by Louise Penny
Petrichor. That fresh smell of drying grass—or in my case wet pavement after the rain. You didn’t know there was a word for it, did you? The rain had just cleared out. Everyone’s been cooped inside, pent-up energy building, seething. Bad guys couldn’t do their thing. The rain stops, they come out to play. Shards of sun streak through a buttermilk sky. People in L.A. can’t deal with rain anyway.
Petrichor. There’s a word for everything. The word for my life at that moment was hell.
I was finishing up the job from hell, putting together the final bill on the Rence case. Identity theft. If you ever want your life to turn to shit, get your identity stolen. Not only did it turn Rence’s life to hell, but mine too. I’d spent three months on it, mostly barricaded inside, chasing leads on the dark web from the hole, my office. Three months of pure hell till I caught the bad actors—but Rence will spend five years trying to get her name back. I like what I do for a living, though lately, with computers and the Internet, it can get a little boring and tedious—they make it too easy to track people down. Not that it wasn’t boring before, sitting on stakeouts or gumshoeing it, but at least then I was out in the world, among the living, even if it meant sweltering inside a parked car or hiding behind bushes, getting sunburned and having an excuse for all the crappy food.
A man opened the office door, the little bell on it rang. It’s a concession to the old days that makes people feel comfortable, something they don’t often feel when they have to hire a private investigator. It also makes a chime on my computer ring. I looked up, saw him enter on the video monitor. There wasn’t an inch of my office, inside or out, that wasn’t covered in a crossfire of cameras. I even had a camera on the restaurant across the street, shooting the front of my building. I’d done a little work for Lou Hernandez, the owner, and instead of taking money from her I asked if I could put a camera on her place. She agreed. I liked watching my little storefront PI shop on Windward Avenue in Venice. I particularly liked watching it from the hole.
I opened the door to the small front office, covered in pix of Venice from the old days. The piers and amusement parks, people in old-fashioned bathing suits on the beach. The canals and oil wells. And a young surfer dude standing next to his stick, stabbed in the sand. Originally a color photo, I’d printed it in sepia so it would match the others. It reminded me of who I used to be—I didn’t get much surfing in these days. Actually, I hadn’t surfed in years. I thought about it a lot though.
I’m talking about Venice, California. Los Angeles. Hey, the other one in Italy has canals and grand thoroughfares with colonnaded arches. We have grand canals and streets with grand colonnaded arches. Okay, so we don’t have such grand canals these days, most of them have been filled in, including the Grand Canal. And Venice didn’t quite cut it as the cultural paradise-by-the-sea that Abbot Kinney, its founder, had envisioned. Today it was an ever-changing kaleidoscope of people, dudes dancing on skates, musicians, artists. Maybe a few pickpockets here or there. But it was home. And I liked it here.
“Jack Lassen?” the familiar-looking man said from behind expensive shades, entering my place. Tan, very tan. Maybe the kind you pay for, maybe the kind you get from sitting by the pool, sipping mojitos, or whatever the in drink was these days. Loafers without socks—that told me a lot about him. Pastel shirt, Rolex. Definitely not a walk-in off the beach looking for a handout.
I smiled. He didn’t return it.
“You’re a licensed private investigator in the state of California?”
“Want me to show you my photostat?” Of course we don’t have photostats anymore, but he was playing with me, I played back.
“Funny.”
“What can I do for you, Mr. . . .”
“Lambert, Patrick Lambert.”
I knew the name. As in “A Patrick Lambert Production.” Hey, this is L.A. Everyone aspires to a credit like that or “A Film By.” Few get there. Lambert had been there for twenty years with no signs of coming down. Back in the day he’d been a leading man of the George Clooney variety. Good-looking, athletic. Heartthrob. And richer than God’s Uncle Larry. He’d drifted from acting to producing and become an even bigger player, if that was possible.
“Have a seat,” I started to say. But he was already making himself comfortable, leaning back in one of the guest chairs like he owned the place.
My office was neat as a pin, clean as a whistle—what other clichés can I come up with to describe it? I wanted customers to feel confident in me. On the other hand, sometimes I worried they’d think I had no business if there weren’t a lot of papers strewn here and there, piles of manila folders and the like.
