Shane walked across the office, picked up the yellow sheet, folded it, and put it in his pocket.
“Anything else?” Haley asked.
“Yeah, can you punch up Farrell Champion?” Shane asked. His heart was beating hard in his chest. It surprised him that he would fire all of his own adrenal jets at the idea of a computer run on Farrell Champion. He immediately knew that it was because he was breaking his promise to Alexa, but his gut told him there was something wrong there.
“The movie guy?” Haley was saying. “The big-time Oscar-winning producer?”
“He hasn’t won an Oscar, just been nominated.” “Right … and he’s the one who wants to hire this strawberry, this Carol White person, and make her a star?” “No, it’s an unrelated matter.”
“Jesus, Shane …” But for some reason Haley spun his chair around and started punching in Farrell Champion’s name, probably because he was just as interested as Shane in knowing what kind of trouble the famous celebrity producer might have gotten himself into.
The screen came back empty.
“Clean as Crisco,” Haley said, and swiveled around to look up at Shane. “Anybody else? How ‘bout Tiger Woods or Minnie Mouse?”
Shane had been thinking about asking for a run on Nicky Marcella, but decided he’d worn out his welcome. He’d do it himself Monday after he went back on duty. He smiled, then picked up his gun and badge.
“Thanks for the good fitness rep, Skipper.”
“You earned it,” Haley said.
Shane was quickly out the door of the captain’s office. He stopped at an empty homicide desk, picked up a phone, and dialed an LAPD extension. A woman’s voice answered the phone. “Records and Identification Division.”
“Is Lee Fineburg around?” Shane asked.
“Fineburg . That’s Records Services Section, Special Duties. One moment please. I’ll switch you.”
In a few seconds he heard Lee Fineburg’s voice. “Lee? It’s Shane Scully.” *
“Shane, you is da man.” Fineburg’s voice grinned over the line. Shane pictured the skinny geek who was also the LAPD racquetball champion. “I need a quick favor, and it has to stay covered.”
“Covert ops. Love it.”
“I just ran a guy named Farrell Champion through the regular mainframe downtown and he came back empty.” “No criminal beefs … okay.”
“No. Not just no criminal beefs, no nothing. No parking tickets, no fender benders, nothing. A blank screen.”
“Kinda unusual,” Lee said. “Most people at least have a loud party once in a while.”
“Would you do me a favor and run a deep background on this guy? Start five years ago. He sort of appeared out of nowhere in the late nineties, and there are all of these romantic stories about where he came from and what he did before Hollywood. Gunrunner in Libya is one I remember reading, and a diamond hunter in South Africa, bullshit stuff, probably planted by studio flacks, but it keeps showing up in magazines.”
“We’re talking about the movie guy, right?”
“Right. And maybe you could run him through NCIC in Washington… .”
“Sounds juicy.”
“Just a precaution. I’m sure it’s nothing.”
“Okay, I’ll call when I get something. Your Venice number still good?”
“Yep. Same cell, too.”
“Got it all on my PalmPilot so I gotcha covered.” Shane got into his car and drove down to Rampart looking for the Ho-Tell Motel on Adams.
He found it on the corner of Adams and Gilbert. It was one of those uninteresting boxlike structures that had gone up all over L. A. in the fifties, under the name of “clean-line” architecture. It had a sloping roof, stucco walls, and a big faded sign out front that read: HO-TELL MOTEL, and under that FREE CHEWING GUM. The chewing gum was for hookers after oral sex. “Free chewing gum” was street code for a hot-cot motel. The sign also meant you could rent rooms by the hour.
Shane pulled into the motel parking lot and got out. The lot was half-empty, but it was only eleven A. M. He walked toward the office’s large plate-glass window, which was protected by steel bars and had burglar alarm tape across the bottom. Shane looked inside. The office was deserted, so he opened the door and entered. The room had one vinyl couch and an end table with a pottery lamp that was pushed against the wall. The lampshade was broken and sat at a jaunty angle, like a drunk sleeping it off in the corner.
