The agent looked at his watch, and Nate saw that it was a Swiss Army watch like the one he wore. The absence of at least a Rolex made Nate conclude that the guy's client list probably included a lot of B-listers like Rudy Ressler.
The agent said, "Rudy, Leona, must go. More tomorrow. Will loop you in as soon as I hear more from A&E. Good to meet you, Officer."
He kissed the air in Leona's direction, rose, and departed. And Nate was disheartened that the agent hadn't even offered him a business card.
When he was gone, Leona Brueger stood wobbling for an instant and said to Rudy, "Damn these new Jimmy Choos. Too sky-high for me."
Nate looked down and thought that the double ankle straps looked very smart around her shapely ankles, but the leather resembled snakeskin, and he was not fond of reptiles. She took a little step sideways before righting herself and heading for the ladies' room. Sure, Nate thought, it's just the shoes.
When she was gone, Rudy Ressler said, "Leona and me, we're going to Tuscany for three months. At least that's the idea, but I don't think I can stay away that long. We plan to get married before the end of the year and move up to Napa. Leona's got a yen to own a vineyard and make wine." He pulled a sour expression and said sotto, "I don't know how long her fantasy will last, but you know how women are."
Nate said, "And, uh, how about the cable movie you mentioned? When do you think you might start prepping it?"
"Right after the first of the year," Rudy Ressler said. "I'd like you to read for the part of a police detective. It's not a big part but it does involve a couple of pages of dialogue and a big action sequence. Would you be interested?"
Nate's breath caught and he said, "Absolutely."
"Of course, I can't promise you the part right now. First you'll have to read for us. But if you do an acceptable job, it would be fun to have you in the role. The r-e-a-1 cop playing the r-e-e-1 cop. The publicists could have fun with it, too."
Nate took an LAPD business card from his wallet with his cell number on the back and said, "I'll be honored to read for you, Mr. Ressler."
"That's fine, Nate," Ressler said. "Just fine."
When Leona Brueger returned, she said, "Ready to go, Rudy?"
"I'll get the car," he said and headed toward the entrance.
Leona Brueger put her arm through Nate's and he walked her to the door, where a stunning young hostess who Nate figured for another aspiring thespian said, "Good day, Mrs. Brueger. Hope to see you soon."
Before Nate pushed open the door, Leona Brueger reached up with her free hand and squeezed his biceps, saying, "You've got impressive arms, young man."
"I have to work extra hard in the gym to keep them," Nate said. "It's hell getting older."
"You don't know older," Leona said wistfully, looking up at him. "Sometime you should drive up to my house and I'll pour you a drink and tell you sad stories about older."
When they got outside, Rudy Ressler's Aston Martin was waiting and he was standing beside it with a cell phone to his ear. He said to Leona Bruger, "Damn! Leona, I'm terribly sorry. I just got a call from our editor, who's practically in a fistfight with the director over the final cut. Can you possibly catch a cab?"
Nate said, "I can take Mrs. Brueger home."
"Could you, Nate? That's great," Ressler said. "Okay with you, Leona?"
"Go referee the fight," she said. "See you this evening."
Before he got in his car, Rudy Ressler said, "I just had a thought, Leona. While we're in Europe, maybe Nate here could drive by in his patrol car once in a while and check in on the house and the new man. What's his name?"
"Raleigh Dibble," she said.
Ressler said, "Yeah, Raleigh. Would you mind, Nate? There's some valuable art in that house and that's a lotta responsibility for a new guy."
"Be glad to," Nate said, realizing that he did not get to do lunch.
When Rudy Ressler had pulled away and Nate was waiting for the parking attendant to retrieve his car, he smiled apologetically and said to Leona Brueger, "When was the last time you rode in a seven-year-old Corvette?"
"At one time in my life I drove an eighteen-year-old bathtub Nash," she said. "I was only slightly older than my mode of transportation but I loved that beast. I was driving it when I met my first husband, who I came to love a lot less than my old car, but through him I eventually came to meet Sammy Brueger. Now how about the story of your life, Nathan? Do they call you Nathan?"
