‘Miss Dahl won’t be keeping the appointment.’
‘She – ?’
‘Gabriel Burns was my husband.’
He stepped back as though I was something communicable. ‘I – I – I don’t believe I know Mr Bu-bu-rns.’
His hands shook so bad I had to take the keys and open the door myself. Inside, the house was empty of all but floors and walls and the walls at the back were glass framing a view across the canyon and down to Hollywood. That view was all the furniture I’d ever need. St John locked and bolted the door and then fell back against it.
‘You can’t tell them about this.’
‘Which them you talking about?’
‘Anybody. Particularly my agency.’
I pointed him down a hall that led in the direction of Burke’s property. The walls were neatly laid brick and the light fixtures on the ceiling were asymmetrical triangles blown from frosted glass. It was a really fine house. ‘What, you got kids, afraid you’ll get fired, they’ll go hungry?’
‘No, I don’t live with, no, no kids. But I have house payments, car payments, my God, I just bought a new living-room arrangement direct from Milan.’
The hall extended past room after room with window walls facing the canyon and ended at a room so big I wanted to strap on a pair of roller blades. St John couldn’t help himself. He reverted to his role and announced, ‘The master suite.’
I guessed bedroom wasn’t a grand enough word. Through the half-opened door into the bathroom I glimpsed something like a jacuzzi or sunken hot tub, my familiarity with the plumbing of the rich insufficient to tell me which. I walked across the floor to the brick wall at the far end, where I’d hoped to find a window looking on to Burke’s estate.
‘Tell me what happened the night my husband was here, the night before his body was found.’
‘He, he was here that night?’
‘That makes you very close to being an accessory to murder, doesn’t it?’
The wall facing the canyon was glass brick at the ceiling and sliding glass doors at the parquet floor. I flicked up a latch and stepped on to a wooden terrace constructed on stilts over the descending hillside. To the north the land sloped down to Burke’s estate, nestled against the back ridge of the canyon, then rose sharply to hilltops in Griffith Park. From the porch corner off the master suite I looked across thirty yards of landscaping directly into Burke’s living-room windows.
‘What was Gabe’s deal with you? Straight cash or percentage?’
St John blurted, ‘Excuse me just a moment,’ and hurried into the bathroom. I crouched on my heels and examined the flooring for blood, scrape marks, a torn corner of yellow Kodak or green Fuji packaging, any sign at all that Gabe had been here and what had happened to him. The angle matched and the windows looked identical to the ones from the computer disk. With sticks, a telephoto lens and fast film he could have shot straight through the wall of glass that gave Burke his view down the canyon. Funny how people with windows rarely consider it’s as easy to see in as out. The floor was clean, any evidence swept up or kicked over the edge or not left at all.
I rapped on the bathroom door to hurry St John along. He called out, ‘Busy!’ I gave him another two minutes before I hammered again. His fair skin when he stepped out had bleached transparent and the blood beneath it blotched red and blue. Water dripped from his face and hands and soaked the collar of his shirt where he’d splashed himself at the sink and then remembered the house was empty – no towels. I didn’t enjoy watching him suffer. The Westside of Los Angeles can be an expensive place if you want to live high because the people with money here have a lot of money and they live very high. The ones who pretend to have money but don’t can fall with nothing between them and concrete poverty except a few terrifying seconds. When you lose your job the fall begins.
I took his elbow, led him on to the porch for some air, confided, ‘I’d say I’ve got you by the balls but I’m not sure you have any.’
In a sudden, frustrated gesture he ripped the tails of his white shirt from his pants and used them to wipe his face. ‘It was a percentage. He promised me ten per cent. Five to ten thousand dollars, he said, maybe more, just to let him have the keys for a night.’
‘But then it turned into two nights.’
‘Why didn’t he just publish the damn pictures!’ He jammed the shirt-tails into his pants but didn’t get the button line straight and ripped them out again. ‘Whose idea was it to blackmail them? Was it yours?’
‘Who said it was blackmail?’
