Daniel James

Chapter Ten271

 Beneath the surface there’s another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper.272

There was a body in the pool.273 I stopped moving and considered whether to retrace my steps out of the garden. No one would know I had been there. The only problem was I couldn’t move. My legs had turned to stone. I wanted to look away, but my eyes were locked on the corpse. It was no longer a body, but a hole in the world. I was gazing at the unreal.

It had been quite a day. I had picked up a tail leaving the LA Louver274 near Venice Beach, been chased through the fairground rides at Santa Monica pier, and was beaten up by a professional boxer in Central Hollywood, before being nearly run off the road on the Pacific Coast Highway. And it wasn’t even 5pm yet.

Two hours earlier, I had followed a late lunch at Musso’s275 on Hollywood Boulevard with a visit to an old friend. It was the latest lead in a busy few days retracing Maas’s footsteps and interviewing those who remembered him from his days here. LA was a strange place.276 The famous Hollywood sign took its name from a real estate development that no longer existed,277 while so much of the exotic fauna and flora we identify with LA had actually been imported – eucalyptus trees from Australia, cypress trees from Italy. It was like driving around a movie set filled with ghosts of Hollywood’s past – LA, a schizophrenic city of extreme light and dark, an urban wilderness where reality and illusion, history and myth, were conflated.

The Forgotten Arm was an old-school boxing-gym in Central Hollywood, nestled between a rundown convenience store and a cabaret bar called The Jack of Hearts. It was owned by a Hall of Fame boxing trainer and ex-fighter, Jerry Napier, who had retired with a 39 – 7 – 1 record. Jerry had charged $5 on the door from the day he opened the place back in the ’80s and had never raised the price of admission once. That was the kind of gym this was and the said a lot about Jerry’s nature. As I walked through the double doors I was greeted by the smell of sweat and blood, and the staccato thud, thud, thud of fighters hitting the pads. The air shimmered with heat, and shafts of sunlight arced back and forth above the rings, tinted with the colours of flags from different nations which hung over the windows. In my shirt and tie I expected to raise a few eyebrows as I walked through the gym, but if the fighters wondered who I was and why I was there they didn’t show it. Jerry’s gym was often the subject of TV documentaries and celebrity visits and it wouldn’t be unusual for reporters or producers to be knocking around. I finally found Jerry watching a Mexican kid shadowboxing in the farthest corner of the gym. Jerry looked as if he’d shrunk since the last time I’d seen him, his once muscular shoulders sagging inside a familiar, sweat-stained t-shirt, which bore a faded version of the gym’s logo – a stylised cartoon-graphic of a muscular arm in the act of throwing an uppercut.

‘How’s things, Jerry?’ I said, hanging my long black coat on the ring post.

He looked at me and grimaced. We hadn’t parted on the best of terms, but I was hoping.

‘What do you want?’ he said.

‘I need your help.’

‘Don’t you always? Well, you know the price.’

‘I paid my five dollars on the way in, Jerry.’

‘The real price. Between the ropes.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You getting in there and earning whatever favour it is you need from me.’

‘You’ve got to be kidding.’

Jerry turned to the Mexican kid sitting on the ring apron.

‘Hey, Esparza. Danny boy here used to have some talent back in the day but I hear he’s gone soft. You fancy testing his chin?’

Esparza looked at me dismissively and shrugged.

‘Le gano con los ojos vendados,’ he said.

‘I don’t have time for fun and games, Jerry. I’m looking for someone.’

‘Who’s playing? You want information? Get in the ring. Esparza has a fight coming up in a few months and needs the sparring.’

‘You’re serious?’

‘As a left hook.’

I changed into some spare gear and wrapped my hands. When I came out of the dressing room Jerry was waiting with a sterilised gumshield and a pair of 16oz gloves. It had been a long time since I’d done any sparring and I’d forgotten how it felt to be gloved-up. My writer’s hands felt claustrophobic being so tightly bound. Jerry came towards me with a head guard, but I leaned away.

‘Don’t be a tough guy,’ he said. ‘Put it on.’

‘You know I hate those things, Jerry. They mess my hair up.’

‘Well, you’re about to have your face messed up too.’

 ‘Este es tu funeral, guapo,’ Esparza added, with a smile.

