When Frank’s Honda slid into the alley I lowered the futon out the window, held it flat against the side of the building, and let it drop, momentum and gravity tipping the padding flat onto the asphalt no more than a foot from the base of the wall. The Rott barked, once, confused, when I slid my legs out the window. I told him to stay calm and gripped the windowsill with both hands to lower myself. I didn’t want to dangle out the window, a coward to let go, and so the moment my body steadied I kicked gently out and released, hoping for the best. I hit the center of the futon with the accuracy of a stuntwoman and tucked into a ball, letting my momentum carry me into a backward somersault, the perfection of my landing marred only by a bump on the head as I rolled back.
Above, the Rott jumped his paws onto the windowsill and barked. I shushed him, pulled the futon behind the trash dumpster, and slid into the Honda’s passenger seat, sinking my head below the level of the windowsill as Frank accelerated toward the mouth of the alley. “Is the Rott following?” That was my biggest worry, that the dog would panic and decide to jump down after me.
“Don’t worry, he’s fine,” he said, barely glancing in the rearview. “Nice landing, by the way. You practicing for your next jailbreak?”
I dug into my jacket pocket and handed him a spare set of keys to my apartment and car. “You’ll go get him once I’m in place?”
“Somehow, I always imagined it would be a little different when you finally gave me the keys to your apartment.” He let a lonely sigh fall from his chest and followed it with a smirk. “Relax, I’ll take good care of your dog. You can have him back when we meet Mrs. Starbal the First. You mind coming with me on that? After you take me to lunch, of course.”
“What are we meeting her for?”
“She’ll talk to us, for one. Not too many people are willing to talk to me about Starbal senior. Certainly nobody who ever wishes to do lunch in this town again.”
“What’s the angle?”
“Nothing special,” he hummed, meaning he wasn’t saying yet, and changed the subject. “You know Logan called to twist my arm about the photograph he picked up from your apartment. He does not want to see any mention of Luster published.”
“Why’s that, you think?”
“I can’t figure it out. It’s like the connection blindsided him.”
“Stewart told me the cops didn’t know anything.”
“If you look at it from Logan’s perspective, he has to treat the whole thing like a gag, right? But what if it’s not? He’s screwed. If we print it, he’ll be forced to deny the connection, and if it turns out Luster is connected in some way? After he’s denied it?” Frank grinned and shaped a mushroom cloud with his free hand. “Ka-boom to the old career.”
“You mean he thinks somebody mailed the photo as a joke?”
“Isn’t that what it said on the back?”
“What it said on the back was J, O, K, E, then, in parentheses, no S.”
Frank turned his face away from traffic to show me a smart-ass smirk. “I know you didn’t have the chance to finish college, but that spells joke, singular, as in, no s.”
“Why not J for James Rakaan? Or even Jason Starbal?”
“Why not J-O-K-E for joke? People about to kill themselves, isn’t that what they think life is all about, a cruel joke?” He swerved into the driveway of a Budget Rental Car franchise and parked next to a blue Ford Focus. He pointed his chin toward the rental car and dropped open the Honda’s glove compartment to show me the keys.
I started the Focus and drove slowly back to Venice, figuring Frank was working on something he didn’t want to tell me about, not just yet. We were often competitive, trying to outscoop one another, not with the intention of sucking up to the publisher but to goad each other on. If Frank was interested in talking to Starbal’s first wife, then maybe he figured Jason Starbal was involved. That made some sense. Jason Starbal was a filmmaker with ready access to video equipment, and Christine’s diary implied that she’d accompanied Rakaan to his house. Maybe Jason Starbal and James Rakaan shared the same sick erotic thrill of strangling drugged young women, video-recording the acts either to enjoy later or to share with other perverts over the Internet. That would certainly freak out Stewart enough to want to kill himself.
