“Right. Ike said his plane was at my disposal. I’m taking him up on it. I asked the pilot to take me to Las Vegas.”
I heard him exhale. “That’s what he told me. I’ll authorize it, but if I remember correctly Ike asked you to not to waste your time with the people in Vegas.”
“I’m just following in Ike’s footsteps.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“If I remember correctly a lot of people told Ike not to waste his time with the people in Vegas. But he went there anyway. Good night, Brian. I’ll talk to you to tomorrow.”
CHAPTER 65
I had no problem reaching Arabella Leone. As soon as I finished talking to Terry I called the Camelot. The operator connected me to Leone’s office. “I’ve been expecting your call, Detective,” she said. “Where are you?”
I told her and she agreed to meet me on the plane. “Have the pilot land at Henderson Executive Airport. It’s private. We can avoid the tourist crowd.”
“Understood,” I said. “I’ll be glad to avoid whatever you’d like to avoid.”
It was 11 p.m. when she boarded the plane. I had seen photos of her, but she was even more stunning in person. Tall, dark, Mediterranean sexy. We sat in the conference area at the rear of the plane. She got right down to business.
“If you’re wondering how much I know,” she said, “it’s everything. The perv in the rabbit costume, Ronnie Lucas, the woman at Familyland, and the bus driver this afternoon. I also know about the note asking for $266 million.”
“Do you know who’s behind it all?”
“I know it’s not me, which I’m sure crossed your mind. Ike’s company and mine have been joined at the hip for the past four years and anything nasty that happens to them affects us. If I were going to try to extort money out of Lamaar I wouldn’t have invested so heavily in the partnership.”
“What about your competition?”
“Good thought. In my world, if your business is going well, the other guy tries to put you out of business. So we looked into it, and we looked deep. None of the other casinos are behind it. Not in Vegas, not Atlantic City, not even Asia. I offered a big fat informant’s fee. I guarantee you if another casino were behind this, some low-level gavoon would have picked up on it and ratted out the big guys in a heartbeat.”
“What about Lamaar’s competition?” I said. “If business is going well in Ike’s world, do you think any of the other studios would try to hurt Lamaar? Did any of them lose out to Lamaar when you were looking for a partner?”
“A few, but they’re so big, what they lost out on is chump change. The business may be full of scumbags, but that’s not how they operate. I think we have a better shot at solving this if we focus on individuals, not companies.”
“I didn’t realize we were trying to solve this, Ms. Leone.”
“I’ll give it to you straight, Detective. Ike and a lot of smart people at Lamaar have been helping us create a vacation resort that will make every other hotel in Vegas look like a ho-hum honky-tonk. We’re supposed to open the first phase of the new Camelot next month. There are billions of dollars of investor money on the line, not to mention my personal reputation. I can’t wait for the Los Angeles Police Department and the FBI to get their collective thumbs out of their asses and figure out who’s threatening my business partner. I’ll help you if I think it’s in my best interest, but don’t spend a lot of your valuable time trying to hold me back. You’ll wind up getting dragged.”
“Ike Rose didn’t want me to meet you,” I said. “Is it because he thought I couldn’t handle the abuse?”
She smiled. Beautiful white teeth framed by soft red lips and warm olive skin. “What’s the matter? You don’t like strong women?”
“Not if they get in the way of me doing my job.”
“I won’t get in your way,” she said. “If anything, I’ll help.”
“You want to help? What do you know about Ike Rose that I don’t?”
“Plenty.” She went on to tell me about Ike’s business successes and failures, his family, his friends, his enemies, the women he slept with, the women he didn’t sleep with, you name it.
I wasn’t sure if it would lead me anywhere, but it was incredibly thorough. “You seem to know a hell of a lot about Ike Rose,” I said.
“I know a hell of a lot about anyone I get involved with. It’s something I picked up from my grandfather. During his career he had more than five hundred informants on his payroll.”
“How many do you have?”
