Why hadn’t I heard of him before? Was he one of those guys who managed to navigate between recognition and obscurity, so he could embrace both celebrity and solitude? Or was I so checked out that it all went by me?
And could Ms. Lopez have been the Jennifer that Mrs. Loo was referring to? Herblach has got to know Les Biden. I added +Les Biden to Herblach’s name and got zero images. I clicked the Search icon and found their names together on a couple of sites. One belonged to a Jerry Biden, while the other mentioned Senator Joe Biden and an aide named Jerry. I reversed the order, put Biden’s name first with +Jerry Herblach and sure enough pulled up a couple of articles with brief mentions of Jerry being one of the executive producers for Murder in the Desert, the movie being filmed under the direction of Les Biden. I clicked onto a site that led me to an article titled “Murmurs in the Desert.” It was an exposé on the troubles on the film set. A reporter from the Tucson Times wrote about ongoing problems with the making of the film in nearby Spring Valley—problems between the producers, the actors, the on-location screenwriter, and the director. His main sources were all of the above, plus a few stagehands and other disgruntled technicians. One of the screenwriters, a guy who one day arrived on the set with a bruised face and a limp, saying his injuries were from a fall, refused to say anything except that all was well.
I tried different word combinations. I threw in Penelope Langham’s name, but her name hadn’t registered yet on any gossip radar. The only mention of her I found was in the Tribune review of The Rose and the Sword that Plotkin had mentioned.
I logged on to TLOxp and searched for any connections between Jerry Herblach and Lino Johnson. Nothing. Back on Google, I tried Lino’s name, with words like “music” and “ukulele.” Besides the expected mugshots and crime scene photos, what I did get was a sepia photograph (circa 1966) of a group of beach boys. I quickly recognized Sam, one of the famed Kahanamoku brothers, and ‘ukulele virtuoso Chick Daniels. Posing with them were an auspicious threesome: Sterling Mossman, the popular Barefoot Bar entertainer who had also been a cop; tobacco heiress Doris Duke; and a kid with a Martin ‘ukulele in hand. The kid had to be Lino.
Shit, now I have Herblach linked to Biden, Plotkin, and half of the Hawaiian music community. Then there’s a very young Lino holding an ‘ukulele not unlike the one carved into his gravestone. That makes for a tenuous but very possible link.
Plus, Biden knows Kay, daughter of Lino, and Kay had once acted for Gerard. That makes her not only the missing person but also the missing link.
I googled “Gerard Plotkin.”
He had a web site, mostly to promote the plays he directed. The home page featured images from The Rose and the Sword, along with some smartly selected, highly positive blurbs. Then there was a diary-style blog that seemed to take its lead from Lewis Carroll. There were cryptic references to the Mad Hatter, the Red Queen, and even some characters from his play: dukes and earls and senators. And there were links to more reviews. I clicked a link labeled Projects. The page that opened up simply said “Under Construction.”
There was little else. What surely must have been a colorful life, reduced to a scant detail or two. Like the business cards in my wallet.
I had to determine, quite rapidly, whether this was going to lead anywhere, whether this angle was even worth pursuing. I blinked a few times to try to moisten my dried-out contacts and continued pairing names, moving from Web to Images and back to Web.
I tried different search engines, focusing on Herblach and Biden again, adding keywords like film, arts, controversy—anything I could think of—then hit Return. Still nothing, except for that Tucson Times article, so I went back to that piece. One crew member had mentioned that Biden had called for a several-day hiatus in filming, and that some members of the cast were headed to Las Vegas. I tried adding Las Vegas to their names, and, as if I were hitting the spin button in a game of screen poker, punched Images. What came up were some group shots, all from the same site. I clicked onto that site. It was a Midweek photo collage, one of those weekly sycophantic homages to the rich and semi-famous. The photos were under the caption: DESERT CAST TAKES VEGAS BREAK. The accompanying blurb stated that several members of the cast and crew of Murder in the Desert had traveled from Tucson to Las Vegas to take in the Mayweather–De La Hoya fight.
