Another famous L.A. landmark is the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The bronze stars embedded in the sidewalks line both sides of Hollywood Boulevard from Gower to La Brea, and both sides of Vine from Yucca to Sunset. Over 2,400 stars are walked on by millions of people every year. I tell you this because, as I fed the meter, I happened to look down and notice that I was standing on Eddie Bracken’s star.
I looked at the northwest corner of Hollywood and Vine. No one stood there. I looked around and saw no one who seemed to be looking at me, but I knew that somewhere, someone was watching every move I made.
I left the ransom in the trunk of the car, crossed the street and leaned against a building to wait. Funny what goes through your mind at times like this. Christine Cole had died in 1967. If she’d lived she’d be almost eighty years old. Playing grandmothers. Great grandmothers. A wrinkled, gray-haired woman. And that would be the way the world pictured her. Not as the sumptuous blond who sizzled on the screen while making love to Warren Beatty in Deadly Ransom. Not the alluring young widow who’d seduced Paul Newman in Never Again. She would be just another aging actress.
But Fate had something else in mind for Christine Cole. Forever young. Forever beautiful. And I couldn’t help but wonder, given the choice, which legacy would she have wanted?
A car alarm went off. The simple kind: HONK HONK HONK. These days nobody looks twice when a car alarm goes off. They are so easily activated. Someone bumps a car. Someone accidently triggers it while locking or unlocking a car. An alarm almost never means that a car’s being stolen.
Except this time.
The HONK HONK HONK sounded familiar. I looked down the street just as my Ford Taurus squealed out of the parking space and roared down Vine. I bolted across Hollywood Boulevard—just missing a bus—and down Vine in pursuit of the car. I ran over Rex Ingram’s star, Blanche Thebom’s, Alistair Cooke’s, Bronco Billy Anderson’s, Greer Garson’s and Red Buttons’ … but it was too late. The car wove in and out of traffic, then turned a corner and disappeared. My Taurus and the two million dollars were gone.
Now I’ll be the first to admit that not all my cases turned out the way I’d hoped. There were a couple of missing person cases where I’d struck out. A few blown surveillances. Hey, nobody’s perfect. But having your car stolen with a two million dollar ransom inside is pretty fucking embarrassing.
Before I had too much time to feel sorry for myself I heard a cell phone ring. My cell phone. I answered. “Hello.”
“Missing something?” A deep voice, cocky.
“Who is this?”
“You don’t really expect me to tell you, do you? I like your car, Gideon. It’s got a lot of get up and go. Too bad it got up and went.” He laughed. Then I heard a HONK, the screech of brakes and the crash of broken glass. “Oops. You do have insurance, don’t you Gideon? I’m afraid I’ve had a little fender bender.” I could hear the engine roar and the receding sound of honking horns. “The engine still runs fine, so don’t worry.”
“Who is this?”
“You’re the detective. You tell me.”
I racked my brain trying to recognize the voice. I couldn’t. “Am I going to get my car back, or is that part of the ransom, too?”
“That depends. The ransom in the trunk?”
“In used hundred dollar bills.”
“Good man. I always thought you looked dependable.”
“So we’ve never actually met?”
“Oh, we’ve met.”
“When?”
“That’s for me to know and you to figure out.”
“What about Christine’s body?”
“She’ll be in the trunk of your car. I’ll call your office in an hour and tell you where to find it.”
“Wait. Why me?”
“Because you owe me, pal. You owe me big time.” And with that, he hung up.
Number One On
The Call Sheet
“You owe me, pal. You owe me big time.”
Christ, what a lame line, the Kidnapper thought as he dropped the cell phone into his pocket. Right out of a bad TV show. Which is where it had come from. That guest shot on Shadowchaser a couple seasons ago.
The director had loved his performance. “Brilliant, Roy. You gave me the fucking chills.”
Roy Cooper, by the way. Our Kidnapper.
Roy had modestly accepted the compliment while privately thinking he should get an Emmy for making such a bullshit line sound real, much less chilling. Nobody talks like that in real life, he thought. Well, he’d been wrong. This was real life and he’d just laid the line on that private dick. Was it life imitating art or art imitating life? Who gave a shit, as long as Gideon Kincaid was now the one with fucking chills?
