by Michael Nava
“Yes, a tragedy. She was a great talent.”
He looked at me to see if I was baiting him, and when he was satisfied I wasn’t, offered a tepid, “A real star.”
“How long have you been her agent?”
He shook his head. “I took her on what? Six, seven months ago, as a favor. Before that, she hadn’t been represented in a long time.”
“A favor to whom?”
A glint of feral menace appeared in the doggy eyes. “What’s it to you?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I represent her estate.”
“Her estate? Ha!”
“There was some money,” I said, confidingly.
“Yeah? How much?”
“I can’t say. Attorney-client privilege and all that. I’m surprised you didn’t know, since I assumed she earned it from work you got her.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I understand she had quite a career in the seventies.”
“I know,” he said. “She showed me her clippings. Lots and lots of clippings.”
“This money,” I said. “I’ve got to figure out where it came from and whether she paid taxes on it.”
“Sorry. If she was getting money, it wasn’t from me.”
“You said you took her on as a favor for someone. Maybe that person could help me. Who was it?”
“Duke Asuras,” he said with pride.
“The head of Parnassus? How did he know her?”
“He was her agent when she was working,” he replied.
“Back in the seventies?”
“Yeah, like that. The lady had some problems, he wanted to help her out. He sent her to me.”
“You spoke to him?”
“Well, no, not personally. The guy runs a fucking studio. I got a call from an exec who told me Duke would be grateful if I helped get her career back on track.”
“Any luck?”
“I got her a couple of parts,” he said. “Small parts, TV. Hey, she’d been out of the business fifteen years, dead drunk most of it. She wasn’t looking her best, either. Then the bitch turned on me, dragged out the clippings, said the parts were too small and started turning them down. She was a real piece of work, that one.”
“Why did you continue to represent her?”
“Because for the first time, I’m getting my calls to Parnassus returned the same day I made them.”
“You have no idea how she supported herself.”
He shrugged. “It had to be Asuras.”
“Why would he give her money?”
“Who knows? I figure he was shtupping her back when he was her agent. He bumps into her, feels sorry for her, tries to help her clean up her act. For old-times sake.”
“Who knew Asuras was such an easy touch,” I said, falling into the agent’s cadences.
“Asuras? A prince,” Kahn said fervently. “A great man, a leader of the industry. You seen his grosses?”
The Hollywood equation: success equals character.
“Thanks,” I said, getting up to go. “Listen, do you remember the name of the executive at Parnassus who asked you to represent Joanne Schilling?”
“Yeah, yeah, some stuck-up bitch. Talks like she’s got a dick in her mouth.” He flipped through his Rolodex. “Josey Walsh.”
I met Serena for dinner at Galaxy Burgers, a fifties diner in Silver Lake, midway between my house and her office. The restaurant looked like two concrete pie plates stuck together and encircled by a band of round, nautical windows. To create the illusion the building was hovering, it sat on a raised platform disguised by shrubs. The metallic silver paint had long ago faded to gray and was adorned by gang graffiti. Inside, the floorboards were visible beneath a shredded electric-blue carpet. Rips in the red vinyl booths were repaired with electrician’s tape and the white Formica tables were stained with forty-odd years of spilled food and drink. In a couple of old photos by the bathrooms, the waitresses were shown in their original form-fitting, high-collared Judy Jetson spacesuit uniforms, but the waitresses had been replaced by waiters as the neighborhood got tougher, and they wore grease-stained black trousers and short-sleeved white rayon shirts with clip-on black bowties. The food was only passable, but the menu boasted a “bottomless cup of coffee” and no one cared how long you occupied the booth. Galaxy Burgers was a favorite of derelicts and slackers and I liked it, too, because the spaceship that never quite got off the ground was one of my private metaphors for LA. Plus, when they said bottomless cup of coffee, they meant it. A coffee-hound’s heaven.
I was already in my favorite booth when Serena came in, her fair sunburned skin, yuppie pinstripes, athletic stride and perky lesbian hair causing a commotion among the skulking regulars who clung to their booths like spiders to their webs.
“Jesus, Henry,” she said, surveying the room. “Is this where you find your clients?”
“You’re the one who insisted on meeting at a neutral spot.” I handed her a grease-stained menu. “Have whatever you want, I’m buying.”
“I’ll eat at home,” she sniffed. “You said you found something.”
I gave her a summary of my meeting with Carson Kahn, concluding, “Josey Walsh is the key. Have you talked to her again?”
“She won’t budge,” Serena replied. The waiter appeared with a coffeepot and filled our cups. “She said she told me everything she knows about Joanne Schilling.”
“Did she know Schilling had been murdered?”
Serena sipped the coffee, made a face, put the cup down. “I broke the news to her. It rattled her for a second, but then she went back into denial mode.”
“Did you point out that while she claimed Schilling needed a place to stay, she was paying rent on an apartment in the Valley?”
“Of course, I did,” Serena snapped. “Walsh said she didn’t know anything about that. All she knew was the hard-luck story Schilling told her.”
“Did she know Schilling was a witness in the Travis case?”
“She says not,” Serena replied.