I clicked on the first image. As the picture emerged on the screen, unfolding from top to bottom, I recognized Jerry Herblach. He stood next to D. B. Williams, a young B-list actor, and Playboy bunny Shaila Marie. There was another guy in the picture, identified as Elliot Reuben; I assumed he was some Hollywood bigshot. Jerry and the bunny were together in the next photo, his arm around her as he beamed at the camera. The photo below that one seemed to have been taken at a country club. It featured five men in golf shirts. The caption read: Jerry Herblach, Isaac Irashige, Josiah Kamana, and Genaro Blankenship join Steve Wynn at his private course.
Blankenship, Kamana, and herb?
Herb? Herblach???
The final photo was a big group shot. The backdrop was a nightclub. Except for Wynn, all the aforementioned players were there. On the right edge of the photo, her head turning slightly away from the camera, decked out in a short black dress and sparkling earrings, was my one and only missing girl. Her hands were clasped at crotch level. She wasn’t smiling. On the opposite end, not smiling either, stood Matt, in a polo shirt, his hands in the pockets of his faded jeans. The four men in between them all wore aloha print shirts. The caption stated that this photo had been taken just before the Oscar De La Hoya–Floyd Mayweather fight.
I leaned back and shut my eyes. I looked around at the other denizens spending this beautiful day staring into computer monitors: senior citizens, high and middle schoolers, moms with kids. My head was spinning.
Man, this was surreal.
I take it back. This just got painfully real.
Part Two
FOLLOW ME, FOLLOW YOU
It was becoming abundantly clear that all those identical detectives in prismatically changing cars were figments of my persecution mania, recurrent images based on coincidence and chance resemblance.
—Nabokov, Lolita
25
With the news of Gerard’s death crashing into my missing girl case, I had to dive off the rails and glean some perspective. There was no time to dig through the wreckage, or assess the time of collision. My hunch was that these events were inextricably linked, and I had to follow that hunch. I put off my pursuit of Smokin’ Joe, canceled my planned rendezvous with Mia, even though when I had called her she said that she had something to show me. What the fuck is it this time? I said tomorrow.
I drove to Diamond Head Theatre, and as I got out of my car in the KCC parking lot and trotted toward the aging structure, I saw, parked illegally and close to the entrance, a Challenger Hemi V-8—the kind of muscle car that cops had a hard-on for. I ducked behind a monkeypod tree and watched from a distance.
While waiting I yanked my cell phone from my pocket. I hadn’t charged it and it was down to one bar. I called Connie.
“Got a minute?”
“Sure. Just don’t mind me if I start yelling.”
“Watching the grandkids?”
“I wanna shoot these lovely monsters, if you get my drift. Any news? I’m really starting to get worried.”
“I’m exploring the Vegas angle. Did Matthew say anything about a boxing match? Oscar De La Hoya?”
“Oh, sh-sugars, I’m getting another call. I have to take it. Can I call you back?”
“Sure.” Great. I clicked my phone shut and twirled a cigarette for a good minute, fighting the urge to light it. Remembering that sorry run up the hill to the other side of Diamond Head, I crushed the poor cigarette in my fist, sprinkled the tobacco around the tree’s roots, and pulled out something I could twirl but not light up: my green-edged poker chip.
After a couple of minutes, two plainclothes detectives, neither of whom I recognized, came out the side door, led by
Helen, the ticket lady. She watched them as they got in the car. When the driver fired up the engine and floored the accelerator, leaving rubber all over the lot, she shook her head and went back in.
I waited a few moments, marking the time by twirling the chip through my fingers and taking deep tokes from an imaginary cigarette, then trotted over to the side door and knocked.
Helen jumped when she first saw me. “Oh. You.”
Now to see how much of an actor I could be. “I just heard about Gerard. What, what happened?”
“Oh, dear. Oh, dear.” Helen covered her mouth. “It’s heartbreaking. You know the police was just here.”
