Digging James Dean

by Robert Eversz

  A sign flashed by on the right announcing a northbound on-ramp to the Hollywood Freeway. The cop car continued straight. I swung up the ramp and already exceeded the speed limit by the time I merged into the right-hand lane. The numbers remained frozen in place. If I’d guessed wrong, the odds of incidental contact decreased to needle-in-a-haystack proportions. I told the Rott to hold on and swerved to the fast lane. The dashboard clock read just past one in the morning. When the speedometer needle topped a hundred the display’s numbers jolted back to life, the direction still north by northwest and distance dropping thirty feet a second. At one thousand feet I spotted the van’s taillights in the second lane to the right. I pulled into the same lane. The van held at a steady sixty-five down the long slope of Cahuenga Pass into the flickering lights of the Valley, signaled a lane change, and rode the cloverleaf off-ramp to the warehouse district between Van Nuys and Burbank airports. The driver wasn’t taking any chances at getting pulled over for a traffic violation, meticulously following every rule in the Department of Motor Vehicles handbook. When he turned off the boulevard and into a nest of warehouses I pulled to the curb. A pair of headlights showing on the street at that hour wouldn’t look coincidental. The distance to target ascended slowly, no more than twenty feet per second, and the direction veered to the east. A moment later, the numbers held steady at less than two thousand feet. The van had parked.

  I rolled forward, passed the van’s position to the east, turned again and again to come at him from the opposite direction. I pulled to the side when the distance dropped to three hundred feet, put the telephoto lens to my eye, and scanned the warehouse across the street. A chain-link fence topped by razor wire rimmed the perimeter. Twenty yards of blacktop stretched like a no-man’s-land between the chain-link and the corrugated aluminum side of the warehouse, a sprawling one-story construction with a sloping tin roof. I panned the lens left, toward a spill of light. The corner of the warehouse hid the light’s source. Probably a security lamp. Beneath the spill I spotted the front fender of the van, the light reflecting against glossy black paint like streetlight on tar.

  I opened the Nikon’s aperture wide and slowed the shutter speed. The car shook with the roar of a jet descending toward Burbank airport, the silver, fishlike belly of the plane floating directly overhead, wing lamps slicing through the liquid night. I waited and watched, calming the Rott—and myself—with long, forceful strokes to his back. I thought about what Vulch had said, that people who know me tend to fall a little short of their allotted three score and ten. He’d been joking but the joke had some truth to it, and for a few minutes I allowed myself to feel like a modern Typhoid Mary. But I’d barely known my husband, having hooked up with him in a Vegas marriage a few weeks before his death. I’d been entirely ignorant of the incendiary photos he’d been taking that led to his murder. I’d learned more about my husband after his death than before it. My mother had died, yes, but everybody’s mother dies, one of the reasons life is essentially painful. And my sister’s own greed had killed her. The nineteen grand she stole from my checking account hadn’t been enough. She’d stolen a tip to a hot photo, hoping to make even more, and she’d been paid with a broken neck. Not my fault.

  Had Theresa set me up for a grass blanket, thinking I’d steal into the cemetery to photograph the theft of Valentino? Not Theresa herself—she was only sixteen, after all, not Charles Manson—but someone else, someone older, perhaps the driver of the black van? If true, why had she been reduced to panhandling on the 3rd Street Promenade? Or had she been planted there, with the knowledge that I’d be certain to go looking for her? If she wanted to escape me—or been conscious of the fact that I’d be looking for her—she could have chosen some other spot to solicit money. But teenagers are not entirely conscious and so trying to figure out their behavior requires a balance of rational and irrational thinking. They tread between the rich fantasy world of children and the mundane realm of adulthood until the world kicks reality into their teeth often enough, kicks the dreaminess out of them.

