The Detective & The Pipe Girl: A Mystery

by Michael Craven

  “I like that,” I said aloud.

  I walked over to the door and was about to ring the bell or knock with the massive knocker, when the door swung open. Mountcastle, again, at the ready.

  I sighed.

  “Right on time,” he said.

  I didn’t respond.

  “Please come in.”

  He scooted back and away and I entered. I stood in the foyer, looking around. In terms of design, floor plan, it was similar to some other nice houses I’d been in. But the way it was decorated, put together, was unlike any house I’d ever seen. I looked to the left, the living room I thought, or one of the living rooms. My eyes found the couch. It was immense. Eight or ten people could sit on it side by side. It was bright blue. The floor it sat on was wood, but painted shiny black. A bright white rug covered most of the floor. Other pieces of furniture sat around randomly almost. I was taking it all in quickly, scanning the room. A hammock, an actual hammock, some big colorful pillows on the floor, a painting that I think was a Manet.

  And no, not a Monet, a Manet. Strange and seductive.

  Mountcastle said, “Mr. Vonz is in his writing studio. This way please.”

  I followed Mountcastle through the house. Various rooms that most houses have, but all made explosive by the Vonz touch. Rooms with beauty and tension. A dining room. A sitting room. A library. The library had dark walls, leather couches, surprisingly things you’d expect. But right in the center of the big wall across from the books was a very large painting of an aristocrat on a horse. It seemed too normal for the Vonz estate. But after a few seconds of looking at the picture, I noticed that the horse had a very human face and the man had a very horselike face. The painting came alive suddenly, it almost seemed to move and breathe.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  We then went through a section of the kitchen and out a back door. And then, through a beautiful back courtyard full of foliage and flowers, a pool and a tennis court sitting in a chunk of the estate off to the left. See? There they were. A perfectly groomed California hardcourt, and a shimmering, inviting pool. Big, but still elegant.

  We arrived at a relatively modest back house. Mountcastle stopped, gave me that baby-faced expectant smile, and motioned for me to head in.

  “Walk right in, John. No need to knock. He knows you’re here.”

  I looked at Mountcastle. The man-child. Who was this guy? How old was he? What kind of twisted shit was he into? Did he have a little room upstairs where he skipped around giggling and playing and prancing and throwing things in the air? Was he truly twisted, like actual mental issues that could lead to violence? Who knows, man? Who knows? I turned and knocked on the door.

  “No need to knock. Just go in,” Mountcastle said, smiling, eyebrows arched up.

  So I did.

  3

  There he was. Arthur Vonz. The great Arthur Vonz. The artist. The auteur. Winner of a zillion Academy Awards. He looked, believe it or not, younger in person. He was sitting behind his desk, holding a pencil. He was a longhand guy. Old school. Pencil, paper, and his ideas. His office, his little back house, was quite small. Desk, two chairs in front of it, big comfortable chair over in one corner. But it was still handled in the same way as the rest of his house. Wild color combinations. Unusual choices. One wall was a painting. It didn’t have a painting on it, it was a painting. A massive Galapagos turtle looking right at you and sort of smiling.

  Shit, I’ll take it over that man-horse thing any day.

  Vonz stood up. About six-one. Like me. He stuck out his hand.

  He said, “John Darvelle. Nice to meet you.”

  “You too.”

  We shook.

  “Have a seat.”

  I did.

  “Thanks for coming to me. I mean driving over. Do most people come to your office when they hire you?”

  “It depends.”

  “On what?”

  “I really don’t know.”

  He thought for a long second.

  “So,” he said. “My story.”

  I nodded, and unlike a lot of times, I was actually interested. Thing is, I can usually guess the general idea of what someone wants from me. I have a knack for it. Some guy walks in, I think: Wants to know if his wife is cheating. Some other guy walks in, I think: Corporate problem. Wants the competition looked into in one way or another. You get the idea. I know: Exciting cases. But, whatever, my point is, I’m usually in the ballpark, oftentimes right on the money. But right now? No idea. Could be anything. Stalker. Woman on the side. Rival. I didn’t have an innate sense.

