by Alan Russell
Graham remembered Smith directing his glance to a spot somewhere above and behind him, and then had noticed his almost imperceptible nod. A moment later Graham felt a sharp pain. He tried to reach behind him and probe where it hurt, but his coordination was suddenly shaky. He fell to one knee, and when he tried to get up, his other leg gave out on him. Several times he attempted to rise, though a part of his mind knew he was doing little more than rocking from side to side.
When Graham awakened the next morning in his own bed, his back was very sore, and there was a bandage that hadn’t been there before. He assumed a tranquilizer dart had been used on him, though his memory of the night was shaky enough that he could almost think of it as a dream.
Until now.
“Pilgrim.”
Not a dream, thought Graham. Just a lingering nightmare.
“I’m listening,” Graham said.
“In the future,” Smith said, “do not try and record our conversations.”
Knowing that Smith would eventually have to come to him, Graham had installed a voice-activated telephone recording unit. They knew about him, and about it. He felt the need to know about them.
“I don’t know what—”
“Don’t lie or waste my time.”
Smith probably had one of those phones that alerted him to recording devices. That was the problem with gizmos, Graham thought. If you relied on them, eventually you encountered someone with more gizmos.
“When you play back your recording,” Smith said, “you won’t find my voice on it. I am calling from a secure line with a bypass setup that makes it untraceable, and a baffle that makes it impossible for any recording device to pick up my voice. Nonetheless, be warned that any future attempt to record our conversations will result in your losing that beach-boy tan you currently possess.”
Smith’s threat revealed to Graham that he was being monitored: Graham’s skin was bronzed from a recent outdoors assignment. It was possible Smith had him in his sights that very moment. Graham moved away from the windows into the shadows.
“Your target is Joseph Cannon,” Smith said.
In the industry, Cannon was a well-known director, with two nominations for Academy Awards. Still, his name wasn’t a household word.
“Why Cannon? Celebrity photographers ignore directors unless their last names are Spielberg, Cameron, Scorsese, or Tarantino.”
Smith didn’t answer, save to say, “Give him your full attention for a week, starting tomorrow.”
“Is there anything in particular I’m supposed to be looking for?”
“Your usual.”
Smith hung up before Graham could ask him any other questions.
His usual, thought Graham. Smith, in his supercilious tones, had made that sound like something rather unsavory.
Graham played back the recording and listened to a one-way conversation. Like all good spooks, Smith had vanished without a trace.
Joseph Cannon liked young men.
That wasn’t uncommon in Hollywood, but having sex with a minor was. Graham caught Cannon and actor Mitch McCoy cavorting with four attractive and youthful men in an exclusive clothing-optional Palm Springs retreat. Cannon should have checked the birth certificate of one of the young men. From what Graham saw, the minor acted like anything but an innocent, but what mattered was that he was sixteen.
It wasn’t a new story. Cannon could have learned from any of a number of headlines that preceded his. Director Roman Polanski’s sexual relationship with a thirteen-year-old girl resulted in his fleeing the United States never to return. And Charlie Chaplin and Errol Flynn drew the wrath of a nation for consorting with young girls.
When Graham’s pictures ran in the tabloids, Cannon got dropped from a big film he was supposed to direct, McCoy stopped being considered a leading man for anything, and the minor got his fifteen minutes of fame.
As for Graham, he wondered what the hell his assignment had to do with national security. Something about the work made Graham feel as if he were a hooker decoy doing john patrol. He wondered if he was just being tested, or whether there really was some good reason for Cannon being targeted.
Months had passed between Graham’s last conversation with Smith when the phone rang in the middle of the night. In Graham’s profession, that wasn’t uncommon. Late-night clubs attracted many of the younger actors, and Hollywood soirees often ran late. But Graham knew intuitively that Smith was on the other line. His heart was racing when he picked up the phone.
“Pilgrim.”