  I stepped out of the car to stretch a moment and use the curb behind the rear fender as an emergency toilet. Before I unzipped my pants a figure in black trotted out to the rolling chain-link gate and the van eased away from the warehouse, lights dimmed. I ducked below the fender and crawled toward the wheel, waiting for the sweep of headlights that would flush the Cadillac from the shadows, but the van instead sped in the opposite direction, toward the city. I slipped into the driver’s seat, my profile low, careful not to shut the door behind me. The numbers on the distance meter rolled slowly higher as the van motored south, then accelerated when the direction veered to the east. I poked the telephoto lens above the steering wheel and focused on the gate, now closed, and the figure sauntering toward the warehouse. When the corner clipped him from view I started the engine and swung the Cadillac a hundred and eighty degrees, gripping the door to prevent it from winging open. I waited until the next block to slam it shut.

  I caught sight of the van again as it turned left at a traffic signal to ramp onto Hollywood Freeway south. The green arrow morphed to amber as I approached. I gunned the engine and slid across on red, no more than half a mile behind the van. If someone wanted to push false information it would have made more sense to have Theresa call my cell phone or landline again. But then, maybe that would look too obvious. They knew I’d be looking for her after my sister’s murder and they knew where I’d look. But who were they? Not teenaged Satanists seeking cheap thrills in kissing the devil. The driver had moved like a man in his late twenties to early thirties. The van looked no more than a year or two old. Not many teens can afford payments on a twenty-five-thousand-dollar panel van, not to mention rental on a warehouse in North Hollywood. Maybe they recruited teens like Theresa to work for them, runaways or disaffected youths looking for a paid adventure robbing graves. That still didn’t tell me who they were. Older Satanists, I supposed, interested in holding black masses with the bones of celebrities or some such nonsense. Whoever they were, they killed people, and I had to be aware that young and seemingly innocent Theresa might be bait for a trap.

  The van swung east at the interchange with the Ventura Freeway, then signaled its intent to take the Barham exit south. The dashboard clock ticked three AM, and with few other cars driving surface streets at that hour I let the van play out well ahead of me, past the broad, blocky buildings of Warner Bros. Studios and over the vestigial, concrete-coffined remains of the Los Angeles River. I cut my lights as I crossed Forest Lawn Drive and sped to close the distance, afraid of losing the van in the labyrinth of streets snaking the hillside on both sides of the boulevard. Then the distance began to close a little too fast, the van slowing to turn left onto a canyon road shrouded in trees.

  I flicked on my lights, afraid of running off the road as I turned into the shadows, headlamps flashing over a street sign that read LAKE HOLLYWOOD DRIVE.

  Eighteen

  MOST WHO frequently drive the streets of Los Angeles carry a Thomas Brothers map on the passenger seat, and those who spend more time behind the wheel than in their bed—including journalists and their hyena cousins, the paparazzi—carry one in their head. I didn’t need to flip the pages of the map to know where I was; the chaparral-brushed slopes of Cahuenga Peak and Mt. Lee loomed overhead, fifteen hundred feet of undeveloped desert mountain rising from the urban landscape, two of the Santa Monica Mountains that ripple through the center of the city like a spine. On those rare days of rain, water trickles down the southern slopes toward Lake Hollywood, a fenced reservoir that supplies drinking water to the city. Over the saddle-shaped crest the immaculately trimmed grass of Forest Lawn cemetery rolls up the northern flanks, bordered by a chain-link fence to keep out coyotes and other creatures wishing to dig up one or more of the tens of thousands buried in its soil.

  The distance to target held constant at two thousand feet as I wheeled the Cadillac up the ridge, the road fringed with oak, eucalyptus, and oleander. The van�
��s direction veered north and the distance numbers plummeted. I knew by the change that the van had turned and stopped. I switched off my lights and slowed to a jogger’s pace, windows rolled down to listen to the low thrum of the city in the distance and the crackle of tires over leaves until the unmistakable clunk of a vehicle door shutting sounded from the darkness of a side street. I pulled to the side of the road at Wonder View Drive and signaled the Rott to stay quiet. I kept a pry bar in the trunk, the closest thing to a weapon I could carry and not violate parole. I went to get it.

