Try Darkness

by James Scott Bell

  “You’re being naive now, Ty. In the law, costs and benefits are the only thing that matter. You can put a value on anything, and that’s the way it should be. It’s more efficient that way.”

  “Well, as the great philosopher Steven Wright once asked, if one synchronized swimmer drowns, do all the rest have to drown too?”

  Al just looked at me.

  “I don’t like drowning, Al.”

  “Wait a minute,” he said, now looking like he’d drawn that straight and was ready to go all in. “I see. You think there could be some connection between this chick’s murder and Orpheus. You really do, don’t you?”

  I said nothing.

  Al was happy to go on, tilting his head back as if telling a joke to a packed house. “Yeah! You got this idea you’re some kind of Bogart or something, and you’re gonna find a conspiracy. Yeah, Ty Buchanan, supercop.”

  “I want Depp to play me in the movie,” I said.

  “This is so funny except that it’s not.”

  “Then let’s get a serious offer on the table. Here it is. You instruct whoever is calling the shots at the Lindbrook to accept rent on behalf of room 414, and every other renter who makes the request. You have until four-thirty today to give me your answer. If it’s not the answer I want to hear, then I’ll be at the courthouse tomorrow morning when it opens for business and present the clerk with a complaint that names Orpheus and Roddy. Have I made myself clear?”

  Shaking his head, Al said, “Sad. Really sad.”

  “Four-thirty,” I said.

  “You have a tank of gas?” Al said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I think you’ll be taking a drive.”

  40

  HE STEPPED OUTSIDE with his cell on his ear. I listened to the Ray Charles track, happy. That was more like it. That was real music and artistry.

  Law was like that, too. A lot of art and jazz to it, despite what they tried to tell me at Gunther, McDonough. You can have all the law on your side, but unless you know what to do with it you can come off like a rube holding live wires in his hands. You might be the one who gets electrocuted. Or more likely your client.

  Which is why you need to get past the games played at a place like Gunther, and the lawyers like Al Bradshaw who practice there. They’ve become like the machines in The Matrix, running off the juice of humanity. And draining it in the process.

  To be a great lawyer, it was occurring to me, you have to feel something. You can’t sleepwalk through a case or cause. You have to find the thing you’ll die for.

  A criminal defense lawyer has the hardest job, because he usually reps the guilty and the damned. So what’s he supposed to feel? The Constitution, that’s what—the guarantee that the government can’t just shut you away because they don’t like the way you look or what you say, but they have to overcome a big burden of proof, and if we lose that, boys and girls, we lose the only thing that stands between us and the exercise of pure will and mob rule.

  This was the one thing Gilbert Calderón had going for him. His lawyer actually believed that.

  But Al was right about one thing. I did think I could smoke something out by keeping Kylie on as a tenant at the Lindbrook. I did think there was more going on. It was a long shot, but the Red Sox finally won a World Series, right?

  And a little part of me, the selfish part, the part Father Bob and Sister Mary hadn’t been able to excise, just plain loved sticking it to Al Bradshaw.

  Al came back in and sat down.

  “You are being given one more shot.”

  “Of espresso?”

  “Listen to me. You are getting a privilege not many people get. All I can say to you is, don’t blow it.”

  “I’m all atwitter.”

  “You should be. You better be. You’ve got fifteen minutes to get to the top of Linda Flora Drive.”

  41

  IN LOS ANGELES, the rich have always been able to carve out slices of exclusive heaven for their nests. They’ve always been able, with little effort, to hold back the hordes of merely well off and not-doing-too-well. The gates of their restricted habitations did not have to be made of iron bars. Time and land values do just as well.

  Mostly land. L.A. was never a crowded hub of European immigrants in stuffy tenements working factory jobs. Early on, it was a sprawl of fashionable neighborhoods like Angeleno Heights and Bunker Hill and the Adams district. As these began to fray, wealthy developers expanded outward, to Beverly Hills and the new burg called Hollywood, with handy deed restrictions built in. No blacks. No Asians. No Mexicans.

  By the time the courts stepped in and put the kibosh on such restrictions, the land had appreciated so much the “undesirable element” just plain couldn’t buy in. Thus, the rich had erected barriers of gold every bit as effective as the impenetrable gate that met me just off Linda Flora Drive, at the home of one Sam DeCosse.

  Or I should say, one of the homes of one Sam DeCosse, the billionaire land developer.

  That was who I was going to see. That was the shot Al said I had. The one not to blow.

  To blow it with Sam DeCosse was a one-way ticket to big trouble in little Catalina, which is the island you could see from the DeCosse property, along with a big stretch of ocean, the Getty museum, and about one-fourth of the world.

  The gate at the end of the drive was like the one in King Kong. No one was getting in without the king letting you. Three security cameras in various positions stuck up from behind the gate, like those aliens from War of the Worlds.

  I had to get out of my car and announce myself at the little box outside the gate. And wait. One of the security cameras moved, scanned me. I smiled at it.

  Another minute ticked by. Then the gates swung open. I got back in the car and drove up to Valhalla.

  That’s right. That’s what Sam DeCosse called his place.

