Then I got a call that put events in a different perspective.
“I got a message for you from Cassie,” Pop said, so loudly I thought he’d lost his hearing.
“Things are a little crazy right now,” I said. I didn’t know where to start. Should I say goodbye to him now, or later? I doubted I’d have time to call again before they arrested me.
“She said it was important,” he shouted. “She said if she wasn’t back by now, I should call you with this message.”
“What message?”
“That she’s meeting Mick Jagger’s assistant. Said he could get her a role in some new movie, what did she call it? L.A. Cats? Brats? Something like that. I told her it damn well better not be a rock band. And she said you shouldn’t worry, she wasn’t gonna drink anything. You got any idea what she’s talking about?”
“Where is she? Did she say?”
“She’s somewhere down near your part of town, Hollywood.”
“Did she leave any way I could get in touch with her?”
“Well sure, I bought her a new phone yesterday, you know, the kind you kids put in your pocket. Why the little meathead didn’t want to call you direct, that’s what I want to know. You want the number?”
I grabbed the pen from the receptionist’s desk and inked the ten digits he recited into the skin of my forearm. I punched the numbers into the cell and paced, listening to the distant rings with increasing anxiety. “Mick Jagger’s assistant” could only be Jagger Starbal. How had she tracked him down? I hated feeling helpless. When voice mail picked up, I grabbed a services brochure from the counter and ran out the door. I knew why she hadn’t called me direct. The clever little fool had connived a meeting with someone she knew I’d try to stop her from meeting. I left a message instructing her to call me immediately and started the Cadillac. After I hung up, I called again and left a second message repeating the same information just in case she somehow lost the first.
Ray Spectrum had staked me out and set me up, but maybe he wasn’t aware I knew who he was or where he worked. Midmorning traffic toward Hollywood flowed no worse than usual, the stream of cars trickling through knots near Westwood. I cut north to Sunset Boulevard west of the freeway and tracked a Porsche through the hills, just enough distance between bumpers to spot any traffic cops pulling out to stop him for speeding. The sight of the Rott’s blood on the passenger seat and floorboard brought me close to tears again, but I shut them down and mopped at the blood with a towel as I drove. I’d have my time for revenge, and soon. Spectrum had been hired to stop me from looking into the Starbal connection, I felt sure of that. He’d started with threats and harassments, and when I’d refused to back off he decided it would be simpler to get rid of me legally, easy enough to do with someone serving out her sentence on parole.
I parked around the corner from Amoeba Records and took the bloody towel, camera bag, and baseball bat to the trunk. A parking sign near the corner advised no parking one day distant. I’d have to make sure I got the car moved before then. A parking ticket, documenting the presence of my car that close to Spectrum’s office, wouldn’t improve my legal situation, not considering what I planned to do that morning. I removed the camera and lenses from the camera bag and secured them inside an aluminum-padded case I kept in the trunk, decided to slip the point-and-shoot camera into my jacket pocket just in case. I wrapped the handle of the baseball bat in a sweatshirt from my change-of-clothes suitcase and stuffed the barrel into the emptied camera bag, then shut the trunk.
Nobody paid much attention to me when I walked through the lobby of Spectrum’s building, the handle of the baseball bat protruding from the camera bag clenched to my side. I stepped into a parking elevator and rode it to the second subterranean level. The cars to the left were parked by assigned space, all owned by tenants and their employees. I backtracked toward the far-corner spot, where a three-car gap in the line revealed where the ex-con had parked his Tercel on the day I’d tracked him. I didn’t see Spectrum’s black BMW. Lucky me. He wouldn’t have left the ex-con on the sidewalk, writhing in agony. If not worker’s comp, then common decency required him to drive an injured employee to the hospital—even if a check of his employee records would find no mention of the ex-con’s name. Checking someone into a hospital, that took time. I regretted what I’d been forced to do to the pit bull mix. I wondered what they’d done with him. Put him down, I guessed. I added that to my list of sins and slid under the Ford Taurus parked next to the empty space.