  Below Wonder View Drive the land canted to the blue-black waters of Lake Hollywood, the city lights spreading beyond like a field of electric flowers. My husband had been murdered there, his body dumped hurriedly into the lake’s shallows. I shut the trunk softly and slung the pry bar through a belt loop. A single row of houses perched on the hill to the left of the drive, picture windows dark as sunglasses. I walked the center of the road, footsteps muffled by asphalt, and scanned the darkness ahead. I heard the van before I saw it, the rolling thwack of a side door pausing my footsteps at the inside edge of a left-hand bend. Wonder View Drive clung briefly to the mountainside, curling to a dead end at a padlocked gate barricading a Department of Water and Power access road. The van had muscled over the curb to park near the gate, wheels on the steering side dug into the hillside. I counted six heads hustling single file around the barricade toward a dirt road.

  I backtracked from the curve and surveyed the hillside, the soft-tipped brush outlined against the darker earth. Someone would remain with the van. I couldn’t follow through the gate without passing directly before the windshield. Up the hill two water tanks, painted white, glowed blue in the moonlight. The terrain offered no visible paths but patches of hardpan showed beneath gaps in the brush. I slung the Nikon across my chest and climbed. Sparse rains and constant sun had packed the ground and the footing was simultaneously hard and slick, like gravel spread over concrete. Clear of the water tanks, I circled downslope onto the dirt road, the mountain screening the van from view. A trail branched away from the road to scratch a thin line east through the brush. At the next rise silhouettes bobbed against the night sky and vanished over the ridge.

  I cut across the road and onto the trail, chaparral scratching at the legs of my jeans. At every rise I spotted shapes moving along the trail ahead. Two of the figures carried something polelike between them. It took no great leap of deduction to guess where they headed. If celebrity bones were worth their weight in gold, then a little more than a mile around the skirts of Cahuenga Peak lay the mother lode: Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, Walt Disney, W. C. Fields, and Humphrey Bogart—most of the stars of the post-silent-film era had been buried in Forest Lawn cemetery. The group’s target could be one or more of several dozen graves. I didn’t intend to stop them. The theft of bones didn’t spark my personal moral outrage. I intended to follow them to the site, call the police, and photograph the bust. The carnival display of police lights and fleeing grave robbers would be dramatic enough to sell not only to Scandal Times but to the legit press around the world.

  The bump and jostle of steps along the hill reminded me of unfinished business I’d tried to conduct behind the Cadillac earlier that night. An outcrop of rock marked the apex of the ridge. I waited until I hiked around it before squatting in the brush. After I finished I heard feet scrabbling for purchase on a patch of loose pebbles over rock. I’d heard sounds before, coming from the group packing through the brush ahead, but this time the footsteps came from the slope behind me. I zipped hurriedly and turned my head in the direction of the footsteps, listening. I counted two people coming up fast, about fifty yards distant. I’d dressed entirely in black and the van lay a half mile from the trailhead. If someone had been watching the hill from the van, they had the eyes of eagles. I slipped the crowbar from its belt loop and peeled the camera strap from my neck. The outcrop jutted a good ten feet from the ground on the downhill side. I crept silently along the wall of rock, feathering my heel to the dirt and softly rolling the foot forward, a kicked rock or cracked twig as potentially fatal as a misstep to a tightrope walker. At the edge of the rock I paused, the crowbar in my downhill hand, the camera on its strap in the other.

  While I waited I thought about my sister. Those who followed me had likely been her murderers. What right did they have to decide it was her time to die? They could have taken her camera, tied and gagged her, and left her behind, uncomfortable but alive. They didn’t have to break her neck. Maybe I was being naïve, but had she been allowed to live she might have straightened out her life and achieved some sort of grace. Not all lives that go bad have to end badly. My own life had experienced its dark moments but I had some hopes for the future, foremost that I would die a better person. They cut my sister’s life at its darkest point and she died a liar and a thief. They damned her, and that fueled my rage.

  Tightly controlled rage has always been my best friend in moments of physical crisis and I called on it then, in the name of my sister. Each approaching footstep sounded so crisp I could sense the heavy-heeled impact of boot onto the packed earth, the roll of the boot over crackling grains of sand and gravel, the flex of the toe and soft brush of air as the boot pushed away, each second fragmenting into split seconds that passed as slowly as the seconds themselves. When the six-foot Cyclops strode past my position he seemed to be moving in slow motion.