“Not nearly that many. Mostly I rely on LexisNexis, D&B, Bloomberg, and Google. I even managed to find out a few things about you.”
“Like what?”
“For one thing, my grandfather wouldn’t have liked you.”
“Because I’m a cop?”
“No, Detective. Because you’re an honest cop.”
We talked for another twenty minutes. We were both trying to solve the same problem, but there was no question that we were on two different sides. We agreed to keep the channels of communication open.
“After you solve this case,” she said, carefully choosing the right pronoun, “come back for a weekend, and I’ll comp you across the board. Private plane, deluxe suite, gourmet meals, the best shows, the complete high-roller package.”
“Thanks,” I said. “And if you solve it, I’ll pick you up in my Acura, drive you to L.A., and take you on all the rides at Familyland.”
CHAPTER 66
Team Rambo, as the executives at Lamaar are known, have their offices in a ten-story glass-and-chrome building in Burbank. It’s right up the street from NBC and a short twenty minutes from my house.
I had asked Amy to meet me there at 8:00 sharp. I got to her office at 8:52, and I was far from sharp. I braced myself for a verbal drubbing as only Amy can drub.
Instead I got a cheery welcome. “Good morning, Detective. You must be exhausted from criss-crossing the country in one day. Where’s your partner?”
As far away from you as he can get. “We decided to divide and conquer,” I said. “He’s busy conquering the FBI. You’ll have to settle for just me.”
“My pleasure, but I did want to apologize to Detective Biggs. I was pretty crazy yesterday. I practically ordered him to solve this case on the spot.”
“He might have mentioned that you were a little upset,” I said.
“If he said upset, then he’s a real gentleman. I was a total bitch. Angry, frustrated, scared. Shit, I’m still scared. I mean, I work for Lamaar, too. That makes me just as much a target as Rose Eichmann.”
“I’ll pass on your apologies to Terry,” I said.
“I’d tell him myself, but I’m headed to Vancouver for three days. But you probably know that already.” A. Cheever was a lot of things. Dumb was not one of them. She knew she had been voted off the island. And she knew that I knew.
She had on a charcoal gray skirt and a mint green cashmere sweater. She sat on the sofa and crossed her legs. She looked smashing. I sat in a chair facing her and handed her my copy of The Rabbit Factory. “Eeg gave it to me.”
“Wow, these are hard to come by. Dean Lamaar bought up every available copy when it came out. Then he let the big book distributors know that if they touched it they would never sell another Lamaar product again.”
“So much for freedom of speech. Have you read it?”
“I read everything written about the company,” she said. “Part of my job is to separate fact from fiction.”
“And which is this? Fact or fiction?”
“For starters the author’s name is a lie. Daniel Eeg wrote it. What I don’t understand is why he gave it to you. Is it supposed to help your investigation?”
“Maybe yes, maybe no. Eeg wanted me to know that Dean Lamaar isn’t the saint he’s made out to be. He’s suggesting that whoever is out to hurt the Lamaar organization hates the man as much as the company.”
“But the man is dead,” she said.
�
�That may not be enough for whoever is behind this. They may be out to destroy his legacy. So I repeat the question. How much of this is true?”
“You want truth? Dean Lamaar was a legend, a visionary in an arena where it’s not easy to break new ground—wholesome family entertainment. His name is right up there with Walt Disney or Jim Henson or Mr. Rogers. The public adored him. All true.” She clasped her hands and rested them on one knee. That was apparently all the cooperation I was going to get.
“Amy, I know your job is to hype the good stuff, but I need a little help with the shady side. Go off the record for a minute, will you?”
“You told me the other night that cops don’t go off the record,” she said. “Anything I say can and will be held against me.” She gave me a wink. God, she was sexy, even when she was being a bitch.
“I’m sorry I ever said that. You can talk off the record.”
“And you won’t hold anything against me?” she said.
I didn’t have to be a detective to read the double entendre. I had turned down her invitation for a bowl of chili and a romp on the Calvin Klein sheets, and now she was paying me back. Like I said to Frankie, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
“No, but I can really use your help,” I said.
