“You mean, were you on camera?”
She nodded.
“Yes,” I said.
“All that means is we went out, you know, earlier.”
“On the same night he robbed James Dean’s grave? You know the law is not going to let this drop. Sean stole an important part of the town’s legacy.”
“Fairmount?” The girl pursed her lips and blew a scornful stream of air. “The town could give fuck-all about James Dean. He’s money to them, that’s all. They didn’t even like him when he was alive but they all love him now that he’s dead, or at least love the money he brings to town.”
“What did Sean do with the bones?” Frank asked.
“Threw them in the river.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Felt like it, I guess.”
“What river?”
“The Wabash. Or maybe it was the Eel. Both of ’em run through the center of Logansport.”
“So he throws the bones into the river and less than two weeks later he gets a tip about a planned grave robbery at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Just a coincidence, right?”
She shrugged as though credibility was the least of her concerns.
“Did they cheat him? Is that why he double-crossed them?”
“He didn’t steal any bones,” she said, her face bloodred.
“You told me he threw them in the river,” Frank said.
“I was just trying to get you off my back.”
“You were lying then but you’re telling the truth now?”
“Why are you protecting him?” I asked. “Were you with him that night in Fairmount? Did you help him break into Dean’s coffin?”
The girl abruptly stood, glanced sullenly around the bullpen, asked, “Is there a bathroom around here?”
Frank pointed to a hallway breaching the far wall, near the stairway. “At the end of the hallway to the right. It’s unlocked.”
Theresa tilted her chin toward the ceiling and walked away with the studied composure of a fashion model strutting the catwalk. She might have been a liar and a thief but I appreciated her sense of the theatrical.
“She’s lying,” I said.
“Of course she’s lying. That isn’t the problem.” Frank opened the right desk drawer and waved the sheaf of twenties off the table. “The devil knows I’m not a stickler for truth. The problem is, her lies are too boring to print. Kids playing at Satanism? That story is so trite it wouldn’t play in a box buried near the classifieds.”
“Maybe she’ll invent a better story for you in the bathroom,” I said. “Why don’t you try to write the truth for a change?”
“If you believe in truth, justice, and the American way you shouldn’t be in this business,” Frank answered. “I’ve interviewed thousands of people and after a while you develop an eye for things. This girl isn’t going to tell us the truth. Not now. I’m happy to settle for something I can print.”
I thought about the girl’s facility for lying and about how she’d walked out of our meeting. Had she needed to answer the call of nature or regain her composure or something else entirely? “I think you’ll have to settle for what you just heard.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I think she’s just done a runner,” I said.
Seventeen
ONCE CLEAR of the Scandal Times security door I could see the girl trudging resolutely a half mile distant down the boulevard. Tailing someone on foot in the San Fernando Valley is like trying to sneak up on somebody in the middle of a salt flat. As long as they don’t turn around you can get away with it, but if they glance over their shoulder you have little alternative except to stick your head in the ground and hope they don’t notice the only other thing visible on foot is someone pretending to be an ostrich. I jogged to my car, curious whether she’d run back to the beach to beg more spare change or turn to someone else, to the boyfriend she claimed had abandoned her or perhaps the people she supposedly betrayed. She seemed desperate enough to do something stupid, and though I didn’t feel responsible for her, I didn’t want to see her thumb a ride with some stranger willing to trade sex for bus fare. But then, I didn’t know whether she was truly desperate or just calculating. Her boyfriend hadn’t pitched James Dean’s bones into the river. He’d sold them to somebody. She might hit up that somebody for money. She might be smart enough to beg or stupid enough to make it sound like blackmail. Liars lie about one thing and tell the truth about the other, Ben had said, and you never know which is which. They also tend to lead short lives, if my sister and husband were any example. I called Frank as I rolled out of the lot and turned left onto Laurel Canyon asked, “Who’s Bernard Schwartz?”
“Tony Curtis,” he answered, as though every idiot knew.
