Digging James Dean

by Robert Eversz

  “I can’t track the owner of the van without the license plate,” Frank said, examining the proofs on his desk through a magnifying loupe. “I don’t have the resources of the FBI or LAPD. I can’t order a check of every black Dodge van registered in the county.” He picked out one of the wide-angle shots of the gang leaving the warehouse, said, “I can use something like this but only if I have a story and I don’t have a story.”

  “What do you mean you don’t have a story?” I was tired and more than a little irritable and I spoke louder than intended. “Teenage celebrity-grave robbers are not a story?”

  “If they get arrested, it’s a story.” Frank stuck a finger to his ear and swizzled it around. “Until then, the Raelians sell more newspapers.”

  “What about the chase through the desert?”

  “Where’s the story? A teenager is abducted and then rescued in the middle of nowhere with no witnesses?” He shook his head as though he pitied me. “This guy Sven, who is he, some sort of Swedish mystic? To sell this story I need a face.”

  “What about Chad Stonewell? He’s a face.”

  “You have no proof he’s involved.”

  “His bodyguard is involved and that’s more proof than you have against the Raelians.”

  “The Raelians love publicity. Any publicity. Scandal Times and the Raelians are made for each other. Movie stars, on the other hand, are infamously litigious.”

  I picked the proof sheets from his desk and returned them to their envelope. “People have called you cynical, vicious, mean-spirited, and the illegitimate son of a crocodile and Komodo dragon but never a coward.” I held out my hand for the loupe. “Where’s the intrepid investigative reporter I used to know?”

  Frank slapped the loupe into my palm, said, “You mean the guy who wrote The Truth About Two-Headed Sheep and Celebrity Kleptomaniacs? Still looking for his Pulitzer.” He sat down behind his desk, the chair squeaking in protest, and opened the top-right drawer. “Are you broke yet?”

  “Not yet.” I emptied out the right front pocket of my jeans to count the contents. “I still have thirty-five cents.”

  He flicked his wrist. A check skittered across the desktop. I read the amount. Five hundred dollars.

  “Your paycheck for the Raelian shoot,” he said.

  I folded the check and stuffed it into my jacket pocket, asked, “What if Theresa wasn’t the only one?”

  “You looking for more runaways to befriend?” The curl of his lip accused me of being a sucker.

  “The more the better,” I said, going along with it. “Maybe I can start a halfway house. How many teenaged runaways go missing in Southern California every year?”

  “How many runaways come to Southern California in the first place? It’s an unanswerable question.”

  “So if some of them disappear, nobody notices.”

  Frank wadded a sheet of paper and tossed it like a basketball toward the trash basket beside his desk. The wad bounced off the rim and rolled against the wall. “What’s to notice? No address, no job, no school. It’s like they were never here. But street kids, that’s a Times story, not something for the tabs.”

  “If missing kids isn’t a scandal, what is?” I asked. “How many dead kids do you need before the story is good enough for Scandal Times?”

  “Who said anything about dead kids?” A heart the size of a golf ball may have throbbed in Frank’s chest but it was still a heart. He sounded as though I’d wounded him.

  “Maybe you’ll understand the question if I ask it again. What if Theresa wasn’t the only one? How about a couple dozen dead kids, shot in the back of the head and buried out in the desert? Is that a story? Or will one or two be good enough?”

  I slung the camera bag over my shoulder and strode across the bullpen to call the Fairmount marshal’s office. When the answering machine picked up I called Tuck’s cell phone. He’d given me the number when I’d recognized two of the suspects on his wall.

  “If it isn’t the lady paparazzi from L.A.,” Tuck said. “You shoot any celebrities since I saw you?”

  “None fatally.”

  He was an easy laugh. Tires thrummed in the background. I’d caught him in his patrol car, probably cruising for jaywalking squirrels and other local delinquents.

  “The guy you’re looking for is named Sean Casey,” I said.

  “Whoa, how do you know this?”