“My wife, Emily, is missing. The cops aren’t moving fast enough.”
“You want me to find her?”
“You’re good.” He stretched.
“Am I boring you?”
“You sure you’ve done this before?”
“Just making small talk.”
“I don’t need small talk. I need someone to find my wife.”
“Did you lose her?” I knew I’d better stop.
He got up, turned for the door. Most people have trouble getting to the point, so I do a little friendly jousting with them. Not him, he was all business, or should I say biz? Unlike all those down-and-out PIs in the movies, my business was doing okay and I didn’t need the money. But I didn’t like the guy—wasn’t sure why, sometimes you just don’t. That didn’t mean I wanted to let business just walk out the door—his money would buy me a meal or two at El Coyote as well as anybody’s. Besides, I needed a break after the Rence case. You think it might have been that Hollywood swagger that put me off?
“Hey, Mr. Lambert, you come to a Venice PI, you get a Venice vibe. Did you come to me specifically or was I just the closest one to you?”
“You’re not the closest. You have a good rep, though I’m beginning to wonder why.”
“Tell me what’s going on.”
He seemed to collapse in on himself, lowered his voice. “My wife Emily’s been missing for about a week now. I think she’s been kidnapped.”
“You’re rich.”
His face startled. Hollywood folks, the successful ones, are very wealthy and like to pretend they’re “of the people” while sitting in their modest 20,000-square-foot houses and their $150,000 Teslas.
“I’m just trying to figure out why someone would kidnap your wife. Motive and all that.”
“We’re comfortable. And to answer your next question, no, there’s no ransom demand. Yet.”
Comfortable, the old saw people said when they were way more than comfortable.
“I came home from work on Friday. Drawers dumped out. Whole house ransacked.”
“Forcible entry?”
“The police said it looked like someone jimmied the sliding door open, but they think it was staged. They’ve lost interest. In fact, they think she ran off. That she faked the crime scene to make it look like she was kidnapped.”
“Why would she do that?”
“She wouldn’t.” He sounded very sure of himself. Guys like that always sounded sure of themselves. They were, after all, God’s gift to women and everyone else. Why would anyone ever want to ditch out on them?
“When I came home her car was gone. I think the kidnappers took her in it.”
“Have the cops found the car?”
He shook his head. “Not yet.”
“Alarm? Surveillance cameras?”
“Neither was on. We don’t always have them on when we’re home, especially during the day.”
“Help? Servants?”
“Off that day.”
Naturally.
He handed me a stiff piece of semiglossy paper with photos on it. Blond hair, full lips. Overly made up. Pretty in that typical SoCal IWannaBeAnActress way—and if you did want to be an actress, why not marry Patrick Lambert, one of the hottest producers around? Yeah, she was an actress. Hell, what he’d given me was a six-by-nine composite card, the kind that
actors hand out to casting directors. It had the standard studio head shot, plus action shots, bikini at the beach, climbing a tree. I’m not kidding. The best for last, steely-eyed holding a Goncz GA-9 pistol—cool-looking high-tech gun, the kind Hollywood loves—dressed in a leather bustier and six-inch stilettos. I hoped that gun didn’t have much recoil.
“Anything better? Normal, y’know, snapshots.”
He slid a wallet-sized photo across the desk. Without makeup she really was pretty. “There’s a ton of pictures of her on her Facebook page.” He wrote down the password to her account. I wondered why he knew it.
I followed him to his comfortable Pacific Palisades house, er, mansion on an acre and a half overlooking the ocean. The house was small by Saudi prince standards but was definitely comfortable. He showed me where the break-in occurred. Sliding door off a pool patio, a slight dent in the doorframe.
“These are the official police photos.” He showed me a dozen police pix from the crime scene. “I have some clout with the PD.”
I bet you do.
The broken door. Ransacked dressers and closets. It was a little too perfect, everything just a little too perfectly out of place, strewn here, strewn there—like on a movie set maybe. But that didn’t really mean anything. Bad guys don’t always do everything according to Hoyle.