  Vonz said, “Two years ago, I had an affair.”

  I looked at him. No acknowledgment, no judgment, I just looked at him.

  “It was brief. And, I’m going to tell you this because it’s relevant . . .”

  He took a deep breath, looked away to the left, then looked back at me. “It was electric.”

  This guy was sucking me into his story.

  He continued. “Most people think everyone in Hollywood has lots of affairs. Why? Because lots of people, like me, have plenty of opportunities. What is it that Chris Rock says?”

  “You’re only as faithful as your options.”

  He laughed. “It’s a good line.”

  “It is,” I said.

  “And me? Well, I’m a director. So it’s a bit of a double whammy. There is a tangible connection, a tangible reality, to what a tryst with me might get someone.”

  I nodded. Not because he was saying anything particularly insightful. More to let him know I was listening. Following along. But I was thinking: I’m glad he didn’t patronize me by asking me, or confirming, that I knew what he did or who he was. He was respecting his audience’s intelligence. That appeared to be his way.

  “But until the affair I just mentioned, I was never unfaithful. I never took any of the opportunities I was given. In fact, I began to relish almost in not taking them. It gave me a certain pride, but more so, a certain energy, to not do what I knew I could do. And to not do what . . .”

  “Everyone in the world expected you to do.”

  He looked dead at me. “Exactly.” And then, “Are you married, John?”

  “No.”

  He left it at that. I had been married. Once, for six months. But he didn’t need to know that. My guess is he wanted to have a quick bonding session of the marriage-is-hard-no-matter-what-it’s-easy-to-get-tempted variety.

  “Well,” he said. “Back to the story. One day, about two years ago, my ability to resist the temptation changed—in an instant. When I met Suzanne.”

  He paused. Then continued, “Suzanne Neal.”

  I said, “Suzanne Neal.”

  He looked at me, puzzled, but with a wry, maybe even hopeful, expression. “Do you know her?”

  “No. But I like her name. Suzanne Neal. I like the way it sounds.”

  “I do too.”

  “Both the way it sounds when you say it, and the image it creates. She sounds attractive.”

  Vonz, very matter-of-fact, said, “She is.”

  And then he sat there. Still. Staring into some kind of void. Like he was on pause.

  I said, “So, you broke your streak, and had an affair with her.”

  It was a statement, not a question.

  “Yes,” he said, back on play. “I met her on one of my sets. She was an extra on a movie I did called Undertow.”

  “I liked it a lot.”

  “Really? That one some people got and some people didn’t.”

  “I got it. It was a typical adventure movie, B-movie type plot, B-movie archetypal characters. Only the movie was made really, really well. With all these sophisticated touches. With all these things that you typically don’t see in a B-movie. That was the idea, I’d bet. That was the concept. To take a genre-type story and infuse it with really artistic direction.”

  “That’s right. That was the idea. That’s exactly right.”

  “But Starlight. That to me is your best movie.”


  “Thank you. That’s one of my favorites too. It’s one of the only movies I’ve made, maybe the only movie I’ve made, where I made exactly what I set out to make. It’s not to say that I don’t like, or even love, some of my other films. It’s just that they didn’t turn out quite how I envisioned they would. Except for Starlight. That one did.”

  Vonz looked out the window, again to his left, for a second. Thinking. Maybe contemplating that notion. Or maybe thinking about what he was going to have for lunch. I really didn’t know.

  He looked back at me.

  I said, “Suzanne Neal.”

  “Yeah. It happened out of nowhere. Toward the end of the filming of Undertow I spotted her, we chatted, she charmed me, I took her to the Bahamas.”

  I thought: Replace the Bahamas with a Motel 6 next to the freeway and it’s just like any other affair.

  Vonz continued. “Like I said, it was electric. Primal, even. It was like the manifestation of all the affairs I had never had wrapped up into one. It was an exorcism to a certain extent. Subconsciously, I was mad at myself for getting myself into a position where women came with the snap of a finger—and then never doing anything about it. Inside my body, my biology, quite frankly, was pissed off at me. I had turned down all these opportunities and, as I said, part of me, my conscious mind, was energized by that. But another part of me, my id, was depressed and angry about it. I had rejected and suppressed millions of years of evolution. But then . . . Suzanne. I couldn’t resist. The dam broke. I let it all out.”

