The only aspect of my appearance that seemed to throw the receptionist at Stone, Fell and Hughes was my hair, just about identical to hers in colour and cut, though I was pretty sure hers was not pre-owned. I asked, ‘Could I speak with your Employment Opportunities Director please? Mr Finley asked me to come by.’
She pressed a series of digits with her palm flat against the board to avoid damaging her ultra-length crimson nails, spoke softly into her headset, then glanced up at me with a winning smile. ‘If you’ll have a seat, Mr Fielding will be out in just a minute.’
One minute stretched to twenty before a plump-faced forty-year-old with a cowlick and striped red tie popped through the door. His gaze travelled from my ankles to my eyes, taking several rest stops between, as he circled the reception desk to greet me. ‘Miss?’
‘Dahl, Miss Dahl.’ I offered a limp-fingered grip and let my eyes go pleasantly blank when I smiled.
He wrapped my hand in a patronizing two-handed shake and sought to penetrate my character with a glance. ‘Fielding here. Call me Jerry. Why don’t we have a little talk in my office, hmmm?’ He led me through an open-ceiling work area broken into a maze of cubicles. The walls were partitioned just low enough for some boss to nose over the top and see if you were playing computer games or really working. The bosses themselves had floor to ceiling walls and doors that closed. Mr Fielding was a boss.
‘How do you know Mr Finley?’ He made himself at home while perusing my résumé, kicking his oxfords up to the corner of his desk to recline near horizontal.
‘Well, we met in the lobby and when I told him I was looking for employment he suggested I apply here.’
‘Did he get your phone number?’
At first I didn’t understand what he meant but then I did and knew just how to answer. I didn’t say anything. I blushed.
Fielding grinned with boys-will-be-boys admiration. ‘That’s Finny.’
‘That’s what?’
‘Finny. Mr Finley’s nickname.’ His eyes dropped back down to the résumé. He turned it over to confirm I’d written nothing on the back and tossed it on to his desk. ‘I must hand it to him though, he chose well this time. The training and work experience all look good, and eighty-five words per minute is impressive.’
I certainly hoped it was. I’d invented the résumé that afternoon at a local copy shop that rented computers and printers by the hour, asked three different people what secretarial skills I should claim. A cat hopping across the keyboard could type more accurately than I.
‘We don’t have any immediate openings, but positions do pop up from time to time. If something does, I’ll call and we’ll arrange a formal interview to discuss responsibilities, salary, benefits – that sort of thing. And of course we’d administer a test to verify your word-processing and typing skills.’
I folded my hands on my lap and puckered my mouth to angles of prim righteousness. ‘I expect to be tested. After all, if you don’t verify the information I could claim just about anything, couldn’t I?’
He made a sudden movement to place both feet on the floor and said, ‘I’m happy you understand,’ a signal the interview was over. He took my hand, prattled on about how grateful he was that I had chosen this company to apply to, and just as he released his grip said, as though forgetting something of small but still critical importance, ‘Oh – I didn’t see anything here about marital status?’
‘Single,’ I smiled. ‘But still hopeful.’
He plucked a pen from the inside pocket of his suit as though ready to note that on my résumé and joked, ‘Then so am I.’
Some joke.
As I stepped into the hall I asked with polite urgency, ‘The little girl’s room?’
He pointed to his right, no hesitation at all. ‘Just around that corner, second door to your left.’
A woman about my age stood at the sink washing her hands when I pushed through the door. She bent her hips away from the sink to keep dry her knee-length grey skirt and matching jacket. Her mouse-brown hair had been trimmed in no-nonsense style just above her shoulders. She couldn’t hide her smirk when I asked which office belonged to Mr Finley, but then, she didn’t try. I was getting a feel for his taste in women. I fitted right in. Her directions were as precise as a blueprint. I thanked her, backed into a stall, lowered the toilet lid and dialled Frank. The answering service picked up – he’d turned off his cell phone. For two hours I entertained myself by reading the graffiti and flushing the toilet. ‘The brighter the tie, the bigger the dick,’ one line went. I wasn’t sure what it meant but I agreed with at least one interpretation.