He said he’d wire me the money within the hour and gave me the names and numbers of Emily’s besties and sister. He wanted her back, bad. I could see it in his eyes, or maybe he was just afraid what they would say in the tabloids?
I called Laurence Lautrec, a Detective II in the West L.A. station, from my cell. He was my department go-to. We’d worked together when I was on the force. Claimed he was related to Toulouse. The fact that Laurence was black and six feet tall and Toulouse white and barely five foot didn’t seem to bother him. And who knows, down the ancestral line anything might happen.
Every once in a while we’d get together to go shooting or just shoot the breeze, sometimes with guns.
“It’s not my case,” he said. “But from what I hear, some-a the guys think she mighta pulled a Gone Girl and—”
“What, faked her own kidnapping? Why? She’s an actress wannabe married to a player. Rich. Good-looking. Powerful. Nobody skips out on that.”
He gave me a “who are you kidding” look, said he had to get back to work. He also said he’d send whatever he could regarding the case my way.
I hit Tito’s Tacos on the way home. A little out of the way, but worth it, and I sure as hell didn’t want any of those too-hip hipster joints. With my taco fix satisfied, I parked behind my building, went in, slid down the ladder back into the hole—a 1950s bomb shelter built by some previous owner of this little building during the Cold War, when trust was low and paranoia high. He was going to hide down here and be safe if the Big One came. Of course what he’d come up to when he opened the hatch might not have been much fun. The next owner had used this space for storage. The hatch door was solid steel, four inches thick. If I was down in the hole I could lock it so it couldn’t be opened from the outside. I felt safe and snug down here, from bill collectors, home invaders and burglars, angry husbands and nukes. There was recirculating air and filters, electricity from batteries, generator, and solar, and enough food and water for one person for a month. Well, it might not have been the best food, but it would do—MREs. Plenty of books and DVDs. A link to the Internet. I could be happy here forever if I didn’t have to earn a living. And it was bigger than you might think, taking up the entire square footage of the building . . . and then some. The biggest problem was getting things down the hatch, but I managed. I also added running water, a shower and toilet, and a great galley kitchen that HGTV would be proud of. Even had a chemical toilet in case the shit ever really did hit the fan topside and the regular one stopped working. All the comforts of home, including a million-dollar view of the Venice boardwalk from the Venice Beach live cam, spread out on a sixty-inch flatscreen. But it was quiet and that made up for a lot. And I didn’t tell anyone except a handful of really good friends that it was here or where I lived.
By the time I got back to the hole, the material from Lautrec was already there. I downloaded it and perused the reports. Nothing jumped out at me.
I turned to Emily’s Facebook page. A ton of pix. Nothing really out of the ordinary, no incriminating pictures. I printed a couple to show around along with the composite card should the need arise.
I made sure Lambert’s payment cleared before I really dug into the job. Just because he’s a big Hollywood muck doesn’t mean he’ll keep his word. I’ve been doing this gig for seven years on my own. Before that I had a partner for two. He preferred the safety of a steady paycheck—his wife’s—and became a stay-at-home dad. Before that I was a cop for nine years, until I got shot in the hip, a nice euphemism for ass. I could have stayed on in the department, but I like my ass. It gives me something to sit on.
I scanned the monitors to make sure everything was good. Nothing unusual happening on the Venice Beach live cam either, where the unusual is usual. I then looked at the outer office. The pictures on the walls. A clean, well-lighted place. My board. Even though I was just yards off the beach, I never seemed to get around to surfing anymore. I don’t know why. I guess sometimes you just have to grow up, do grown-up things. Little games are for little boys, as the song says. On top of that, I just didn’t have the time I had when I was younger. Every day it seems to evaporate like the fog snuffed out by the sun. So I kept that board, leaning on the wall, to remind me of younger days, better days. Glory days—like the high school football star who made the game-winning touchdown, then didn’t do much with his life after that.
Turning back to the computer, I checked all the usual resources on Emily Lambert, Spokeo and Intellius, DMV and military records. She’d led a pretty ordinary life except for marrying Lambert. And was wife number three for him.
Lambert called, wanting to know what I’d done. It’d been about three hours since I left his house, and already he’s bugging me. Hollywood Power Player thinking he owns me or Guilty Guy protesting too much?