Frank veered at Rose and circled the block while I pulled into the grocery-store parking lot across from my apartment, parking two rows behind the white Tercel. I pulled from my jacket pocket a point-and-shoot camera with a 4.5X zoom lens, decent enough for a pocket cam but not nearly as powerful as the telephoto on my Nikon. Seen through the lens, Frank carried something in his left hand as he lumbered up the steps to the second floor of my building. The ex-con lifted a pair of binoculars, the cheap kind that can be bought for under twenty bucks in any drugstore. Frank keyed the door and slipped into the apartment. The ex-con shifted his shoulders and leaned over the passenger seat, the door frame concealing the action of his hands from view. It looked to me like he was writing something down—probably a log of my movements and visitors.
Frank emerged from the apartment less than two minutes after he’d gone in, leading the Rott out the door by his leash and dangling the object he’d carried up the stairs—a donut, the zoom revealed. Frank didn’t relate to animals any more gracefully than he did to people, but he and the Rott shared a common passion for junk food, and that formed the surprisingly solid basis of their friendship. He led the Rott down the stairs bite by bite, then tossed the stub onto the floor of the Honda, shutting the passenger door after the dog leapt after it.
The ex-con pulled himself out of the Tercel to watch as Frank sped away, then dropped back into the car to light a cigarette and think about what he’d just seen. A few minutes after he extinguished his smoke, he stepped from the car and approached a raggedy man who pushed a shopping cart crammed with clothing, blankets, old books, and brightly colored plastic toys. He shook his head as the ex-con spoke to him and tried to continue his trek toward the sea but paused when a single bill of money waved in front of him. He snatched the bill as quick as a frog catching a fly and swerved across the street, leaving the cart safely parked just inside the sidewalk while he climbed the steps and rang the buzzer to my apartment. He backed away from the door and hung his head, then rang the buzzer again. Then he just stayed there, swaying from side to side, like somebody had put him into neutral.
The ex-con lit another cigarette, thought about what he was seeing, then lifted a cell phone to his ear. He talked to somebody for a minute or two, finishing the call and the smoke at the same time. He stepped into the car and reached to the right of the steering wheel. The Tercel quaked, exhaust trickling from the pipe. I started the rental and let him jet from the lot before I pulled out of my slot. He drove east on Rose before cutting toward the crown jewels of L.A.’s Westside: Century City and Beverly Hills. Mid-afternoon traffic congealed just enough to slow the Tercel, making it that much easier to follow. I fell a few cars back, speeding forward whenever I sensed a changing signal might separate us. He led me east through Beverly Hills, then north through West Hollywood onto Sunset Boulevard, just east of the Strip. After we hit the 6000 block the glitz of the Westside faded into the grime of east Hollywood. He passed Amoeba Records, signaled left, and swung across traffic into a parking lot beneath a black glass and silver steel midrise, pausing just long enough at a parking arm to insert a card into the code slot. I swept past and pulled a U-turn at the next light, coming at the public entrance to the underground lot from the opposite direction.
A ticket flickered from the box beside the parking control barrier. I grabbed it and sped past the rising arm into the first open slot. The clank of a compact door shutting near the far corner revealed where the ex-con had parked his car. I slipped out of the rental and into the nearest stairwell. I took the stairs two at a time, grabbing the handrail to pull me through the turns with greater speed, then skidded to a stop at the top landing to gather my breath before pushing through into the lobby. Across a granite
-tiled floor the ex-con stepped alone into an elevator. I waited for the doors to slide shut and stepped across the lobby, watching the lit buttons above the elevator to mark his progress. The elevator behind me chimed. I rode it up to a corridor of offices with the names of minor-league entertainment companies and professional service corporations—mostly accountants and lawyers. I leaned against the wall and listened. Around the corner, a door hissed and clicked as it shut. I veered to the inside wall and peered around the edge. The moment I read the brass letters on the door at the end of the hall, I knew I’d tracked the watcher to his hole: Ray Spectrum Investigations.