  Okay, I thought. He’s intellectualizing his decision, his cheating. A redneck, barefoot in front of a 7–Eleven, would have just said, “I was horny, bro.” But Vonz was indeed in a unique situation. The wandering-eye scenario was a bit different for him. It’s not everyone who has the most beautiful women in Hollywood proposition him.

  “So,” I said. “It ended?”

  “Yes. My wife caught me. Gina. That’s her name. Gina caught me.”

  He shot a look out the window, this time the window behind him, behind his desk. “My wife who isn’t here, by the way.” He looked back to me. “So, she caught me. I was willing to deal with the consequences. Because I didn’t regret my decision. I believed I had to see what it would be like to follow my primal urges rather than suppress them. And it was great—as I said. It really was. But the truth is, the electricity of the sex abated. As it always does. And feeling that, knowing it for sure, comforted me. Made me happy that I had a wife I loved. A wife I wanted to stay with. And, as it turned out, a wife who was willing to forgive me. She never threatened to leave. She just wanted me to end it. So I did. But here’s the thing. Suzanne and I kept in touch. I cared about her. I had connected with her, and I cared about her. Gina, of course, didn’t know about this. But . . . I liked Suzanne. And I liked knowing what she was up to, giving her advice, helping her if I could. After all, she had helped me. So over the course of the last year or so, I introduced Suzanne to some industry people, helped her get a new agent, chatted with her from time to time. Just loosely kept an eye on her. Stayed in touch.”

  “And now you haven’t heard from her in a while?”

  Vonz didn’t exactly answer. He kept talking, but he didn’t exactly answer. “John. Do you believe in karma, signs, signals from the universe?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Me too. And . . . I don’t know, something feels off to me. Suzanne and I have had periods where we didn’t talk much. And, yes, right now is one of them. I haven’t heard from her in a while. And the number I had for her stopped working recently. But for some reason I feel like something’s up. I don’t know. I’m worried. I want to know that she’s okay.”

  Or maybe, I thought, who she’s dating.

  “And you don’t want anyone to know you’re looking,” I said.

  “That’s right. I don’t want my wife to know. I don’t want my assistant Paul to know. They think you are here to look into a little problem I’m having at my production company.”

  “Paul told me he didn’t know why I was here.”

  “He lied.”

  I thought: Or you did. One of the two.

  I said, “Paul. Interesting dude.”

  Vonz chuckled. “Yes. Well, Paul’s been with us a long time. Gina didn’t think it would be wise for me to have a beautiful young female assistant. This was before I ever strayed from my marriage—before she even had an inkling of suspicion. Just a smart wife being a smart wife. Paul’s the son of an old friend of Gina’s. He needed a job. Let’s face it, he’s not the type of guy who’s going to be running a boardroom in New York. He’s more the type who still reads comic books and lives at home with his parents. So I hired him, at first as a favor. But turns out he’s a great assistant. Best I’ve ever had.”

  I nodded and moved on. “I charge seventy-five an hour, plus expenses, which I document. An example of an expense would be: Say I’m following someone and he or she goes to a Dodgers game. I would expense my ticket. Some examples of things that aren’t expenses: the gas in my car, the food I eat while on the case, my cell phone bill. It’s very rare that clients dispute my expenses. Almost never. I invoice you when I’m finished with the job. On the invoice, as far as pertinent information goes, it will say your name, a number I assign to the case, and the amount you owe. No case details on the invoice itself. You can terminate the relationship any time you want. And so can I.”

  He nodded. “Great. Thank you for being clear. Let’s do it.”

  “All right,” I said. “What can you tell me about Suzanne? You have a number, an address, any family friends I can talk to? Anywhere she hangs out? A picture?”

  He turned to his side, opened a drawer, and carefully pulled out a picture. He handed it to me and I looked at it.

