“They give you money. Mister H gives you money.”
She stared at me, chewing on a couple of fries. “Hey, no offense, but I don’t know you.”
“I’m not a cop.”
“You can say you’re not.”
“Look, I don’t know your name. I don’t want to know your name. But a friend of Mister H’s is causing me a lot of problems.” My injuries had made my point for me a couple of times this week, so what was one more? I lifted up the edge of my blouse, careful to turn so as not to show the little boy. “I need to make him go away.”
She shook her head. “Mister H never hits. You’re nice to him, he’s nice to you.”
Not hard to guess what “being nice” entailed.
“No. Mr. Hitch—Mister H didn’t do this. These marks were given me by a man by the name of Roger Sabo. You know him?”
After a couple of seconds’ hesitation, she nodded.
I paused, trying to tamp down my eagerness. I had to tread very lightly now and get her to give me something.
“How do you know him?” I asked.
“He hangs around the construction site.”
“What’s that?”
“Mister H is working on this big building. The guys who are working on it, they get tired, you know.”
“Where is it?”
She gave me the address. Just off Ventura Boulevard in Woodland Hills. Closer to Tarzana than Panorama City, that was for sure.
“Roger is selling his supplies there?”
She nodded. “The construction workers are there all the time. Sometimes Mister H asks a couple of us to stop by.”
“And he helps you pay off your bills.”
She nodded. The toddler reached over for her French fries and she pushed his hand away. “You’ve had enough, José.”
The baby woke up and started crying. She jostled him roughly, trying to get him to stop.
“Do yourself a favor,” I said. “Don’t go to the construction site for the next week.”
“I got doctor’s bills, lady,” she said. “Thanks for the lunch.”
I left the three of them there and walked back to my car. I couldn’t decide whether I was surprised or not. Whenever men had money they liked to use the power of it, particularly with women. Everywhere, every time. I didn’t see why Los Angeles, a city built on a transient population with big dreams and few opportunities, would be any different. I wanted to forget it, forget the images she’d left with me.
On the other hand, the woman’s story would allow me to pressure Hitchcock to help me with Roger Sabo, so it wasn’t like the entire day had been a loss.
Now to take care of Roberto’s little errand.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SEVERAL MILES NORTH of Panorama City was the upscale suburb of Sherman Oaks. Right in the middle, placed near the freeway, was the Fashion Square Mall. A large enclosed mall that followed the template of all modern shopping malls, with all the usual stores lining its corridors, like Macy’s and Bloomie’s and bath shops and high-priced denim shops.
Every large, cylindrical kiosk I passed had posters of a grinning Erica Rose, wearing a polka-dotted tank top and a short skirt with orange tights and her red hair splayed out behind her, leaping into the air and strumming a pink guitar. I sent a picture of it to Stevie, who called me back to say the poster was advertising both Erica Rose’s TV show and her live appearance here at the mall.
Which was the reason I was there, of course.
I stopped in the jean shop to watch a bunch of teenagers take stacks of jeans into the changing room, casually dropping the ones they didn’t like in piles on the floor. One girl picked up a pair of jeans and her friend immediately looked over at them. “Size four! Guys, she wears size four!” The girl dropped the pants like they were on fire. She was thin, approaching emaciated, but she wasn’t L.A. thin, and around here that’s all that counted.
The critic picked up a different pair and said, “Oh my God, these are so cute, I have to try them on right now.” She was already wearing a pair of designer jeans, but what was one more? My first reaction was that I wanted to slap her, but in reality I wanted to slap myself. One time, when I was fifteen, I’d whined incessantly about only having ten pairs of my favorite jeans. Each of which had cost over $300. And needed its own special pair of shoes to go with it. And my mother had given in and let me go on a much-needed shopping trip, because I had nothing to wear.
The Fashion Square also had a large area in the center, open to both floors, where promotions could be held. Today’s promotion was a midday concert by TV star Erica Rose. She was going to do a couple of songs and sign pictures.