Roy took the entrance ramp onto the Westbound Santa Monica Freeway. Traffic was light; it wouldn’t take long to reach LAX.
Roy had enjoyed making Shadowchaser. It had been shot on location in Vancouver, a beautiful city. They’d had that cute little redheaded production assistant, Kimberly, who he’d banged in his trailer on the last day of shooting. The Shadowchaser performance had helped get him the role in Jailbait. The movie that was supposed to make him a star. Yeah, right.
Well, now he was the one writing the script. He was the one controlling his own destiny. No more casting offices filled with the same collection of hunky unemployed actors. No more five-line roles as bad guy of the week. No more being listed number twelve or thirteen on the call sheet. He was the star of this production. And this time he would get Hollywood’s attention, once and for all.
For the second time that day Roy pulled into the LAX long-term parking lot 3. A few hours earlier he’d parked his SL550 in an isolated corner, then taken the shuttle to the terminal and a bus back to Hollywood for his three o’clock ‘appointment’ with Gideon.
There was so much to remember, Roy thought as drove through the lot. So many details to get right. The plan would only work if the cops couldn’t find you. And they had so many ways to turn a fingerprint, a cotton fiber, a footprint or a speck of dust into an ID. He’d worn surgical gloves to make the ransom notes. But he couldn’t very well wear surgical gloves driving Kincaid’s car. Talk about looking suspicious. He’d thought about leather driving gloves, but no one wears driving gloves in a boring piece of six-cylinder crap like this Taurus. He’d have to wipe down the car.
He’d worn gloves last night, so fingerprints weren’t a problem. But footprints could be. And there was always the possibility that dirt from the cemetery had clung to his clothes. So he ditched the gloves, crowbar, pants, jacket and boots in five different dumpsters, in five different parts of town. He’d also worn size-eleven boots even though he actually wore size-ten shoes. Never hurts to confuse the enemy.
Roy reached the Mercedes, parked next to it. One of his first acting jobs had been on Criminal Minds. He’d played a cophating, tobacco-chewing redneck, who ran a chop shop. In one scene he’d had to show someone how to steal a car in thirty seconds. The producers had hired a technical consultant—a reformed thief named Fingers—to teach him. Roy had learned well. During the scene, he jimmied the car, used a dent puller to disable the steering wheel lock and stuck a screwdriver into the column to jump-start the car. Elapsed time: twenty-eight seconds.
And now, once again, art was imitating life, or life imitating art or whatever. In Hollywood, Roy had jimmied open Kincaid’s Taurus, setting off the alarm. A quick tap with a dent puller had disabled the steering wheel lock; a little jabbing and twisting with a screwdriver had started the engine, shutting off the alarm.
Now he pulled the screwdriver out of the steering column, killing the engine. Fingers had also shown Roy how to break into a trunk using a screwdriver and a hammer. So, with a quick glance to make sure no one was watching, Roy popped open the trunk, found a black duffle bag, and unzipped it. Inside were stacks and stacks of hundred dollar bills.
Two million dollars. More money than Roy had ever seen. Ever dreamed about.
His fanta
sies were always about fame. Being recognized. Being idolized. Being asked for autographs. Oh, mansions, cars, yachts and private jets were in there somewhere. But they were the icing on the cake. It was the head-turning, people-whispering, finger-pointing kind of fame he relished.
Still, two million bucks was nice. Especially since it was just the beginning.
Roy opened the Mercedes’ trunk. Inside was a burlap bag full of bones. Roy swapped the bag of money for the bag of bones, just like he promised. Well, almost like he promised.
He hoped that shitbag Gideon Kincaid liked surprises. This was going to be the first of many.
Who Hates You Baby?
As far as I knew there was only one person who really hated me. My ex-wife. And the feeling was mutual. Oh, I’ve pissed a lot of people off during my thirteen years as a cop and six as a PI. Nobody likes getting arrested, and as a private eye I’ve nailed people for everything from insurance fraud to adultery. But usually when you catch someone doing something wrong, they know it’s wrong. They don’t hate you for catching them; they hate getting caught. It’s not personal.