“What about the coincidence of Donati hiring me to represent Travis?”
“She said she hadn’t worked for Donati for several months and didn’t know anything about it.”
“With that kind of memory, she ought to go into politics.”
“She may start remembering when the police come around.”
“What do you mean?”
“I notified the LAPD homicide detectives investigating Schilling’s murder that they might want to talk to her dear, intimate friend, Josephine Walsh.”
“Why would she be more forthcoming to them?”
“I could tell she wasn’t taking me very seriously because I’m a woman. I get that more often than I care to admit. From other women, I mean. I assume men don’t take me seriously,” she said, throwing me a sharp look. “She’ll pay attention if it’s a man asking the questions.”
“Did you tell LAPD about the connection to the Morse murder?”
“What connection, Henry?” she said, wearily.
Having just had this argument with Odell, I let it go. “What about the car bombing investigation? You heard anything from Odell?”
“He promised to get back to me by the end of the week if he had anything.” She tried the coffee again. “God, I’m beat. I’ve got a backlog of a hundred cases with new ones coming in every week. I’ve got swastikas at synagogues in Fairfax, arson threats at black churches in South Central, and some asshole going around Union-Pico, pretending to be the INS and extorting illegals. Plus Donna’s threatening me with couples’ counseling and Jesse cries whenever I leave the house.” She belched softly. “And heartburn.”
I listened quietly to her speech. “Are you flaking on me, too?”
“No.”
“Odell thinks I’m turning into a conspiracy junkie, seeing Asuras beneath every bed. You, too?”
“We talked,” she admitted. “He told me you think Asuras hired Gaitan to kill Joanne Schilling—”
“Odell was the o
ne who said she was killed with a service revolver.”
“So naturally it’s Gaitan,” she said. “That’s the problem, right there. You’re still gunning for him.”
“Fine,” I said, “I’d be happy to get out of the business of doing the cops’ job for them if you persuaded the sheriff to reopen the investigation.”
“The sheriff’s not interested in reopening the investigation,” she said brusquely.
“How do you know? Did you ask him?”
“I wrote a memo suggesting there were some loose ends that needed looking into. Whether Katie Morse’s murder was related to Amerian’s, the murder of a key witness. The answer came back through channels this morning. Travis was the killer, the case is closed. These other two murders are completely unrelated.”
“How can they know that before they investigate?”
“Think about it, Henry,” she said. “The department’s got its hands full investigating open cases, plus those killings in West Hollywood were a political hot potato for the sheriff, thanks to you. You made him look bad. Do you really think he’s going to admit the killer is still out there somewhere? And not just any killer, Henry, but the head of a major studio. He might as well arrest the mayor.”
“But we know Asuras did it.”
“We don’t know that,” she said. “All we know is he’s connected to one of the victims and to Schilling. The rest is conjecture.”
I looked at her. “I’m not letting up.”
“I’ve got to go,” she said, scooting out of the booth. “Don’t do anything crazy, Henry.”
“What, like murder a bunch of people?”
“Henry,” Donati greeted me in his deepest register. “I’ve been meaning to call you, but, you know, there are a lot of demands on my time.”
Thus put in my place, I replied, “I can only imagine.”
“So what can I do for you?”
“You were going to get back to me about Alex’s manuscript.”
“Oh, that,” he said. “I don’t think we have anything else to talk about.”
“Asuras doesn’t care if I go to the cops?”
“I told you when you first asked for a payoff that we weren’t interested in doing business with you,” he said. “That hasn’t changed.”
“No, what you said was—” I stopped. Something in his tone alerted me that he was speaking on the record. “Are you taping this call?”
“As a matter of fact, I am, Henry. I wanted it on tape that you’re trying to blackmail Duke Asuras.”
“If you actually practiced law,” I said, “you’d know secretly taped phone calls are inadmissible in court.”
“But not at a disbarment proceeding,” he reminded me. “Different rules of evidence.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t incriminate me.
“I don’t know if I’ve offended you, or if you’re just nuts,” Donati said, “but this is going to stop. The other night at your house you tried to extort Duke with a phony document you obviously acquired from your friend Richie Florentino It was the same slanderous piece of crap he tried to use in his hatchet piece about Duke. You know you’re not going to the police with it, because if you do, I promise you, Henry, I’ll see to it you lose your license to practice law. I promise.”
He hung up.
I was awakened at one in the morning by a call coming in on my office phone. I reached for the phone.
“Mr. Rios? It’s Rod.”
“Rod,” I said, sleepily switching on the lamp. “What’s going on?”
“School starts next week,” he said. “Tonight my dad showed me the tickets for Utah. I made up my mind, I want to take them to court.”
“I know it wasn’t an easy decision,” I said.
“I talked to Mr. Wise. He’s coming down from San Francisco to meet me Saturday.” He paused. “Could you come, too?”
“I’ll be there,” I said. “I’ll call Phil in the morning and we’ll coordinate.”
Rod said, “I hope this is the right thing.”
“I don’t think they’ve left you any choice,” I said.
“Unless I change,” he said sadly. “I’ve got to go.”
