Hollywood Nate said, "You may regret that rash remark, sir." And he took the badge wallet from his pocket to show Rudy Ressler his SAG card, and said, "At the station they call me Hollywood Nate because of this."
"I'll be damned," the director said. He laughed out loud, turning to his companions and saying, "This officer is a SAG member. Only in Hollywood!"
"Have a good evening, sir," Nate said with a hopeful smile. "Call me when you get a chance, Officer. I'm serious," the director replied, looking at Hollywood Nate appraisingly this time. Before the limousine pulled away, Nate heard Rudy Ressler say to the driver, "We're dropping Ms. Franchon at her sorority house and then you can take the rest of us to Mrs. Brueger's home in the Hollywood Hills. Do you remember where it is from last time?" "Yes, sir, Mr. Ressler," the driver said.
The limousine drove off, leaving the other cars blowing horns and flashing their high beams at the inevitable traffic jam, and the paparazzi still snapping pictures. Hollywood Nate decided to take a better look at the chief's SUV and at the LAPD security aide standing beside it, who looked familiar. When he got closer, he recognized the wide-bodied, balding, mustachioed Latino cop in the dark three-piece business suit. It was Lorenzo "Snuffy" Salcedo, an old friend and classmate who had served with Nate in 77th Street Division when they were boots fresh out of the police academy, as well as later, when Snuffy had worked patrol at Hollywood Station for two years.
Snuffy had served nine years in the navy before becoming a cop and was ten years older than Nate. But he wasn't showing the effects of his forty-eight years. He had competed in power lifting in the Police Olympics and had a chest like a buffalo. Snuffy had acquired his nickname from his habit of tucking a pinch of Red Man chewing tobacco inside his lower lip and spitting tobacco juice into a Styrofoam cup. Some cops mistakenly thought that he was dipping snuff. Nate remembered that their training officers at 77th had threatened to make Snuffy drink the contents of his cup if they caught him, but at Hollywood Station, once he was off probation, he'd kept his lip loaded most of the time. He was always the division champ when it came to chatter and gossip, in a profession where gossip was coin of the realm.
Back then, their late sergeant, whom they'd called the Oracle, was often tasked by the watch commander to deal with Snuffy's droopy 'stash. But the Oracle would simply say to him, "Zapata is dead, Snuffy. Trim the tips off that feather duster next time you're clipping your nails."
Snuffy seldom did and the Oracle didn't really care. Then Nate thought of how much he missed the Oracle, who'd died of a massive heart attack on the Walk of Fame in front of Hollywood Station. The stars in marble and brass on that part of Wilcox Avenue were not there to commemorate movie stars but as memorials to the Hollywood Division coppers who had been killed in the line of duty.
Nate's reminiscing stopped when Snuffy Salcedo left the LAPD chief's SUV at the curb and jogged toward the red carpet parking area, arms outstretched. Under the mustache his toothy grin was glinting arctic white from all the lights on Hollywood Boulevard.
Nate said, "Snuffy Salcedo, I presume?"
Snuffy said, "Hollywood Nate Weiss! Where the fuck you been and how are you? Abrazos,'mano!"
He gave Nate a rib-crushing embrace, and up close Nate saw that bulge under Snuffy's lower lip.
Snuffy said, "I saw you spear that chubby pap, you rascal. Glad to see you still got the chops you learned back in the day with me." Then he did an Elvis impression and sang, "Down in the ghet-to!"
Nate said, "I see you still got that revolting wad of manure inside your lip. Does the big boss let you drive with a cup of tobacco juice in the cup holder?"
"It disappears when Mister shows up," Snuffy said.
Many of the veteran LAPD cops had never accepted this chief of police, the second one to be imported from the East Coast since the Rodney King riots. This chief had come seven years ago, and when the coppers referred to him privately, it was not with "Chief" before his surname but with "Mister," the ultimate invective, meaning that he was just another imported civilian politician and could never be a real LAPD copper.
"So how do you like driving for this one?" Nate asked. "Have you ever had a colonoscopy?" Snuffy said.
"Why've you stayed in Metro all these years, Snuffy?" Nate asked. "Aren't you sick of it yet?"