Well, with our Kidnapper it sounded personal. “You owe me, pal. You owe me big time.” Who the hell was it?
I called Hillary, asked her to pick me up, then paced along Hollywood and Vine making a possible enemies list.
Robbie Lipman. I accidently hit him in the face with a BB gun when we were twelve and knocked out all his teeth. Boy was he mad. But that was twenty-eight years ago, and now he’s a dentist making half a mil a year. Hell, he should be grateful. I’m the one who got him interested in dentistry in the first place.
Sister Margaret Russo. She tried to run me over in the parish bus after I arrested her for playing Pull the Pokey with boys in her second grade class. But she’s still locked up in the Sybil Brand Institute, teaching bull dykes how to conjugate Latin verbs.
Hillary drove up in her blue Prius. “This wouldn’t have happened if you let me work in the field with you,” she said.
“If you’d been here you would have done something stupid like chase him.”
“And caught and, like, captured him. Case closed.”
“Or he might’ve gotten away, kept the money and the body.”
“He might anyway.”
“Too true.” I told Hillary about the phone call and the cryptic, ‘You owe me, pal.’ “So,” I asked. “Who hates me?”
“Stacy.”
“Besides my ex-wife.”
“I’ve been ticked off at you a couple of times.”
“You don’t count.”
“What’d his voice sound like?”
“Male. Deep. No real accent.”
“Maybe he, like, disguised it.”
“That’s hard to do without it sounding phony. This guy sounded natural.”
Hillary sucked on her lower lip as she thought about it. God she was cute when she did that. “Eli Cochran?”
Eli Cochran. He was an artist. He painted feet, mostly, but he was very good. And successful. His toes were hanging all over the country. One day his wife woke up and he was gone. Along with the bank accounts and a gorgeous USC co-ed. His wife wanted me to find him. I did. Living on a houseboat near Seattle. I dutifully told the wife, expecting her to send a divorce lawyer. She sent a hood with a hammer, who crushed Eli’s hands. Eli didn’t blame the hood or the wife. He blamed me. He blamed me so much he threw a Molotov cocktail through my office window. Hillary grabbed the fire extinguisher while I chased him down in the parking lot. He pleaded temporary insanity and was sentenced to the State Mental Facility at Camarillo.
“No, Eli’s still locked up.” Suddenly something caught my eye. I couldn’t believe it! “Stop the car,” I shouted.
Hillary swerved to the curb and slammed on the brakes.
“What? You see your car?”
“No.” I pointed. “Look.” She followed my gaze to a bus stop. Sitting on the bench was a middle-aged woman reading a paperback book. My paperback book, Rear Entry.
Hillary smiled. “Cool ...”
The woman was about halfway through. Probably at the part when the detective, Digby Magee, discovers his beautiful client is actually a porn star. “Think she likes it?”
“She looks positively riveted.”
I had this fantasy: I’d see someone reading my book and sit down next to them. I’d look over and ask if they liked the book. The answer, of course, was that they loved it. Then the reader would look at me, flip to the back cover, see the author’s picture and realize I wrote the book. I would sign the book and leave, basking in their praise.
Dare I? What the hell. I opened the door. “I’ll be right back.”
As I sat next to the woman I noticed she was on page 156. Digby has just slept with his beautiful client for the first time. I’ve been with a few women in my time, and I’m far from a prude, but I’ve got to tell you, writing a sex scene is weird. You feel like you’re making love with the whole world watching. But I went for it and got pretty specific. Anyway, as she turned the page, I asked, “I’ve seen that book around. Any good?”
The bus came. The woman stood, looked at me. She cocked her head, recognizing me, unable to figure out from where. Then it hit her. She turned the book over, looked at the picture, then at me. “You wrote this?”
I was smiling from ear to ear. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Pervert!” She threw the book at me and got onto the bus.
That’s why they call them fantasies.