“Alright, I’ll tell you what I know. Then maybe one day you can do something nice for me. Deal?”
“Deal.” I wasn’t sure whether or not I had just sold my soul, but after working in Hollywood for a less than a week, I felt like I fit right in.
“I didn’t know Dean Lamaar personally, but a lot of people who did thought he was a bastard. He was definitely a sexist, and probably a racist, a homophobe, and anti-Semitic. He was not the most politically correct man, but remember, he lived in an era when nobody was politically correct. The Civil Rights movement didn’t happen till the sixties. Women didn’t burn their bras till the seventies. In his defense, he was a product of his time. But even with that as an excuse, he was still a first-class shit. I’ve heard stories about how ugly it was to work here back in the old days, especially in the animation studio. Low wages, long hours, no benefits, no unions. Basically, you either worked under the terms Dean Lamaar dictated or you didn’t work at Lamaar.”
“That’s what the book says. Is it true?”
“Probably. Hollywood’s a scummy place to work now. I’m sure it was no better fifty years ago. Especially for women and other minorities. But I doubt if Lamaar Studios was much different from Universal, Fox, or any of the others.”
“Did Lamaar write an autobiography?”
“I wish he had, but no. Every writer in Hollywood offered to ghost it for him, but he refused. Said his personal life was too boring.”
“Too bad. I’ve read enough bios. I was looking for some kind of personal statement.”
“We could take a look at Deanie’s Farewell,” she said. “A few days before he died Dean Lamaar made a tape about the history of the company. That’s as personal as it gets.”
“It’s also a major coincidence, and detectives don’t believe in coincidences. Didn’t you ever think maybe it was kind of just too perfect that he made this definitive tape right before he died?”
“I love the way you think, but no. He made videotapes for all kinds of programming or events or special occasions. In this case we have an attraction at Familyland, The Homestead. It’s a replica of the house Dean grew up in, kind of a mini-museum of his personal archives. He made the tape to run on a screen at The Homestead, but it’s so boring we never used it. It would have just faded into oblivion, but Lamaar died a few days after he made it, so it took on a whole new significance. It became our founder’s final words. Deanie’s Farewell.”
“I’d like to see it.”
“It’s in the archives at Familyland. I’ll have them send you a copy.”
“I’d like to see it now. I’ll drive back down there. It would help if you came along.”
“I was hoping you’d ask me out to a movie,” she said. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 67
Disneyland has Main Street. Familyland has Crane Street. The house at 23 Crane was a reproduction of the house where Dean Lamaar was born. As long as I had made the drive back to Costa Luna, I figured I’d check it out.
If the designers wanted to capture the look of a genuine Depression Era home, they succeeded. Young Dean’s room was frozen in time, with clothes draped on the chair and shoes on the floor like he was still a carefree kid. His schoolbooks and toys were placed strategically around the room and his early drawings were proudly displayed. From what Eeg said about Lamaar’s father, the art on the wall was revisionist history. If Eeg was telling the truth, Dean hid his drawings, or the old man would kick the shit out of him in a drunken rage.
There were photos of Mom and Dad with accompanying bios that made them sound like the all-American family. So who was lying? Eeg, with his horror story about the abused boy who murdered his father? Or Familyland, for portraying the Lamaar family as if they were Ward, June, and the Beaver?
We golf-carted to the Dexter Duck Building and took the elevator down, this time to B Level. I followed Amy through a labyrinth of corridors. “Brace yourself for Maxine Green,” she said. “She’s a real character.”
“Cartoon variety or just another delightfully zany Lamaar employee?”
“More acerbic than zany. She’s got a razor-sharp tongue. She’s also the first black employee Mr. Lamaar ever hired.”
And he stuck her down here in the bowels of the building, I thought.
We got to a door marked Video Archives. Amy swiped her ID card and we entered a room that was two basketball courts deep and crammed with rack after rack of videotapes. A tiny wisp of a woman with cocoa brown skin and white hair pulled back in a bun was seated at the front desk. Amy introduced us. “Maxine Greene, this is Mr. Lomax.” I noted that I had been downgraded from Detective to civilian.
