“That’s why I asked. You seem like the kind of guy who’d know.”
Frank pointed at a boutique courtyard building across the boulevard that looked like a cross between a Spanish hacienda and a mini-mall, the style of building that attracts lawyers, accountants, and others in the white-collar professional crowd. “The guy we’re after, the guy who owns the warehouse, has a ground-floor office in that building.” He scuttled toward the street corner, his eyes on the traffic light to cross with the next green. “His name is Daniel Sopwell and his company is called Sopwell Holdings. I’ve already done a walk-by. It’s strictly small-time, a two-person operation. His secretary said he’s at lunch. We’ll ambush him when he returns.”
I kept stride next to him, asked, “So do they or don’t they?”
“Do they or don’t they what?”
“Have a bone there.”
“I thought you were kidding.”
Sleek foreign steel knifed through the air in front of us, accelerating through the amber light.
“So you don’t know the answer.”
He stepped off the curb in front of a BMW straining to stop on the red, as if daring it to hit him, then half turned and flipped off the driver when the bumper slid over the white crosswalk stripe. “I’ve been asked some pretty arcane questions before but yours sets the record. Go ahead, ask me how big a whale penis is.”
“I don’t want to know that,” I said, two steps behind.
“Fifteen feet.”
I caught up to him, said, “Jealous?”
“Are you kidding? Of course I’m jealous. I know this might be confusing to someone with your lack of experience, but men don’t literally have bones, no matter what the slang infers. We have something called erectile tissue, which is entirely a different thing. I can show you, if you’d like.”
“No thanks.” I followed him across the sidewalk and into the courtyard. “My interest is completely hypothetical.”
“Then hypothetically I’d say a dolphin’s penis is boneless too, and I don’t even want to know why you’re asking.” He stopped before brass letters hung on an oak door. The letters spelled SOPWELL HOLDINGS. “I told the secretary we’re interested in profiling Sopwell as our land pillager of the month, so she expects us.”
I opened up the aperture on the Nikon and slowed the shutter speed for low-light conditions. Frank knobbed open the door and stepped into the lobby. A permed woman in her mid-forties smiled cheerfully from behind the reception desk. “He should be back any second,” she said, gesturing toward a couple of leather chairs at the far wall. “Please, make yourselves comfortable.”
We sat, Frank bearing a pleasantly blank expression, as though he waited for the bus and not to ambush Sopwell. The light would be difficult to work with, fluorescents above and a smoked plate-glass window beside the door. I attached the flash and stopped down the aperture. A man dressed more for the entertainment business than real estate—Persol sunglasses, designer sport coat, knit cotton jersey, slacks, and sneakers—slipped through the door a few minutes after we sat and cast a sidelong glance at us as he moved toward a private office behind the secretary’s desk.
“These people are here to interview you for a newspaper column about real estate?” The secretary’s voice rose uncertainly at the end of her sentence. “Something about being the land optimizer of the month?”
Sopwell turned to greet us, making a show of flashing open his sport coat to slip his sunglasses into the inside breast pocket. Armani, the label read. From the top of his forehead to the crown of his head his hair grew in sparse clumps that looked like recently planted tufts of crabgrass, the result of a series of hair-implant procedures. Except for the hair he was movie-star handsome, eyes gray as granite and rugged chin adorably dimpled. The chin in particular looked familiar and I wondered where I’d seen it before. With a face that handsome he must have been really bummed out about losing his hair. It must have seemed like a personal tragedy. I stepped to the side of Frank’s shoulder and put the Nikon’s viewfinder to my eye.
Frank stuck the tip of his pen to his writing pad and, pitching his voice to a tone heard most commonly in district attorneys prosecuting capital crimes, asked, “Could you comment on the current police investigation regarding your involvement in the robbery-homicide at Hollywood Forever Cemetery?”
His eyes blanked with the shock of the question and like he didn’t know what hit him he said, “What the fu…?”
I squeezed off the flash.
“Sources tell us that one of your warehouses is the secret base of the gang responsible for the crimes. Are you part of the gang or its sponsor?”