Then I remembered. Natalie Wood had come from a Russian family in San Francisco. Her name had been Natasha Gurdin. Some director had Anglicized her name. “Natalie Wood costarred with James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Do I remember right?”
“I was wondering if you caught the reference,” he said. “You got the girl in your sights yet?”
“She’s on foot a couple hundred yards ahead of me. I think I’ll let her run, see where she goes.”
“If she contacts the Raelians be sure to let me know.”
I cut the connection on his laugh and slid the Cadillac to the curb. Ahead, the girl stopped to consult a bus schedule posted near the traffic light. I glanced at the dashboard clock at the same moment she raised her wrist to check her watch—a few minutes before ten PM. She gazed up the boulevard, then paced behind the bench until at ten past ten a yellow and white RTD bus opened its doors. The girl descended from the bus at the Canyon Plaza shopping center five miles later. She strode between the parked cars in the lot with her chin tilted up and forward as though she fixed a course just a bit higher than the rest of us, turning her head neither left nor right while heading straight for a row of pay phones stationed beside a Blockbuster Video store. She clenched one arm tightly around her ribs and pressed the phone against her ear, rocking from side to side as though psyching herself up for the conversation. The call lasted less than five minutes.
The girl paced out the hour, deflecting the interests of a couple of boys and a curious security guard, and when a battered blue Toyota Tercel approached the curb she sprung into the passenger seat as though making a getaway. I wheeled out behind them, headlights dim until camouflaged by traffic, KXLU student-run radio piping from the Caddy’s tin speakers. The Tercel caught the first southbound ramp onto the Hollywood Freeway and hugged the slow lane into Cahuenga Pass, the lights of hillside homes studding the cutout shapes of Mount Olympus and the Hollywood Hills. Past the crest the lights of Hollywood refracted against the smoke and exhaust to cast a glowing sheath above the rim of the city’s buildings. The Tercel rode the freeway down to the Franklin off-ramp in Hollywood, followed Franklin east toward the hills of Los Feliz, turned onto first one and then another side street, and sputtered to the parking gates of a two-story apartment building dating from the 1960s. Gilt script running three feet high along the stucco facade spelled out THE PALMS, and accurately enough two of that species flanked the front walkway.
Parked cars lined both sides of the street bumper to bumper. I coasted to the red zone at the corner and cut the engine. The apartment buildings and private homes on the block huddled together like immigrants from different cultures and times, Queen Anne cottages butting against Beaux Arts duplexes that turned aghast windows on California stucco apartments. The brake lights flashed and the Tercel sloped down a short concrete ramp into a parking garage beneath the California stucco. I lifted the viewfinder to my eye, bringing into telephoto close-up the face of the driver ascending from behind the wheel. She wasn’t more than nineteen or twenty, gamine-thin and dressed in a stylish grab bag of velvet, paisley, lace, and beads, her blond hair falling past her shoulders and the bangs curving to her jaw like a pair of scythes.
I clicked the shutter and panned the
lens across the roof to frame Theresa nudging shut the passenger door, her eyes peering beyond the gates as though she searched for something, or someone. It’s difficult to see into night shadow from a lit room. She couldn’t see the Cadillac but her look unnerved me. She hadn’t bothered to watch her back before. Her escort curved her hand forward in a curt wave. Theresa ducked out of the frame and hustled around the hood of the Toyota, following her escort to a door at the far wall. The door led to an interior courtyard visible through the glassed entrance. I followed their progress up steps ascending beside the deep end of the pool to a rear corner apartment. After they keyed themselves in I strolled up the front path and raised the telephoto lens again to read the number on the door: 2G. The name printed beside the buzzer to 2G read RYAN.
I leashed the Rott and walked him around the block, thinking about the look Theresa had given me that night, and decided I needed to put some distance between us. I made a phone call. When we returned to the Cadillac I tuned the radio to a talk show—some moron spouting political opinions just offensive enough to keep me alert—and waited.