  “After he broke into the grave he came out to L.A. with his fifteen-year-old girlfriend,” I said. “She can testify he broke into the grave, even though she wasn’t there herself.”

  “You know that for a fact?”

  “I know that as part of the deal.”

  “What deal?”

  “The deal that I tell her it’s safe to cooperate with you.”

  We argued about that back and forth before he finally agreed. He wouldn’t charge her with being an accessory if she agreed to testify. Across the bullpen Frank stood from behind his desk and stalked toward me, shaking his head. Tuck thanked me for my help and I hung up feeling good about the call.

  “You’re just jerking my chain about the missing teens.” Frank knuckled over the desk and stared at me as though he resented himself for being suckered as much as me for suckering him.

  “The people doing this, they didn’t seem to hesitate to kill my sister.” I spoke patiently, as though reasoning with a stubborn child. “They were willing to kill Theresa for betraying them. If they haven’t killed other teens, it’s only a question of time before they do. You’re the one with the big brain here. Think about it. According to Theresa, these kids all believe they’re going to be made into movie stars. It’s like a cult.”

  Frank stood bolt upright as though someone had just goosed him, and his right hand flew up to smack his forehead with enough force to give a smaller man a standing-eight count. “I’m an idiot! A moron, an imbecile, a blockhead, a cretin! A cud-sucking cow has more brains than I do.”

  “Tell me something new,” I said.

  He spun on his heels, took three steps parallel to the desk, then pivoted and took three steps back. “You’re so smart, what did I just figure out?”

  “That I’m always right.”

  He turned his head slowly left, back to center, then right, in a slow pantomime of negation. “You’re so wrong you don’t even know when and why you’re right. You said the magic word.”

  “Please?”

  “No. Cult.” He whirled and paced. “Why didn’t I see it before?” He unclipped the cheap plastic pen from the neck ring of his T-shirt, said, “Let me see those photographs again.”

  I lifted the proofs from the envelope and spread them on the desk.

  “This is what we’ll do.” He circled an image of Theresa standing in the desert, looking forlorn, and another image of the warehouse at night. “These photos suck—no insult intended—but cults sell newspapers so we’ll print these two below a story titled…” He flipped the proof to its blank back, chewed on the tip of his pen, and then wrote something, concealing what he’d written with his other hand. “You have to get me better visuals, something with more visceral impact, but I think the headline will sell the story well enough.”

  He pulled away the blocking hand and swiveled the proof sheet so I could read, right side up, the proposed headline: “Teen Terrorized by Celebrity-Bone-Napping Cult.”

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “Brilliant,” I said.

  “Cults, celebrities, terror, and teens,” Frank said, nodding in agreement. “It’s really got it all, doesn’t it?”

  Twenty-Three

  APENCIL of smoke drifted from the rail overlooking the lights of the city, then darted toward the mouth of a lean figure clad in a long black trench coat, the moonlit dome of Griffith Park Observatory looming above him. The stars above Los Angeles are pale and anemic things, gasping through the weave of smog and night, and the light radiating from the city long ago deprived the observatory of any scientific usefulness. If the
view above disappoints, the one below doesn’t. On the street the lights of Los Angeles do not cluster brightly or tower overhead but space themselves sensibly just above eye level, ordering the city into signs and signals devised for the passing eye of an automobile. Viewed from above the lights cascade down the hills like froth on the curl of a wave breaking upon a long, flat sheen of sand; streetlamps, arc lights, flashing and static neon signs, fluorescent office and incandescent house lights, and everywhere at every hour of night the bright heads and red tails of automobiles flowing through the freeways and surface streets like tropical fish in an aquarium of lights. Whenever the city irritates me I climb the hills and fall in love all over again.

  “Enjoying the view?”

  Vulch didn’t turn when I spoke, his elbows propped on the metal railing, the cigarette burned to a nubbin between his fingers. At the opposite end of the observation walk teenagers huddled in small clusters, couples bound together in two-headed silhouettes, their chatter and laughter spraying down the hillside. “I like it here,” he said. “Always have.” The rigid line of his mouth creased into what might have been a smile. “I’ve always enjoyed the stars.”

