by Avery Duff
“May I ask about one of those photographs behind me?”
“Sure, I took most of them. Guess which ones?”
“Let me think,” he said, smiling.
In the one that interested him, a brunette in a black cocktail dress glanced at the camera from a nightclub two-top. Expressive eyebrows, wavy hair, an all-knowing Angelina Jolie–esque smile. Beside her, a heavy-lidded man in a long-sleeve paisley shirt and fringed leather vest. He knew exactly where the camera was and looked right at it. About as stoned as you can get and still be conscious. A male graced with movie-star good looks, and that’s what he was.
“You and Chet Jordan?” he asked.
“China Club, way back when.”
“I loved his movies,” Robert said. “His comedies were great. Then he’d be serious in the next one. One of those actors who could pull that off.”
“Not many of them can do it. Robert De Niro, Matt Dillon, Kevin Costner . . . I’m sure there are others. What Chet most enjoyed was losing a limb or being disfigured. It made him appear deeper than he actually was. Chet, you might’ve guessed, was a firm client where I worked in the ’80s.”
Evelyn’s hand was entwined with Chet’s on that white tablecloth.
“A client?” Robert asked.
“Oops. Okay, we dated for a while.”
She told him about table-hopping lunches at Le Dome, stars and agents at most every table. Dinners at Chasen’s, more stars, drinks at Skybar, more rock and rollers. Private jets to Las Vegas, New York, and Zihuatanejo, Mexico.
“Zihua was perfect before the tour ships started showing up. Looking back on it,” she said, “that might’ve been the tail end of Old Hollywood.”
“Chet Jordan. Supposed to be the next Marlon Brando, right?”
“The next Brando? No such thing. I was such a huge fan of Brando’s—I even joked about it in my high school yearbook—but no one will ever be the next Brando. Truly one of a kind, but ‘the next Brando’ is what Chet’s people put out there. Same old story, Robert. Chet was a great actor and a great big mess.”
Robert recalled Chet Jordan had died in a car crash. Drunk, they said. Tour buses even stopped by the site on those morbid movie star death tours.
“We broke up not long after that club picture, and he died a few years later. Fame’s supposed to fill that empty spot inside, but when they find out it doesn’t work, look out below.”
He told her about farm life up in Gilroy, life around the Bay Area, his days at UC Berkeley as an undergrad; after that, Hastings for law school, then coming south to work at Fanelli & Pierce. After a five-year stint, he’d left the firm last year. Single, he lived with a great woman named Gia over in Brentwood.
She asked, “Do any serious wills or trusts work while you were with Fanelli?”
“Several very specific research questions for clients with trusts, but nothing practical.”
Then her: “After I decided against becoming a professional photographer, I worked in a real estate office downtown. Saw that I wasn’t going to get anywhere without a profession, so I saved up for Southwestern. Trusts and estates. I was drawn to that area of practice because no one I knew growing up had either a trust or an estate. Rich people—they’ll always have money, and they’re always going to die.”
And they’re always going to have problems. Robert thinking this about his own family.
When it came time to find a job, Evelyn told him, all the top midtown firms were just then starting to look for women attorneys.
“Not a darker-skinned woman who way back then rolled her r’s. So around then, that’s when I married Syd Levine and took his last name. After that, doors opened up, and I wound up at Holtzmann and Shapiro. I was with them almost a decade, but I grew tired of grinding it out as a junior partner. I managed to leave on good terms, along with several of their big clients.”
“Grinding it out,” he said. “I feel you.”
“My husband, Syd, I loved. A beautiful man, and by that, I mean a gay man. Early ’90s, we divorced, and I kept nothing but his name. He moved to West Hollywood and died of pneumonia a few years later. Get it?”
“AIDS,” Robert said.
When Evelyn called to set up this meeting, she’d mentioned a girl. She’d get around to it when she was ready—not before—so he didn’t bring it up.
She asked him to bring her a photograph from the wall. It was her father, with Evelyn’s mother. Both posed beside a limousine parked in front of a white-frame house.