"My mother and father do," he said. "But everybody else calls me Nate."
"Nathan Weiss." When she said his name, she gave his biceps another squeeze and hung on to him unsteadily. "How is it that a nice Irish-Italian girl like me ends up being attracted to gorgeous Jewish men?"
He smiled self-consciously and said, "Must be the circles you travel in. I haven't run into all that many gorgeous Jewish men. But I'm not much of a Jew anyway. Haven't even gone to temple since I was a kid." Then he paused and said, "Except a couple of times when somebody died."
"Relatives?"
"Cops."
"Jewish cops?"
"No, but I still felt compelled to go and pray for them, even though I know it's all mumbo jumbo."
She looked up at him and said, "Revealing that personal information to me just made you even more attractive. But I'll bet you're used to compliments from women, aren't you, Nathan ?"
Nate was relieved when the parking kid arrived, and he drew the Vette up beside a Ferrari 599 that he'd read in Motor Trend was selling for more than $300,000. Another kid delivered an Audi R8 that Nate had read sold for a paltry $150,000.
The kid held the door open for Leona Brueger, and Nate tipped him $10, the most he had ever tipped for car service.
After he got behind the wheel, Nate said, "I do apologize for my car."
She smiled and said, "You really are too cute for words, Nathan." Then she took off her right shoe and said, "These goddamn things're killing me."
She removed the left shoe and held it in her hand while Nate drove north in heavy traffic. He looked over and touched the shoe, saying, "Is it really snakeskin?"
"Damned if I know," she said. "I'm not a shoe whore. I'm one of those broads that just buys the brand and hopes for the best." She yawned and leaned back, slurring her words slightly and said, "Go ahead and ask me."
"Ask you what?"
"How much I paid for them."
"I wasn't thinking that," Nate said, but he was.
"Come on, Nathan," she said. "I've had lots of cops in my extended family. The price of things was always on their minds. I understand you. I grew up poorer than you can imagine. I was a regular little Scarlett O'Hara when I came to this town, vowing never to be poor again. It didn't take me long to learn that everything in Hollywood is for sale if you know how to shop."
"Okay, how much do those shoes cost?" Nate asked.
Leona yawned again and said, "I think they were thirteen hundred and change."
That impressed him for sure. He looked down at the shoes again but didn't touch them this time.
Trying to make conversation to keep her awake, he said, "It sounds like you and Mr. Ressler have a wonderful vacation coming up. Two months in Tuscany sounds great."
Her eyes were closed when she spoke. "Tuscany again. A different villa this time. Rudy's never been there. Rudy's never been many places outside of Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Malibu, and the San Fernando Valley, where he can run his production company on the cheap."
"And you're getting married when you get back? Congratulations."
She opened her eyes and said, "My, my. Rudy shared a lot when I went to the ladies' room. It must be the badge you carry. He's very impressed with authority figures. When he has dinner with the chief of police he almost wets his pants." Then she told him her address in the Hollywood Hills and closed her eyes.
Nate wondered if a bottle of wine always made her so chatty. And he wondered if an innocent flirtation with Leona Brueger might give him more juice with Rudy Ressler. Then he re
membered what an assistant director had said to him on one of the last jobs he'd worked. The AD had observed the producer's wife, a woman twenty years older than Nate, flirting with him. It made him say to Nate, "Officer, if you want to get work in this business, don't pet the cougars. Not when they belong to the boss."
She actually began dozing by the time they reached the foot of the Hollywood Hills and the Corvette began climbing up Outpost Drive to Mulholland. Nate had always enjoyed driving in the Hills in a black-and-white, admiring the view homes, fantasizing about that one break that could make it all possible for him, too.
When he got to the address she'd given him, he pulled up to the gate and stopped. It was easily the largest residential property in this part of the Hollywood Hills and Nate had to admit he'd love to be shown around.
He said gently, "Uh, Mrs. Brueger, we're here."