  I let him pass. Had I not lain in wait, prepared to jump whomever and whatever moved past the edge of the rock, the sight of the Cyclops might have terrified the wits out of me. His one eye, a long, telephoto-like lens, protruded from a goggle mount strapped to his forehead, blinding him to both sides, and he tilted his head to the earth then back to the horizon line with each step as though he lacked the depth of vision to track both in the same glance.

  The second creature to stride past wore the face of a man, and there was nothing wrong with his peripheral vision. His black-sleeved arms jerked toward his face the moment his head swiveled to my side of the rock. My own arm was already moving by then, the crowbar backhanding the short distance between my shoulder and his chin. He got his left arm high enough to deflect the bar from his teeth but not high enough to clear his head. The bent end of the bar clipped his skull just above the eyebrow and his head jerked sharply away from the blow, feet shooting out from under him as though he’d been clotheslined.

  The Cyclops whirled at his partner’s stunted cry, one hand deftly flipping the telescopic goggle from his face and the other scrabbling for the zippered gap in his black windbreaker. I swung the camera on its strap like a knight’s mace, recognizing the Cyclops’s features the moment before the camera body cracked against the side of his head. The blow wrong-footed him and he went down sideways, boots flailing for purchase on the gravel-slick ground before he pitched head-first down the hill. I didn’t think I’d done enough damage to keep him down, not like the first one, who stared glass-eyed at the sky. I hadn’t liked the way the hand of the Cyclops had snaked toward the gap in his jacket and I didn’t think I could leap down the hillside fast enough to deliver a second blow before he pulled and fired what he packed beneath his shoulder.

  I bolted while he still skidded down the hillside. I looked back once over my shoulder as I crested the ridge. He stood, one foot higher on the slope than the other, Cyclops eye centered over his face, and pointed something one-handed at my fleeing back.

  Then I was over the ridge and gone.

  Nineteen

  IMADE an anonymous call to the cops from a box on Barham, notifying the 911 operator that the inhabitants of a black van parked on Wonder View Drive intended to break into Forest Lawn cemetery. The news didn’t give the operator heart palpitations. When she asked my name I hung up. I still hoped to photograph the bust, even if the cops would have trouble proving anything more serious than intent to trespass. But the man I recognized beneath the Cyclops eye as Chad Stonewell’s bodyguard hustled his crew back into the van faster than I expected, the
numbers on the digital tracking unit already on the move by the time I returned to the Cadillac. Once the van began to move, the chance to photograph the bust vanished. By the time it turned right on Barham, speeding toward the freeway, it was just another vehicle on the road. A traffic bust would prove nothing. I didn’t bother calling the police again.

  The van followed in reverse the same route that had taken it to the fringes of Forest Lawn cemetery. Stonewell’s bodyguard had to suspect they were being followed. I wondered which of us played the hunter and which the prey. The Cyclops had been wearing night-vision equipment and trailed the first group by a half mile. The distance between groups might have been part of the original plan, the two men providing backup for the main group. Or the driver could have spotted me from below while I climbed the hillside and spontaneously decided to take me out from behind. Another possible scenario worried me far more: they might have known I followed them from the start. The trip to Wonder View Drive could have been a ruse designed to trap me, a ruse that failed because of my sex. They lost sight of me when I squatted behind the outcrop of rock. Had I unzipped and let it fly like a man they could have shot me where I stood.

  The van ramped off the freeway two exits earlier than expected and sped into the web of residential streets between commercial boulevards. Perhaps they dropped someone off or kept a safe house in the area. I didn’t know the neighborhood and couldn’t risk following the van down a dead-end street. I coasted to the curb. The numbers switched back and forth on the display, the van heading east, then north, then west, then south, only to reverse course and inscribe the same path in reverse. He was circling the block, I realized, then doubling back to catch anyone trying to follow. The flow of numbers stilled for minutes, as though the van had reached its destination. I suspected they instead lay in wait, trying to flush out their pursuer. The numbers flickered to life again. The van moved due north toward the warehouse, the driver no longer worried, seemingly, about someone on his tail.