He dropped his hands to his sides, looked down at the wrinkled shirt-tails and pressed them flat against his trousers. ‘Nobody. I just guessed that was it. When he didn’t, you know, when I didn’t see anything in the papers.’
‘Gabe didn’t tell you that was why he needed the keys? You just guessed he was blackmailing Burke?’
His head went sideways and then up and then down and sideways again in a confused figure eight. ‘He didn’t, no, he didn’t tell me anything, but, hey, why else wouldn’t, you know, the pictures be published? Had to be blackmail.’
Most people aren’t good liars. White lies or even tinted ones are voiced without a stutter but when they lie about their own bad behaviour a direct question gives them gridlock. They sweat, their voice clamps like brakes on a wheel, they pretend to do something else when they lie so you can’t see how bad they are at it. Sometimes it’s only one thing that gives them away. With St John, it was everything, starting with his shirt-tails. When his hand dipped into his trousers again I slipped the back of my hip under his and yanked him down to the wood. Before he could kick I pulled his tie and swung my elbow into his face. The crack told me I’d hit my mark. I let go of his tie, stepped back. He rolled on to his knees, blood spurting from his nostrils.
‘Oh God, lady, you broke my nose!’
‘Well, now you can go to a plastic surgeon, get it fixed the way you’ve always wanted.’
He stayed on his knees and tried to stop the bleeding with a hand to his nostrils. The guy had no clue that sooner or later he’d bleed to death that way. I knelt next to him and put my arm on his shoulder. He tried to push me away. I gently eased him back toward the railing. ‘Come on,’ I encouraged him, ‘sit on your butt, put your head back on the rail here, that’s the only way to get the blood to stop.’
He was pliant as a child, leaned his head back and pressed his fingers against the sides of his nose like I showed him. I was sorry I hit him, it was like hitting a kid, I felt really bad about it. ‘Peter,’ I said, my voice sad, ‘don’t lie to me. I’m under a lot of pressure here. Do you know what I did this morning?’
He moaned that no, he didn’t.
‘I picked up my husband’s ashes. Compared to that, your nose, your job, they just don’t mean much. So please, who told you Gabe was blackmailing somebody?’
‘If you tell them I talked, they’ll kill me, OK? Well, maybe not kill, but, oh God, a broken leg for sure. And my job, well that’s gone anyway, isn’t it?’
‘Shhhhh. I’m not going to tell them anything, OK? And if you say what happened, no lies, no omissions, I won’t contact your work either.’
‘It’s all going to come out anyway. I mean, it’s murder, right?’
‘That’s what the law says.’
‘The guy next door, not Burke, the bodyguard. Earl. He said it was blackmail.’ The truth was working its way loose, I could feel it, like an abscessed tooth. ‘He knew someone had been here, he’d seen one of the photographs, and the angle, this was the only place it could have been taken from. Earl, he made me, my job, nothing I could do, he said he’d get me fired.’
‘What did Earl make you do?’
‘Give him a set of keys to the house.’
‘What else?’
‘Call him. You know, when, it, I mean I, when it –’
I stroked his brow, calmed him like a hurt child, whispered it was OK.
‘When Burns asked to borrow keys again. I
called Earl, told him he would be here that night.’
I left St John on the terrace, fingers pressed against his nostrils while he waited for the bleeding to stop. I couldn’t hate him even though his phone call likely led to Gabe’s murder. He didn’t betray Gabe for any reason more venal than self-preservation. I don’t think either of us had hard feelings about the other. I got what I needed to know and he got a broken nose to soothe the guilt of his betrayal. A fair trade, in my estimation.
Just beyond the bungalow’s foundation the ice plant sloped sharply to leave such a wedge of air between the terrace and the ground that the fan-shaped plane of wood seemed about to sail into the canyon on a gust of wind. The ice plant provided good foothold at the roots but the leaves were thick and slippery and as I crept down the slope along the terrace pilings I had to kick and dig with each step. Beneath the edge of the terrace my eye caught scraps of cellophane, sun-faded strips of coloured cardboard, a Miller beer can, a clear plastic glass, and further than I thought it could have fallen, tucked into the ice plant so just the bottom rim poked out, an empty film box, Kodak-yellow and marked ASA 1000.