She opened her eyes and rummaged in her purse until she found a key ring that had a small remote device on it. She pressed it and the gate swung open. He drove in on a long, curving, faux-cobblestone driveway. He made the circle around a bubbling fountain so that the front of his car was facing the gate and she was on the side in front of the huge tiled arch over the main door.
He jumped out and ran around to open the door for her but she was already out, holding her $1,300 shoes in one hand and her purse in the other.
"Come in for a minute, Nathan," she said.
"Okay, Mrs. Brueger," he said.
This was a first. He'd been inside many homes in the Hollywood Hills over the years but as a cop, almost never as a guest.
She unlocked the door and pushed it open, walking to a nearby computer panel on the wall to punch in her code and deactivate the high-pitched alarm warning.
"Follow me," she said.
He did that, crossing a foyer of Mexican tile until he was looking down two steps into the great room. It was very large and it seemed that almost every square foot of the white plaster walls contained paintings: oils, watercolors, and numbered lithographs.
Leona Brueger tossed her shoes on a massive glass coffee table, knocking over some pricey-looking knickknacks.
She said, "Have a seat. I'll be right back. What're you drinking?"
The entire interior was done in cream and custard colors: the walls, the drapes, the carpet, the side tables, and even the twin sofas, with accent pillows in subtle pastels. It all spelled comfort to Hollywood Nate. There was none of that minimalist crap he was constantly seeing in magazines and in the L. A. Times home section.
This all looked stuffed and overstuffed. He had the impression of being enveloped by a giant voluptuous marshmallow.
And then there was the view. It was Hollywood, but not his Hollywood down there at asphalt level. This was Hollywood as seen by God, if there was one. The smog from this elevation was not ugly, not a dingy gray blanket of dangerous gases settling over the L. A. basin in late summer. No, this was a blaze of vivid primary colors propelled by offshore breezes and later would be lit by a last solar gasp before the sun fell into the Pacific. It was astonishing how beautiful and even delicious the L. A. smog could look from a $15 million home in the Hollywood Hills.
She paused on the top step and said, "Do you like the view?"
Nate said, "Up here the smog is the color of a cabernet and overripe plums and purple grapes with a spray of peach juice flowing through it. But somehow I don't think this is what they mean when they say that Hollywood is just a big fruit bowl."
Leona Brueger said, "Why, Officer Weiss, you do surprise me. Not only do you carry a SAG card but you have a touch of the poet in you. I wonder what other surprises you might be keeping hidden."
Nate looked at his watch and said, "I have to be at work and in uniform by seventeen fifteen--I mean, five fifteen. I better not have a drink."
She turned and said, "How about diet soda? You look like the healthy diet soda type."
"Fine," he said. "Thanks."
The coffee table between the two sofas was piled with art books that looked as though they'd never been opened, and women's magazines that looked well perused. When she returned with his diet soda in a crystal goblet, she had a goblet of white wine for herself. She held her glass up to his and said, "Chin-chin," which a makeup artist that Nate used to date said was "the cry of the Hills birds," meaning the women of the Hollywood Hills.
She sat down two feet away from him on the sofa and said, "I gave the butler the afternoon off. He won't be back until seventeen hundred--I mean, five o'clock."
That made Nate chuckle, and then he said, "Would he be Raleigh, the guy I'm supposed to see when I check on your property after you're gone?"
"That's him," Leona Brueger said. "Some of my friends say I shouldn't leave all this" -- she waved in the general direction of the paintings -- "with a man who's only worked here such a short time, but he's also worked for a friend of ours and comes highly recommended. Besides, I don't give a rat's eyeball for all this. It was my late husband's passion, not mine. It's well insured anyway, so que sera, sera."
"I don't know very much about art," Nate said, sipping his soda and thinking, Yes, this lady really does like to get her drink on.
"Neither do I," she said. "And I'm too old to learn. And speaking of old, how old did you say you are?"
"I'm thirty-eight," he said. "I know I'm getting a bit long in the tooth to make it in the movie business. I've been a cop since I was a baby of twenty-one."
"Hah!" she said. "Old. Thirty-eight is old, is it?"