Out in the hall I heard the white noise of ventilation ducts, fluorescent tubes and electronic equipment but no voices and no footsteps other than my own. I passed the entrance, counted off the doors and stepped into an office twice the size of Fielding’s. The pictures on the desk were all of Finley doing manly things with his buddies. Fielding said people called him Finny. With his dark hair and Euro-style, he could pass for Italian. When he was introduced people probably heard Vinny. Somebody like Piña would naturally slide the F to a V, to something she’d heard before. I picked the cell phone from my purse and tried Frank again.
He answered with a brusque ‘Whaddyawant?’ In the background, I heard clattering plates and conversation.
‘Hey, you eating dinner? You alone?’
The line went dead. I touched redial, listened to the phone ring five or six times, hung up, touched redial again. This far into the evening, he needed to stay wired to any calls coming in. If he shut off his cell phone, he shut off his sources. When he finally picked up I said, ‘I don’t have a lot of time for phone games.’
‘What was that you were playing last night?’
‘Interviewing a witness.’
‘You always interview witnesses on your back?’
He didn’t mean it. He was angry. I let it go. ‘I wasn’t playing games. When I called you I didn’t expect her to show up.’
‘Her? I never figured you for a lesbian.’
‘Sure, Frank. That’s why I won’t sleep with you. Get it now?’
He hung up on me again. I hit redial one more time. After fifteen rings I gave it up. In a city of nine million strangers I had one less friend. I sat in Finley’s chair and looked around. It was a nice chair. With the controls to slide the seat, backrest and arms this way or that it had more moves than an amusement park ride. The bottom half of his computer screen looked like the best place to catch his eye. The envelope would be the first thing he saw when he entered the office. If he still worried about the photographs Gabe had taken, I’d leave him a colour photocopy of one and see what that stick did to his beehive.
His desk drawers looked like some manufacturer’s display model, organized into neat sections for writing tools in one drawer and company letterhead in the next. A beige four-drawer filing cabinet took up the space between desk and wall. The top drawer sprang open to a tab labelled Tinseltown Estates. The file behind it ran to the back and didn’t end until the middle of the third drawer down. I pulled out the first item behind the tab, a thick blue home-bound report titled Tinseltown Estates – Where the Stars Shine Night and Day.
A faint scratching of nails sounded at the door. I eased shut the drawer and sat, trying to look invited. The door slivered open to the startled face and doppelganger hair of the receptionist. Her first reaction was to back out of the office, forget she’d even seen me. She expected Finley and it didn’t bode well that she came face to face instead with a blonde who could have been split from her same egg. But before she closed the door suspicion subverted jealousy and she said, ‘You know you shouldn’t be in here.’
‘You’re absolutely right, I mean, Finny’s an hour late already and a girl’s gotta have some self-respect, ya know?’
‘I meant it’s after hours, against the rules.’
‘I didn’t mean to break any rules. He just told me to wait in his office.’
‘This isn’t the
way to get a job here. Not through Finny. A lot of girls come up here but none of them ever gets hired.’
Women are always tougher on each other than on anyone else. I knew what she was getting at. She was calling me a slut. ‘I should be like you – get hired before I drop into his office late at night?’
‘I think you should leave. If Mr Finley returns, I’ll tell him you’re waiting in the downstairs lobby.’ She reached inside the office and shut off the lights.
31
Little Chapel of the Dawn packaged all six foot of Gabe into a cardboard box that wouldn’t fit a pair of shoes. Not much remains after the water boils out; a hundred and seventy pounds reduced to ounces and a few mixed memories. The cardboard box rested on an oak table in the Little Chapel itself, amid twin vases spilling over with yellow roses. The house organist played ‘God Save the Queen’ while I walked down the aisle to retrieve the ashes. The funeral director stood at the back, hands folded and head lowered. In a place like Little Chapel of the Dawn even camp took on a solemn note. It was like Gabe and I were getting married again, only this time the vow wasn’t unto death but into it. When I lifted the box it was still warm from the oven, like bread.