‘Can I ask what you’re doing down there?’
I glanced up to a little bull pawing the ground at the rear corner of the bungalow, just before the hill began its slope into ice plant. What he lacked in height he compensated in bulk, probably packed two hundred pounds into a five-foot-nine frame. Most of the body builders I’ve met are short of six feet, work out their Napoleon complexes with weights. He’d come out the same way I had, through an unlocked gate just to the side of the parking overhang.
I said, ‘Sure, you can ask,’ and slipped the film box into my pocket. I ran my hand over the top of the ice plant, found a cigarette butt and threw it further down to where the ice plant stopped and the hill steepened to hard-packed dirt over stone.
‘Answer me!’
‘I said you could ask. I didn’t say I’d answer.’
He pointed his finger at me, even took a threatening step down the hillside. ‘Get up here, now!’
It didn’t take much to bait him, just a middle finger waved like a red cape and he charged down the slope. I let myself scream and hopped from one foot to the next like I was more afraid of falling than getting caught. The scream had some viscera in it; the guy was big and built and projected enough murderous testosterone to scare the teeth out of a rabid dog.
He wasn’t bad on his feet for a wide one – I had to admire his sense of balance as he pounded through the ice plant – but after a dozen steps he was moving too fast to control his speed or lateral movement and when I planted my feet and sprung up slope I caught him at the ankle hard enough to give my shoulder a plum-sized bruise. He flailed out to grab any part of me he could reach but he was already flying; gravity gave him just enough time and space to tuck before he hit back first onto the hardpan dirt and loose rock at the ice plant’s fringe. At that speed and angle the canyon slope provided just enough resistance to sandpaper him raw as he bounced and kicked but did not significantly slow him until he tore into a clump of sagebrush another dozen yards down. The combined drag of that and his fingernails clawing into sandstone finally stopped his momentum. I regretted that he’d halted short of a considerable drop off to the canyon bottom but without climbing down and pushing him the last couple of feet there was nothing I could do about it. He lay there for about twenty seconds, clinging to the rock and I hope thanking God he’d survived, before he slowly pushed himself up to hands and knees.
The best thing to do was get myself up the hill and gone before he came back to his belligerent senses. But I couldn’t help myself, I had to say something. I called out, ‘Hey Earl!’
His head wagged from side to side and slowly came up to fix me with a baleful stare.
‘Next time, bring your sister!’
33
Madame Alex lived appropriately enough in 90069, a zip code that straddles the hills above Sunset Boulevard from Laurel Canyon to the border of Beverly Hills. By the look of her house – an old-Hollywood-style hacienda built into the hillside, shaded by the graceful fans of fifty-foot eucalyptus trees – the business of procuring for celebrities was a profitable one. The property didn’t look anything like a bordello; even the neighbours might not know they lived next door to Hollywood’s most notorious madam. I parked the Caddy on the opposite side of the street, slid over to the passenger seat and waited while the sky lit smog red and burned to cinder black. The only sign of activity inside the house occurred when an immense shadow blotted the single back-lit curtain draping the first floor window. Foot traffic in the age of out call and cell phones had been a naïve expectation. I looked up the number from my notebook and gave Madame Alex a call.
‘Cass! How wonderful to hear from you again! I’m so very, very sorry about what happened the other night.’
I wondered what she meant by that. ‘But I had a fabulous time! I was hoping to see Piña again tonight.’
‘Forgive me, she’s engaged. I have a very special girl I’d like to introduce to you.’
‘I prefer Piña, thanks. What about tomorrow night?’
‘She’s not free, no. Now this girl, her name is Sindee and she’s a beautiful blonde California girl.’
‘I’d really like to see Piña.’
‘I’m very, very sorry but Piña is very strict on this. She thinks you’re wonderful but she just doesn’t do water sports.’