I arrived at the mall fifteen minutes before Erica Rose was supposed to take the stage and I settled myself by a pillar where I had a view of the stage and of the crowd.
Problem one: there was no crowd. It was the middle of the week, after school, and a teenaged tween star was going to perform. I didn’t see many of the middle schoolers I assumed she appealed to. College-aged teenagers, moms with babies in strollers, and other people who had the freedom to be out shopping in the middle of the week were here. But no tweeners.
Problem two: Erica Rose wasn’t setting up, doing sound checks, double-checking that the stage was set up correctly. There could only be two reasons for that: she was running late, or she didn’t waste her time worrying about what she was going to sound like because the entire thing was a farce anyhow. Either reason pointed toward her being both manufactured and unprofessional.
Five minutes after I started waiting, a large group—forty or fifty, it seemed like, probably one bus full—of young teenagers was herded down the hall toward the concert area. They had to dodge shoppers and one chaperone had to lean over and pull one from the clothing store she’d gone to check out.
The chaperones settled the tweens on the floor near the stage, and as they gave the kids last-minute instructions—including lots of clapping! —I counted. Forty-one. I suspected they hoped the group of ringers—what these newcomers clearly were—would spark interest from other kids in the mall to join in.
Or maybe they were there for the video crew, who came down a different corridor of the mall, following the prancing and buoyant tween star, Erica Rose, who came frolicking toward the stage. She had bright red hair teased out in a mane behind her, and she wore the same outfit as she had on the poster: green tank top, bright purple short skirt with yellow leggings. She waved gaily at everyone who stopped to watch her pass, which was most of the people in the mall, because this was Los Angeles, and there was a video crew. One girl seated on the floor near the stage popped to her feet when Erica Rose was twenty feet away, a book and pen in her hand. The left-side chaperone immediately signaled her to sit down, which she did. When Erica Rose started wending her way through her audience, the same girl popped up again and Erica Rose gave her a big hug and then signed her book.
The starlet then hopped her way up on stage to begin the show. She attached her stage mic and waved out at the audience. “Hello, Sherman Oaks!” she cried.
Well, I think that’s what she said. Because she was drowned out by tremendous electronic feedback, which had everyone, including me, covering their ears.
And Erica Rose lost her smile and looked off-stage.
Mistake numero uno. You never lose your smile when something goes wrong. You continue on as though everything’s perfect.
After glancing nervously off-stage, Erica Rose smiled broadly again and called out to the audience. She tried valiantly to be heard over the growing din of onlookers talking. Mistake number two: she was going to make herself hoarse trying to speak loudly. The acoustics in this mall weren’t built for people to project their voices long distances; they were designed to spread sound around so the place always sounded like there was a lot going on.
Finally, the music—pre-recorded electronic dance music, with a standard 4/4 beat—started up, and Erica Rose launched into her routine. She was doing her own singing—lip syncing is
a talent that not every performer has and I doubted she’d learned it yet—but it was being filtered through Autotune. I could have been the one up there singing and I would have sounded halfway decent, which was a testament to the power of software that can make someone sound like they can sing on key.
Erica Rose finished her song and bounced around the stage, waving at all the kids in the audience, most of whom were duly unimpressed. The handlers off to the sides clapped their hands over their heads and smiled gaily, indicating what the kids were supposed to do. A couple of them followed suit, and the cameramen walking through the audience immediately focused on them, which was a much bigger incentive to the other kids to get into the spirit. Clap loudly, get photographed!
The girl did another song, with much the same choreography. There was nothing wrong with Erica Rose that a few more years of polish and study wouldn’t fix, but that was the problem: she wasn’t still learning, she was out there front and center, trying to be a star without doing any of the work.
I suddenly thought of Courtney.