The Rott sensed him first, sitting bolt upright on the passenger seat to give a bewildered bark no more than two seconds before long, bone-white fingers shot from the cuffs of a black leather jacket to settle onto the driver’s-side windowsill. I fought the urge to auto-eject through the canvas roof, glanced casually at the ruby-encrusted gold ring circling the hand’s thumb, said, “Hiya, Vulch. Thanks for coming.”
“Anytime, Nin.” The voice, a baritone, spoke softly. “You wanna ask the dog to move over so I can get in the car?”
The Rott whined and hopped into the backseat when I snapped my fingers. I sought Vulch’s image in the rearview mirror as he circled the trunk and saw movement more than shape, as though what moved was less than half human and the rest vampire. We’d met shortly after my release from prison. He’d been a friend, mentor, and competitor to my husband, and a man of such shadowy ethics that I’d initially suspected him of being complicit in my husband’s death. Some in the trade called him the king of the paparazzi, not that his long and lanky form and penchant for dressing entirely in black looked regal but because he was the best in the business, a man so good at what he did that he’d become a legend long before his goatee and swept-back hair had gone gray. Early in his career he’d been nicknamed the Vulture, Vulch for short, partly because he always seemed there for the kill, but also for his nose—a prodigious, beaklike appendage jutting below ever-present black Ray-Bans. Vulch slinked into the car and pulled a large black case onto his lap, shutting the door so gently I didn’t hear the latch click. One by one he flipped the three latches that secured the case’s hinged top.
“What’s the target?” he asked.
“Why, I’m fine, thanks, considering. How are you?”
I caught a glimpse of his eyes over the side rim of his shades. They were as dark as the rest of him. He extended his hand sideways to shake mine without looking at me, intent on taking inventory of the case on his lap. “I heard about your sister. Your mother, too. My condolences.”
“Who told you?” I asked.
He shrugged as a way to let me know it was none of my business, said, “A lot of people you know have a tendency to stop breathing all of a sudden so I’d rather not spend any more time here than necessary.” His lips split over yellowed teeth, his version of a smile.
“Death happens to everybody, eventually,” I said.
“Sure, but it happens with uncommon regularity around you.” He set the case on the floor between the edge of the seat and the dash, the LCD monitor positioned to be read with a downward glance from the steering wheel. “This is a real antique—a digital tracking system. You remember how to use it?”
“Why antique?”
“The new stuff uses GPS and cellular technologies, kind of like a combination cell phone and global positioning device. But you need a laptop computer to use the GPS system. You have one?”
“Not yet.”
“Didn’t think so. Sometimes I don’t think you understand how profoundly technology changed those five years they locked you away. No computer, you probably don’t even have a digital camera.”
“I hate those things.”
Vulch wrinkled his nose, said, “I smell dinosaur.” He gave me a quick refresher course on the instrumentation. The system operated on digital transmissions, relaying distance and direction data from a transmitter mounted on the target to the receiver in the case. It was simple enough to read while driving but from what I remembered it took experience to translate the data on-screen to the view out the windshield. Vulch was showing me how to select the transmission ID code when a black van rolled past the line of parked cars on the right and veered to block the driveway leading to the Palms’ underground parking. A man dressed in khaki and black hopped onto the sidewalk from the front passenger door and hustled toward the entrance to the apartments. I couldn’t get the telephoto lens up fast enough to get a good look at him before the van obstructed my view but in that brief glimpse he looked familiar.
“Is that your target?” Vulch asked.
“It is now,” I said.
He observed the van, still as a predator waiting on prey, then turned his head to scan the block behind it. “The target can move at any moment, driver presumably keeping an eye on his side mirror, no windows in the back of the van but could be somebody looking out the passenger mirror, not to mention the possibility of someone watching from the apartments. Know how you’re going to do it?” He spoke as though he’d figured it out.
I knew how I was going to try. He handed me the transmitter—a half pound of electronics encased on a magnetic pad—and wished me luck. I said, “You should have the number of a local hospital ready in case luck isn’t enough.”