‘Water sports? Is that what she told you?’
‘Please, Cass, we’re women of the world. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s just that some girls go for it and others don’t.’
I said, ‘Oh?’
‘Now Sindee,’ she confided, ‘is a beach-bunny type, she surfs, she swims, she’s very into water sports of all kinds.’
I cruised down the hill thinking Piña’s message to back off couldn’t be clearer. I wasn’t likely to see her again, at least not professionally. Then the phone rang with Lester’s voice at the end of the ether. He frequently called after sunset with a tip about some actor or another. His call didn’t surprise me but his tone did. He called me Nina and with a slow, careful diction I hadn’t heard from him asked me to stop by his office that evening. He’d not once called me Nina since our relationship began. He always called me Shooter.
‘What, Lester, did the doctor change your medication? I mean, you always sound like you’re on drugs, but this sounds like a whole different spectrum of narcotic.’
‘No, Nina, I’m fine, I’m – I’m just a little tired. I have a cheque for you from People magazine. They made it out to you personally.’
‘So?’
‘You need to sign it over to the agency so we can run it through our accounts.’
I said I’d swing by in half an hour. The moment the connection closed my thumb punched out a number and two rings later a voice announced that I’d reached 911, emergency services.
‘It’s my boss. I think he’s just had a heart attack. I was talking to him on the phone and after he said he had chest pains I heard him groan and there was this big thump like he’d fallen to the floor and now I can’t reach him at all. Can you send –’
‘What’s the address where your boss is now?’
I gave it, with his name and mine. I wasn’t absolutely certain something was wrong but why else would Lester invent a story about picking up a cheque? He was very strict about money. Every time somebody bought one of my photographs they paid the agency, which took its percentage and then passed the rest to me. Any cheque made out to me directly would be returned to sender.
Lester’s suite was accessible through a rear door that opened directly on to the parking lot. Running a paparazzi agency is a night business, with photographers dropping off film well into the blue hours just before dawn. Lester needed that back door to take deliveries. By the looks of the broken glass in the lobby and the still-ringing burglar alarm the paramedics hadn’t known about it and had crashed through the front.
The back d
oor swung open to a short hallway. Through the wedge of space between the door to his office and the jamb I watched two hunks in medical whites kneel over five-foot-two Lester, stretched prone on the carpet. A cervical collar wrapped his neck and a beige strip of foam curved around his skull from jaw to forehead. One paramedic prodded his chest while the other prepared a bandage to apply to a cut above his eye. Lester yelped when the paramedic pressed his rib-cage.
I poked my head around the door. Two of the three fax machines had been knocked to the carpet and the light table upended with enough force to break the glass. Over by the desk paper and film swamped the floor ankle deep. Each of the four file cabinets had been emptied of prints and negatives and then toppled.
The paramedic pulled his hands back to rest flat on his thighs and glanced up at me with patient brown eyes. ‘Are you a relative?’
‘I made the call to 911.’
‘I gotta admit ma’am, this is the strangest-looking heart attack I’ve ever seen.’ He tried to be serious about it but when he got a good look at me the lower half of his face split into a smile. He kept his hair clipped short and a stubble of strawberry blond on his very square jaw. He had a gravity to him that came from saving lives every day and I liked that.
‘If you knew he’d been assaulted why didn’t you just report that?’
‘I didn’t know he’d been assaulted.’
‘Then why call?’
‘He sounded like he had a gun to his head. If I’d called the cops and said I think my agent might be in trouble they would have sent someone around in what, four or five hours?’
He admitted I had a point.
I knelt next to Lester, afraid to touch him. That he’d been attacked was my fault. Had he never met me he’d still be pacing the room with his usual manic fervour. I owed him for his pain and I’d pay that debt when I paid Gabe’s. ‘Did you recognize them? Just yes or no.’
‘The bastards wore ski masks. Jesus, they really trashed the place, didn’t they? Something about a set of negatives. When they didn’t find those they wanted you. I had to make that call.’
Killing Paparazzi Page 18