“Max has been in charge of Video Archives since before they invented video,” Amy said. “It used to be called Film Archives.”
“And before that it was Stone Tablets,” Maxine said, totally deadpan. “What can I get you this morning, honey?”
“I need a copy of Deanie’s Farewell,” Amy said.
“I have it filed right here under Boring,” she said, tapping on her computer keyboard. Ignoring the glasses that were dangling on a gold chain around her neck, she leaned forward and squinted at the screen. “I’ve also got it with Spanish or French subtitles, so it can put you to sleep in three languages. Oh, and I’ve also got the source tape.”
“I’ll pass on the subtitles. The English version is fine,” Amy said.
“Excuse me,” I said. “What’s the source tape?”
Maxine reached for the gold chain and put on her glasses. Apparently she could see without them, but she could speak better with them on. “It’s everything they shot that day. It’s what they edited from.”
“Sounds interesting,” I said. “Can we get that, too?”
“Mike, source tapes go on for hours,” Amy said.
“Not this one,” Maxine said. “Dean Lamaar hated being on camera. He’d shoot everything in one take, maybe two if he flubbed a line.” She removed her glasses and squinted at the screen again. “Let’s see, the final edit is twelve minutes; the source tape is eighteen minutes, forty-two seconds.”
“We’ll take both,” I said.
“I’ll get them,” Maxine said, “but I’ll be damned if I can figure out how these are going to help you in your investigation.”
I could see the panic in Amy’s eyes. “What investigation?” I said.
“Oh, please, Mister Lomax,” Max said. “You’re one of the detectives investigating the Ronnie Lucas murder.”
“Do I look like a cop?”
“No, honey, with that suit and tie you look like a middle-aged rap star,” she said. “But I just finished filing away all the news footage of Ronnie’s murder and your face is all over it.”
“You’
d make a good witness,” I said. “Yes ma’am. I’m investigating Ronnie Lucas’s murder.”
She must have been seventy years old and weighed ninety pounds. Or maybe it was the other way around. She stood up to her full four-feet-ten-inches. A good stiff breeze could have blown her to the next county. But when she put her spindly little hands on her hips, she looked like a geriatric black Wonder Woman.
“Ronnie was one of my favorites,” she said with her jaw clenched. “I hope you catch the fucker who did it. I’ll get your tapes.”
CHAPTER 68
Maxine set us up in a private screening room. Amy and I watched the final edit first. The tape consisted of Dean Lamaar, the white-haired patriarch, sitting behind a desk telling folks how terrific his life had been.
Looking more like everybody’s favorite uncle than a gazillionaire Hollywood mogul, Lamaar talked about how it all started with “the simple drawing of a rabbit with attitude.” He didn’t mention the possibility that a good chunk of that attitude may have come from the pen of Lars Eeg.
He went on to explain how “that single rabbit evolved into a company that has come to symbolize the family values that make America great.” It was totally self-serving. Now I understood why they didn’t use it in the exhibit. Most people would rather spend their time on long lines waiting to risk their lives on Cosmic Cat’s Space Plunge.
“Maxine was kind,” Amy said. “This is worse than dull.”
She put the source tape into the VCR. It opened on the desk we had just seen, but Lamaar wasn’t seated yet. I watched the time code tick by on the bottom of the screen.
“And you thought the first version was hard to watch,” Amy said.
“Why the hell is the camera running if nothing’s happening?” I said.
“Tape is cheap,” she said. “With film they’re very selective about what they print, because processing is so expensive. When they’re shooting a busy executive like Mr. Lamaar they just keep the tape rolling.”
After about a minute an off-camera voice said. “Hey Deanie, I’m all set up here. Step in.” Lamaar entered the frame, sat behind the desk, and the camera moved in to the shot we had seen in the final.
The Rabbit Factory Page 27