Puzzle Pieces
As promised, the kidnapper/car thief called my office an hour after he stole my car. “Your car’s at LAX. Long term parking lot 3.”
“Are the bones in the trunk?”
“Open it and find out.” He sounded final, like he was going to hang up. I eyed the Sony tape recorder I’d hooked up to the phone, hoping to record enough of his voice to jar my memory.
“Wait. Don’t hang up yet. At least give me a clue who you are.”
“I am anyone.” The line went dead.
“I am anyone,” I repeated, rewinding the tape. “What the fuck does that mean?”
“It means he’s, like, very metaphysical,” Hillary said. “Or very confused.”
I replayed the tape so Hillary could listen. “Recognize the voice?” I asked.
“No.”
“Me neither,” Hillary said. “But he sounds all full of himself. Superior, like.”
I rewound the tape to the end of the call.
“I am anyone.”
“Listen to that,” I said. “Hear the conviction in his voice? The pride? It’s not an idle statement. It definitely means something. I just don’t know what ...”
I found my Taurus parked in lot 3. The front bumper was crushed, both headlights broken. A 757 roared above us as Hillary asked, “You think this means he got on a plane?”
“I think it means he’s a lousy driver.”
There were scratches on the driver’s side door where he’d obviously used a jimmy to get in. The steering column was pried open and the trunk lock had been punched out. The car was dusty; I hadn’t washed it in a few weeks, so I could clearly see the areas where he’d wiped away his prints. This guy wasn’t making any mistakes.
I opened the trunk. The duffle bag was gone, replaced with a smaller burlap bag. I unzipped it enough to see what was inside—bones.
“The knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone. The thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone ...”
Alex Snyder stood over Christine Cole’s bones, now spread out on a worktable in his mortuary lab. In another corner of the lab, a mortician was working on the naked body of an old man.
“I know the song,” I said. “Want me to sing along?”
“No. But the song is anatomically correct. Unlike these bones.”
“What?”
“We’ve got three femurs. Only one scapula and no humerus. These aren’t Christine’s bones. Some of them aren’t even human. Dog or monkey, I think. And the jewelry’s missing.”<
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That son of a bitch, I thought. “That son of a bitch,” I said.
“Why’d he switch the bones?”
“To blackmail you again,” I said. “Or the Cole estate. Or he may just plan to sell the bones on the Internet to the highest bidder. A lot of movie nuts would pay a fortune for one of Christine Cole’s bones.”
Something was working in the back of my mind. Why did all this sound so familiar to me?
“A lifetime spent in the eternal care business and I’m going to be remembered as the moron who lost Christine Cole.” In the seven hours I’d known Alex Snyder, I’d seen him go from a grandfather oozing warmth and compassion to a gun-wielding maniac to his current incarnation—a hopeless man on the brink of despair. He crossed to a desk, picked up a phone. “Do you happen to know the number of the police?”
Then it hit me. “Wait,” I said. “Give me a couple more days. There may be a way to get the body back.”
“Really. How?”
“Find the kidnapper.”
“You know who it is?”
“No. But I think I just figured out where to start looking.”
The Plot Thickens
I love bookstores. Picking up a new book fires my imagination. Inside could be adventure, suspense, humor, passion—or the key to catching a kidnapper.
I read a lot of books. Mostly mysteries. And I read even more book jackets, trying to decide what to buy. Somewhere, sometime, in the last few months, I vaguely remembered reading a book jacket that had something to do with Christine Cole and kidnapping.
So I drove to the Barnes and Noble just a few miles away and parked myself in front of the mystery section. There was a whole wall of mysteries, hundreds of them. I’d decided to start my search in the A’s and work my way toward Z. A little predicable, I know, but also logical. But first I had to make a little detour, to the K’s. Kemelman, Kemprecos, Kijewski ... Kincaid. By God, there it was, Rear Entry. Two copies. I took one off the shelf and looked at it. The cover art was very cool. There was a close-up of a terrified beautiful woman, and in her eyes you could see the reflection of a man standing in a doorway, a .38 in his hand.
Dead and Not So Buried Page 2