I smiled as if I knew better and climbed into the ring. Esparza was already waiting for me, pacing back and forth the way a cat does. He pounded his gloves together with a heavy thud when he saw me and grinned, his brightly coloured gumshield like a segment of orange in his mouth. I looked down at Jerry.

‘One round?’

‘One round,’ he replied with a smile. ‘If you can make it through three minutes I’ll tell you anything you want to know.’

It had been twelve years since I had last stepped between the ropes and I had never done more than spar. I had met Jerry back in London during a brief flirtation with boxing journalism as a trainee reporter. Guys like Esparza were professional athletes who lived and breathed boxing; gym rats who trained all day, every day, and sparred hard. Boxing could be a brutal sport and it took a certain kind of person to succeed. It was survival of the fittest and, right now, in my early thirties and nursing my three-hundredth hangover of the year, I felt very far from my prime.

Esparza said something in Spanish as we touched gloves in the centre of the ring but I couldn’t make it out. A split second later I was bleeding. He hit me square in the face with a hard jab before I’d even had time to set my feet, leaving my legs wobbly, and black spots flashing before my eyes. I got my hands up quick and kept them there, moving out of range and pivoting away to my left when I realised my back was against the ropes. That was the last place I wanted to be against a guy like Esparza. I needed to keep on my toes, give him a moving target and maybe, if I got lucky, get his respect by landing a hard shot of my own but all of that was easier said than done. My feet felt heavy, my legs weak, and I’d forgotten most of what I’d been taught years earlier. Esparza blocked my poor attempt at a jab and made me pay with one of his own. He had the kind of jab that snapped your head back. It wasn’t a rangefinder but a weapon in itself. He threw a combination, body to head, pushing me back. I couldn’t think or move fast enough to avoid the punches. All I could do was absorb them on my arms and gloves and try to survive. I was already tired and Esparza knew it. Sooner or later my hands would drop and he would catch me clean, then it would be lights out. I kept moving, trying to frustrate him. Every now and then Jerry would shout advice to his protégé from the ring apron.

‘He’s throwing a lazy jab, kid. He’s wide open for a big overhand right. Nail ’im!’

‘I don’t think he needs your help, Jerry!’ I tried to say, but it didn’t come out too clearly.

By calling for the shot Jerry was inadvertently helping me. Maybe that was his intention all along. Esparza dutifully threw a big right hand as he’d been asked and, because I knew it was coming, I was able to slip under it, step to the side, and throw a counter left hook. I planted my feet and put all my weight into the punch. Esparza hadn’t got his hands up fast enough to block the shot and it caught him flush. I probably hurt his pride more than his jaw but it was something. I don’t remember much after that but the round seemed to go on forever. Three minutes can feel like an eternity when you’re getting punched in the face. I ended the round with my back against the ropes, my gloves around my head, trying desperately to stay upright under a barrage of heavy punches. Finally, the bell rang and it was over. It was then I realised an audience had formed around the ring to watch the action.

‘Nada mal cuate. Me hiciste sudar,’ Esparza said, slapping me hard on the shoulder. I nodded and sat down heavily on the ring apron, exhausted and sore, my mouth filled with blood. Jerry threw me a towel.

‘You ready for a drink?’ he said.

‘You’re buying,’ I replied.

The address Jerry gave me belonged to a house in the Hollywood Hills. I had paid for the information with my own sweat and blood and hoped the drive would be worth it. The last few days had been spent interviewing former actors and producers, artists, gallery owners and collectors, and the occasional celebrity friend and drug dealer, but it had yielded precious little in the way of fresh insight into Maas and the truth of his life. My last hope was the lead I had picked up from Fiona Vale in New York – the eccentric film producer and art collector Alec Zimmer, who had allegedly been at odds with the Maas Foundation over the ownership of an original video installation by the artist.

Stretching fifty miles along a ridge of the Santa Monica Mountains, Mulholland Drive was named after the engineer who built the waterways. It provided a spectacular vantage point over the shimmering expanse of the city.278 A lot of people complained about LA’s geography and its urban sprawl but I found my way around just fine, having been blessed with an almost supernatural sense of direction. It was the heat I couldn’t handle. I was built for much colder climates.