She took a long pull from the wineglass and put it down on the coffee table. She scooted close to him and said, "I'll bet I could help your career a little bit. As far as the part in whatever the thing is that Rudy's doing, you've got it. I'll see to that. But it's only a couple of days' work. I know other people in the business. People with real topspin. I could introduce you around. Some evening when you're off duty, would you like to come here to a dinner party and meet a few of my friends?"
"You bet I would," Nate said, wondering if a chemical peel gave her that buttery skin.
"I have to warn you, though," she said, "all they talk about is diets, drugs that facilitate diets, and box-office grosses."
"Fine with me," he said.
"Can you really act?"
"Well, I'm not one of those who go through life imagining how everything would look through the lens of a Steadicam, but I've taken some classes," he said. "And I've had a couple of speaking parts, but not in a feature film yet. And I can't count the number of times I've been an extra." He stopped when he saw her lips curve up in a little smile, and he felt like a kid bragging to a wealthy aunt. Then he said, "So, yes, I think I can act. But so can thousands--no, make it tens of thousands--of other people trying for the same breaks. I know what I'm up against."
"Rudy Ressler is no Martin Scorcese," she said, "but I'm sure you're aware of that. Is that how you see yourself? In a crime movie directed by Scorcese or maybe by Clint Eastwood?"
"In my fantasies?"
"Yeah, let's hear your fantasies."
"To be honest, in my fantasies I'm not playing a cop. I see myself in a Woody Allen movie."
He watched her burst into laughter, and he wasn't sure how to interpret it until she stopped and said, "You are adorable, Nathan Weiss. I think I could like you a lot."
"I like you, too," he said, not knowing what else to say. And then it occurred to him that what was making him feel so uncomfortable and awkward was not just the fact that she was Rudy Ressler's fiancee and he wanted the job. And it wasn't just her age. She was a fit, hot-looking woman, even if she was as old as his mother. It was that she was rich. This was the first time in his life that Nate Weiss was playing a flirtation scene with a seriously wealthy woman.
"Meanwhile, you do have a job that you like, yes?" Leona said.
Nate said, "At Hollywood Station we used to have a sergeant we called the Oracle. He said that doing good police work was the most fun we'd ever have in our entire lives. And I've found that to be
true." Then he thought of his former partner, Dana Vaughn, of her lying dead in his arms, and he said, "For the most part it's been fun.
"Where does acting come into it, then?" she asked.
Nate said, "I thought acting would be what I could do full-time after my pension is vested. I'll reach that in three more years, but if I retire at that time, I still won't be able to draw the pension until I'm fifty years old. I figure I could be a full-time actor in the interim. But I need a break. Don't we all?"
"So that's your dream, is it?" she said.
Nate said, "My dreams aren't complicated. Any one of the Kardashians could interpret them."
She said, "I'm surprised that when you serve twenty years as a cop you aren't able to receive any pension money yet."
"I'll still be too young then," Nate said.
"Too young," she said with a look of melancholy. Then her eyes narrowed and she said, "Me, I'm old enough to have my cop and eat him, too."
Talk about a cougar! This man-eater looked like she truly could come at him, fang and claw. While he was contemplating that troubling catamount image, she said, "I'm old enough for anything. Any damn thing at all."
With that she leaned over abruptly and kissed him on the cheek and then on the mouth. Her kiss was open-mouthed and warm, with lots of tongue.
When she pulled away, she looked at him, sloe-eyed, and he figured there was no way out, not if he wanted to be in Ressler's movie. This menopausal momma was about to debauch him right here in this goddamn marshmallow palace!
Leona stood up and unbuttoned her dress and let it hang open. He saw a lace-trimmed white bra that held breasts he guessed were helped by silicone, and a flat belly that she'd earned, and shapely thighs the color of burnished copper, compliments of a tanning bed, he supposed.
As though reading his thoughts, she said, "The tawny color is mostly mine even without tanning, compliments of my Italian old man. But my ma was Irish, so I can hold a grudge with the best of them. Don't ever cross me, gorgeous."
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