“Who are you?” Anger infused his eyes with some life. He whirled toward his secretary. “Call security!”
“Maybe I’ve made a mistake,” Frank said, suddenly contrite.
“You bet your ass you’ve made a mistake.”
“Records registered with the County of Los Angeles indicate you are the owner of a warehouse located at…” Frank glanced down at his notes, then back up again. “Nine thousand two hundred Leadwell. Is that not your building?”
“I own a lot of buildings.” He opened the front door and swept his hand toward the opening. “Now get out.”
“You don’t deny owning that building in particular?”
“I have security on the line,” the secretary announced. “What do you want me to tell them?”
“You can tell them we’re leaving.” Frank nodded to me to take the lead out the door. He followed me out but turned at the threshold. “One last question. Do you expect to be indicted for murder or just accessory to murder?”
Sopwell slammed the door so hard I glanced up to the roof, expecting a few red tiles to come tumbling into the courtyard. “Great work,” I said. “You can print the text of that interview on the head of a pin.”
“Take a shot or two of the exterior office,” Frank said, and stepped back out of the way. “Did you get the deer-in-headlights shot?”
I crouched on the paving stones for a low-angle shot of the office. When questions come out of nowhere to surprise an interview subject his eyes widen and reflect the light. Frank was so adept at triggering the look with a shock question that we’d coined a phrase for it. “Like a deer in the headlights of a truck doing ninety,” I said.
“That look alone will convict him in the eyes of the readers.” He lit a cigarette, puffed it out the corner of his mouth while he jotted down notes, said, “I didn’t need him to say anything. I’ll write a basic denial-of-truth story.”
“Headline: ‘Suspect Denies Being Murderous Slimeball.’ ”
“Ninety percent of readers won’t even register the denial.”
I turned the lens on Frank, took a quick low-angle portrait, framed by sky. “Sopwell look familiar to you?”
“Careful, you’ll break your lens,” he said, his smile bitter, then shook his head. “Never saw him before.”
“It’s the chin, the dimple.” I shouldered my bag, images clicking through memory like snaps in a slide show, and strode toward the street corner. I’m good with faces. Most photographers are. The stick-figure signal flashed red. Frank shouted at me from the courtyard, alarmed that I’d left him so quickly and wordlessly behind. I ran across the boulevard as the light turned amber and popped the trunk of the Cadillac. I plucked a copy of Halliwell’s Who’s Who in the Movies from a case of reference material I kept on hand to research and identify celebrities.
Frank wheezed up behind me, the cigarette still smoldering between his fingers. “I need the film before you go,” he said. “You’ve been leading a high-risk lifestyle lately and it would be a shame to lose the pictures if the risks catch up to you.”
“Meaning I get killed,” I said, flipping the pages.
“I worry about it night and day.” He took a drag on his cigarette and coughed, lungs sore from the exercise of running across the street. “Particularly if you get killed with next week’s headline still in your camera.”
>
Not many photographs run in Halliwell’s pages but the book offers capsule biographies of most notable current and former movie stars. The capsules include date of birth, a filmography, and, if applicable, birth name and date of death. I paged to the entry for Chad Stonewell and underlined it for Frank with my thumbnail. Chad Stonewell was born in 1950 as Charles Sopwell.
“Thanks for your concern,” I said. “But I don’t think I’ve shot the issue’s front page, not yet.”
Twenty-Seven
AFEW minutes before midnight Luce bolted from her Los Feliz apartment dressed as though she’d undergone a change of character from arts bohemian to film-noir dominatrix, a semisheer black cocktail dress, fishnet stockings, and spike heels peeking behind a flared ankle-length leather trench coat. The Tercel didn’t match the new style but she sped and cornered as though she gripped the wheel of a Porsche. Los Angeles is not much of a late-night town and the streets clear of traffic as the clock nears midnight. Luce choked all the speed she could from the Tercel’s four anemic cylinders, driving as though she thought the devil was on her tail or maybe just me.