“I just met him that night, after the play. And now I read—”
“Why don’t you come inside? There’s tea. Coffee, if you prefer.”
I followed her into the theater office.
We sat at a round table. Multiple copies of scripts lay amidst the piles of mail and envelopes and scraps of typing paper, pens, paper clips, and ceramic cups.
“I’ve been miserable all day,” Helen said as she brought me a cup of coffee in a Styrofoam cup. “People asking questions…. Sugar? I’m sorry, we have no cream, just—”
“Black is fine, thank you.”
A phone rang in the ticket booth area; she ignored it.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I shouldn’t be here.”
“No, it’s good that you’re here. Did you like the play?”
“Wildest thing I’ve seen in years.” It wasn’t really a lie, since I had not seen any play in years. Gerard’s untimely death gave the play a resonance that made its descent into farce a deeper tragedy—the trajectory of our lives.
“He was special.” She pointed to a heavily marked-up script. “He was working on this one.”
“Did you show this to the police?”
She shook her head.
“Why not?”
“They weren’t nice.”
I was beginning to like this woman. “That’s cops for you. Did Jerry, I mean Gerard, have enemies?”
“Funny that you said Jerry. Well, not funny…. When I heard he had been killed, that’s the first name that came to mind. Can we keep this between us?” She gripped my wrist.
“Of course.” I grasped her wrist with my free hand. Her eyes were dilated. What is she on?
“He complained endlessly about Jerry.”
“Jerry Herblach?”
She nodded. “Yes. He helped finance the production. At first they seemed good together, conferring on things that came up. But after a while Gerard complained that Jerry seemed to be taking control of the play, making decisions, even about casting, without even consulting him first.”
“Did you say anything about this to the police?”
“Oh, I gave them a few names. Jerry’s … and a few others.”
“Others?”
“Well, cast members, acquaintances … no one I’d consider to be a suspect. It’s just that … the sheet looked so blank…. Wanted to help them fill it … help them feel like they were getting somewhere.” She smiled wanly.
I had rehearsed a spiel that went like, You know, I’m just a wannabe screenwriter and Gerard wanted to help. We had drinks at Indigo that night, the night before…. But as I went over it in my head I saw nothing but pitfalls, sad coincidences that could make me the suspect, even in Helen’s eyes. My very appearance at the theater at this moment was suspect. I had to come clean.
“Look. I have to tell you, I’m a private eye. I—”
She smirked knowingly, held a hand up, palm facing me. “I suspected that much. You know, I’m very fond of Agatha Christie novels. Poirot is my favorite detective. He’s Belgian.” She covered her mouth to stifle a burp, then giggled. “I am too.”
“That’s … good to know. Look, I was working on an unrelated case, and came to Gerard because I thought he might be able to help me with some … background information.”
“You don’t have to explain anything. I got good instincts about people.”
“They should let you do the casting.”
“They should!” She smiled. “Seriously, they wouldn’t let me near that stuff.” She looked away. “And they shouldn’t. It’s not my kuleana … I’m sorry if I’m not—” she cleared her throat “—coherent. I’m—” she looked me straight in the eye “—heavily medicated.” She recited the last two words in a deeper voice, as if she were quoting someone else.
I saw an iMac on a nearby desk, one of those translucent blue ones. “Who uses this?”
“We all do. Me, Gerard, the other directors and staff.”
I walked over and sat down in front of the computer. Pressed the power button. Nothing happened.
“Sometimes it takes a while,” I said. I tapped my fingers and hummed as I waited.
“I’m not very good at this, but usually we turn the power strip on.”
“Good idea.” I pressed the power strip switch to on with my big toe, pressed the power button again and continued humming.
The humming worked. The iMac came to life with a screensaver, a shot of a sailboat in a sea of blue.
Helen leaned over, hovering behind my right shoulder.
“Don’t know if we can access Gerard’s e-mail, but there might be something in a file.”
I noticed the purple e logo, part of the Microsoft Word package. “Do you use Entourage?”
“What’s that?”
“How do you do e-mail?”