“Dad drove limos for the studios, Paramount, MGM, and Columbia—before it was Sony—and always brought home romantic tales of driving big movie stars around town.”
“Like who?”
“Burt Reynolds, Cybill Shepherd—and did I mention Marlon Brando?”
“Might’ve,” he said.
“Isn’t it funny?” she asked. “Where else would it matter if you were Brad’s proctologist or gave J. Lo bikini waxes, or you were so-and-so’s limo driver?”
“Crazy, yeah,” he said, smiling along with her.
He asked about another photograph. Her father, standing alone on the porch of that same house.
“That one’s later on, much later. He always wanted me to take him by our old house. He’d been so proud of it, a homeowner in a neighborhood of renters. But by then, I’m not even sure he knew what he wanted, but I did it anyway.”
Robert gauged the pained, confused look in her aging father’s eyes. Dementia, he guessed, but didn’t mention it. He thought of his own father, Garrett Worth, diagnosed with late-onset schizophrenia after cashing out, then losing his inheritance from the family farm. The turmoil had split his family apart.
From out of nowhere, Evelyn asked: “My memo on Teo and the trust’s spendthrift provision. What did you think about it?”
Toning down his admiration, he said, “I thought you covered everything. And given the way the California statute reads, I thought you were right.”
California’s spendthrift statute made an exception if Teo’s assaults had led to a felony conviction. If that happened, it would be open season on Teo’s portion of trust assets. In her memo to Carlos, Evelyn reminded him that Teo had been a professional boxer. If one of Teo’s victims pressured the district attorney, the charge could be aggravated assault, a serious felony. If Teo were convicted, the spendthrift clause protecting Teo and the trust from lawsuits would fly out the window.
Evelyn said, “The Peters case, my favorite. I located Mr. Peters’ lawyer’s office—not his PO Box, his office. It was in a two-story strip mall near Crenshaw and Wilshire.”
The opposite of a high-rent district, Robert knew.
“I set up a lunch meeting, let him choose the restaurant, even promised to pick up the check.”
“He picked Fatburger, right?” He settled into the story.
“Pacific Dining Car, downtown,” she said. “Making me drive to him, but I was a no-show. When he rolled into work three hours later, loaded, I was at his dump of an office door—pretty sure he slept in there, too. In one hand, I held a certified check for—how much was the check, Robert?”
“One hundred two thousand dollars and no cents.”
She nodded. “In my other hand, I held releases of the trust and of Teo Famosa. I told the guy: ‘Suing the trust, even you know that’s a nonstarter. That gets thrown out of court first. And Teo Famosa? You’re going to settle his claim before I leave your office with this check. If you don’t, you’ll never see it again because the trust will pay criminal lawyers twice that much in fees to make sure Teo Famosa is never convicted of a felony.’”
Then the shyster would get paid nothing.
“And?” Robert asked.
“He dashed off with the releases. I waited at the nail salon next door, and a half hour later, he brought back his client’s notarized signature. After that, I advised Carlos to start setting up reserves against Teo’s future misdeeds. As you now know, Teo did not disappoint.”
He nodded. Two more ass
aults. No guesswork now why she didn’t speak to Teo in court. For years, his behavior had been a problem for her friend Carlos.
“Now,” she said. “About the girl.”
“Oh, that,” he said.
“Think you know by now that two years ago, the trust started selling real estate and went all cash. You saw my letter to Carlos?”
In it, Evelyn had told Carlos she approved of selling the apartment buildings.
“Yes, I did.”
“Out here, earthquakes make real estate a decades-long game of Russian roulette, and maintenance on those buildings had increased every year. Carlos told me he was tired of plugging the dike with temporary repairs, and I didn’t blame him. Some big-ticket repair would come along, sooner than later.”
Robert thought about it. By the time Carlos had sold out, LA real estate had made an epic run from its lows in 1998. Carlos’ decision to sell was easy to justify as a trustee’s prudent investment—and the sale put him in a position to diversify the trust’s assets.