Shane rang the little bell. A man with an Arabic-looking face and skeletal demeanor came out of the back room to stare at him. He was smoking a Turkish cigarette.
“You want room? Come by hour, day, or week,” the man said in broken English.
“I’m looking for Carol White. She sometimes uses the name Crystal Glass. I understand she frequents this motel for business.”
“Carol White … No … no … not got a Carol White.” He didn’t check the register book, so he knew her.
Now Shane had the big cop decision. What wallet do I go for? The badge or the billfold? The badge could clam this guy up because he was renting rooms to whores. The billfold would probably produce a better result but cost Shane money; money he wasn’t sure he could get back from Nicky. Finally, he reached for his billfold, pulled out a twenty, and laid it on the counter.
The Arab looked down at the Jackson as if it were a dead cockroach the maids had missed.
Shane added another twenty and then a third. Sixty bucks was his limit. There was a market for information in L. A.
“Hey, Abdul,” Shane said, leaning in and making his voice hard, “are you trying to piss me off and destroy my cooperative spirit?”
“No sir. Crystal, she a friend?” .
“Right. She performs services on me.” The man stared at Shane deadpan. “Do I have to spell it out?”
“Maybe across street on corner. She got corner there, she not there, you try Snake Charmers Bar next door. Sometimes she go rest it there.”
“Thank you.”
Then the Arab did a David Copperfield on the three twenties; they disappeared before Shane’s very eyes.
She wasn’t on her corner, but Shane found Crystal Glass in the Snake Charmers Bar next door.
Chapter 5.
CRYSTAL GLASS
The Snake Charmers had wood floors, a small stage painted black, and a bar on the far side of the room. When Shane came through the door, an African-American dancer with a pockmarked complexion was standing in the center of the stage doing a slow coffee grind, while Tina Turner sang “Tiny Dancer” from the old-fashioned Wurlitzer. An overweight blond stripper sat in a metal chair with a towel tucked under her armpits, watching her colleague with listless, dead-eyed indifference. Morning dancers in nude clubs were on the bottom rung in show business, just one step from unemployment. There was a glass full of quarters on top of the jukebox; each dancer would put several in and pick her songs, then do her set and sit down. Shane looked around, and as his eyes adjusted to the light, he could see a few people sitting in the imitation leather booths that lined the walls. The windows had been boarded up and painted over to keep it dark inside. Shane walked up to the bartender, who had burly shoulders, a shaved head, and was watching a baseball game with the volume turned off on a small black-and-white TV set that was just below the bar top.
“Is Carol White around?” he asked the man, who looked up, immediately making Shane as a cop. The bartender was in his mid-forties and bald. He had green tattoos on his arms the kind you get in prison because the only color available in the joint was the green institutional ink supplied by the government to the penal system. The man didn’t answer Shane, but looked back down at the TV.
“How about Crystal Glass?” Shane persisted. “Sometimes she uses that name.”
The bartender kept ignoring him, so Shane reached out and slapped the ex-con hard across the side of the head. That brought him up fast.
“What the fuck?!” the man snarled.
“Sorry,” Shane said. “You had a big yellow wasp about t
o land on your bald head there.”
“Hey, this ain’t the fuckin’ police department, and I ain’t fourone-one.”
“This bar ain’t gonna be open much longer either, unless you give me a little respect.”
The ex-con glowered at him, flexing his right hand, which had the word fuck tattooed across the first four knuckles. Classy guy.
“Eat me, cop.”
Shane reached out and again slapped him hard across the side of his head. It was an open-handed slap that made more noise than damage. Suddenly everybody in the bar stopped talking and was watching. The stripper had stopped in the middle of her grind and stood in the center of the stage, her breasts sagging, hands on chunky hips. Everybody, including Shane, wondered what would happen next.
“Lemme ask you one more time before I go through this place and confiscate everybody’s bag of sparkle,” Shane said. “Is Crystal Glass in here?”