I was determined that death would not separate us, not yet. When I got the box into the Caddy I set him on the seat next to me and opened the plastic pouch, stamped Personal Effects, that the coroner had delivered with the body. The contents were barely plural: one leather wallet, water damaged; one set of glasses, black; and one Swatch, not waterproof. The wallet contained twenty-three US dollars and five English pounds, Visa and Blockbuster Video cards and a California driver licence. The absence of house or car keys meant whoever killed him used the keys to gain entrance into his apartment. I pulled the driver licence, set it aside with his glasses, his watch and a tube of super glue. The rest I tossed into the glove box.
Midway between the glove box and steering wheel, about the spot a hula doll would go, I super-glued Gabe’s ashes to the dash. His glasses fitted the cardboard box like a face. Below the glasses, I fixed a playing card illustration of a daggered heart, and beneath that, his driver licence. Amid fragments of the amulet he’d given me I stuck his watch. I liked the way that expressed how time went bang. The shrine would be a work in progress, a place to pin my griefs and hopes. I said a little prayer for Gabe’s soul to the plastic Jesus I attached to the top and asked forgiveness for all the bad things I’d done and even worse things I was certain to do in the future.
When Finley pulled within range the transmitter let out a little beep and a few minutes later I spotted his Land Cruiser racing down Wilshire. Finley was in the hurry, not me. He didn’t have much time to beat the clock if he wanted to park and get up to his office before nine. The report on Tinseltown Estates lay folded open on my lap. The first page of the report began with a poetic pitch, layered over an architect’s rendering of a hilltop housing development:
Tinseltown Estates
Where the stars shine night and day,
And the gentle smogless breezes play,
Your estate above the city rests,
Secure you’ve bought the very best.
With only the finest materials in use,
Each estate has magnificent views
And neighbours from the silver screen;
Life here is the best it’s ever been!
Except for the dodgy rhyme of ‘use’ and ‘views’ it sounded pretty good to me; whoever wrote it could make a good living in the greeting-card business. Maybe Finley was a sensitive soul behind the executive façade, not that poetry made him any less likely a killer. Lots of women I knew at the Institute wrote poems and the prison poet laureate was a woman doing life times five for salting the potato salad with arsenic at her in-laws’ Fourth of July picnic.
Page two looked pretty impressive, an artist’s four-colour rendition of a tropical mountain rising from the arid basin of the city. On the opposite page, the project was described in prose:
Tinseltown Estates
‘Where the stars shine night and day’
A visionary real-estate project destined in future years to be mentioned in the same breathless whisper with Beverly Hills and Bel Air, Tinseltown Estates is an exclusive residential community to be nestled amid 350 lush hillside acres on Mount Lee, with sweeping views over Lake Hollywood to Downtown, Universal City and the Pacific Ocean. Each custom home will be hand-crafted with only the finest materials and set amid winding country roads on two-acre tropically landscaped lots. Being driven up the halcyon slopes of Tinseltown Estates, high above the stress and noise of the city below, will be like coming home to heaven. And just as the stars shine in heaven, Tinseltown Estates will boast its own galaxy of luminaries, thanks to the exclusive partnership between its developers, Stone, Fell and Hughes Development Corporation, and its investor partners – all legends of the silver screen – the Tinseltown Players Corporation. And because security is of equal concern to executive, investor and celebrity alike, Tinseltown Estates will be a gated community with its own highly trained internal security force and perimeter protection based on the most modern technology available.
Prices start at just $2.5 million.
