Charley did not arrive at Stephanie’s until ten in the morning. He had just driven through the open gate and parked when the front door of the house flew open and Eve came running out, only to stop dead when she saw who it was. Recovering immediately, she smiled and came over to the car as he got out.
“Charley!” she said. “God, I’m glad you’re here.”
Confused by then, Charley just stood there with his hands hanging at his sides as she gave him a gingerly kiss on the cheek.
“I thought you were Brian,” she said.
“I’m sorry to disappoint you.”
“Oh, you haven’t—really. But I can’t imagine you’re very happy to see me again. How on earth did you find us?”
“Dumb luck, mostly. You say Brian isn’t here?”
It was if he’d jerked her awake. Suddenly she looked fearful and worried. “No, he certainly isn’t. And I’m afraid he’s gone off the deep end again, Charley. When I heard your car, I thought maybe he’d changed his mind and come back.”
“From where? Why? What’s he done?”
She shook her head despondently, her eyes suddenly moist. “Oh, it’s crazy. I’m not even sure. I just got up. Come on in. Stephanie—the lady of the house—she’s in a state of shock. Her daughter Terry, who’s only eighteen—Brian took her with him. And they took both cars for some reason.”
Charley followed her into the house. She was wearing a black T-shirt and khaki shorts and did indeed look as if she’d just gotten out of bed. Her hair was a mess, a lush, dark brown tangle, and she wore no lipstick or eyeliner. Still, she somehow managed to look as beautiful as ever.
“Stephanie’s downstairs and at the other end,” she said, leading the way though the house, which was typical California Spanish, but older than most, Charley judged, better built than the contemporary staple-gun variety.
As they walked, Eve looked back at him. “What really pisses me is that I was planning to leave today,” she said. “I was going to take the money you gave him and send it back. But now you’ll never know. You’ll never be sure.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
Again she looked back, this time with a rueful smile. “I imagine you would.”
“About Brian,” he said. “What he’s up to? Tell me what you know.”
“Well, the people making the movie about Kim Sanders—Wide World Studios—the studio head lives in Bel Air. With a telescope, you can see his house from here. Stephanie says he’s got a world-class art collection and that right now Brian’s on his way there to destroy it.”
Charley groaned. “Jesus. Won’t he ever quit?”
“I’m afraid not.”
Charley followed Eve down a hallway that ran past a small study and a bedroom with glass doors on the other side, through which he could see a patio and swimming pool. At the end of the hallway, they entered a large bedroom that looked, like its king-size bed, unmade, lived in. An unhealthy-looking woman with blond hair sat sprawled in an easy chair, dabbing at her swollen eyes with a wadded handkerchief. On the lamp table next to her there was an open champagne bottle, an empty glass, cigarettes, and an ashtray.
Eve introduced Charley to her and the woman nodded vaguely, as if she weren’t quite sure what was going on.
“My baby,” she said. “The son of a bitch has taken my baby with him, and she’s gonna wind up in prison right along with him.”
“You sure about what he’s doing?” Charley asked. “The art collection?”
Stephanie nodded. “I heard them leave about a half hour ago. And when I got up, I found this under my door.” She handed Charley a sheet of lined yellow paper.
Unfolding it, he read:
Stephanie,
Please don’t worry about me. It has to be done, what we’re doing. I’m in Brian’s hands, so I’ll be all right. I know I will. If all goes well, we’ll be home soon.
Love,
Terry
Charley looked at Eve. “You seen this yet?”
She took the note from him. “No, I’m afraid not.”
“I meant to show it to you,” Stephanie told her. “Really, I was going to—I just don’t know what I’m doing. I’m so scared. My baby’s gonna wind up in prison because of him—I just know she will.”
Charley pulled a coffee table around and sat down in front of her. “Stephanie, listen, maybe we can stop him. Maybe it’s not too late.”
“I wish I could believe that.” She reached for the champagne bottle, then set it back down. Her hands were shaking noticeably.
Eve meanwhile had read Terry’s note. “Why would he take her with him? I don’t get it?”