  42

  FROM THE OUTSIDE, I guessed the house was maybe fifteen thousand square feet, Spanish architecture. Palm trees on the outside, almost like a mansion from the crazy twenties in Hollywood.

  A weight-lifter type in a gray suit with pink tie was standing outside the front, waiting for me to pull up. He had brown buzz-cut hair and squinty eyes. As if he spent too much time in the sun.

  If you were to open a catalog for mail-order bodyguards, he’d be the picture they’d have. He was not the valet. He did not offer to park my car.

  I got out and nodded. “My name’s Buchanan. I have an—”

  “I know,” the guy said. “I’ll show you in.”

  I walked toward him and he requested that I stop. I stopped.

  “I need to pat-search you,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “We have to be careful.”

  “So do I,” I said. “I won’t be patted by anyone I’m not engaged to.”

  The squint got squintier. “Sir, it’s just a standard pat search.”

  “And this is just a standard ‘you’re not going to touch me,’ pal. Deal with it.”

  For a moment he looked like he wanted to deal with it. Personally. But before he could, a voice said, “That won’t be necessary.”

  In front of the door stood Sam DeCosse. I recognized him from the hair. DeCosse had one of the most recognizable pates in the country. His hair was the color of a polished penny, and no one knew if that was natural or not. He combed it in an impossible way that seemed to defy the laws of physics. The front swept halfway down his forehead, then back over itself, like a Malibu wave in reverse. Only an industrial-type lacquer could have kept it all in place.

  When combined with his olive skin, the effect was striking. He was one of those people who walks in a room and sucks in all the energy. There was even a rumor going around a few years ago that Bill Clinton refused to be in a gathering with Sam DeCosse because he couldn’t get the attention away from him.

  “Come on up, Mr. Buchanan,” DeCosse said. “Thank you, Devlin.”

  The bodyguard’s jaw muscles twit
ched.

  I smiled and walked up the path toward Sam DeCosse. He was wearing a fairway green golf shirt tucked into black slacks.

  “Welcome to my home,” he said.

  43

  THE FIRST THING I saw as I walked through the front door was a large bronze piece of what someone in an LSD flashback would have called art. It was a tangle of what looked like eyes and arms, looking or reaching toward stars and moons. It was Lucky Charms meets a fatal crash on the 101 Freeway.

  “Like it?” DeCosse asked, striding into the foyer.

  “Friendly,” I said.

  “I hate it. It’s my wife’s idea. Instead of a flower arrangement, you see, you get this, which is supposed to give a sense of the divine. She’s the spiritual one in the family. A feng shui maniac.”

  “Maniac?”

  He nodded, resigned.

  “Doesn’t being a maniac sort of defeat the purpose of feng shui?”

  “Come in, won’t you?”

  He led me into a huge living room with lots of glass and light. The walls were painted fresh blood red, a little too garish for my taste.

  As if reading my mind, DeCosse said, “The color is my wife’s idea of her inner self. She’s fiery and spontaneous. I’m the serious one.”

  “Should be at least one in every family.”

  “You should see the kitchen. It’s a color called robust eggplant. Can you imagine that?”

  “I can hardly imagine eggplant.”

  Another voice, a woman’s, said, “Oh, I think you can.”

  I turned and saw a tall, striking honey blonde, mid-thirties. She wore a strappy orange top that was barely adequate to hold her most stunning feature. The feature was either nature’s gift or the work of a surgeon, but most men would not care. She wore black yoga pants tucked into Koolaburra boots. Her eyes were green and her skin about as perfect as a baby’s behind, if the baby were made of porcelain.

  She came to me with hand extended. “I’m Ariel,” she said in a breathy voice.

  “My wife,” DeCosse said. He was probably twenty years older than she was. Maybe he felt the need to explain.

  “Glad to meet you,” I said. “Ty Buchanan.”

  “Buchanan. Good strong name,” she said. “You would be a sort of metal horse trough.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Yes, with running water for charisma and prosperity.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Feng shui,” DeCosse said.

  Ariel said. “Do you have a passion, Mr. Buchanan?”

  “Really good pastrami,” I said.

  Her face froze a moment. As if she didn’t know what to make of me. Then she tilted her head back and laughed. A little too hard.

  “I’ll see if Maria can come up with something for lunch,” she said. “You are staying for lunch?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “But thanks. Maybe another time, when I need to get shuied.”

  She froze again. Then laughed again. Then said good-bye and left the room.

  “She’s something, isn’t she?” DeCosse said. “She’s got a life force going on. Wants to act.”

  “She’s got the looks.” Which put me in mind of the Anna Nicole Smith syndrome. Blond Venus marries older man for money, tries to get career in show business. Maybe that was unfair. Maybe they loved each other and she was the next Streep.

  “She wants to do character work,” DeCosse said. “She wants to be known for more than her looks. She did a play at one of these little theaters in Hollywood, some Russian play, by Gorky I think it was. She was totally into it. But I wouldn’t mind if she landed a role on a hit series. It’d keep her occupied.”

  He turned his back as if to signal the end of that part of the conversation and walked me into a sun room. He motioned for me to sit, which I did on a futon covered in jade green silk.