What had Cassie been thinking? On the night she appeared at my door, lugging that towering backpack, she’d shown an interest in the details of Christine’s murder that I’d attributed to the morbid curiosity of an adolescent. As I lay under the car and waited for Spectrum to show—I guessed the third space was reserved for the Camry that rear-ended us the day before—I plotted out the days since she’d returned. She could have set up the meeting with Mick Jagger’s so-called assistant while still in Phoenix, or at least begun the process. How could she have contacted them? Through the Internet? Pop didn’t have an Internet connection. She could have used the library, but not enough time had passed to search, connect, and set up a meeting.
The night she appeared at my door, Cassie already knew about the Starbals through the appearance of the code word, L.A. Brats, on the Suicide Girls website. She’d talked to Nephthys and Tammy, and unlike me, she probably navigated the Internet with ease. I now assumed she knew everything I knew, if not more. But why was it so important to her? Did Christine’s death fuel such outrage that she was willing to risk her own life to expose the killer? Adolescents make warped calculations of the risk of things, admittedly, and perhaps she didn’t understand the dangers of her enterprise. But why had she made such an extreme effort rather than content herself with the usual teenage pleasures of chewing gum, cigarettes, bad music, and hormonally induced mood swings?
But no, she knew the risks. Cassie knew the risks of crime from the perspectives of both victim and perpetrator. I’d underestimated her capabilities a couple of times. She may have just turned fifteen, but she had criminal experience beyond her years and a natural ability that, had it been in a more conventional field, would have been considered prodigious.
When I heard the approaching swish of radials on concrete, I breathed deeply to calm any fluttering of nerves and turned my head to watch for tires swerving into the space next to me. Spectrum didn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d be easy to sneak up on, and I knew that if I hesitated or allowed adrenaline to deflect my aim, the consequences could be fatal, if not for me, then for Cassie. If he backed in or carried a passenger, I’d be forced to abandon the plan altogether, but he headed straight into the nearest slot and braked with a scorching screech of rubber, the passenger door on my side of the space. I slid out from beneath the Taurus and pulled my feet under me, crouching in wait between the two cars. The motor fluttered to silence and the moment of inaction that followed stretched to uncomfortable seconds. I gripped the bat one-handed, a few inches above the knob, and focused on controlling my breath. The locks popped and the driver’s door on the opposite side clicked open, the car shifting with the weight of someone stepping from behind the wheel. I leapt as Spectrum’s head rose above the roof and I jabbed the barrel of the bat forward to spear him in the skull, just above the spine. He never saw me or the bat. He fell like a big bird shot from the sky, arms flapping as he dropped. I glanced around the parking structure. No witnesses, not yet.
Spectrum lay face down beneath the open door, briefcase dropped to one side, sunglasses splayed to the side of his face and keys sprawled a few inches from his fingertips. I snapped the keys from the pavement, and watching the body carefully for signs of movement, I opened the trunk. I’d hit him pretty hard in the back of the head and hoped I hadn’t killed him. I grabbed his heels and dragged him to the back of the car. Desperation lent me extra strength. I bent at the knees, dug both hands under his belt, and trying not to cry out with the effort, I hoist
ed his midsection just over the top lip of the bumper, got my knees under his chest, and rolled his torso into the trunk. A quick frisk yielded cell phone and wallet but no videotape. When I shoved his legs inside he grunted, once, and blinked his eyes. I’d done the job right, hadn’t killed him. That made me feel better about things. Technically, they called what I was doing kidnapping.
What the hell, in for a dime, in for twenty years to life.
I slammed the trunk.
31
RAY SPECTRUM DROVE a new BMW 540 sedan with leather seats and power everything, the 4.4-liter, 325-horsepower V-8 engine growling like a beautiful beast when I turned the ignition. I backed the thing cautiously out of the slot, careful not to scrape the car next to me or ding the one across the aisle, far less willing to put a dent in the fender of such a fine car than in the owner’s head. He kept his parking card within easy reach, in the padded armrest behind the stick shift. I rolled up to the parking control arm, inserted the card, and accelerated onto Sunset, heading toward the Hollywood Freeway north. The car responded with an awesome surge of speed when I pushed the RPMs and it maneuvered with precision at every twitch of the steering wheel. I could outrun Jeff Gordon’s Dupont Chevy in such a car, though I resisted the temptation of demonstrating it. Even a far more talented liar than I might have difficulty explaining to a traffic cop why she was driving a car with the registered owner stuffed in the trunk.