Helen showed me. She clicked on Internet Explorer to access her e-mail through her browser. Now to find out who, if anyone, was using the Entourage account.
I clicked on the purple e. When I saw plotking21 I knew it had to be Gerard’s account. It was asking for a password. Shit.
In crime films I’ve had the privilege to see, at this point the detective would look around the room for a clue or two, then proceed to type in the magic word that would get him in. In the real world, unless you were quite the hacker, you could sit there guessing all day and get nothing. While it wasn’t the best strategy to try every conceivable password based on his birthday, his favorite pet, or his favorite food dish, I tapped the keys as I tried to channel all I knew about the guy. I tried martini, forwards and backwards; didn’t expect it to work, and it didn’t. I tried variations of his name, tried phrases like kingofplots. Not a chance. I looked through the messy desk drawer, trying to find a clue amidst the scraps of papers. Nothing looked like a password. Back on the computer I looked for a digital file where he might have kept his passwords.
I got zero, zip, and nada.
I was contemplating whether to resort to Cain & Abel or Brute Force, or calling up Kenzo Fennari, the only hacker I could trust with something like this, if he was even available, when Helen came to me with a list of what looked like usernames, followed by number/word combinations that were to some degree coded.
“He was changing his password every month,” she said. “This is what he called his ‘cheat sheet,’ so he’d be able to keep track. He never could remember….”
I looked through the sheet. Seems Gerard had coded his passwords just enough so he could remember them without giving the whole store away. I combed through the combinations of digits and letters, looking for patterns. A common pattern was letters surrounded by numbers. One went 89s–––e98. It appeared to be a name with three letters missing. Hopefully they were letters. A listing that didn’t quite fit the pattern went 723kin–––p!, which obviously contained his name, only backwards. These passwords weren’t hard to decipher, but I would have to figure out which account to attach them to.
“Belvidera!” Helen practically shouted as she looked at _b––––––a_. “Lower case b, preceded with and followed by blanks. There was also _r–––––––a_.
“I think the underscores represent numbers,” I told her. “Seems he liked to put a number before and after the series of letters, usually the same number.”
I tried every number from 0 to 9 to frame the wor
d belvidera. None of them worked. OK. Think, Kawika. “If the beginning and end numbers were different,” I said out loud, “that would multiply the possibilities. Not a good way to go.” I looked at _r———a_ again. “You know any eight-letter word that begins with r and ends with a?” I was drawing a blank.
“Gerard was fond of anagrams.”
Oh fuck. “Seriously?”
I stared at the word belvidera. It contained the letters r and a. If the _r———a_ was based on anything other than that name, it was going to be a very long day. Against my better judgment I was already switching letters around, finding words. I saw bared evil, bare devil, evil bread, then hit on a combination that snapped me upright. “Rebel vida,” I said out loud.
“Oh, that is so Gerard. The rebellious life.”
“Let’s try it.” I crossed my fingers. It was harder to type that way, so I uncrossed them. I tried 9rebelvida9. Didn’t work. I changed the nines to eights.
A pair of eights got me in.
“Thanks for sharing his private information,” I said to Helen.
“Well, he doesn’t need it anymore, does he?”
“No.” I looked at her. Medicated and melancholy. I turned back to the computer screen.
“Here we go.”
“Tons of spam,” I said out loud as his very full inbox opened up before my eyes. It was the usual crap: enticements from computer companies to buy their software at rock-bottom prices, donation requests from charities and political action committees, rebate offers, travel offers, stay-at-home job offers, penis-enlargement offers—everything but a combined offer to travel while at home lengthening your penis.
Gerard’s folders were categorized thus: Theater, Sports, Music, Friends, Shopping, News, Miscellaneous, FuckedUpShit, and Family. I clicked on Theater.
While no particular e-mail entry leaped out, I noticed that a few were from a lava.net account with the username piratej1000. I clicked on one of the more recent saved messages; one, sent on May fourth, had been sent to multiple recipients:
For a Song Page 20