“At first, it was girls Carlos was involved with. Nothing wrong with that—God knows he needed companionship. But, I’d say, eight months ago, he met the girl and started spending more—a great deal more. Traveling, new clothes, a rented 1150 Mercedes—he even took me for a quick ride. Oh, and the cigars, vintage wine, connoisseur marijuana—sorry, primo weed—and God knows what else he spent on her. She really got her claws into him.”
Claws. Robert had a feeling the girl was why the cash in the trust and Carlos’ personal account did that nosedive from $220,000 to $18,000.
“Who was she?”
She shrugged. “He called me on one of those fake phones. You know the ones?”
“A burner.”
Disposable, bought with cash, sold by the hundreds in Venice Boardwalk storefronts. He recalled Carlos’ phone bills—nothing more than the data package for Internet and TV.
“He brought her over here, right out front, on their way back from somewhere—Vegas, that’s right—making a big deal out of dropping by. He rolled down the window, wearing designer shades. I looked in. The girl, she was blonde—that week anyway—and if he said her name, I didn’t catch it. The he flipped me a five-hundred-dollar chip from the Bellagio, told me I should get out more.”
She made light of it, but it was easy to see that his treatment had hurt her.
“Anyway, after he met her—that’s right about when he started talking up those two garbage investments. That’s why I sent him letters threatening to resign, hoping he’d see I was serious and come to his senses.”
“When did I resign?” she asked from out of nowhere.
A test question?
“March of this year.”
“The exact day?”
He shrugged.
“Guess,” she said.
“Guessing March twelfth.”
“Bravo.”
She fished a flash drive from her pocket and tossed it across the room to him. For some reason, that throwing motion seemed to pain her.
“Our personal and our formal correspondence. Should give you more flavor for the situation.” She sat back in her chair. “Over the years, Carlos and I had become friends. That nail salon meeting, for example? I never charged the trust for the actual meetings, but Carlos and I would get together, have a glass of wine and a few laughs. Oh, like telling him how that shyster brought the release back to the salon, and I’m holding up my hands. ‘Sorry, dear, my nails are still drying,’ making the guy wait till they dried before getting his check.”
“Wish I could’ve seen that.”
“Priceless.”
“The girl? What ever happened with her?”
“Don’t know, but she dropped him cold. After that, he was a beaten man. He wrote me several e-mails, wondering if he’d offended me. I didn’t respond, so he began to drop by my house, all hours. Crying, upset, stoned . . . some of it’s on that flash drive,” she added.
She stood up slowly, but when he moved to help, she waved him off.
“You spend years thinking someone’s a friend. A good friend, even though he behaved badly toward me . . . Now that he’s gone . . . I know I could’ve behaved better on my end. Extended myself more when he reached out, but I didn’t.”
She motioned him into the kitchen. As they passed her gallery of photographs, she pointed out one of Carlos and her, standing on her front steps.
“That was the day he moved into his new place. Couple years after I moved in here,” she said.
It was the first image of adult Carlos he’d seen. Teo was on the money about his brother: slight, five nine or five ten, receding hairline, and glasses too big for his face.
Evelyn leaned down to pick up a bag from her kitchen trash can. Looked like it took some effort.
“I got that,” he said.
“Thanks.” She pointed at a nearby kitchen drawer. “Grab my clicker, would you?”
He slid it open. Inside the drawer: two garage-door remotes. One had her address felt-tipped onto the plastic; the other was clean.
“It’s the marked one,” she said.
They walked out the kitchen door. In her garage, he dumped her trash into the black can and opened the door with her remote. She let him pull her can into her rear alley for pickup.
“It’s only a few blocks over to Carlos’ house. Mind if we walk?”
“Not at all. Teo’s expecting my call. I’ll have him meet us over there. Gia wants to take care of his daughter today while we’re busy.”
“A man with a plan,” she said.
He clicked the door closed, handed back her remote.