“Maybe he needed both cars,” Charley said. “But first, Stephanie, how do you know where he’s headed? I mean, this guy’s art collection?”
“I guess in a way I’m to blame,” she said, reaching down and picking up a newspaper supplement. “For some reason I save all these Calendars, the magazine section of the Sunday Times. A month ago they ran this story on Kevin Greenwalt, the new president at Wide World Studios.” She opened the supplement and showed them the article. “His old man was a mogul at Universal. He’s the one who started the collection. And now the kid carries on with it. Some of the paintings are really valuable. And I guess Brian figures that since they’re out to ruin his reputation, it’s only fair to ruin something of theirs. Get even, you know? Send them a message.”
“Greenwalt’s place—it’s the one the telescope’s trained on, isn’t it?” Eve said.
Stephanie nodded. “I was kidding with Brian about it only yesterday. I never dreamed he’d just go right ahead and do it.” Unsuccessfully, she tried to snap her fingers. “Just like that.”
Though Charley wondered what telescope they were talking about, he didn’t take the time to find out. “Do you have any guns here?” he asked. “Do you know if Brian took any with him?”
Stephanie shrugged. “There’s my second husband’s gun case in the game room. But I don’t know if Brian took any. I didn’t think to look.”
Charley got up. “We’ll look on the way out. And maybe you better come along,” he said. “If we do intercept them, you’re the best bet to talk your daughter out of it.”
“Oh no, I can’t go with you. I just can’t.” Dropping the magazine, Stephanie held up her hands for them to see. “Look how shaky I am. I can’t do anything. I really can’t.”
“It’s up to you.” Charley picked up the magazine and started for the door. “We’ll do what we can.”
Eve led him to the game room, where he saw that the glass case had been left open, with a key in it. Two of the rack spaces were empty.
“Oh Christ,” he said. “I don’t like the looks of this. I can’t believe he’d take guns. What’s he on—drugs again?”
Eve shook her head. “Not that I know. Come on, let’s hurry.”
She led the way out onto the patio and up the outdoor stairs, the two of them running by now. Seconds later they were in Charley’s car, roaring down the cul-de-sac to Mulholland Drive, where Eve told him to turn left. Considering what might lay ahead, for himself as well as for Eve, Charley thought the weather at least could have cooperated, served up yet another typical Southern California summer day, clear and warm, with a touch of the sea in the air. But this was a Midwest day, already in the nineties, only dry as hemp, with a Santa Ana blowing in from the desert, replacing the smog with sand and dust. There was a distant wail of fire engines, and to the west, beyond the next rise, a column of smoke angled out to sea.
“Turn left again at Beverly Glen,” Eve said. “It goes straight down to Bel Air. It’s probably four or five miles to the house.”
“You think it’ll be hard to find?”
“Afraid so. The streets are all about twenty feet long and have chic little names, not numbers. It’s all very woodsy and countrified.
“Great.”
Eve looked over at him. “You mind telling me what we’re going to do? What we can do?”
&
nbsp; “I’ve got no idea. Try to intercept him. Try to talk some sense into him. And if we can’t—I don’t know—kidnap the girl and call the police on him.”
“You think we should do that?”
“It’s high time somebody did something, wouldn’t you say?”
Instead of answering, Eve lit a cigarette. “I just can’t believe he’d go this far,” she said. “And the cunning bastard, he knew enough not to let me in on it. He knew I wouldn’t go along.”
“This Terry, what’s she like?”
“Timid and introverted. Plain. Worships Brian.”
“Enough to go this far? To risk jail?”
“So it seems.”
“What kind of cars do they have?” Charley asked.
“An old nine-eleven Porsche and an even older station wagon—the big kind for pulling trailers. Like a truck.”
“A Travel-All?”
“Yes, that’s it.”
As Charley turned onto Beverly Glen and headed down toward Bel Air, he asked Eve to glance through the Calendar article and give him the gist of it. So for a short time they drove in silence as she pored over the story. Then she summarized: “Well, as you saw, there’s this nice big picture of Greenwalt and his wife in front of a Jackson Pollock—Jesus, what that must be worth! The wife is a Bryn Mawr graduate in fine arts and, quote, ‘one of Hollywood’s rising young hostesses.’ The basic part of the collection—and the valuable part—are all abstract expressionists like Pollock and de Kooning and so on. And then he’s got a lot of rising young turks too, names you never heard of, like Willis, Hensen, Andrews…”
“Never heard of any of them.”