When she finished her act, Erica Rose signed more autographs and waved and smiled big. She hugged several of the girls in the audience for the cameras. As soon as the camera lights went off, though, the kids in the audience hopped up and disappeared, probably trying to spend the money they’d earned for sitting there.
Erica Rose stood on the edge of the stage area. A PA handed her a bottle of water. I zipped to her side.
“Hi, Erica Rose. My name’s Drusilla Thorne.”
“Who are you?” She didn’t quite have the Hollywood attitude down. The first clue was that she acknowledged my existence. Her voice was strained, which meant she wasn’t using proper singing technique. And she was shaking. Perhaps vibrating was a better word. Stage fright. She had done her performance and now her nerves had gone wild.
“Your performance was fantastic,” I said.
She lighted up like Rockefeller Center, excited to hear those words from a complete stranger. “Did you like it?”
Well. I had Erica Rose figured all wrong. She was trying her best, I believed that. But she had a lot more work to do to be really good at not just the singing or the dancing but the performing, which was the hardest skill of all. Maybe it was even innate. It was one thing to sing, it was another to seduce the crowd into loving you.
The shaking told me she knew she wasn’t there yet, and she didn’t know what to do about it.
I wanted to tell her that she was only sixteen and she had lots of other choices in life ahead of her. But right now, in this moment, she was miserable.
“I need to speak to you about an upcoming performance you have scheduled.”
She tossed her red hair from side to side and grabbed a sweaty bottle of ice-cold water. “Talk to my manager.”
“Who are you?” said a man standing nearby. He was in his forties, a little paunchy, male-pattern baldness. He wore a blazer over a t-shirt and jeans, but the jeans were pressed and the t-shirt was high quality, so this was his uniform, not something he’d thrown on this morning.
“Drusilla Thorne,” I said, and we shook hands. “You are?”
“Chris McClanahan,” he said.
“Perfect. We need to talk about the concert you’re doing for the Villiers Literacy Foundation,” I said.
“Listen, I’m sorry, but Erica Rose is coming down with a—”
“Save it.” I leaned toward him. “I’m here from his main financial backer, Roberto Montesinos. You and I are going to talk. When and where’s most convenient?”
It was no trouble throwing my stepfather’s name around. After all, Roberto had known perfectly well how this was going to go once I talked to Dr. Villiers: I would play enforcer for his agenda. In case I wasn’t already certain that he had me squeezed between my inheritance and the law, now I was using my unique skills for him. And even with all that, he was still the most reasonable relative I had, and he was a step-relative at that.
Chris wanted to make this issue go away. He shook his head. “Erica Rose’s schedule is really crazy.”
“That’s fine. You simply need to open time in yours.”
“Yeah? I’m kind of busy too. Fuck off.”
“She will stop being busy, Mr. McClanahan.” I smiled. From what I’d just seen, that wasn’t even a threat: this girl was not ready for prime time.
“What are you going to do about it?”
“Yellow and Green is produced by Ed Rathman Productions. Rathman Productions is part of the Forrester Group. Forrester is owned by Van der Laan Entertainment. Jane van der Laan Montesinos is married to...” I waited for him to finish the sentence for me. “Roberto Montesinos. You talk to me, or Erica Rose’s show ends production and she doesn’t get hired by anyone in the VDL family again.” Given that Stevie had explained how VDL produced most of the shows for KidsTV, I felt confident about making that promise. And if Roberto didn’t want me fully representing him, he should have said something.
McClanahan grunted with frustration, which told me he hadn’t been aware of at least one of the relationships I’d just mentioned. “I can’t talk now,” he said. “Tomorrow? Can we do this tomorrow?”
“Now is better.”
He ground his teeth. “I have a meeting I can’t miss today.”
“The only excuse I’ll accept is a meeting with your parole officer.”
McClanahan stared at me. “Fuck,” he muttered.
“Name and phone number. Not that I don’t trust you, but I don’t trust you.”