"The overtime money driving for this one has been keeping me where I am," Snuffy said. "Mister is the first LAPD chief to need security aides everywhere but in his bathtub. You'd think a guy that's been married as many times as he has woulda picked a babe that cooks this time around, but there's no food in their house and they go out every night to eat. On his weekend days off, he even needs us with him. We're a full-service detail with this one. There's five of us security aides and we're all getting richer than Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band."
"I had a feeling his Irish twinkle might mask a gloomy Celtic interior," said Nate.
Snuffy Salcedo said, "In addition to an ego that makes him think the MetLife blimp should have his face on it instead of Snoopy's, I think Mister's got something like OCD. He has a thing about stoplights and he counts them. I might get yelled at if I take a route with too many of them. And he's obsessed with wiping his face with Kleenex. If there was even half the oil coming out of Mister's pores that he thinks there is, we wouldn't need any more imports from Saudi Arabia. Since I don't have a degree in abnormal psychology, I just concentrate on the overtime money when he's like that. By the way, did you get married again?"
"Not a chance," Nate said. "And no kids."
"You were so lucky her casabas never got to producing dairy products. Me, I'll be paying for our kids till Jesus returns."
"Even without kids I know what divorce costs," Nate said, nodding. "Twelve months of eating Hungry-Man nukeable food until I could afford an occasional lamb chop."
"I used to call mine RK," Snuffy said, "because during sex she was about as active as roadkill. Yet she talked me into paying for a boob job for both her and her sister, and she went wild after that. Four new mammaries and I had no access to any of them. I was the boob."
Nate said, "Me, I'm not gonna marry another Jewish woman no matter what my mother wants. My ex turned scary mean the minute her blood sugar rose with morning orange juice. It took a while after the divorce till she stopped breaking eggs on my car."
"Guys like you and me should mix 'n' match," Snuffy said. "And always marry outside our tribes."
"I'd sure like to see you transfer back to Watch Five at Hollywood Station," Nate said sincerely. "It'd be like old times. We could partner up. I'd even let you keep your spittoon in the cup holder and try not to puke all over myself when you used it."
"What!" Snuffy said incredulously. "You haven't heard?" "Heard?"
"I've finally had enough of this driving gig. I'm transferring back to Hollywood in time for the next deployment period. I thought there'd be notices on the bulletin boards by now, and pictures of me in the roll call room right next to the Oracle's."
"Fantastic!" Nate said. "Wait'll I spread the word. Snuffy Salcedo's turning in his chauffeur's cap and coming home to roost."
"Long overdue," Snuffy said. "I've driven for three chiefs. The only one I liked was the first one that City Hall imported from the East Coast. I wish the mayor hadn't gotten rid of him when he found out the dude wouldn't trade his Las Vegas jaunts for eternal youth. I grew fond of him. Basically he was just a harmless old porch Negro."
Nate was about to ask Snuffy if he'd heard from any of their classmates lately, when the burly Latino cop stopped chattering long enough to turn toward the herd of people emerging onto the red carpet, and said, "Holy shit! He's already out!"
Hollywood Nate turned and saw the chief of police, his wife, and another elegantly dressed couple standing on the curb in front of the Kodak Theatre, and the chief wasn't twinkling. All of the bonhomie that he'd shown to the paparazzi was gone.
Snuffy Salcedo scampered to the SUV, jumped in, and zoomed to the pickup area, where he leape
d out and ran around to open the rear door for Mrs. Chief. Nate saw the chief jawing at Snuffy and neither looked very happy.
On the next transfer list, P2 Snuffy Salcedo did return to Hollywood Station, where he could no longer get as rich as the E Street Band.
Chapter Three.
LEONA BRUEGER HAD always referred to her home located high in the Hollywood Hills, almost to Woodrow Wilson Drive, as a mini-estate. Three residential lots had been bought and cleared of aging houses and tied together to make it the largest parcel in that part of the Hills, with a splendid view almost to the ocean. Her late husband, Sammy Brueger, had made most of his early money by buying into three wholesale meat distributors at a time when people said you couldn't make real money in that business.