“No kidding.”
“Does the article say anything about the physical layout of the place? The security system?”
The paintings are all in what was once a ‘grand room’ or ballroom. And Greenwalt isn’t worried about thieves, it says. The gallery, as he calls it, is fireproof and burglarproof and most of the paintings are too huge to carry. The sculptures in the outdoor sculpture garden are so humongous you’d need a crane to move them, according to Greenwalt.”
“Anything about the household staff?”
“Not a word.”
“How about the studio and his movie work? Anything about Miss Colorado?”
Eve shook her head. “Only that he puts in a twelve-hour day and the studio has six films in various stages of production. And that Greenwalt believes he has, quote, ‘the right formula for reversing the studio’s precipitous decline over the past few years.’”
She put down the magazine and looked over at Charley. “Tell me—is your mouth dry?”
“Like chalk.”
“Good. I was afraid I was coming down with something.”
Once they got on Bel Air Road, they had to backtrack up Brown Canyon, looking for Alana Lane. As Eve said, the area was indeed woodsy and numberless, with hidden little streets shooting off like tendrils from Bel Air, which was a narrow blacktop corkscrewing up the canyon past rustic wood fences and rows of giant eucalyptus trees that stood naked, their bark hanging in genteel tatters. There also were pepper trees and Conifers of every kind, and palms too, farther back, closer to the houses, some of which were dark and wooden, not the almost uniform Spanish stucco that reigned in Beverly Hills.
Charley was beginning to wonder if they were lost—just as they came upon Alana Lane, a tendril curving down toward Beverly Glen Boulevard, but dead-ending just this side of it. At the end of the short, curving street there was a stucco wall enclosing Greenwalt’s estate. Inside, on the highest ground, was the house, huge and white, with an orange tile roof. Though the wrought-iron front gate was standing open, Charley pulled up to it and stopped.
Eve looked at him with frightened eyes. “What now? Just what the hell do we do?”
“We go in,” he said.
“And then what?”
“Christ knows.”
Throwing the car back into gear, Charley headed up the hill to a point where the driveway forked, the right lane leading to the front entrance while the left went around to the rear of the house. Continuing on the left lane, they passed Greenwalt’s “sculpture garden,” a reflecting pool surrounded by objects that looked as if they had been placed there by a gang of practical jokers. There was an actual electric chair sitting on a slab of concrete; there was a standing twelve-foot-high wooden cigar with sly, painted eyes and flippers for arms; there was a polished steel doughnut the size of an earthmover tire; and finally, weirdest of all, a black-painted shed that looked suspiciously like a ten-hole outhouse.
Charley smiled grimly. “Well, he hasn’t struck here yet. Too bad.”
“There’s the Travel-All,” Eve said.
Pulling in next to it, Charley was disappointed to find it empty. He had hoped that the girl would be in it, waiting, a “wheelman.” Then he could have either cajoled her or forced her into his car and had Eve drive her home, getting them both out of harm’s way and leaving him free to go inside and deal with Brian alone. He knew he didn’t have much chance of talking him out of his folly, but he could try at least. And failing that, he could always hit him in the head with a baseball bat, as he’d done when they were kids—by accident, hitting the catcher instead of the ball. More likely, he would simply pick up a phone and call the police.
“You better stay here,” he said to Eve, who was already out of the car.
“No, I better not,” she said.
“Right.”
Going around a high hedge, they entered the backyard, which contained a large swimming pool and cabana as well as a tennis court. At the near end of the pool there were so many umbrella tables and other pieces of outdoor furniture that the place had the look of a hotel—an empty hotel. There was no one, anywhere.
But there was a back door—standing open. Charley’s legs suddenly felt like sandbags.
“I’m gonna pee in my pants,” Eve whispered.
“Then stay behind me.”