They headed up her alley, which angled back to Harvard Street. Several houses up from her garage, she stopped behind a neighboring house; an old chain-link fence encircled the lot, flush with the garage on each side. Stepping back, he could just make out its rusting downspouts and overgrown yard.
“Can’t count how many times I called the city about this deserted house. Even circulated a petition, but the owners do just enough to keep the city off their backs.”
One in every neighborhood, he was thinking. Gia’s house might qualify as the nuisance in hers.
Before he could add his two cents on this eyesore, she pulled up her sleeve. A thick, black band covered her forearm. A needle ran into her arm.
“After our morning in court, a chemo port was installed. So no matter what, Robert, time is no longer my friend.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“So am I. When you see me wearing a wig, pretend like you don’t notice.”
CHAPTER 9
Three ficus-lined blocks from Evelyn’s house, a black Lexus SUV was parked near the address Kiril had seen in the probate court file. From the driver’s seat, Kiril watched Penko twist the miniature human hand on his gold necklace and cracked the window against the sour smell seeping from party boy’s pores.
First night on the tour bus, they’d made the rounds in Hollywood; the next night, they’d found the Santa Monica apartment building where the feds finally had grabbed Southie gangster Whitey Bulger.
Black Mass, a movie about Bulger’s rise and fall, was one of the men’s favorites. His, too. Others were New Jack City and Ray Donovan. But The Godfather always ranked number one in their hearts: Francis Ford Coppola’s passion play of family, revenge, and severed horse heads.
Outside Bulger’s building last night, they’d paid their respects—toasting, pissing on the sidewalk, and wondering which windows gave into Bulger’s apartment.
“His apartment wall, he hide all his money inside,” Penko said. “Almost a million stinkin’ dollars.”
So they all drank to Whitey’s hidden million and anything else that came to mind.
Even so, Kiril had held himself back because he’d been with Ilina again. Because he wanted to keep an eye on Penko, too, never knowing when the man could cross the line from civilized to barbaric. As the tour guide had dropped them off at the Biltmore, he’d asked them all if they knew
about Elizabeth Short’s death. The so-called Black Dahlia murder.
“The lobby of your hotel was the last place Elizabeth Short was ever seen.”
Kiril had last seen Penko squatted next to the driver, fascinated with the Short woman. She’d been burned with cigarettes, butchered, surgically cut in half, a smile carved into her face, and her body dumped in a vacant lot.
Glancing at Penko then, he’d wondered how long he would be saddled with this man. This nephew of Pinky, the coarse, overperfumed woman who’d taken over as mistress of Gospodar? Not much longer, he prayed.
Early this morning, this SUV had been delivered to the Biltmore hotel’s garage, with further instructions about what was expected of them today. The SUV belonged to a couple who’d bragged about an upcoming two-week cruise at a body shop the Draganov family owned and operated in San Bernardino. Their car would be back in the shop and repaired a week before they came back into the country.
Now, next to Kiril, Penko’s eyes drifted to his laptop where an early episode of Ray Donovan played.
“Love the Ray,” Penko said. “He is serious badass.”
From the back seat, Alexandra sat up from her nap. One of the party girls from the tour bus.
Alexandra said, “Love the Ray, too. Very handsome, very strong. Very virile.”
“I have not one care about what you love,” Penko told her without turning around.
“Last night you say you love me very much.”
Kiril saw Penko’s neck swell with blood, his eyes narrowing. Kiril spun on Alexandra.
“Mouth of a whore. Shut it before that man shuts it forever.”
She started to go at Penko again but caught Kiril’s warning, even hungover as she was.
“I am sorry, Penko,” Alexandra said. “You make love to me so good last night, but today you don’t even speak to me.” She massaged his neck. “I am woman, darling, after all.”
“Whore woman,” Penko added.
“Yes, your anytime whore woman.”
Penko eased. Kiril winked at Alexandra—smart girl—and settled into his seat again. Wondering: Who wears a right-hand replica on a neck chain? Even if it might represent the missing right hand of Bulgaria’s Saint Ivan?