  “Thanks for coming on such short notice,” DeCosse said. “I’m glad I happened to be in town.”

  “My luck.”

  “Luck has very little to do with anything, Mr. Buchanan. Luck is the coin of the loser, whether it’s Las Vegas or life.”

  “Wow, did you just come up with that? Because that’s pretty good.”

  “Maybe it’s in one of my books,” he said. “Which I write myself, by the way. I don’t use ghost writers like certain other . . . ”

  “Billionaire authors?”

  “Got no respect for that. You farm out your project to some hack for a fee, then you sign off on it and the publisher runs with it and everybody goes away happy. But you die a little inside. You have taken a slice out of your soul.”

  “That’s very metaphysical of you.”

  “Surprised?”

  “A little.”

  “Why?”

  I shrugged. “It’s not exactly what you’re known for. You’re known as the Chainsaw. You’re known to cut down any and all obstacles in your path to clear the area for whatever you want to do.”

  DeCosse smiled. Perfect teeth, of course. “Did that come out of one of my PR kits or something?”

  “Maybe you should hire me.”

  “Don’t think I might not. You’ve got huevos. It takes ’em to work for me, and it takes ’em for you to be doing what you’re doing. You used to work over at Gunther with Al Bradshaw.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why’d you leave? You sure you won’t have something to drink? Let me make you a DeCosse.”

  “You have a drink named after you?”

  “Would you expect anything less?” He walked to an oak credenza and pushed a button. The credenza opened like the Red Sea, and a bar setup appeared. Silver and crystal and clinking things.

  “The secret ingredient is love,” he said.

  Okay.

  He did some mixology, then came to me with two glasses with ice and something amber and fizzy. He handed me one and raised his.

  We drank. Whatever it was had a gentle kick, like an eight-year-old girl soccer player.

  “Bourbon’s at the base,” DeCosse said. “Bourbon built this country, did you know that?”

  “Um, no.”

  “Not the overindulgence of it. That’s for weak men. It’s the men who could handle it, coming home after World War Two, who started in New York and proceeded to build the greatest nation on earth. They did it on bourbon and gin and guts. That was my father’s generation. The greatest generation.”

  “Your father was a builder, too, wasn’t he?”

  “The best. Came back from the South Pacific and started kicking everybody’s butt in New York. Bourbon was his drink, too. He knew how much he could hold.”

  DeCosse drank again and sat in a chair opposite me. “So you were going to tell me why you left Gunther, McDonough.”

  “Were you around last year when I had my little run-in with the law?”

  “Run-in?”

  “A minor tiff. I was accused of murder.”

  DeCosse paused mid-sip, squinted. “Ah! Now I remember. You’re that guy.”

  “I’m that guy.”

  DeCosse shook his head. “Now I admire you even more. You beat that rap. That’s hard to do.”

  “It’s easier if you’re innocent,” I said. “The firm, of course, didn’t believe in the presumption of innocence, and sent me packing. After the charges were dropped, Pierce McDonough asked me if I’d come back to the firm. I wasn’t interested.”

  “What interests you now?”

  “The hotel business.”

  He put his drink on the table next to his chair. “Then let’s get down to the hotel business. Key word that, business. It means offering something that people will want to pay for, and doing it in a way that they keep wanting to pay for it. That’s what I do, Mr. Buchanan. I create things people want and they pay me for it. Are you with me so far?”

  “So far it’s simple economics.”

  “But economics is rarely simple these days. You’ve got government interference and media interference. And then there’s the worst sort
of interference, the kind that gets really irritating.”

  “And that is?”

  “The legal kind. You lawyers. I don’t know what it is about law school, but there’s brain damage inflicted there—takes away all your objectivity. I guess, like the mosquito, there’s nothing you can really do about it. All you can do is swat at the individual mosquitoes as they try to suck your blood.”

  He made a picking motion off his arm and pretended he was squeezing something between his fingers.

  “Now,” he continued, “I have my own pond of mosquitoes that bite for me. You can’t avoid it in this world. So when I come across a bright young bloodsucker like you, I say to myself, what would it take to have him in my pond? Surely that’s a matter of economics, too.”

  He swirled the ice in his glass and took a sip, waiting for me to answer.

  “Is there anything,” I said, “that isn’t a matter of economics?”

  “Can’t think of anything.”

  “You know, right and wrong.”

  “You can put a price on that, too. Now as I understand it, there’s a minor problem involving one of my properties, and you represent that problem. What if I were to offer this interest one million dollars?”

  “We’ll take it.”

  “You see? And what if I were to offer ten dollars?”

  “We’d say, Take a hike.”

  “So there you have it. Somewhere in between is an arrangement that can work for both of us. Quaint notions of right and wrong—these only get in the way of sensible men working for the best interest of all combined.”

  “I’ll take nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand,” I said.

  DeCosse smiled and drank.

  “And one other thing,” I said. “I want whoever killed the girl’s mother.”

  The smile melted. “What are you talking about?”

  “Let’s see if we can put an economic value on that,” I said. “My client is a six-year-old girl who lived in the Lindbrook with her mother. A couple of nights ago somebody killed her mother. I want to know who.”