She slowed midway into Hollywood and turned onto Las Palmas, cruised past a hipster-celebrity club of the moment named Bar Bar, and parked around the corner. I backed into a space down the street from the club and watched the corner, understanding then the change of outfit. She strode the sidewalk as though she owned it, past a rope barricade restraining a crowd of more than fifty stylishly dressed hopefuls waiting to gain admittance, glanced neither left nor right nor checked her stride until she reached the security guy working the entrance. He bent at his tapered waist, his bodybuilder chest and shoulders straining the seams of his black suit. Luce said something and he nodded his bald head once, eyes inscrutable behind chrome and onyx sunglasses. Some bouncers in the L.A. club scene acquire a celebrity to match the velvet ropes they guard and Luther had that glow, no mere thug but a thug with style. He’d turned me away at the ropes no fewer than six times, and five of those times I’d come disguised in borrowed Manolo Blahniks and Prada, the kind of person he’d normally admit. He stepped back, unhooked the rope, and let Luce enter.
I’d have a better chance of sneaking into heaven than Bar Bar with Luther at the door. On certain select nights the celebrity crowd partied there, not because the interior offered anything special—the decor wasn’t any different from a thousand other low-rent clubs—but on a whim. The word goes out among a select group of people that this bar or that club is where the celebriati are going that month and so they all go. How the word spreads is a mystery. Homing devices implanted in their back molars, maybe. They didn’t admit people they didn’t know—except women who look desirable enough to interest the men inside—and they certainly didn’t let known paparazzi anywhere near the entrance. That Luce had been admitted so readily meant that her name had been left at the door or that she was a regular, or merely that Luther thought someone inside would want her. Clubbing might have been in her plans for the evening before I’d talked to her or Bar Bar could have been chosen as the one place she could meet someone safe from my prying camera.
I accelerated from the curb and circled the block to the mouth of the service alley at the back of the club. Two stretch limousines idled midblock, light from an adjacent doorway spilling blue onto long, black hoods. I put the telephoto lens to my eye and opened the aperture wide. The back of the club had not been lit to encourage photography, and the limousines had parked close enough to the entrance that the doors, when opened, would shield those entering or leaving the rear compartments. I snapped the latches on the silver case Vulch had given me and attached the night-vision lens. The night blossomed fluorescent green when I lifted the viewfinder to my eye. The infrared lens wasn’t nearly as powerful as the telephoto, but when I panned the lens to the back of the club the face of a chauffeur smoking a cigarette by the hood of his limo burst into light.
Five minutes after I’d set up the camera the rear door of the limousine nearest the exit winged open, gripped by a black-jacketed chauffeur. In the gap between the club and limo door I spotted a flash of hair that registered almost white through the lens, and a black spiked heel planted into the asphalt before it knifed into the limo and the door swung shut. Blond hair and stiletto heels are not rare fashion accessories in a nightclub—I’d been guilty of the same style on a few occasions—but the infrared lens was more sensitive to light than I’d thought. As the woman pivoted to enter the limousine the ghostly-green image of her face had veered toward the passenger window, visible in infrared through the smoked glass.
I ducked beneath the wheel as the limousine glided away from the back exit, the crack and roll of tires turning out of the alley toward Las Palmas. Maybe Luce had gotten lucky in record time, her quick exit a coincidence of good fortune, or maybe her friends intended to leave me out front, trying to gain entrance to the club while she slipped out the back. Anyone can rent a limousine and driver for the night, as legions of graduating high schoolers annually prove. Chad Stonewell wasn’t the only possible occupant of the limo’s passenger compartment—just the most likely one. More than once a changing traffic signal flagged me while the limo cruised ahead, rolling down Santa Monica Boulevard toward the sea, but I never lost sight of its taillights in the empty city night. When it reached the Palisades the limo turned parallel to the ocean and coasted to the curb. The chauffeur hustled around the hood and snapped open the door on the passenger side. Luce burst from the compartment as though pushed, indignantly straightened the line of her trench coat at the curb, and clicked on stiletto heels toward the pier.