He hung up and then, a second later, I heard the click of another receiver hanging up. At first I assumed one of his parents had been listening, but then I heard the distinct sound of footsteps at the other end of my house, in the office. I hopped out of bed, threw on some clothes, grabbed the baseball bat I kept beneath the bed and burst out into the living room.
“Who the fuck is out here!” I shouted, switching on the light.
The front door slammed. Footsteps echoed off the steps to the street. A car started just outside my house. I ran to the kitchen window as it sped past: a blue-and-white cab, the logo Lucky’s Taxi Service painted on the door.
Chapter 20
THE NEXT MORNING I was standing outside my office window with Jim Kwan. In his capacity as our neighborhood watch captain, he was inspecting the hole that had been cut out in the corner of the window from which, presumably, the intruder had reached in and unlatched the lock.
“Yeah,” Kwan said. “Looks like a professional. You didn’t hear him come in?”
“No,” I said. “I was asleep. If the phone hadn’t rung—” I decided against pursuing that line of speculation. “I wonder if you could canvass the neighbors, see if anyone saw anything.”
“Sure,” he said. He looked at me, his round, open face clouded. “Listen, Henry, there’s something I got to tell you.”
“About what?”
“I was talking to old Mrs. Byrne down the street,” he said, referring to the terror of the neighborhood, a bigoted old woman who spent her days reading a Bible and casting a censorious eye on the rest of us. “She said she saw a meter man hanging around your house a couple of days ago. Said he walked around from one side and came out the other.”
“The meter is in the back.”
He nodded. “I know, but Mrs. Byrne said everyone’s meters were read last week. She also told me this guy didn’t go anywhere but to your house. I should’ve said something to you, but half the time she makes things up to have a reason to talk to me.”
“Sounds like someone was casing my house.”
“I’m going to tell the security service to pay special attention to your place,” he said. “You should take care of this window as soon as you can. Did they take anything?”
“No,” I said.
“You were lucky then.”
“Yeah, lucky.”
On Saturday morning I drove to the outlet mall at the edge of the central valley town where Phil Wise and I were meeting with Rod Morse. I took Highway 99 through a landscape of field, farmland and long horizons, familiar to me from my own childhood in the valley. A dusty haze hung in the cloudless September sky. A new subdivision appeared like a weird mirage in the midst of tomato fields. A banner outside a junior high school proclaimed, YOU ARE ENTERING A DRUG-FREE AND GUN-FREE ZONE. The mall resembled a collection of barns, a tribute to the valley’s agrarian culture that was being rapidly displaced by things like subdivisions and outlet malls. Soon, all of California would be a suburb either of San Francisco or Los Angeles. Small towns like this would disappear, and while there was something to be mourned by their loss, at least urban culture might moderate the rancid local bigotries that had driven me out of my hometown and which would probably drive Rod out of his. I pulled into the parking lot in front of the Mikasa outlet store and made it to the McDonald’s, with five minutes to spare. A thin, goateed man in an electric-blue vintage suit waved me to his table.
“Henry? Phil Wise. Rod’s not here yet.”
I slipped into the booth across from him, the remains of an Egg McMuffin between us. I estimated Phil’s age at twenty-eight or twenty-nine. The suit was from the sixties and he carried it off with Gen-X panache. He had long fingers but his nails were bitten to bloody stubs.
“Nice to finally meet you face to face,” I said.
Ouch, I thought, but said, “How did you get interested in this work?”
“Pentecostal parents,” he replied, smiling. He had smoker’s teeth.
“I thought things were better for your generation.”
“In the big cities, maybe,” he said. “Not in places like this or where I was raised.”
“Which was?”
“Colorado Springs,” he said. “I’d like to go over a couple of points with you before Rod gets here.”
“Sure, but I want to make clear, this is your show. I’m just here for moral support.”
We became so intent on our conversation, we didn’t notice that the crowded restaurant had grown very quiet as a phalanx of deputy sheriffs surrounded our table. Then Phil looked up and nudged me. I looked around at the beefy, glowering uniformed men.
“Is there a problem?” I asked the nearest one, a black man whose name tag identified him as Deputy Collins.
A middle-aged woman suddenly burst through the circle of cops pointing at us. “That’s them,” she shouted. “Those are the child molesters who’ve come for my boy.”
Collins said, “Philip Wise, Henry Rios. Get up.”
“What the hell is this?” Wise demanded.
“I said, get up,” Collins replied, jerking him to his feet by his shirt collar. “You’re under arrest for conspiring to commit kidnapping.”
“I want them in handcuffs,” the woman, who I now realized was Rod’s mother, screamed.
Collins complied.
Four hours later, we were sitting in a conference room at the DA’s office with a pudgy, bespectacled assistant DA named George Holly, who was trying to talk Phil out of suing the county for false arrest and false imprisonment.
“The sheriffs had a good faith belief there was probable cause to arrest you based on what Mrs. Morse told them,” Holly said defensively.
“Good faith!” Wise screamed. “Two faggots are coming to town to abduct our son? That’s your idea of probable cause? Where did you go to law school, you Nazi?”
“You were planning to remove Rod from his family,” Holly replied, his plump, pale face going apple red.