“Oh no, not that guy,” Frank said, his mouth stuffed with French fries, when I told him that the ex-con keeping watch on me worked for Spectrum. We met at a Fatburger near my apartment after dropping off the rental and picking up the Caddy, a late lunch at a restaurant of his choosing his price for helping me work the tail. I’d accepted without qualm, knowing he wouldn’t choose a boutique Westside restaurant that required a bank loan to pay the bill. Frank preferred hamburger to filet, and pizza to almost anything.
“Why not that guy? What about him?” I asked.
Frank slowly unwrapped the paper from the edge of the hamburger and stared as though he’d lost his appetite, a rare phenomenon. “He’s a fixer,” he said.
“What’s a fixer?”
“Somebody who fixes things.”
I didn’t suffer from the same loss of appetite. When I bit into the hamburger, the sauce spilled over the paper wrapping and dripped onto the table. “What kind of things?” I asked.
“Embarrassing things.” He shook his head, flummoxed. “Let’s say you have a celebrity actor who gets his kicks from snorting cocaine suspended by his heels from the ceiling, nude, while a hooker whips him with a wet weasel tail.”
“Are you making this up or did it really happen?”
“Stranger things have happened, but I’m making up this one.” He looked at his burger as though about to take a bite but held off. “Let’s say the guy who deals the coke and the hooker are partners working a blackmail grift. They tell the celeb pay up or the photographs are going to start appearing on the Internet. What can he do about it? If he pays, he’ll be on the hook for the rest of his life, and if he doesn’t, not only will he be laughed off the screen in his next picture, the ASPCA will sue him for mistreatment of weasels.”
“He could always confess to the public and beg for mercy,” I said.
“If he made a living playing the kind of guy who might like getting whipped with weasel tails while suspended nude from the ceiling, sure, he could work it into great publicity, but what if he plays priests or tough guys? Not an option. So he hires a fixer, someone who promises to make the problem disappear, one way or another.” He lifted the hamburger to his mouth and bit down, then continued to speak while he chewed. “The fixer approaches the blackmailers and offers a deal that won’t blow back on the celeb. Unlike the celeb, who only plays tough guys, the fixer is physically imposing, a real tough guy who looks like he wouldn’t hesitate anchoring the blackmailers to the bottom of Santa Monica Bay. Of course he doesn’t actually kill anybody if he doesn’t have to, because the bodies could surface and that might lead to bad publicity. He prefers to give the blackmailers part of what they want—it’s only money, after all—with the threat of lethal retaliation if they break the deal.”
“And Spectrum, he’s a fixer?”
“There are two top-dog fixers in this town,” Frank replied, chewing now with great enthusiasm. “Anthony Pellicano and Ray Spectrum. Pellicano got his start as a skip tracer working deadbeat accounts. Spectrum was a cop, originally.”
“Local?”
“LAPD. Internal Affairs reprimanded him over an officer-involved shooting—he was working vice at the time—and he quit to join the dark side. The fact that he shot some people while in uniform only adds to his reputation. You know what he likes to tell clients?”
I shook my head, no clue.
“‘I only make people disappear as a last resort.’”
“You think he might include troublesome paparazzi in that remark?”
“No doubt.” He finished the hamburger with a polishing lick of his fingers. “If Ray Spectrum has been hired to fix you, your problems with Detective Logan are going to feel like a minor case of sniffles before a truck hits you.”
“Who do you think hired him?” I asked.
“Starbal, who else?” He suppressed a burp with the back of his hand and fingered out the pack of cigarettes in the front pocket of his T-shirt. “Either direct, or through his lawyer.”
“You mean Stewart?”
“I mean his father. Spectrum built his business on guys like Jason Starbal. He wouldn’t hesitate to drop a dead rat in your car if he thought it would scare you off the story.”
“He’ll have to try something worse than a dead rat.” I swallowed the last bite of Fatburger and grabbed a sack of takeout for the Rott.