Now that I had Spectrum’s attention, I needed to find a quiet and secure place to talk to him. I thought about driving into the parking lot at Dodger Stadium, a vast, empty space at that time of day, or perhaps up into Griffith Park, but neither guaranteed privacy from the awkward intrusion of a witness or cop. I could drive the BMW north, against the base of the desert mountains west of Palmdale, but that would take time. I didn’t want to involve anyone else, but in the press of time I couldn’t think of another way to work it. I called Pop to tell him Cassie was in trouble and I needed his help to get her out of it. Pop lost his temper, stringing together swear words that brought back less-than-pleasant memories from my girlhood. I waited for him to wind down, told him I needed his pickup truck out of the driveway and the garage door unlocked, enough space cleared in the garage to park a big sedan, and after that I’d need plenty of privacy. He asked me what I planned to do and we disconnected after I told him the less he knew, the better. I didn’t want to involve him more than I had to. The scene could play out according to plan, Cassie released unharmed and the Rott recovered with no assault charges filed, or the scene could go bad, with unforeseen consequences. If he didn’t know why I wanted his help, he couldn’t be charged with a felony. Or so I thought.
I tore the vet’s services brochure from my jacket pocket and called the number listed while I merged onto the Golden State Freeway toward the San Fernando Pass. The receptionist transferred the call to the vet. The dog had come through in good shape, she said, considering the loss of blood, but they wouldn’t know for sure until a little more time passed. She spoke carefully to give me hope but not false expectations. When an animal goes into shock like that, kidney function is always impaired, sometimes fatally. The risk would decline and the prognosis improve with each passing hour. If the Rott made it through the next twenty-four hours, his chances of surviving the attack were good. I thanked her and promised to call again later that afternoon.
My phone beeped when I disconnected, Frank’s name flashing across the display. I took the call, said, “This is not a good time to talk.”
He picked up the stress in my voice, asked, “Anything wrong?”
“I won’t know the answer to that for another hour.”
“Anything I can do to help?”
I thought about it, not too proud to refuse, the freeway asphalt a blur beneath the BMW’s long, black hood. “Spectrum have any weaknesses that you know of?”
“Why? Is he bothering you again?”
I glanced back toward the trunk.
“Sort of the other way around at the moment.”
I couldn’t drag Frank into this, not yet. If I told him what was going on, he’d be an accessory to whatever crime I committed.
“Why’d you call?” I asked.
“Because I get the J-O-K-E.”
“What do you mean?”
“I heard back from my guy at the DMV and did some checking at a production database called Filmtracker-dot-com. Ozzy’s real name is Oren Flushberg, son of the producer Gary Flushberg, who won an Emmy for American Firefighter. Ozzy is one of four founding partners in Illusterious Productions, with Jagger Starbal, Bryan Kane, and Dustin Edwards. Kane and Edwards both have famous dads in the film business.”
“Jagger, Ozzy, Kane, and Edwards,” I said. “But not Stewart.”
“Like I said, I get the joke, but why didn’t he just tell you?”
“And rat out his own brother?”
“Isn’t that what he sort of did by sending us the video?”
“Just the opposite,” I said. “It was his only alternative. He couldn’t go to the police without betraying his friends and family…”
“So he went to the tabloids?”
“Exactly. Sending us the video, that was meant to warn his brother off, let him know he couldn’t keep getting away with it. When I threatened to publish Stewart’s name in Scandal Times, it flipped him out. No wonder the poor kid killed himself. He didn’t have anywhere to go except down that hole he was talking about.”
“Suicide is just another word for spineless,” Frank said. “If the kid had any character or guts, he wouldn’t have killed himself.”
“What was he supposed to do? Talk to his father? His father is such a whoremonger and bondage freak he probably inspired Jagger to follow in his footsteps. Was he supposed to go to the police? When the cop heading the investigation once worked on a film for his father?”
