The grand old theaters, all within a block or so, have been restored, too. The Egyptian, with its Egyptian-style columns, hieroglyphics, and a twelve-foot dog-headed guard god. The El Capitan, where you can still hear a live organist and pretend you’re watching a live stage production with Clark Gable or Buster Keaton. Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, across the street from the Egyptian, stands out with the huge dragon draped across its pagodalike architecture. You’ve probably heard about its forecourt, where autographs of over 170 celebrities, along with impressions of their feet and hands, have been preserved in the concrete.
I love movies and movie stars. So does most of my family, including Bubbie G, who used to enjoy watching the classics on cable before macular degeneration stole most of the central vision from her once-bright blue eyes. When we were kids we’d visit Grauman’s and try to fit our hands and shoes into the prints made by celebrities we adored, like Judy Garland, Jean Harlow (my mom’s favorite), Bette Davis, and Meryl Streep (mine). My ex-husband, Ron, claims he’s a perfect match for John Wayne and Cary Grant (not), and when my youngest brother, Joey, was in his Star Wars phase, my dad teased him and told him he saw a striking similarity between Joey’s hands and R2D2’s treads.
I wondered whose footprints Randy Creeley had tried to step into. Brad Pitt’s, according to Creeley senior, although that was probably Porter’s embellishment.
Only a few empty spaces remain in Grauman’s forecourt, by the way, but there’s still room for your bronze star to be embedded in the sidewalk along with the other stars on either side of Hollywood between La Brea and Vine. Bob Hope has four stars—one each for radio, stage, TV, and the movies. Gene Autry has a fifth, for music.
There would be no bronze star for Roland Creeley on Hollywood, and there was no star on the sidewalk in front of the two-story blue stucco apartment building where he had lived and died. A wall under repair looked as though it had been electrocuted by lightning bolts of gray plaster, the white paint on one window’s trim was flaking, and another window was shuttered with cardboard. I found a parking spot in front and was careful to turn the wheels toward the curb. Cherokee climbs steeply from Hollywood to Yucca, and I didn’t relish having my Acura roll down the street.
The building manager, Gloria Lamont, was wary even after studying the business card I’d pressed against the privacy window of her door, and she wasn’t keen on talking to me about Creeley.
“I got nothin’ to say,” she insisted. “All’s I know is, he’s dead.” She didn’t sound all that sorry.
I put her in her mid-to-late fifties, judging from the salt and pepper in her cornrows and the fine lines around brown eyes several shades darker than the coffee of her skin. She was around my height, five-five, with a generous figure that she showed to advantage in black spandex leggings and a black sweater with a peacock design that gave a welcome jolt of color to the drab hallway.
She was standing in the doorway to her ground-floor apartment at the front of the building. Behind her Marvin Gaye was offering “Sexual Healing,” presumably not to the young voices whose squeals I heard (“I mind my daughter’s two young ’uns after school till she comes home,” Gloria told me with weary pride). The smell of fried onions and garlic and tomatoes made me wish I’d had more for lunch than a Power Bar and glass of milk.
“The police said Randy overdosed on drugs,” I told her.
Gloria folded her hands under her ample bosom and fixed me with a warning frown that would have stopped a battalion. “I don’t know nothin’ about drugs.”
I’d obviously touched on a sore subject. I wondered if the manager’s statement was for my benefit or for the benefit of ears that might be listening. I’d heard the clack of a door being opened farther back along the hall. Gloria had heard it, too. She’d turned her head and was frowning in the direction of the sound.
“But did you suspect that Randy was an addict?” I asked.
“I get paid to take care of the building and collect rent, not to stick my nose into other folk’s business, like some sorry people who don’t have nothin’ better to do,” she finished, her raised volume aimed at the door behind me.
The door closed with a thunk. Gloria returned her attention to me. “Randy was into drugs again, he got what he deserved. I don’t need his garbage comin’ down on me. I don’t need the police on my back.”
Her voice was quieter but shook with anger—at Creeley or the police, maybe both. The look in her eyes—a combination of fear and defiance—said she suspected that something illegal might be going on behind the doors of the apartments in the building she was managing, but that there was nothing she could do about it.