“How about a car bomb?” Frank asked. “You want to have to check the undercarriage of your car with a mirror every morning before starting it up?” He led the way out the door, lighting a cigarette the moment he moved from a violation of the California labor code—smoking in a place of employment—to mere public nuisance. “Let’s figure Starbal knows his son is involved,” he said, fuming smoke from his nostrils. “He sees we’re making a major play on the story and he panics, runs to Spectrum, tells him we have to be stopped. Spectrum hires the ex-con, who drops the dead rat on your seat, figuring it will scare you off.”
The Rott jumped his paws to the Cadillac’s passenger window when he spotted me, his muzzle pressed against the glass, and tumbled onto the asphalt when I opened the door, too dumb to back away or just too eager to get out to where the food was. I let him sniff the bag before I reached in to tear off a strip of hamburger. “Have you considered the possibility that Jason Starbal is more directly involved?”
Frank peered at me over the smoke curling from his cigarette, his expression as cagey as a card player just asked if he was bluffing. “You mean, have I already considered the possibility that Jason Starbal’s oeuvre might include more than vampire flicks? Interesting idea. You think we should ask Mrs. Starbal the First a few pointed questions?”
“There’s one thing I don’t get about this,” I said, feeding the Rott the hamburger patty, bite by bite. “Why is Starbal trying to scare me off? I’m not the one writing the story. Why not drop a rat on the seat of your car?”
“Have you seen the interior? I’ve got so much junk in there a dead rat would just get lost.” He glanced inside his car to remind himself of the mess and smiled. “Besides, why should I be scared of a dead member of my own species?”
27
I IMAGINED SOMETHING a bit grander for the first wife of one of Hollywood’s most successful producers than a counter position at Bloomingdale’s, even if she worked the more exclusive terrain of men’s and women’s luxury watches, but Meme Richardson had suffered the great misfortune of divorcing Jason Starbal before he made his Beverly Hills mansion money. According to court records she’d willingly sacrificed her alimony payments from Starbal to marry again less than a year after they divorced, her second marriage lasting a spectacularly brief three months. After that, she seemed to have given up on men—on marrying them, at least. She lived in a modest apartment in Westwood and worked in the solidly upscale Century City Mall, less than a mile from Rodeo Drive, never gravitating far from the center of wealth but continually denied access.
Meme—pronounced Mimi—had agreed to talk to Frank off the record about Jason Starbal, ground rules we readily agreed to because so few people seemed willing to talk about Starbal, particularly after the death of his son. She didn’t want to be seen talking to tabloid reporters, so to please her taste for the clandestine we waited outside Bloomingdale’s for her shift to end and followed her at safe distance to Gelson’s, a boutique supermarket where she commonly shopped for groceries. Tall a
nd thin, and stylishly dressed in an embroidered linen skirt and off-the-shoulder stretch silk sweater, she looked like she belonged to the class she sold her products to, a mid-forties woman with taste in quality things as high as her cheekbones. The diet-enforced angularity of her face may have imitated an aristocratic ideal of gracefully aging beauty, but it also gave her a sharp and bitter look. She bought a cup of coffee from the in-store bakery and took it to a table in the informal seating area, browsing through the circular of specials and pretending surprise when we asked if we could join her.
Frank began with a nonthreatening question intended to elicit an easy reply, asking, “How long were you married to Jason Starbal?”
“Five years,” she said, then tightened her lips as though remembering how unpleasant those years had been. “I’ve been waiting for over twenty years to hang Jason by his balls—that’s why I’ve agreed to talk to you—but I have to insist that what I tell you stays off the record. It may not look to you like I have much to lose, but what little I have is mine and I don’t want to be sucked dry by frivolous lawsuits.”
“Why do you think that might happen?”
“Because that’s what rich people do, they throw lawyers at problems to make them go away. If you don’t have the money to retaliate—pffft!” She flicked her fingers into the air in imitation of a small explosion. “They vaporize you in court.”
“Has he done that to you before?”
“What hasn’t he done to me?” She brushed her hand over her hair, pulled sharply back into a ponytail. “You’d think he might not be so damned hostile to the mother of his first son, but every time I get within a hundred yards of asking him for a little something he sics his lawyers on me.”
“Your son, Jagger, right?”
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