  He was making a pun.

  “Like a wolf enjoys sheep,” I said.

  “Not that way,” he answered, his voice deep and serious. “I love celebrities. I love them like an arrow loves the target. They’re my home.” He ground the butt under the heel of a black cowboy boot and slipped a box of Marlboros halfway out the breast pocket of his leather trench coat. “Cigarette?”

  “Don’t smoke, thanks.”

  He pushed the Marlboros back into their leather sleeve as though thinking twice about lighting up. “Hate will motivate you only for so long in this business. You have to love what you’re shooting or you’ll sour like all the other homunculi we call our colleagues.”

  It was a sad fact of our business that the majority of paparazzi were offensively aggressive and dimwitted creatures with all the predatory charisma of hyenas hounding a lion. I was happy for the moment that Vulch excluded me from that lot even if the exclusion was falsely self-congratulatory. I wasn’t sure I was all that different. “Thanks for loaning me the equipment,” I said. “It’s still in one piece, in the trunk of my car.”

  He straightened at the rail and turned, towering over me. Height is an advantage for a paparazzo, enabling one to shoot over the crowd, and Vulch had it. We circled the observatory, heading for the parking lot.

  “You get your shots?” he asked.

  “Nothing special,” I said. “Big setup, no payoff.”

  “I know the feeling. Nothing like sitting in a duck blind all day and shooting nothing but the shit with yourself.” A low, guttural sound that might have been a laugh stuttered from his chest.

  “Too dark to shoot anything anyway,” I said.

  “What stock were you shooting?”

  “High-speed infrared black-and-white, five-hundred-millimeter Zeiss optics, aperture wide-open. Normally that would have done the trick but backup security spotted me walking through the brush, one of them wearing some kind of night-vision device.”

  “A camera?”

  I pointed to my forehead. “He wore it attached to his head. Only one lens.”

  “Head-mounted goggle, then,” he said. “Passive IR system lit you up like a Christmas tree on the White House lawn. You have a night-vision scope?”

  “I see well enough at night without that,” I said.

  Vulch sniffed the air, black Ray-Bans like wings above his enormous beak. “I smell dinosaur again. You’re resourceful, I’ll give you that, but your tradecraft is antique. This isn’t the 1950s, when you can expect to hang by your heels from a balcony to snap Richard Burton canoodling Liz Taylor.” He pointed his key chain at a big black BMW in the parking lot and the trunk popped open. “Night-vision devices, GPS tracking systems, body cams, covert cams—you have the same surveillance gear the cops use available to you, if you’re smart enough to use them. I took your photograph tonight. You know when?”

  He’d been smoking when I’d first seen him, standing at the rail overlooking the city, the cigarette worked down to a butt as though he’d been waiting there, smoking, for several minutes. I thought he hadn’t noticed me until I’d spoken. “In the lot, when I got out of my car?”

  He reached two fingers into the breast pocket of his trench coat and scissored out his pack of Marlboros. “Mind if I smoke?”

  “They’re your lungs,” I said.

  He palmed the pack into my hand and bent over one of a half-dozen equipment cases in the trunk of his car. The cigarette pack felt heavy, even for a full one. I turned it beneath the trunk light and spotted the lens poking from the flip-top. The thing was a camera. “Guess I’ll have to take up smoking,” I said.

  “Nobody smokes in L.A. anymore so don’t bother.” Vulch turned away from the trunk, something that looked like a lens in his hand. “This is a generation three night-vision pocketscope with a military-specification C-mount lens.”

  “C-mount?” I put the viewfinder to my eye, saw the night flare into an alien world of bright greens. A young couple walking arm in arm across the parking lot looked like a two-headed Martian. “A standard thirty-five-millimeter mount? You mean I can attach this to my Nikon?”