My knowledge of drugs is limited to what I learn from the news and movies and TV, and to the occasional sad stories of Orthodox Jewish teenagers caught in their snare. I felt a wave of sympathy for Gloria and was counting my blessings when I heard a screech from inside the apartment, followed by a whoop of laughter.
Gloria whipped her head around, sending her cornrows flying with the clicking of castanets. “Jerome Warren, keep your hands off your sister or I’ll give you what for!”
The noises stopped. Gloria faced me again.
“I can imagine this hasn’t been easy for you,” I said. “Especially with having to take care of your grandchildren. How old are they?”
“Jerome’s goin’ on seven. Jasmine just turned five.” Her tone was stingy, as if I were a social worker and she wasn’t sure what I planned to do with the information.
I smiled. “I have nieces and nephews about the same age. They can be a handful.”
“They good kids, doin’ real well in school,” she said in that same guarded voice that wasn’t buying my pitch at camaraderie. “You said you’re a reporter. Who do you write for? The Times?”
“Sometimes. I freelance for different papers.”
She nodded. “My husband Earl, rest his soul, liked to write. Poetry, mostly. He never had anything published, though. So you’re fixin’ to write about Randy, huh? I can’t see why anybody’d care. He wasn’t nobody special.”
“Do you know where he worked?”
“No one place. He had a job, was makin’ good money from what I could tell, but he lost it ’bout eight, nine months ago when he took sick.”
Something Roland Creeley senior hadn’t told Porter. Or maybe Porter hadn’t shared it with me. “What happened?”
“He got hold of some bad stuff and almost died. I don’t know where he got it,” Gloria added. “Not my business. After that he told me he wasn’t gonna have nothin’ more to do with drugs. He had me believin’ it, too.”
Gloria’s shrug said she didn’t much care, but I sensed she was angry and disappointed with Creeley’s relapse and her misplaced faith.
“How did he pay his rent after he lost his job?”
“He worked some of it off, did jobs around the neighborhood. Fixed doors and screens, small paint jobs, things like that?” She was friendlier now. The arms had come down, like the wooden bars at a railroad crossing when the coast is clear. “He was supposed to paint that outside wall what has cracks, and he was gonna take care of that front window, but then he up and died,” she added with a hint of her former resentment.
So Randy was a handyman, when he wasn’t mugging people to support his habit. “I understand that he wanted to be an actor. I heard he was very handsome.”
“Well, he wasn’t no Denzel. But yeah, Randy wasn’t hard on the eyes.” The woman allowed herself a chuckle. “He talked all the time about makin’ it big in the movies. He was a smooth talker, I give him that. He could make you believe night was day and day was night. He’d borrow ten dollars and tell you he gave you back twenty and you owed him ten.” Gloria’s voice held equal parts of exasperation and admiration.
“He sounds like my ex-husband.” Ron had smooth-talked his way through an affair and for a while had me doubting the truth, even after I confronted him with proof of his infidelity.
“Is that right?” Glor
ia clucked. “Well, I have to say the fear of dyin’ shook Randy up some, ’cause he straightened up his ways. He started goin’ to church regular. He paid his rent on time, prob’ly ’cause he wasn’t spendin’ most of his money on drugs. A few months back he gave me two hundred ten dollars. I said, ‘Randy, what’s this about?’ An’ he says, ‘Mrs. Lamont, this here is money I been owin’ you a long time, and there’s more comin’ but I don’t have it just yet.’ An’ even before that he’d bring candy for my grandkids, and once in a while, some toys he knew they wanted. He was nice like that.” For the first time she sounded sad that Creeley had died.
I wondered if Randy had paid for the toys or helped himself to them. Maybe he’d been playing Robin Hood. “Did he ever get into fights with the other tenants?”
“If he did, I didn’t hear about it. I know he did time, but I didn’t hold that against him. People change, you know? ’Course, I’m not sayin’ I didn’t keep my eye on him at first,” she admitted. “But he was always friendly, never gave me a lick of trouble. Until last week, that is. He more’n made up for it then.”