It was a hard moment for the bartender. He didn’t like getting punk-slapped in front of his dancers, but he knew that if Shane wanted, he could make a mess of the morning business. Finally he nodded at the far booth on the right, and Shane smiled and put down a twenty.
“For your trouble.”
He turned and walked up to the booth the bartender had indicated. The girl sitting there was hard to evaluate at first. From a distance, in the low light, she seemed quite beautiful. Long blond hair and a luscious body. She was dressed in a low-cut minidress, no jewelry, and some eye glitter. But the closer he got to her, the more this changed. It was as if someone was turning a time-distance dial on his first-impression meter, until as he was sliding into the booth, she looked old and used up. He could see the tangles in her hair, the droopy eyes, and the extra weight that was hanging from under her arms. Grime caked her wrists, while unhealthy skin and this morning’s oozing track mark completed the depressing picture. Up close, Carol White was tarnished, dirty, and aging fast. She projected carnal desperation. But the remnants of her looks were still there. Like a child peeking around a curtain, he could still see the residue of teenage beauty.
“You shouldn’t fuck with Leo,” she said. “Leo shot some people and went to prison for it.”
“Yeah? Well, Leo and I have an understanding. He’s not gonna shoot me.”
“You look like a cop, so probably you ain’t here for a forty and five, right?” Talking about the hooker’s forty-dollar charge with the five-dollar room fee; most likely for an hour at the Ho-Tell Motel.
“Are you Carol White?” Shane asked, jumping right into it.
“I’m Crystal Glass.”
“But before that?”
“Before that?” Her eyes clouded up as if she were trying to remember.
The way she said it was sort of lost and sad, as if she could barely conjure up what her life had been like before she’d started hooking on Adams.
“Carol, I’m not here to bust you, okay? I’m here because a mutual friend of ours, Nicky Marcella, sent me.”
A smile suddenly appeared in her sad eyes, then slipped slowly down her face, until it finally managed to turn up the corners of her mouth.
“Nicky the Pooh?” she asked softly.
“The what?”
“Nicky Marcella … That’s what everybody in our high school called him, Nicky the Pooh. That was his nickname.”
“You went to high school with Nicky Marcella?”
“Teaneck High. Course I didn’t finish, ‘cause I won Miss Solar Energy and then Miss Teen New Jersey, so I decided to take my shot, y’know?”
“Hollywood.”
“Yep. The prettiest girl in Teaneck, ask anybody. Gonna be a motherfuckin’ movie star. Didn’t quite make it, did I?”
“It’s a tough business. Only one out of a million, they say.”
Carol leaned forward and now there was actually some light in her tired blue eyes. “You know how close I came?” Shane shook his head. “That close.” She held up her thumb and forefinger about a quarter of an inch apart. “That close. I was up for the Zeffirelli film Endless Love. It was a great part … a film about teenage passion, y’know? It was down to just me and Brooke Shields. Y’know … ? Brooke Shields?”
“Yeah, good actress.” Shane nodded.
“Right … I’d been reading for Mr. Zeffirelli’s West Coast casting director. She was this really nice motherly kind of lady who said I had unique qualities. That’s what she said, ‘unique qualities,’ and after three reads, she gave me a callback to read for Franco Zeffirelli. The Franco Zeffirelli, can you believe that?” Shane shook his head in wonder. “I named my cat Franco because of that—I went out and bought him so I’d have somebody to celebrate with. I named him Franco, after Mr. Zeffirelli. I was so excited.” He watched this memory play across her face like a faded dream. She seemed anxious to tell the story.
“Okay, so the callback was at Metro—that’s MGM.” She was leaning farther forward, her breasts bulging out of her low-cut dress.
“Right,” Shane said, “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.” “Exactly … and he wanted us to do the original balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, ‘cause Endless Love was kind of a rip on that play. So I’d been practicing with my acting teacher all night, and I’ve got the scene down pat, y’ know?”
“Tough scene.”