Graham tried to stop the pounding of his heart. The middle of the night was when goon squads always did their best work. That was when the Gestapo had liked to descend on the innocent, when Stalin’s thugs wreaked havoc. Nixon’s dirty tricks boys used to make phone calls after midnight on “behalf” of George McGovern and the Democratic National Committee while pretending to be African Americans. There was no better time to intimidate than when waking someone from a deep sleep.
“Why don’t you try calling during banking hours?”
Smith didn’t acknowledge his protest. “We need Haley Robinson put under your lens.”
“Half the photographers in LA are already covering her.”
Robinson was coming off a breakthrough movie and was being offered most of the plum roles in town. She was blonde and had a huge smile, with teeth bright enough to attract moths.
“Miss Robinson has a problem,” Smith told Graham. “She’s a kleptomaniac. Somehow this has escaped the attention of the world. You are to immediately remedy that.”
“And what is there about her petty thievery that interests the government?”
“Perhaps you’re right. Maybe there are other matters that should concern us more, such as an accident in Paris.”
Smith let the words hang in the air long enough for Graham to feel like a bug with a foot overhead.
“Do your job, Pilgrim,” he finally said, then hung up.
Blackmail is a great motivator. Graham studied Haley’s haunts and her routines and found ways to photograph her surreptitiously. Graham colluded with one waiter to set up a hidden camera above her secluded table at her favorite restaurant. It was a pinhole photography job, the camera placed in the ceiling and set to take a time-lapse shot every half-second. The memory card was capable of recording thousands of shots. While positioning the camera, Graham kept thinking about exercise-room photos taken of Princess Diana back in 1993. She had been working out in a London gym, and a hole had been cut in a ceiling panel where the gym’s owner had installed a hidden camera. The Sunday Mirror paid a quarter of a million dollars for photos that showed Diana in spandex cycling shorts with her legs spread apart. Diana couldn’t even sweat in private. The pictures were splashed across the tabloids.
Just like Haley’s “klepto!” pictures. At the restaurant, she was caught on film taking a ramekin, a section of the centerpiece, and a steak knife. Graham also got shots of her stealing a stapler at a charity function and slipping two softballs into her oversized purse at a celebrity softball game.
Haley’s sticky fingers gained national attention, and her thievery became fodder for every would-be comedian. She “stole” scenes. The ten million she received for her last picture “evidently just wasn’t enough for her to make ends meet.” Surprise, surprise: Haley was having another “really big” garage sale.
The publicity caused Haley to drop out of a film just before the shoot was to begin. Her publicist announced she would be undergoing “therapy” for her problem. That started a new wave of jokes: the therapist wondering aloud what had happened to the pen he was using to take notes, the shrink’s office looking more sparsely furnished each week.
The Haley jokes would soon pass, Graham knew. He only hoped she knew it. Not a month went by without some actor having to work his way through an embarrassing situation. Jude Law and Arnold Schwarzenegge
r each had “Nannygates”; Kristen Stewart had her directorial “fling”; Tiger Woods was shown to be a real swinger; even Elmo’s puppeteer was exposed. Luckily, fans of film had short and forgiving memories. Rob Lowe, Hugh Grant, Paul (Pee-wee Herman) Reubens, and countless others caught in embarrassing scandals could attest to that.
The world loved a good Hollywood scandal, and then forgot about it. Hollywood’s memory was almost as selective. Tinseltown could forgive anything but a flop. It wasn’t judgmental. And Graham couldn’t afford to be.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
Jaeger was out big game hunting. His chosen watering hole was a Hollywood titty bar called Jugs and Mugs. He was searching for a very large man, one over six feet three, and weighing at least three hundred and fifty pounds.
The sign in front of the strip bar described it as a “Gentleman’s Club.” Emily Post might have had qualms with that description. Judging by the parking lot, most of the club’s clientele were bikers. Hogs and trucks with lots of chrome dominated the area. Jaeger parked his paneled van on the street.