  “There’s an idea.” He lifted a metal tube from a small black case and flourished it beneath the trunk light. “The basic lens is wide-angle but with this adapter you can get up to seventy-five millimeters.” He snatched back the pocketscope and nestled it into the case, latched the case shut, and handed it to me. “Give it a try. If it works for you, buy one of your own. Exposure times are hit and miss so remember to bracket like hell.” He eased the trunk shut and followed me to the Cadillac.

  “What do I owe you for the rental?” I asked.

  “I don’t want your money,” he said.

  That was good because I didn’t have much, but it left open the question what he wanted in lieu of money. “People in our line of work are not known for generosity so forgive me for wondering why you’re being so nice to me.”

  He flipped the case switches on the digital tracking device and checked the equipment with quick, sure hands, the kind of guy who could disassemble and reassemble blindfolded every piece of equipment he owned. “How old are you?”

  “Thirty,” I said.

  “I’m fifty-five. It suits my vanity to have someone younger I can show off to, someone I can advise and to a limited extent protect. That someone used to be your husband. I liked Gabe. He was talented and funny. But Gabe is dead so now I like you. You’re not as funny but you’re talented.”

  My husband had left me little more than aggravation, heartache, and a skein of lies at his death. That I’d also inherited a knight—if a dark one—surprised me. If I harbored deeper suspicions about his generosity I suppressed them. I’m sentimental in my own cynical way and wanted to believe that loyalty to a dead friend motivated him. “I’m working on the Hollywood Forever robbery,” I said.

  “The theft of Valentino?” He sounded surprised. “There’s nothing in that for me.”

  “That’s why I’m telling you.” I may have been sentimental but I wasn’t stupid. One of the cardinal rules of my line of work is never to tell a colleague what you’re doing until it’s finished because we all steal shamelessly. My sister would have been a great paparazza. “You hear anything about people collecting the bones of celebrities, weird black masses, that sort of thing?”

  Vulch lifted the case from the trunk of the Cadillac and set it on the pavement at his feet. “Nothing specific, no, but you should know that Satanism has deep roots in Los Angeles culture.”

  “There’s too much sun and orange juice here for the devil.”

  His teeth flashed yellow beneath the parking-lot security lights. “The chamber of commerce would be happy to hear you say that. You ever hear of Aleister Crowley?”

  I told him I didn’t know the guy and shut the trunk.

  “The
most notorious Satanist and practitioner of black magic in the twentieth century. An Englishman. Was the grand pooh-bah of the dark arts until his death. Lived in Pasadena for a short time in the 1920s. It’s been written that he inspired L. Ron Hubbard.”

  “The founder of Scientology?”

  Vulch lifted a pack of Camels from the left flap pocket in his trench coat, shook out a cigarette, and lit it with an onyx black lighter. “For several months he supposedly belonged to a local chapter of Crowley’s sect, Ordo Templis Orientis, got some of his ideas about Scientology from Crowley and standard concepts in black magic. The rumor goes the head of the sect, a guy named Parsons, conspired with Hubbard to produce a satanic child, with Parsons acting as the high priest to impregnate the girl and Hubbard acting as the seer guiding events in the spirit world, astral plane, whatever you want to call it.”

  “But Scientology is everywhere in Los Angeles,” I said. “Some of the most famous actors and musicians belong to it.”

  “And they got successful pretty damned fast, didn’t they?” He blew a thin stream of smoke out the side of his mouth. “Almost as if they’d sold their souls to the devil.”

  “That’s a cynical thought,” I said.

  “We live in cynical times.”

  “You think the Scientologists are involved?”

  “Not enough money in it,” Vulch said. “That was just an example of how deeply Satanism is embedded here. And remember, it’s not all pentagrams and goat’s blood. The devil isn’t a hideous creature with horns and a tail, not anymore. Who’s going to fall for that shit these days? That’s the devil people try to scare you with, but it’s a false image. Lucifer began as an angel, the most beautiful of all of God’s creations. Remember that.” It seemed he spoke from personal experience. He spoke bitterly. “The devil is so beautiful and desirable you’ll do anything, sell anything to embrace him. And when you do, he’ll drive a stake through your soul.”