Los Feliz is a hipster neighborhood, the kind of place where someone wearing a fez and bowling shirt can walk after midnight without drawing a second look, and so once I cleared the Cadillac I made no attempt to hide my presence on the street. I walked away from the rear of the van, parked to my left on the opposite side of the street. Even if the driver spotted me on the fringe of his side-view mirror he wouldn’t consider me a threat. At the corner I crossed the street to the left and dropped behind the bumper of a Hyundai, the last car parked in a contiguous line that ended at the black van. The crawl space beneath most cars is less than a foot high and decreases toward the center of the chassis, but the undercarriage of the Hyundai was barely big enough for the cat that eyed me suspiciously from the left front tire. I bellied under the bumper, stretched my arms full forward, and slithered under the car. For once in my life, I was happy I never reached my girlhood ambition of filling out a C cup.
I couldn’t identify the next car in line from my roadkill-eyed view but the ground clearance improved enough to allow me to turn my head. I stretched my hands palms down onto the pavement and pulled them one at a time toward my shoulders, simultaneously pushing with my toes, swimming along the pavement like some strange species of land fish. I kept my eye on the curb, watching the black-on-white house numbers float by, until the curb sloped to street level and I knew I’d reached the driveway to the Palms. Overhead, a tailpipe smoked below a black-enameled fender.
I pulled myself under.
The van offered greater ground clearance than the Hyundai, enough to allow me to turn my shoulders and hips. I rolled onto my back, the van trembling with the low-rev fire of pistons, and looked for a secure spot under the chassis to affix the transmitter. I touched the drive train and jerked my hand away, cursing myself for being so stupid. The drive had heated the metal enough to blister skin. I looked for a concealed surface, someplace secure from jarring. The unit wouldn’t do much good scraped off the chassis at the first pothole or bump in the road. The click of a distant glass door echoed between the curb and asphalt, putting a clock on my decision. Footsteps shuffled toward the van—heels and two pairs of soft-soled shoes. A single male voice said, “Remember, no talking in
side the van.”
I swung my heels to the side and inched my shoulder blades across to the street-side wheel well. The transmitter broadcast its signal through a ten-inch flexible antenna. I extended it and palmed the back of the unit, magnetic pad facing the interior well behind the wheel. Footsteps scraped the curb. I turned my head to a pair of Timberland hiking boots, strapped leather clogs, and Theresa’s scuffed brown lace-ups. The van gently rocked as the side door slid open. The clogs and lace-ups leapt out of view. I waited, the magnetic pad hovering above metal, until the van rocked again with the force of the side door ratcheting shut, and when the latch struck the frame I pasted the transmitter to the wheel well. The passenger door snapped open. I pulled my hand away. The van rocketed forward the instant before the door slammed shut. Exhaust sprayed my hair and face. I opened my eyes and saw what passes for stars in Los Angeles.
Vulch slipped out of the Cadillac and pointed to an antenna he’d mounted on the right rear fender. “You’re hooked up, wired, and ready to go,” he said. “Remember, the range is only two miles, so don’t let him get too far in front of you.” He’d started the car while I’d been under the van. The LED display flashed numbers in green to my right. I slapped the transmission into drive. Vulch gave me a little salute as I sped from the curb, two fingers to the right corner of his sunglasses. I think he meant to wish me luck. When I looked for him in my rearview mirror he was gone.
I took the first right and glanced at the numbers rolling on the display, six thousand and climbing as I approached the next major cross street. Six thousand what? Feet, I remembered. But how far was six thousand feet? Over a mile? The number of feet to target decreased to five thousand as I accelerated onto Franklin. A cop car turned onto the avenue from a cross street to drag my speed back under the limit and a moment later the traffic light ahead went crimson. The direction to target swung north while I idled behind the black and white and the numbers shot upward as though the van picked up speed. The light greened. The cops in front of me weren’t in any hurry, sat behind the crosswalk ten seconds before noticing, hey, look, the light changed, then feathered the gas pedal to a speed five miles an hour below the limit. I watched the distance to target click higher and higher, like the ticker on a gas pump, and when the number seized up at just over ten thousand feet I knew the van had sped out of transmission range.
Digging James Dean Page 12