The Sylvia North Building279 was a sleek modernist mansion, with an exterior of grey-hued concrete designed in sharp, jutting angles, narrow slit-like windows, and Mayan art deco embellishments. There was a large pool on the grounds, palm trees and bougainvillea, concrete out-buildings, and spectacular panoramic views over the wilderness of the canyons below, where stray coyotes were said to prowl. The house was located at the top of a steep slope. I parked at the bottom and followed a set of stone steps up to the entrance of the property. When I reached a locked gate, with no buzzer, I decided to walk around the back to find another way inside. There was a single wooden door set into a grey, concrete wall, which was covered with pale green moss. I tried the handle and found it was unlocked. I walked through the doorway into a large garden, stepping over a tiny blue snake as it skittered across my path and away into the undergrowth.

As I crossed the lawn, towards the strange, concrete house and its bunker-like architecture, I realised coming here had been a mistake. There was something in the pool that shouldn’t have been there. My mind didn’t register what it was at first, as if it was struggling to process what it was seeing, but some part of me knew immediately what it was and what it meant. I was looking straight at it but somehow it seemed to be on my periphery, creeping up on me from the edge of my vision rather than the centre. It was a familiar shape, a figure, a man, but everything else about the scene was wrong. The man wore a dressing gown and he was face down in the water, skin pale and bloated, dead. I tried to look away, to move, to run, but I couldn’t. I was gazing at the unreal, frozen by the horror of it, my eyes fixed on the pool and the strange shape floating on the surface of the water.

If I didn’t get out of there I was going to have some explaining to do when LA’s finest came calling. This was my chance to leave, but I couldn’t will my feet to move. At least not in the direction I wanted. I felt myself drifting forward, closer and closer to the house, as if I was being drawn to it by forces beyond my control. The dark, angular, house was calling to me, pulling me in. It wanted to give up its secrets and I couldn’t leave without going inside. Not if I wanted to find out the truth.

The French doors had already been pushed apart when I reached the house. It was a lucky break. Maybe the last I would get. I was standing in a large, open-plan living-room with square stone pillars throughout, reminiscent of Mayan architecture and the work of Frank Lloyd Wright.280 Other than the Mayan embellishments the interior was a masterclass of modern design, with sleek surfaces, modern art on concrete walls, floor to ceiling shelves with books, cassettes and CDs. Everything was in its right place. There were no signs of a struggle.

I began to look around. Almost immediately, my eyes were drawn to the windows. All the blinds had been pulled down and someone had scrawled strange symbols all over them with a black marker – a large circle and an inverted triangle overlapping each other, surrounded by smaller symbols that I didn’t recognise, and a series of repeating numbers along the bottom.281 The drawings reminded me of a strange side-story I had read in one of the Bowie biographies. At the height of his alleged cocaine psychosis, in the mid-1970s, a disturbed and paranoid Bowie had supposedly drawn over the windows, blinds, walls, and doors of a mansion he’d rented here in Hollywood. Bowie, like Jimmy Page and several other rock stars of the period, had become obsessed with the occult and believed the Kabbalistic symbols282 were a form of protection, to keep the dream monsters within his dreaming mind. Maybe Zimmer believed the same, or maybe someone else had left them here as further misdirection. Either way, they hadn’t protected anyone. I took a photograph on my phone and moved on.

The interior of the rest of the house was unexpectedly cramped and oppressive, with low ceilings and long, claustrophobic corridors that telescoped away into shadowy recesses. It had to be my imagination, but it felt as if the space was collapsing in on itself, the further I explored. There were narrow, slit-like windows along the walls but barely any light seemed to get through and the designer art-deco lamps seemed only to illuminate themselves. It was a strange, nocturnal non-place, closed off and dead, like an empty museum. It was the antithesis of LA’s wide, open spaces. The lush green hills bathed in flat, endless sunlight, lay just beyond the doors, but they couldn’t have felt further away right now.

I came to a left turn and found myself looking down a long corridor filled with shop mannequins, positioned on either side of me like a faceless guard of honour. Each one stood in a different pose. Maybe it was art? I had seen worse, but I still felt uneasy as I slowly made my way between their featureless, plastic bodies. I moved forward in a straight line, one foot after the other, convinced that at any moment one of their arms would shoot out and grab me. A bead of cold sweat ran down the side of my face. As I passed the last mannequin and reached the door I let out a long breath and stepped through in the next room.