The club’s sound system was loud enough to rival the comings and goings of the Harleys. Heavy rock. Appropriate, Jaeger thought, for what he needed.
A bouncer silently collected money from Jaeger. The man was big, but not big enough for his purposes. He was over three hundred pounds, but only stood about five nine. Jaeger needed to work with more area than that.
He stepped inside the club, standing a few moments to let his eyes adjust to the darkness and his ears to the noise. A woman wearing a low-cut tropical sarong materialized in front of him with a drink tray and pad.
“Can I get you a cocktail?”
Jaeger asked what kind of beer they had. He eliminated the American piss-water and settled on an Amstel. While waiting for his drink, he looked for the best observation post. A long rectangular stage took up most of the club’s space. Off to the side was a game room. The stage had poles on both ends. At the moment, one of the dancers was swinging on the south pole. If Jaeger went ringside, he’d have a good view of the dancers, but little else. The tables above the stage offered a better vantage point, but they were reserved for parties of three or more.
Jaeger’s eyes settled on the bar. It was purposely small, only five stools, designed as a walk-up bar for the servers to collect their drinks, but it would afford him a central location. He collected his beer, tipped generously enough to have some ridiculously long eyelashes batted at him, then claimed one of the two empty seats at the bar. Jaeger slowly swiveled around on his bar stool. He had a good view of the entrance and the stage, and could see anyone entering or exiting the game room, which consisted of the usual pool tables and video games.
As the loud music concluded, the club DJ worked on the crowd. “All right,” she said with her whiskey voice, “get your hands out of your pants and use them for something useful. Put them together and give Amber a big hand.”
As Amber slowly gathered her clothes, and her tips, Jaeger’s eyes passed over her, more interested in the audience than Amber, looking for his fat man.
“Hey,” the DJ said, “I was a Girl Scout once, but I got kicked out of my troop. They caught me eating Brownies.”
Jaeger searched for double chins, red faces, and biker vests stretched far too tight. There was no shortage of those things.
“And now we have Tiffany coming on stage,” said the DJ. “Let me hear how much you want her.”
The lukewarm response prompted the DJ to say, “Jeez, you guys need Viagra.” Her challenge was met with more applause.
“That’s a little better. Tiffany comes to us from Canada. And she knows how to warm up her Mounties on a cold night.”
The music blared over the speakers. Subtle it wasn’t, but neither was Tiffany. Jaeger signaled the bartender for another beer, and then went back to looking for his fat man. With the men seated and the room dark, it was difficult to determine if anyone out there met his criteria. A few of them had potential, Jaeger decided, but he wasn’t sure if any had quite the mass he needed. For appearance’s sake, Jaeger did his looking while he eyeballed the dancers. They performed to three songs, progressively losing all their clothing.
The dancers blended together. All of them looked alike, sporting the same dyed blonde hair, overdone raccoon eyeliner, and oversized boobs. As far as Jaeger could determine, every stripper there had undergone cosmetic surgery. The result was performers whose chests didn’t jiggle, didn’t bounce. They just took up space, lots of it.
Jaeger smiled to himself. Stuffed human flesh. Oh, yes, he’d come to the right place. Before the night was over he hoped to be performing some plastic surgery himself.
He was at the bar for almost an hour before the first real possibility walked into the club. The man was big—probably six feet five—with a long, round torso. His hair was long, dark, and slicked back, and he had a full Fu Manchu mustache that extended almost to his chin.
Fifteen minutes later another huge man entered the club. The man mountain found two open chairs on the opposite side of the stage from where Fu was sitting. He needed the vacancies—he was on the north side of four hundred pounds, both heavier and wider than Fu. The hair on top of his head was thinning, the only visible part of his hirsute body short of wiry reddish hair. Erik the Red, thought Jaeger. The man looked like a Viking.
Jaeger divided his attention between Fu and Red. To appearances, he was suddenly much more interested in what was occurring onstage. It seemed appropriate that Fu had the south pole and Red the north. Both men commanded their own space. If they were any larger, they might have had their own moons.