He gave me the parole officer’s name and phone number, which I memorized. Then I asked for a specific time the next day when we would meet. “And if you stall me again, Mr. McClanahan, Erica Rose shouldn’t show up for work on Monday.”
“We’ll be in Westwood tomorrow afternoon,” he said.
At least Westwood wasn’t the San Fernando Valley, I thought. I did not like driving into the Valley.
Which probably qualified me for official status as an Angeleno.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
DESPITE HOW EXHAUSTED I was after my failure with the McClanahans, I headed west once again to Tarzana. I picked my spot in the parking lot across the street from the building where Hitchcock Commercial First Construction had its offices, where I could watch every car that came out of the subterranean parking lot. Even as the sun headed down in the west and I had to contend with a flash of orange across the windshield as the car poked out from the side of the building, I could still see everyone’s face. Sometimes having extremely good eyesight is incredibly useful. I didn’t even need to use binoculars.
This exercise got trickier as it got darker. I wasn’t expecting I would have to wait until after sunset.
Greg Hitchcock left in a black Cadillac SUV. It had a dent in the rear door on the driver’s side. I took a moment to memorize his car, in case I ever saw it again.
The receptionist, Mary, left shortly after him. After her blue sedan left, a few other cars left, but I didn’t recognize any of the drivers. After ten minutes of no cars whatsoever, I thought maybe she’d been the last one to leave and had locked the place up after the boss.
Finally, though, twenty minutes after that, my patience paid off, and one more car left the parking. A Prius, of course. Tan-colored and very sensible.
While Jonathan Ricciardi waited for his moment to join the traffic on Ventura Boulevard, I memorized details of the car. Tan Priuses were kind of thick on the ground in Los Angeles and I’d hate to end up following the wrong one.
Jonathan drove twenty minutes up Tampa Avenue to Northridge, which I had only heard of because of the 1994 earthquake. It was relatively easy to follow him from a distance, even with the turns through his neighborhood, following the bounce of his red rear lights off the nearby houses. When I turned the last corner, he had parked on the street in front of a small house with a fence around the yard. He pulled a big cardboard box out of the back of the car and kicked the door shut behind him.
The front door ope
ned. Alison, the teacher from the preschool, had Hailey, the little girl, in her arms. Jonathan leaned over to give both of his girls a kiss as he waddled through the door with his box. The picture of suburban happiness.
My visit was really going to ruin their dinner.
I rang the doorbell and Alison answered it. She opened the door with a welcoming smile, but it dimmed. Vanished, actually. It would be fair to say seeing me made her downright unhappy.
“Hi, Alison. I need to speak to Jonathan.”
“You can’t just come to our house,” she said. Did she remember me from a few brief seconds outside the preschool? She must have.
Jonathan came out of the kitchen, his shirt sleeves rolled up. “Hi, what can… Hi,” he said.
“I need to talk to you,” I said.
He sighed, like he was giving in after a long struggle. “Yeah,” he said.
“What’s this about?” Alison said.
“We can’t have this conversation in your office,” I told him.
Jonathan took his wife’s hand. “Honey, why don’t you give Hailey her bath?”
“I want you out of my house in ten minutes,” Alison told me. Then she stalked off through the kitchen, presumably to wherever Hailey was currently planted.
Jonathan stood there, waiting. As soon as Alison vanished into one of the rooms, I pointed at the living room. “Can we sit down?”
He looked startled. “Oh. Sure. Come on in.”
The living room was small but exceptionally neat and clean. Two small sofas flanked the small square fireplace, with a coffee table between them. No TV. No toys. Every house I’ve been in with a toddler usually looks like a war zone, so I was duly impressed.
I took a seat on the blue sofa, near the front window. Jonathan sat across from me. His palms were plastered together but he kept twisting them, rubbing his fingers against one another. Nervous as hell about something.
“You’re probably wondering why I’ve interrupted your evening,” I said.
Everybody Takes The Money (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries) Page 15