I left the Cadillac at the curb and slipped onto the footpaths of Pacific Palisades Park, the narrow strip of green that hugs the cliffs above Santa Monica State Beach to the pier. The homeless crowded the park at that late hour, curled beneath their coats on the grass or wandering the paths with irresolute steps as they walked to stay awake through the night. Luce stayed on the sidewalk parallel to the park and skipped onto the pedestrian walk ramping down to the old carousel at the mouth of the pier. The video-game arcades that lined the south side had gone dark at midnight and the brightly colored bulbs of the Ferris wheel no longer spun in the night sky, but a few late-night revelers still weaved the wooden planks. Further down, where the pilings advanced from dry sand into the waves, a two-headed shadow leaned against the railing, joined at the lips. Luce skirted the railing at the base of the ramp and stepped onto the broad wooden deck fronting the carousel, hugging her arms to her chest as though nervous or merely cold.
I crept midway down the ramp to eye her through the night-vision lens. She stood too far away to allow me to read the expression on her face but at regular intervals she dipped her head toward steps leading to the beach as though she expected someone. I pulled the cell phone from my side pocket, paged through the list of recently called numbers, and hit call when the display lit Detective Dougan’s. At that hour he wasn’t around the station to answer his phone. I left a message on his voice mail. I knew he wouldn’t be in. Like my game of telephone tag with parole agent Terry Graves I wanted the illusion of full cooperation and not the fact. I’d tracked down someone who might know something about the cemetery robbery, I said, wish you were here. I recited the time and my location and closed the connection.
I detached the night-vision lens from the Nikon and when I reached for the telephoto Luce straightened at the rail. I followed the line of her glance to the figure of a man jogging up the steps, sandy blond hair worn long beneath a black-brimmed baseball cap. He looked across his shoulder toward my position on the ramp and beyond. He couldn’t spot me at that distance, crouched low behind the railing, not without night-vision equipment of his own. I didn’t get a clear look at his face but from his build and hair he looked like Stonewell’s bodyguard.
I mounted the telephoto to the Nikon and panned along the deck, searching out the bodyguard in the restricted circle of the telephoto until a pair of stiletto heels sliced through the frame. I til
ted the lens. Luce was running. The bodyguard breached the top step and opened his arms. Luce rushed into the gap. I pressed the shutter, aperture wide open and shutter speed slowed to a thirtieth of a second, the big lens propped against the railing for stability. “Outlaw Lovers Embrace on Santa Monica Pier,” ran the headline in my imagination. In the dim light leaking from the nearest streetlamp I had a clearer view of the bodyguard’s boots, splayed out to the side, than I did of his face. Luce nestled her chin against his shoulder and closed her eyes. She’d met Stonewell in the limousine, I guessed. He’d abused her for speaking with me and kicked her out of the car to be consoled by the bodyguard, her lover.
The bodyguard stroked her head and though I couldn’t see his face it seemed from that distance that he spoke to her. If he intended to calm her he failed. Her eyes snapped open and she pushed away, chopping at the space between them. His hands flew palms up as though he wanted no part of the argument. She chopped the air again, her head darting sharply forward as she spoke, then she wrapped her arms around her chest and angrily wiped something from her eye. The bodyguard opened his arms again. Luce moved into him, reluctantly this time, but after he held her for a minute her arms encircled his waist and she laid her head on his shoulder. He stroked the crown of her head with his left hand, drew his right elbow back and thrust it forward. The muscles along Luce’s brow contracted and her mouth jutted open in a soundless scream as though she had been struck mute. Her hands writhed against the bodyguard’s back like the scalded wings of a bird, then flailed against his shoulders in a failing attempt to push away. He clutched her tightly to his chest, his right hand working something between them, and she sagged against his shoulder.
I stood and screamed. I screamed for Luce because she couldn’t. The bodyguard gently lowered her to the planks, his head cocked away from the ramp to hide his face. He knew I was there. He knew I was the one who screamed. I put the telephoto lens to my eye and took the shot. He wrapped something in a black cloth pulled from the pocket of his windbreaker and walked away from the body. I tapped out 911 for the emergency operator and sprinted toward the pier.
Digging James Dean Page 19