  Yes, a beautiful girl. Long blond hair, bluish-green eyes, bright red lipstick. She was on a balcony, high up, the sky behind her, the ground below her. She was looking right at the camera, smiling. She didn’t appear to be posing. She didn’t appear to have a pose that she had perfected. She looked natural. Now, I’m not being judgmental here. I’m being objective. She was a beautiful woman. But I didn’t get a visceral reaction from the photo. I didn’t think: Oh yes, I see why you risked your entire marriage on this one. She looked, in this picture anyway, like a pretty California blonde. Sort of typical. Like you see, oh, twenty to thirty times a day in L.A.

  “You take this?”

  “Yeah,” Vonz said. “Keep it. And I’ve got the old phone number, if that helps. I’ve also got the name of a bar where she took me a couple times. The Prince. In Koreatown. And let me give you my number too, my cell.”

  I pulled out a pad, old-school, small, reporter-style spiral. And a pen. Bic, felt tip. I wrote it all down.

  As a detective you need to write things down. That’s pretty obvious. But I write things down, thoughts that occur to me, ideas that pop into my head, that have nothing to do with cases. I didn’t always do this. But now that I do, I could never go back. Because oftentimes a thought comes to you out of nowhere. Sometimes it’s useful to your life, sometimes it’s a moment of clarity about something you’ve been mulling over, sometimes it’s just a notion that you don’t want to let go of. And if you don’t write it down, something incredible can happen. It can disappear. Not for a moment, but forever. Like it was never there in the first place. These thoughts appear to you without warning, and if you don’t zero in on them, in fact make them physically real by writing them down, they can vanish like a punishment. And it’s a painful punishment because these thoughts, sometimes your most original and insightful, seem like they are retrievable. Like they will reappear if you think hard enough. But they won’t. They’re gone. And they’re the worst kind of gone. Because they are just out of reach.

  “What about an address?” I said. “Where does she live?”

  Vonz laughed. “I don’t know. She always just said Santa Monica. When we began our affair, I got a suite at the Four Seasons.”

&
nbsp; I held up the picture.

  “Right,” he said. “I took it on the balcony. We’d meet there. Or she’d already be there. I’d come home at night, of course. Sometimes she’d stay, sometimes she’d leave. It was our secret little place.”

  I looked at the picture again. Yeah, the earth behind and below Suzanne looked to be the area just west of Doheny, just west of the Beverly Hills Four Seasons.

  Vonz said, “So, how long have you been a detective?”

  “Eleven years.”

  “How do you become a detective?”

  “You know, I think there are lots of ways. There are companies out there that employ sometimes hundreds of detectives, and they get people all sorts of ways. Ex-cops, ex-military, people who think they have an innate sense for it. And then, they just train them. Or sometimes people just hang a shingle, put an ad in the paper, and give it a shot. Me? I did a little of both. Went and worked at a big agency here in L.A. Six months later, I resigned and started my own agency. It took a long, long time before I really got it going. But if you stick with something, if you commit to actually doing the thing you say you want to do, it eventually starts to flow.”

  “Yeah. That’s how I became a filmmaker. By just diving in. I didn’t work in the studio system. I didn’t work as a TV director. I just made indie films. It took a lot of work. But more so, time. Things go much slower at first. It could take years just to get barely enough money to start. But eventually, things started to flow.”

  I nodded. “I’m going to go look for Suzanne Neal.”

  4

  All right, maybe he was telling me the truth, or some of the truth. And maybe not. I wasn’t really sure. Maybe he’s still involved with her, and she’s avoiding him. That was my first thought. Or maybe she simply got a new phone and now her old one doesn’t work and it’s got his mind racing. You know? Is she sick of me? Is she seeing someone else? Am I not good enough?

  Believe it or not, people who are in their sixties and have won Oscars and have given speeches to a billion people still have the same little fears and vulnerabilities we all had on the goddamn playground. It’s amazing. Helps me in my business quite a bit. Not just in getting cases—paranoid cat walks in my office and pays me to follow his girlfriend. But in trying to figure out why somebody might have done something. Go back to the playground, John. That’s what I tell myself sometimes. Go back to the simple, pure emotions we felt as children. That’s where a lot of motives live.