A sharp cry from her apartment drew her attention. Gloria turned and listened. “TV,” she told me when she was facing me again.
“Who called the police, by the way?” I’d forgotten to ask Connors or Porter.
“I did, one o’clock in the morning. His girlfriend Doreen woke me and made me open his door. She knowed something was wrong ’cause Randy was supposed to meet her and he didn’t show, didn’t phone? She screamed loud enough to wake the dead when she saw him lyin’ there on the floor. He wasn’t good-lookin’ then, unh-unh.” The manager pulled her lips into a grim line.
I took out a notepad. “Do you have a phone number where I can reach Doreen?”
Gloria shook her head. “I don’t know her last name, neither. The day after Randy died, she came by to get some clothes she maybe left in his place, but the police had that yellow tape up? I told her, ‘Gimme your number, I’ll call you when they done,’ but I must’ve took down the number wrong ’cause when I phoned two days later after the police took down the tape, the lady who answered didn’t know Doreen. I expect she’ll be by.”
I handed her a business card. “When Doreen does come, would you give her this?”
“I guess I can do that.”
“Would it be okay for me to see Randy’s apartment, Mrs. Lamont? You said the police were done, right?” I added when she frowned, “I promise I won’t take anything.” I heard the anxiousness in my voice.
Gloria heard it, too. She was looking at me shrewdly, those brown eyes narrowed. “What do you need to see his apartment for, anyway?”
“Sometimes you can understand a person better from seeing where he lived.” Which is true.
“So this is for your story, huh?” She crossed her arms again. “That’s a load of you-know-what. What’s going on?”
I debated, but not for long. “My best friend was killed six years ago. Now the police are saying Randy did it. I need to know if it’s true.”
I had startled her, but the shock turned to anger. She glowered at me. “Why didn’t you tell me that in the first place?”
“I didn’t know if you’d talk to me.”
“Uh-huh.” She studied me for a moment. “So that part about writin’ a story on Randy, that’s all lies. Not much difference between you and him, is there?”
Well, of course I felt myself blushing. “I may end up writing something about him. Right now I’m trying to find out what I can.”
“Uh-huh.” She cocked her head. “How do I know you’re not givin’ me another story?”
I took out my wallet and showed Gloria a photo Mrs. Lasher had taken of Aggie and me in the Lashers’ backyard against a background of hot pink bougainvillea on a June day a month before she died. “That’s my friend,” I told the manager. “Her name is Aggie. She was killed on July 23, almost six years ago. She was twenty-three.”
“An’ the cops’re sayin’ Randy did it?” Gloria looked at the photo, then at me. Then back at the photo. “But you don’t think so?”
“He could have. But you said he never fought and never gave you any trouble. And he never killed anyone before, as far as the police know.”
“I seen people do things when they drunk or on drugs they wouldn’t do otherwise. Just ’cause a man brings candy to a child don’t mean he can’t turn ugly.”
She pinched her lips, and her eyes had a pained, far-away look. I wondered if she was reliving a memory.
“Ten minutes,” she told me.
“You can watch me the whole time, Mrs. Lamont.”
She dismissed my smile with a snort. “You got that right.”
six
AFTER GIVING STRICT INSTRUCTIONS TO JEROME NOT TO open the door to anyone (“Not even the chief of police!”) and promising she’d be back in ten minutes, Gloria took a ring of keys, locked her door, and led me through a narrow, musty hallway to a second-floor apartment at the back of the building.
“Randy’s daddy was supposed to empty the apartment yesterday so’s I can rent it, but he didn’t show,” she said with annoyance as she unlocked the door and pushed it open. She flipped up a light switch. “Well, here it is.”
Stale air laced with an unpleasant odor I couldn’t identify greeted me like a ghost. I followed Gloria into a generous-size L-shaped living-dining room. The “living” part said bachelor’s pad: cushy red leather sofa, black area rug with a red-and-white swirling pattern, one-piece Lucite coffee table with curved ends. The sofa faced black speaker boxes the size of refrigerators that were hooked up to a sound system housed inside a black lacquer cabinet crammed with CDs, and the DVDs Randy would have viewed on the sixty-inch projection TV positioned between the speakers. Next to the sofa was a black lacquer desk whose working surface was taken up by magazines and a combination phone–answering machine and multipurpose fax machine.