I pulled up to Emily’s sister’s place in the Spaulding Square neighborhood of Hollywood at 9 a.m. the next morning. Nice little Spanish-style houses built in the 1920s, around thirteen hundred square feet—on postage stamp lots of pure L.A. bliss going for a mil and a half—hell, my bomb shelter was bigger than that. Walking to the front door, I noticed she had torn out the front grass and put in an ugly xeriscape. Some xeriscapes are attractive. Not this one. It looked like the Iraqi desert after a brigade of American tanks had rolled over it two or three times. Erin Beckham, Emily’s sister, answered the door. I intro’d myself, got the prelims out of the way.
She invited me in. The house was cozy. Offered me a cup of tea, which I declined. I took in everything about the room that I could, the decor, family photos, artwork. Several of the pix showed her with a man I assumed to be her husband. Buff and tough, like they’re all trying to be today. Dirty-blond hair in a too-slick do. Another of him clowning, posing like the muscle men on Muscle Beach.
“Your brother-in-law, Patrick Lambert, is concerned that the police aren’t doing enough to find your sister.”
Her puckered lips, like she’d just tasted a sour lemon, gave away her feelings for her brother-in-law, even if she didn’t say anything. “He’s got a whole force of studio cops, but he hires you.”
“I’m not chopped liver, you know. I have a pretty good rep, if I say so myself.”
“I didn’t mean to put you down. Just that the LAPD sort of shills for the studios. But either way, I don’t know anything.”
“She have any run-ins with anyone?”
“No.”
“How does she get along with her husband?”
This time a raised eyebrow. “As far as I know they get along fine. I mean, they fight like everyone does. He might be a little controlling, but nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Maybe I can talk
to your husband?”
She glanced over at the photos on the mantel. “He’s too busy and he doesn’t know any more than I do, probably less.”
“What about other siblings, friends?”
“No siblings, just us. And she didn’t have a lot of friends lately.”
I asked if I could use the head. I didn’t really have to; I wanted to see more of the house. I satisfied myself that Emily wasn’t there. I stayed another ten minutes or so thrusting and parrying with her, getting nowhere. Maybe she didn’t really know anything, but it’s my nature—and my job—to be suspicious of everyone and everything.
“I’m sorry I can’t help you,” she said, eyeing the door. A not-so-subtle hint.
“Are you?”
I wanted to slam the car door—but didn’t want to show emotion. And she sure as hell wasn’t showing any, hardly seemed concerned about her missing sister. People do worry in different ways, but I knew she was full of shit. Problem was, I didn’t exactly know what she was full of shit about. Something didn’t seem right.
“Strike one,” I said, driving off, heading back toward the beach. Made some stops on the way to talk with some of Emily’s coworkers, then hit Pink’s on La Brea, hot dogs to the stars. Pink’s is nothing more than a ramshackle shack. But an L.A. institution. I’d rather eat at places like that or Tito’s any day of the week than those new cooler-than-cool places that last a year or three, then spontaneously combust.
I parked behind my building in the secure private lot. Made a pit stop at Lou Hernandez’s restaurant for a beer and headed toward the boardwalk a few yards away instead of to the office. I popped the lid on a Lagunitas IPA and thought on it awhile.
Emily’s coworkers, mostly actors and some below-the-line people, didn’t have a lot to say. I figured they didn’t want to get on Lambert’s bad side and be blackballed. But they did turn me on to one of his exes—right in my own backyard. I looked her up on IMDb on my phone. She’d had a few small roles but was mostly an appendage to Lambert.
Since the pea soup of winter laid a cold, heavy hand on the waterfront, I didn’t know if she’d be on the boardwalk at all. I walked down there, passing a man in a Speedo playing a grand piano, just a little the worse for wear from the weather. I still haven’t figured out what they do with that piano at night. Some detective, huh? I passed the Sidewalk Café and Small World Books, and of course the ubiquitous tourists. Venice is the number one tourist destination in L.A., though for the life of me I can’t figure out why. I guess they come to see the freaks. And since I lived here, I was one of them—my people.