A long, slow and silent exploration of the house followed, until I finally came to Zimmer’s office. I half expected it to have been ransacked, but it appeared to be untouched. There was more modern art on the walls, and a four foot sculpture of a rabbit-like figure made from twisted metal standing by the desk,283 which was covered with framed photos of Zimmer with various Hollywood names, all with the same smile.

Behind the desk were two large filing cabinets. Zimmer clearly kept extensive business records but it felt too risky to go through his files. I didn’t know what I was looking for and it was a sure-fire way of leaving fingerprints behind. There was another door at the back of the office. It opened to reveal a staircase leading down into the basement. There was light flickering against the steps at the very bottom and I could hear a strange repeating sound, like something mechanical caught in a loop. I felt dread wash over me.

Every instinct told me to turn around and leave, but I couldn’t. I had to see what was down there. My whole body was tense as I descended into the darkness, step by step, one hand flat against the wall, keeping me steady. The odd, mechanical sound grew louder and the flickering white light moved up over my shoes and legs, until it covered my whole body. It came from a projector set into the ceiling of a large, cinema-style screening room, with rows of red, plush velvet seats built into the floor. There were champagne flutes by each of the chairs and a table littered with three dozen empty bottles of Krug.284 It looked like I had missed a hell of a party. The projector had been left running but there was nothing on the screen now except blurred images. I had arrived too late.

An image flashed into my mind as I stared at the screen; a group of people gathered together for a private screening. What did they see? Jane’s words kept coming back to me, turning me inside out. Don’t watch the film. There was no way of knowing if it was all connected but whatever happened here had ended with a man’s death.

I left the screening room and returned to the ground floor by a different set of stairs, coming out in a large, modern kitchen, complete with stylish, brushed steel appliances and a granite-topped island in the centre. There was a mug of coffee and an open pack of cigarettes on the counter. As I stepped out into the light I had the feeling I was being watched. I could almost feel the eyes on my back. I turned quickly, just in time to see a young woman with wild, blonde hair coming at me with a butcher’s knife.

‘Fucking hell!’

I raised my hands and managed to grab the woman’s wrist as the blade came down, stopping the point of the knife about an inch from my chest. The make-up around her eyes was smudged from crying and there was a look of frustration on her face, as she realised she was caught, followed by fear. I loosened my grip and she pulled herself free, falling backwards and dropping the knife, which hit the floor with a clatter. She let out a cry and scrambled away from me, frantically pushing herself back on her heels, never taking her eyes away from me until she was safely under the counter. My heart was pounding and I felt light-headed. It was becoming a familiar feeling. I took a step towards her on unsteady legs.

‘Hey…’ I said finally, my voice heavy and thick. ‘It’s okay…I’m not going to hurt you.’

I held my hands up, palms facing her. ‘What happened here?’

‘Stay away from me,’ she cried.

‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ I repeated. ‘I’m going to stay right over here, okay?’

‘They killed him…’ she said. ‘They killed him.’

‘Who did?’

She looked as if she hadn’t heard me, her eyes darting back and forth.

‘Stay away from me!’

‘I told you,’ I said, crouching down so that my eyes were level with hers. ‘I’m not going to hurt you. Who did this?’

She seemed to grow smaller before my eyes.

‘Psychos in animal masks,’ she replied finally.

‘They killed Zimmer?’

‘I thought you were one of them,’ she said.

‘I’m not,’ I said.

‘How can I believe you?’ She looked suddenly like a child, hiding there under the kitchen counter, the whites of her eyes startlingly bright in the shadows. I sat down on the floor so that she could see I wasn’t going to rush her. She could run away if she wanted.

‘You’re just going to have to trust me,’ I said, resting my back against a cupboard.

She pulled her legs to her chest and wrapped her arms around them as if she was trying to make herself as small as possible.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

She shook her head and looked away. I decided to take a more direct approach.

‘Why did they kill him?’

A clarity returned to her eyes.

‘He didn’t have what they wanted,’ she said. ‘They thought he was hiding it somewhere… but Jason stole it two weeks ago…it was my fault. I shouldn’t have trusted him. I was so fucking stupid…and now Alec’s dead.’

‘What did they want that was stolen?’

‘The film,’ she said.

Don’t watch the film. I felt light-headed again.

‘I’m going to call the police,’ I said.

‘Don’t…’ she replied, softly. ‘Please. Please don’t…I can’t be here, I shouldn’t be here…I just want to leave.’