“He got all that about five, six years ago,” Gloria said when I asked her about the TV, which ran over three grand four years ago when my ex, Ron, had lusted for one. “That and his Porsche.” She pronounced it “porch.” “Like I said, he made good money ’fore he took sick, but I think a lot of it went up his nose.”
She didn’t know what kind of work Randy had done and didn’t have the time right now—or the inclination, I thought—to look through her files to see where he’d worked. “Ask his daddy,” she said.
There was a black mug on the coffee table, which was piled with stacks of newspapers and magazines. Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, a church newsletter. More of the same on the desk. With Gloria breathing down my neck, I opened the drawers. Pens, paper clips, pencils. A rubber-banded stack of bills looked tempting, but Gloria said she didn’t feel right letting me look at those, a man was entitled to his privacy, and I didn’t even ask if I could STAR-69 the phone to find out to whom Randy had made his last phone call.
In the dining area, next to a kitchen not much bigger than my teeny galley, were a white bistro table and two white chairs with black vinyl seats, one of which was torn. A dinner plate on the beige-tiled kitchen counter bore the congealed remains of what looked like lasagna. Next to the plate were four empty Heineken cans, a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and the glass, with a cloudy amber coating on the bottom, that he’d used in emptying it.
An eclectic mix of unframed movie posters brightened the ivory walls throughout the L. The Sting. The Truman Show. Terminator 3. The Matrix. Braveheart. Lord of the Rings. North by Northwest. Legends of the Fall. In the center of the living room a green plastic bucket sat on the worn beige carpet, directly beneath a large, nasty-looking brown blister on the ceiling.
“Randy was goin’ to take care of the leak, too,” Gloria said. I sensed she was sorry about his death and not just about the repairs he hadn’t completed.
The bathroom off the living room was tiny. I didn’t find anything of interest in the medicine cabinet, just the essentials. Creeley’s bedroom, around ten by ten with a w
indow not much larger than my eighteen-inch flatscreen computer panel, barely accommodated the king-sized platform bed and black lacquer nightstand. On the wall at the head of the bed, which was a tangle of brown sheets and a black comforter, Randy had hung a cross. From the rectangle of paint around it, lighter and fresher than the paint in the rest of the room, I could see that the cross was a recent addition.
The odor was stronger here, and I had no difficulty identifying it as vomit. Neither did Gloria.
She crinkled her nose. “I sprayed yesterday, but I’ll have to get the carpet cleaned to get rid of the smell. That’s where I found him,” she said with somber theatricality, pointing to a darkened area of matted carpet between the bed and the opposite wall.
I followed her finger with my eyes and pictured Creeley jerking on the floor, dying. Somehow it didn’t give me the satisfaction I’d anticipated. I glanced at the walls, covered with more movie posters and a framed black-and-white headshot of a handsome young man whom Gloria identified as Randy Creeley.
“I tol’ you he was good-lookin’,” she said. “Sexy, too.”
He was. Artfully tussled longish blond hair with darker roots; large, expressive dark eyes; a chiseled nose; a strong, square chin. He didn’t look like a killer, but neither had Ted Bundy or the man who had tried to choke me seven months ago.
I studied the photo a while longer, but if there were hidden clues to Randy’s identity, they eluded me.
I looked through his closet. Randy’s wardrobe had been mostly casual: a dozen pairs of jeans, a lineup of athletic shoes, flip-flops, and two pairs of dress shoes. A couple of Hawaiian print shirts looked especially gaudy next to the dress shirts, dark twill slacks, and black loafers that I assumed he wore to auditions. I flipped among the slacks and shirts but didn’t find any clothing that would have belonged to the girlfriend. Unless Doreen had a key to Randy’s apartment and had removed her things?
Grave Endings Page 4