Sammy Brueger proved them wrong and did it with a slogan that his first wife dreamed up: "You can't beat Sammy's meat." And then, early in the presidency of Richard Nixon, Sammy started following the New York Stock Exchange and became interested in a stock for no other reason than that its NASDAQ symbol, POND, was the maiden name of his wife. He was a born gambler, and when he learned that POND stood for Ponderosa Steak House in Dayton, Ohio, he thought that Lady Luck was calling him. The stock symbol bore his wife's name, and the product was something that he bought and sold every day--meat! So Sammy plowed everything he had into that stock and it zoomed upward an astounding 10,000 percent and he became very rich. He divorced the wife named Pond and married a failed actress whose surname never helped him, and neither did she. Because of the prenuptial, the second one wasn't so expensive to unload.
His third and final wife, Leona, thirty-two years younger than Sammy, told other trophy wives at her Pilates class that the meat slogan had certainly been true in the last ten years of the old man's life, and she thanked God for it. She still shuddered when she thought of him in his old age crawling over her at night like a centipede.
Leona Brueger was still a size two, and was trainer-firm, with expressive brown eyes, delicate facial bones, and a Mediterranean skin tone that bore no evidence of the considerable work she had bought in order to stay looking so good at the age of sixty. Her last birthday had been devastating, no matter how much she had tried to prepare for it psychologically. Leona Brueger's natural hair color had been milk chocolate brown at one time, and she hated to think what color it would be now if she ever stopped the monthly color and highlights.
On a summer afternoon while sitting by the pool skimming Elle and Vogue and reading Wine Spectator cover to cover, she happened to see a mention of a Beverly Hills art gallery where Sammy had bought three very expensive pieces of Impressionist art, two by French artists and one by a Swede. Leona couldn't remember much about the artists and hardly noticed the paintings back when Sammy was alive, opining to girlfriends that trees and flowers should look as though they were living things distinct from the land that nourished them. And the nearly nude body of a peasant woman feeding a kitten in one of the paintings depressed her. She feared that she would look like that when, despite Pilates and a weekly game of tennis on the Brueger tennis court with her Pilates partners, her ass finally gave up and collapsed from boredom and fatigue.
But the article she was reading made her wonder why it had taken her so long to have the paintings appraised after Sammy died, trusting him that they were of "museum quality." He'd always said that the very pricey pieces should hang exactly where he'd placed them: in their great room, the dining room, and along the main corridor of "Casa Brueger."
She strolled inside from the pool, sipping an iced tea, wishing it were late enough for a nice glass of cool Fume Blanc, and studied the three oldest pieces to try to see why anyone would think they were so valuable. She stood before the largest, the one of a woman squatting beside what looked to Leona like a pond or a lagoon. She decided to call the Wickland Gallery on Wilshire Boulevard to ask Nigel Wickland when he'd be coming back for the appraisal. The art dealer had stopped by a week earlier at her request and taken a preliminary look, but he'd said he needed to "research the provenance" before he could give her accurate information. It was hard for her to think about appraisals or any other business when she was about to embark on one of the great adventures of her life.
She'd leased a villa in Tuscany for three months and was going there with Rudy Ressler, the movie director/producer she'd been dating off and on for more than a year. Rudy was amusing and had lots of show-business anecdotes that he could relate by mimicking the voices of the players involved. He wasn't as young as she would like if she decided to marry again, but he was controllable and an amazingly unselfish lover, even though that didn't matter as much as it used to. And he still knew enough people very active in show business to ensure that they'd always have interesting dining partners. His one Oscar-nominated film had kept him on the A-list for the past twenty years. If they ever married, she figured she'd end up supporting him, but what the hell, she was bucks-up rich. Sammy had left her more than she could ever spend in her lifetime. And that reminded her again that she was now sixty years old. How much of a life did she have left?
For a moment Leona couldn't remember what she was about to do, but then she remembered: call the Wickland Gallery. She got Nigel Wickland on the phone and made an appointment for the following afternoon, when he would have a closer look at the thirteen pieces of art. She'd have to make a note to ask the gallery owner if he thought her security system was adequate to protect the artwork while she was in Tuscany. But then she thought, screw it. Sammy had the art so heavily insured that she almost hoped someone would steal all of it. Then she could buy some paintings that were vibrant and alive. It was time for Leona Brueger to get out and really live, away from her palatial cocoon in the Hollywood Hills. She might finally take the risk and buy a vineyard and winery up in Napa Valley.