A few pages into the report, the text listed the members of the Tinseltown Players Corporation. As corporations go it was a small one, just four men and one woman, but all five belonged to that exclusive club of actors whom the studios trust can open a picture from Kalamazoo to Katmandu on the strength of their name alone. Damian Burke was not the most famous name on the list but as an action-picture star who in his most recent role as the President’s bodyguard single-handedly eviscerated forty-two neo-Nazis, thirteen Arab terrorists and a Stinger missile in full flight, his name was prominently displayed under the title, Special Security Consultant.
Finley bolted from his hole a few minutes before noon, blasting from underground parking in a wild screech of tyres that turned the head of the single pedestrian on the block. He wove wildly from lane to lane and cut up other drivers indiscriminately – acting like a typical LA driver in an upscale car – then swerved into a four-wheel skidding U-turn. The manoeuvre slowed a speeding pack of onrushing Mercedes and BMWs, which sounded their horns in appreciation of the opportunity to use their ABS braking systems and rack-and-pinion steering if not yet the air-bags. But Finley wasn’t finished yet; he rocketed forward and darted to a squealing left turn across traffic, heading north toward Sunset Boulevard. I needed only to pull on to Wilshire and turn left to track him. He pushed the speedometer up to sixty, sixty-five between traffic lights like he thought the devil was on his tail. Maybe she was.
The roads branching east and west from Beechwood Canyon simultaneously climb elevation and income levels – the higher the elevation the higher the cost of the home – up to the ridge tops of the Hollywood Hills, where the city below glistens in miniature from skyscraper to sea like a model ready for camera. What the real-estate hucksters called ‘million-dollar views’ up here they meant literally; vacant lots listed at that price. The tracking system led me up one of these ridge tops to Finley’s Land Cruiser, caged behind spiked gates painted Versace gold. A granite-paved drive curved through a neatly trimmed paradise of bougainvillea, hibiscus hedges and flawless lawn to rest at the feet of two huge topiary lions. The beasts had been grown to guard the steps leading to the Corinthian colonnade of Burke’s California-Neo-Romanesque mansion, the kind of hyphenated architectural rubbish people with more money than taste have favoured in Los Angeles since its inception as loose-marble capital of the world.
Just beyond Burke’s estate the road dead-ended against the eastern boundary of Griffith Park. I turned around at the cul-de-sac, noted the servo-cameras at the top of the golden gates and coasted down the hill to a classic split-level California bungalow, all straight lines and clean angles. A real estate company’s For Sale sign speared the ground beside a stepped brick path. Ask for Peter St John! the sign urged.
I dialled the telephone number and did just that.
32
Peter St John sported a cheerfully tragic look about him, as though he had once entertained more glamorous ambitions than selling real estate but was determined to make the best of his disillusion. Something of the college thespian had lasted to his mid-thirties in the elaborate gentility of his gestures and the careful flair of his dress. From his jaunty step to the gold handkerchief that jutted just so from the breast pocket of his blue blazer it seemed he wished the character he played to convey better breeding than his own. He was certainly handsome enough to be an actor – a wispy Rogaine blond with square jaw and spacious blue eyes – but deviation from the script, such as me, gave him trouble.
Improvisation is the unteachable art of acting and St John in this regard was artless. I didn’t look like the Miss Dahl he’d spoken to on the phone, personal assistant to a furniture magnate from Sweden. I didn’t look like anybody’s personal assistant except maybe Joan Jett’s or Courtney Love’s but the odds I had appeared randomly were considerably longer. He couldn’t decide whether to retain his salesman mask, all cheery and welcoming, or his get-rid-of-a-lost-stranger face. Maybe his inability to improvise was why he was still selling real estate and not movie tickets. He leaned his shoulders forward, cocked his head courteously to the side, said, ‘Miss…?.’
‘Nina Zero.’
He tried to be just helpful enough to brush me off gently. ‘If you’re here to see the house I have an appointment with another client at the moment, but –’
Killing Paparazzi Page 17