I needed to get out of there, I wanted to wipe down every surface I might have touched and run for the hills, but she was clearly in shock and probably needed to go to the hospital. I couldn’t just leave her. She also had answers and I would have been a fool to let her go without finding out what she knew. I knew, whatever I decided, I was going to live to regret it one way or another.

‘Look…’ I said. ‘I can get you out of here and take you somewhere safe…I have a car parked outside.’

‘No police?’

‘No police.’

‘Why…why would you do that for me?’

‘Because I need to know what happened here – the whole story.’

END

Notes

271. Daniel was an expert in noir fiction and saw the role of biographer as a kind of literary detective. In this, and other chapters, he foregrounds the signs and signifiers of noir in the visible exterior of the narrative, knowingly employing classic motifs to explore the ‘slippage’ between reality and fantasy. This is clearly a conscious choice, as was his decision to inhabit the role of writer-detective while working on the book. And yet, I find myself questioning how much of this was a performance by the end. Like Bryan Ferry, whose lounge lizard persona was originally an ironic comment by a former art school student, how long before the mask and he who wears it become one and the same? – Anonymous.

272. David Lynch, during an interview about his 1984 film Blue Velvet.

273. The body in the pool is a recurring motif in noir, particularly those set in LA and Hollywood. Arguably the most famous appearance of this scene is in Billy Wilder’s classic Sunset Boulevard (1950), in which William Holden’s doomed screenwriter, Joe Gillis, become entangled with the ghosts of silent-era Hollywood in the form of Gloria Swanson’s forgotten icon Norma Desmond. It can also be seen in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974). Although the exact circumstances of Hollis Mulwray’s murder remain ambiguous in the film, it seems he was drowned in a pool rather than one of LA’s reservoirs as first thought. The film also explores the complex relationship between LA and water: “Either you bring the water to LA, or you bring LA to the water.” Wilder’s film is also a favourite of the artist and director David Lynch, whose Mulholland Drive (2004) also explores Hollywood’s dark side. Like Lynch, Wilder’s film merges elements of noir and horror. In fact it has been described as the definitive ‘Hollywood horror film’, despite its ostensible realism. Other examples of the body-in-the-pool motif can be seen in the French film, La Piscine (1969), starring Alain Delon. There are also echoes in The Swimmer (1968) with Burt Lancaster, also set in LA, which presents a “tortured main character as he attempts to immerse himself in a fantasy life that is no longer available to him.” These themes are, of course, all too familiar – Anonymous.

274. A well-known LA art gallery.

275. Musso & Frank Grill is a world famous bar and restaurant and a former haunt of many famous writers, including Raymond Chandler, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, James M Cain, Dashiell Hammett, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway. By the 1940s and 1950s it was so well known that aspiring writers would consciously seek out the bar to imitate their idols. It’s no coincidence that Musso’s was on Daniel’s itinerary in LA – Anonymous.

276. Journalist Carey McWilliams wrote that “Los Angeles is the kind of place where perversion is perverted and prostitution prostituted.”

277. Hollywoodland.

278. A route immortalised by the artist David Hockney, in his 1980 painting Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio – Anonymous.

279. Designed by architect Diane Selwyn-Elms in 1951, in a combination of styles inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House and also the work of British architect John Parkinson, who, influenced by Art Deco and Spanish colonial styles, designed many of LA’s iconic buildings, including its City Hall, Union Station, and buildings such as the Memorial Coliseum and Bullocks Wilshire department store, but whose work has been largely forgotten and overlooked since his early death in 1935 – Anonymous.

280. For arguably the finest example of Frank Lloyd Wright’s love of Mayan architecture see LA’s the Ennis House, which has been featured in such films as Blade Runner.

281. Although Daniel makes another association, in the text, the symbols he uncovers in the house made me recall Jorge Luis Borges’s classic short story, Death and The Compass (1941) – Anonymous.

282. Bowie had a long and storied relationship to occult practices. An entire album he created at the time, Station to Station, is structured around a journey through each station of the Kabbalistic tree of life.

283. Based on my research, I believe this sculpture was a famous early piece by British visual artist Louise Mackenzie – Anonymous.

284. A brand of champagne. Founded by Joseph Krug in 1853 in the city of Reims, in the heart of France’s champagne region.