“Tell me about it.” Her eyes were almost sparkling now. “You gotta plead and cry, and you gotta not understand what Romeo’s saying in that scene. It’s all about misunderstanding—lotta different emotional values you gotta play. That’s why Franco had us doing it, me an’ Brooke. So I show up for the audition and I see Brooke sitting in the other chair and she was so beautiful … so composed … and I sorta started to choke. I thought, how is he ever gonna choose me over her, y’know? But I was there, so I thought what the hell, y’know?”
Shane nodded. “What the hell.”
“So I went in first and I started to do the scene, but Mr. Zeffirelli stopped me and said, ‘Do it inna da chair.’ And I said, ‘Mr. Zeffirelli, I need to move around,“cause, see, that’s the way I practiced it. But he was walkin’ around in front of the lights waving a cigarette, sayin’, ‘I’m a shoot dis test widda bery tight lens ana donta wanta no movement.’ Like that, with his Italian accent and all, and it was sorta hard for me to understand him, and I had to get him to say it twice. I could tell he was getting frustrated, but I asked him again, ‘Can’t I do the audition standing?’ And he sort of started to raise his voice and shout. So I sat down and tried to do it the way he wanted, but I kept seeing my own face off to the side of the room on the monitors, and I looked so different, kinda pasty and white. It just kinda threw me, y’ know? I couldn’t remember the words and I froze.”
She sat there, her face now in a slight scowl, her eyes down on the chipped linoleum tabletop. Then she slowly brought them up, dragged them, as if she were pulling weights. “So that was it. Brooke got the part … but it was close. If I hadn’t had to sit in that damn chair, I bet I woulda got it. It was down to her and me that close.”
This time she put her two fingers together and smiled at him. Shane felt his heart go out to her. She was so vulnerable, so fragile, that he thought if he said the wrong thing she might break into pieces right before him. She smiled a sad smile of apology. That smile seemed to be saying: “I know I look like a cheap forty-dollar whore, but I used to be the prettiest girl in Teaneck, and I was almost in a Zeffirelli movie … almost. It was that close.”
Shane returned her smile, but she didn’t see it. She was looking at him, but her mind was somewhere else. He looked down at the twenty or more old track marks on her arms, the open one still glistening from that morning’s fix. Heroin—the gift that keeps on giving.
“Listen, Carol, Nicky Marcella sent me here because he has a part for you. He’s producing a film and he asked me to look you up. He said the part was very unique, that you have the exact quality needed to pull it off.”
“Nicky said that?” She was smiling again. “Nicky the Pooh is such a sweet guy. He
almost put me in another movie two years ago. I met his investors. Even went out with one and we partied, ‘cause Nicky said the guy was about to put up more preproduction money. But I had to do a reading in front of the director. By then I’d lost my confidence. I froze there, too.”
“I think he’s planning on just putting you in this. He said you were the one he wanted.”.
She was wringing her hands on the table, over and over again in a desperate motion, as if she couldn’t get them clean—the Lady Macbeth of the Snake Charmers Bar.
“Wouldn’t that be something?” she finally said. “Course, I’d have to get straight… .”
“Right. Gotta stop shootin’ slat.”
“Yeah … yeah. Wouldn’t that be somethin’? Me back in the movies …”
Then a shadow fell over them and Shane looked up. A skinny, ebony-black man, wearing a pinstriped suit and carrying an umbrella, was glaring at them. The man had no tie, but wore a pound of jewelry under his silk shirt—a Mr. T starter set.
“You better be pitchin’ your ass, or makin’ a pass, girl. ‘Cause, if he ain’t buyin’, you be dyin’,” rhyming his sentences like a Baptist preacher.
“Sorry, Black … I’m sorry.” Carol was grabbing for her purse and starting to scramble out of the booth.
Shane reached out and grabbed her arm. “Hold it. Hold it … Who is this?”
“Ain’t talkin’ t’ you, Chuck,” the black man said. “I been watchin’. You ain’t nothin’ but a tire-kickin’ Gumby motherfucker. Jus’ sittin’, jaw-jackin’, takin’ up the ho’s time.”
Hollywood Tough (2002) Page 4