“Wait a minute,” he objected. “I can’t confirm that. Are you sure Sean said it was Logan who worked with Starbal on that film advisory thing?”
I noticed the cars falling rapidly away on my right and glanced down at the speedometer. The BMW was doing one hundred miles per hour like a knife through water. I downshifted to fourth and moved one lane to the right. “Yeah, that’s what he said. Why?”
“The Internet Movie Data Base lists somebody else for that film.”
“So maybe it’s a mistake,” I said. The IMDB listed every cast and crew credit for every film known. They couldn’t be 100 percent accurate. Why would Sean tell me something like that unless he knew it for fact? I told Frank to double-check his sources and asked him to ring me back in an hour.
The freeway cleared of traffic near the pass and I risked a little extra speed to get over the hump. The briefcase Spectrum had been carrying lay on the passenger seat, next to a bottle of designer water. I pressed the lever and the locks flipped to reveal a Hi8 video camcorder—an older videotape technology. I understood why Spectrum hadn’t yet converted to digital. Digital leaves too many records, the possibility for duplication as infinite as the Internet. How many times had I read that police technicians successfully salvaged from confiscated computer data files that supposedly had been deleted? Spectrum was too smart for that, his business too confidential to risk loss of control over the material. It’s easier to control tape-to-tape duplication, and, if necessary, destroy all copies completely. Technically savvy young guys with deep pockets, they’d buy the newest and most expensive technology without fully understanding the consequences. They’d buy and shoot digital. Maybe that was how Stewart acquired the video copy of Christine’s killing. Brothers have few secrets from each other. He’d hacked his older brother’s computer and burned the digital file onto a disk.
I ejected the videocassette from the camera and stuck it into my pocket. The crime recorded on the tape would be minor compared to the crimes I’d be accused of should events spin beyond my control. As I drove, I contemplated an eye-for-an-eye approach: if the Rott died, I’d maim Spectrum in revenge. I tried to fan
tasize doing it and failed. He may have deserved severe injury for what he’d done to the Rott, but I wasn’t going to take that responsibility on myself. I made no such promises if he refused to cooperate and Cassie was harmed as a result.
Pop was standing on the porch when I wheeled onto his street, the garage door propped open and his pickup parked at the curb in front of the house. He tracked the BMW with a slight lean forward. Cars that expensive were a rare sight on his street. He didn’t spot me behind the wheel until the tires turned into the drive. I coasted under the garage door into a space cleared of boxes and tools. Pop’s image slid into the rearview mirror and he pulled down the garage door. I turned off the ignition and stepped out of the car.
“You want to tell me what’s going on?” he asked.
I was surprised to see him inside the garage. On the phone I’d asked for privacy. “Somebody in the trunk,” I said.
He looked like he was about to ask the obvious question—why was somebody in the trunk?—but guessed the reason quickly enough. “He know where Cassie is?”
“That’s what I’m going to ask him. You mind waiting outside?”
Pop reached into the shadows beside the garage door and pulled a shotgun from the wall. “My house. I’m staying.”
“This isn’t what I asked you to do,” I said. “I need to talk to him alone.”
“Sorry, it’s either my way or the highway.”
He’d used that expression a lot when I was growing up. I’d hated it no less then than now. I glared at him, trying to will him to back off. The fool was going to implicate himself in a crime. He backed toward the trunk, shotgun dangling casually from the crook of his arm. I reached into the passenger cabin to retrieve my baseball bat and contemplated the wisdom of giving him a little tap on the head, just enough to make him go night-night. Hitting someone over the head with a baseball bat isn’t a surgical procedure, and I decided I’d be just as likely to do serious damage. “You do not lose your temper, under any circumstances,” I said. “If anyone loses her temper here, it’s me, particularly considering that shotgun you’re holding.” I keyed the lock, hoping I’d be able to swing a deal that would get Cassie back unharmed and keep Pop and me out of jail. Pop raised his shotgun and when I popped the trunk, Ray Spectrum’s Southern California tan had gone deathly pale.
Zero to the Bone Page 27