flight and end up in somebody’s living room, hamburger. On his left was a steep bank going up and many utility poles. Danny rounded a curve to his right doing eighty or so, and left it in a four-wheel drift that took him to the opposite side of the road before he could correct. Coming up the hill was a Mack truck, towing God knew what, and he managed to miss it by a hair. Where the hell was that driveway?
He knew the people who lived there, and it was tough enough not to miss it at normal speeds; at his present velocity he had a millisecond to make the entrance, and he felt relief when he saw the striped mailbox that marked it. He braced himself for the swerve, and to his surprise, made it; he was off Beverly Glen now, and hurtling down two hundred yards of gravel driveway that was about to turn sharply to the right, a turn he had no intention of trying to make. Dead ahead, he saw his salvation; then, in a heart-stopping moment, he saw a flash of blue water. He had forgotten that between him and his objective lay a lap pool.
Danny now had no choice; he was committed. Out of a crazed curiosity, Danny looked at the speedometer: eighty-five miles an hour. He pointed the car straight ahead and, at the bend in the driveway, he and the convertible left the ground. The driveway’s edge fell away to an embankment, at the bottom of which lay the pool. The car flew straight over the pool, and Danny caught a glimpse of an astonished woman lying on a chaise to his left, talking on a cordless phone. “Afternoon, Agnes,” he murmured. Amazingly, the car maintained its directional stability, and when it struck the ground it did so on all four wheels. Danny saw a glorious sight rushing at him.
The car struck the tennis court fence and carried it down the court, making a horrible noise. Next it hit the net; the steel wire supporting it snapped like a thread, and car, fence, and steel poles met the fence at the opposite end of the court. The thoroughly mangled car was netted like a trout.
Danny didn’t see anything after the first fence, because the airbag was in his face. When the thing collapsed, he struggled to take a breath and then fainted. His last conscious thought was to wonder why the airbag hadn’t worked when he struck the sports car, and to thank heaven it hadn’t.
CHAPTER
31
When Larsen got back to his office, another piece of paper he had requested was on his desk. He took off his coat and bought a cup of bad coffee from the machine in the hall before he sat down and picked up the document—the arrest record of one Myron Aaron Moscowitz. He had requested it that morning, and after his interview with the builder, he was surprised there was such a record.
In October 1968, Moscowitz had been charged with possession of less than one ounce of marijuana and resisting arrest. Disposition: a $1,000 fine and thirty days on the county farm. They were tough on potheads in the sixties, he reflected. “Resisting arrest” probably meant he had given the cop some lip and had gotten his ear cuffed for it. He wondered what the experience had done to Moscowitz’s opinion of policemen, and if that opinion might have colored the information he had given to Larsen that day.
Larsen thought about it. The builder had been polite, affable, but had he detected something else? Come to think of it, apart from the list of subcontractors, which Larsen had insisted on, Moscowitz had given him zip. Couldn’t remember what kinds of cars people drove. He thought of half a dozen people he knew, and he could remember exactly what each of them drove. Why couldn’t Moscowitz?
He looked at the arrest record; a full set of fingerprints was attached. He picked up the phone. “Hi, it’s Larsen; could you bring me that print you picked up at the Millman guest house? I’d like you to compare it to a set I’ve got here.”
He stared at the whorls of Mike Moscowitz’s fingerprints and thought about his peculiarly unsatisfying conversation with the man.
The fingerprint man showed up a minute later. “Whatcha got?”
Larsen handed him Moscowitz’s record. “Check your print against this set,” he said.
The fingerprint man held up a card with a single print on it and looked back and forth from card to card. “You got a loupe?”
“Will a magnifying glass do?”
“Sure.”
“No sleuth should be without a magnifying glass,” Larsen said, rummaging in a desk drawer. “Here.” He handed it over.
The fingerprint man placed the two cards on Larsen’s desk, moved the desk lamp over them, and scrutinized first one, then the other through the magnifying glass.
“Close, but no cigar.”
“What?”
“At first glance I thought they might match, but not
under the glass. These are from two different guys.”
Larsen was half relieved—he’d liked the man—and half disappointed. “Thanks,” he said, and the fingerprint man left.
After his conversation with Moscowitz, he probably wouldn’t have looked closely at the subcontractors, but the fact was he had nowhere else to go in his investigation. He spread the computer printout of van owners on his desk, got out his notebook, and started to compare the two.
Lopez Plumbing Contractors
Jimmy Lopez was the only James, but no van.
Bud Carson Framers
No van.
Gianelli Electrical
No van.
Keyhole Security
Bingo. He ran quickly through the rest of the list: no more Ford van owners among the subs. Moscowitz had said it was a popular van in the building trade, but there were only two Ford vans in a dozen outfits, if you included Moscowitz’s.
Keyhole Security’s address was a P.O. box number, and he wasn’t about to start dealing with the post office to get an address. He tried the phone book; there in the Yellow Pages was Keyhole, in Santa Monica. Everybody was in Santa Monica today.
He found a government directory and the right phone number. “Afternoon, this is Detective Larsen, Beverly Hills PD. I need a copy of the business license of Keyhole Security.” He gave the address.
“Let me check my index,” the woman said, and he heard her keyboard clicking. “Right. I’ll print it out and mail it to you today.”
“Can you fax it, please?” He gave her the number. “And as soon as possible?”
“Sure, baby,” she said, and hung up.
To his surprise, the fax machine rang two minutes later. He was waiting for the license as it came out of the machine, and he began reading it on the way back to his office.