Raleigh L. Dibble was in his third-floor apartment in east Hollywood, getting ready for the part-time job he was doing that evening on the only day off from his regular work. It paid chump change, but it helped with the rent and the car payment on his nine-year-old Toyota Corolla, which needed tires and a tune-up. He stood before the mirror and adjusted his black bow tie, a real one, not one of those crappy clip-ons that everyone wore nowadays. He fastened the black cummerbund over his starched dress shirt and slipped into his tuxedo jacket for a big dinner party in the Hollywood Hills celebrating the release of a third-rate movie by some hack he had never heard of.
All Raleigh knew about the homeowner tonight was that the guy was a junior partner in a Century City law firm who needed an experienced man like Raleigh to augment his hired caterers and make sure that things ran smoothly. Raleigh's past life as the owner of a West Los Angeles catering business had qualified him for these quasi-butler jobs where nouveaus could pretend they knew their ass from corned beef. Raleigh had met a lot of wealthy people and earned a good reputation, which brought him a small but steady income and had kept him from drinking the Kool-Aid after his business had gone belly-up.
He thought he didn't look too bad in the tux. Mother Nature, the pitiless cunt, had put macaroni-and-cheese handles around his middle, and it was getting scary. At only five foot seven he wasn't tall enough to carry the blubber overload. Though he didn't have much hair left, what he had was nutmeg brown with the help of Grecian Formula. And his jawline was holding up, but only because the extra fat had puffed his cheeks like a goddamn woodchuck. Now he had a double chin--no, make it a triple. If he could ever earn enough money, he hoped to get a quarter of his body siphoned into the garbage can by one of the zillion cosmetic surgeons plying their trade on the west side of Los Angeles. Then maybe a hair transplant and even an eye lift to complete the overhaul, because his eyes, the color of faded denim, were shrinking from the encroachment of the upper lids. Enough money could rectify all of that.
Before he left the apartment for that night's gig, he figured he'd better call Julius Hampton, his full-time boss for the past six months. The old man had just turned eighty-nine years of age when he'd hired Raleigh, w
ho was thirty-one years younger almost to the day. Raleigh had been hired the month after Barack Obama took office, and it was an okay job being a live-in butler/chef and all-around caretaker six days a week for the old coot. He was being paid by a downtown lawyer who administered the Hampton trust fund, but the lawyer was a tight ass who acted like it was his money, and Raleigh had had to practically beg for a wage increase in early summer.
Julius Hampton had been an indefatigable and flamboyant cruiser of Santa Monica Boulevard in his day, but he'd never made any kind of pass at Raleigh even before learning that his new employee was straight. Raleigh figured that gay or straight, it wouldn't matter to the old man anyway, since Raleigh was no George Clooney, and the geezer was through with sex. Julius Hampton was left only with fantasies stoked by their weekly visits to west Hollywood gay bars, more out of nostalgia than anything else.
This boss had been a longtime friend of a lot of other rich old men on the west side, not all of them gay by any means. Raleigh had driven Julius Hampton to many dinner parties where Raleigh would hang around the kitchen with the other help until the party was over or his boss got tired. On nights when the old man's phlebitis was bothering him, Raleigh would bring the collapsible wheelchair from the car and wheel him out to the old Cadillac sedan that his boss loved and Raleigh hated. Raleigh figured that in his day, Julius Hampton probably had a lot of boy sex in that Cadillac, back when his plumbing still worked. Maybe sitting on those beat-up leather seats brought him delicious memories. In any case, his boss had dismissed the suggestion every time Raleigh urged him to junk the Cadillac and buy a new car.
Raleigh L. Dibble had been in the catering business almost continually since his high school days in San Pedro, the third child and only son of a longshoreman and a hairdresser. As a young man he'd begun concentrating on using good diction while he was on a job, any job. He'd read a self-improvement book stressing that good diction could trump a poor education, and Raleigh had never gone to college. All he'd ever known was working for inadequate wages in food service until he went into business as a working partner with Nellie Foster of Culver City, who made the best hors d'oeuvres and gave the best blow jobs he'd ever known. They'd done pretty well in the catering business when times were good, working out of a storefront on Pico Boulevard. But they'd gotten into some "difficulties," as he always described his fall from grace.
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