When Fu was joined by friends, Jaeger started focusing more on Red. The man’s salami-sized fingers were rarely still, thumping out the beat of the music on the stage. He liked to stroke his beard, rub his nose, and scratch at his pelt. It wasn’t only testosterone. Jaeger suspected Red of being a pill popper, probably wired on crank. He wasn’t thin like most speed freaks, but the way he drank beer could account for that. Red was downing a full pitcher every half hour.
He was probably a dealer, too, judging by the way the performers singled him out for their gyrations. Or maybe it was just that Red tipped well. When the women danced in front of him he studied them with the scrutiny of a gynecologist before peeling a ten-dollar bill from a large roll and dropping it on the counter.
It was just before midnight when Red raised himself for the second time in half an hour and made his way over to the restroom. Jaeger suspected he wasn’t only getting rid of the beer. As had happened with his earlier visit to the john, Red returned more boisterous, and bright-eyed, and amped.
Jaeger had seen enough. Red would probably close down the bar, but that was fine with him. Better that Jaeger be seen leaving well before the big man.
He waited out in his van, and as he suspected, it wasn’t until 2:00 a.m. that Red left the bar. Jaeger was pleased to see that he was alone.
Red started his bike. It was overly loud, even by Harley standards. The hog was fixed up in a Nazi motif, its mirror shaped in the form of an Iron Cross, and silver SS lightning bolts airbrushed on both sides of its black fuel tank. Red’s helmet was Third Reich with a Darth Vader glossy finish.
The motorcycle patched out of the parking lot, and Jaeger kept far back, letting the bike fade in and out of visual range. He wasn’t worried about losing it. The motorcycle was so loud he could have followed it blind.
Red avoided the freeways, traveling east on mostly deserted roads. He might have been mindful of the highway patrol, or maybe he thought he could make better time on the back streets. Jaeger considered ramming the van into the bike, but that would mean accident evidence to worry about, paint and metal that police techs would try and match up. Still, that wasn’t the determining factor. Honor wouldn’t be served that way. There were good ways to make a kill, and bad ways. Given a choice, Jaeger always chose the goo
d way.
Up well ahead, Red made a left. Jaeger accelerated, closing the distance between them. The bike’s brake lights flashed red before making a right turn into the parking lot of a large apartment complex. Jaeger followed behind, driving by a security gate that looked as if it had been broken for years.
Red pulled his bike under an overhang. Despite the late hour, and the proximity of other apartments, he seemed in no hurry to cut his engine. Jaeger slowly drove forward along the asphalt, scanning the setting. No one was around, and Red was out of sight of the apartment windows that overlooked the parking lot. The area appeared to be clear of any people. The plan was still a go. Jaeger was glad of that; the alternative was to stake out a greasy spoon off Interstate 5 and wait for an oversized trucker. He much preferred to act now.
Jaeger pulled in next to the still thundering motorcycle. He walked over to Red, reached out with his hand, and the hog was suddenly silenced.
“They call that the kill button, don’t they?” said Jaeger.
Red looked at him in disbelief. No one touched his bike.
“I know all about kill buttons,” Jaeger said.
“What the fuck do you want?”
“I have need of your body.”
“You fucking faggot.”
Red stepped off his bike. He was wearing thick, black Doc Martens shit-kicking, metal steel-toed boots. Red reached his slab of a hand out to grab Jaeger, but only caught air.
“Human flesh stretches. Think of all those breasts you were looking at tonight stuffed with silicone and saline.”
“Fucking faggot followed me home.”
Red swung at Jaeger, but missed. As the smaller man backed away, he kept talking: “I need to stuff you like a Strasbourg goose. That’s not only an expression. The goose is force-fed, stuffed so full of food and water that its liver distends. Have you ever had pâté? Such a wonderful taste for such a cruel act.”