Though she gave him a wry look, she did slip behind him as they crept inside, into a rear hallway with utility rooms on one side and a huge kitchen on the other. At the end of the hallway a skinny young woman cradling a shotgun sat back in an oak kitchen chair, facing a closed door.
“Jesus Christ, Terry!” Eve said to her. “Have you gone completely mad?”
The girl looked walleyed with terror, but that didn’t keep her from swinging the gun onto them.
“Brian!” she called. “Brian, we’ve got visitors!”
“I’m Brian’s brother,” Charley told her. “It’s not too late. Why don’t you drop the gun and go home with Eve.”
The girl looked even more terrified. “Brian!” she called.
Charley glanced at the door she was guarding. “Who’s inside?”
“Who do you think?” she said. “The servants. The slaves.”
“I want a word with my brother.” Ignoring the gun, he moved past her, following the hallway as it widened, circling the base of a curving stairway and leading around to the foyer, which was marble-floored and elegant, with an ornate fountain in the center: a pair of cuddling bronze cherubim pouring water from a pitcher in an endless stream. On each side of the foyer there was a wide doorway, one leading into a large, beautifully decorated living room and the other into the gallery, which appeared to be about sixty feet by thirty, a brilliantly lighted room with dozens of huge nonobjective paintings lining the walls and a row of sculptures—mostly “assemblages” and “found objects”—running down the center.
Going on into the gallery, Charley saw Brian moving feverishly along the wall of paintings with a can of aerosol paint, spraying on each of them a single huge, sweeping letter in metallic Day Glo pink.
THIS IS SHIT, he wrote, and moved on to the next row of paintings, yelling at Charley as he worked.
“Get your ass out of here, man! This is none of your fucking business!”
“Is it Terry’s?”
“Ask her!”
By n
ow Eve had come into the gallery too, and she appeared mesmerized by the scene before them, Brian’s great, gaudy letters imposing at least a semblance of order and meaning on what otherwise seemed at best a riot of color: a Jackson Pollock that looked as if it once had served as the floor of a pigeon coop; a de Kooning that could have been a self-portrait by an inebriated Charles Manson; a Motherwell that looked like an extreme close-up of a giant crushed crow, a monumental oozing of blackness. And there were others: a piece of awning ten feet square; a green carrot on a field of vomit; a door doodled by an idiot; and one painting that appeared to be nothing but a frame. Almost all of them by now bore Brian’s huge, slashing letters, which finally added up to a second message, the one that had brought him here:
NO MISS COLO FILM
Finished, he tossed the spray-paint can into one of the assemblages and ran past Charley and Eve into the foyer and down the hall, where he got the shotgun from Terry. He told her to go out to the wagon and wait for him. Then, charging back into the gallery, he yelled again at Charley and Eve.
“Will you two get the fuck out of here! What do you think you’re gonna do, stop me, for Christ’s sake?”
It was a reasonable question, and Charley might have laughed at himself—at the ridiculous futility of his mission—if he hadn’t been so angry and scared. He took Eve by the arm.
“He makes sense. Come on, let’s go!”
But she pulled her arm free. “No, wait.”
And she stood her ground at the gallery doorway, watching in utter fascination as Brian raised the shotgun and pointed it at the sole artwork in the huge room that didn’t appear to belong there: one of the new latex trompe l’oeil sculptures, a sitting nude so totally lifelike it had not only painted-on skin and eyes but real hair, real eyelashes, real nails. And at the moment it looked for all the world like a real person about to be killed in cold blood. Then the shot rang out and the thing exploded in a shower of plastic and hair and other junk, all of it shockingly bloodless. Moving backwards then, toward the doorway, Brian pumped four more shots into the gallery, these into paintings he had already defaced.
Charley took Eve by the arm again, half shoving her ahead of him, and this time she made no resistance, running on toward the back entrance, unaware that Charley had stopped at the door Terry had guarded, to see what condition her prisoners were in. Opening it just a crack, not ready yet to be seen and later identified, he made out one man and three women, all Asians, sitting in the dark on the floor of a large pantry, their arms, feet, and mouths duct-taped.
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