Zahna stopped on the sidewalk, clutching her shoulder bag with the fifty-five hundred-dollar bills inside. About twenty yards away, one of the LAPD officers was standing behind her car, examining her license plate and writing something down. Crack cocaine had her mind racing and her heart speeding. The cops hadn’t seen her yet. Be cool, she told herself. Then she spied a tow truck hitching up to a car parked several vehicles behind hers.
Abruptly, she turned and started walking in the other direction. The traffic sign posted on the corner of Fifth Street read: NO PARKING AFTER 3:30 P.M. Zahna glanced at her watch; it was 3:39. She relaxed. The two policemen were among the corps ticketing vehicles parked on the downtown streets after the cutoff time, and the tow truck was one of many working the afternoon rush hour, hauling illegally parked cars out of the way of the oncoming traffic. It was an everyday happening at the start of the afternoon commute. She’d been caught in it once, and the ticket had cost her $85, plus another $160 to get her car out of hock from the garage they towed it to.
Zahna walked swiftly back down Hill Street, ducked through Pershing Square across to Olive, then doubled back to Fifth and approached her car from the opposite direction. Just as she’d hoped, the cops had moved ahead to the next offending vehicles, and the tow truck had moved off with its haul. She zipped down the street, her keys in hand, snatched the ticket off her windshield, jumped in her car, and peeled off.
The whole exercise exhilarated her. She felt empowered as she crumpled up the parking ticket and threw it on the floor. “So long, cops,” she said out loud, as she rolled down Fifth Street toward the Hollywood Freeway. So long, L.A., and good riddance.
She had been knocking around this town for a lot of years, and she’d come to a stone-cold dead end. She had a nowhere job, she lived in a dump, she drove a wreck, she had no friends, no love life, no money, no prospects. That all could have changed, should have changed with Jack Nathanson. They were good together, had been from the start. She was the only woman who could give him what he needed—hadn’t he told her that a hundred times? She was the one he kept coming back to. Yet she was the only one of his women who had ended up with nothing. Not even an acknowledgment that she existed.
She’d gone to his funeral, couldn’t stay away. She used her station ID to get in, put on a hat and horn-rimmed glasses, pretended she was a reporter. The transparent casket freaked her out—for a minute she thought she was having a drug hallucination, seeing him lying there with that smug smirk on his face. How typical of him, even dead. Stifling the urge to scream at him, she turned away, and there stood the widow. She pulled out the pad and pencil she’d brought to pass herself off as press, and actually started to interview her. Zahna had no idea why she did that, or what she’d expected; she only knew that it made her feel…like nothing. Nobody.
They were all there, his wives, driving their expensive cars or riding in limos, dressed in their fancy clothes, talking to each other, taking their bows, sucking up everybody’s sympathy. Janet Orson, the grieving widow; Debra Angelo, the madonna with child; Maxi Poole, the big-deal newswoman. His real love, his Zahna, was there, but not one person said hello, or said they were sorry, they hoped she was holding up all right. Nothing. That’s what she had to show for giving him three years of her life: exactly nothing. At least Monica Lewinsky had her fifteen minutes and some bucks in the bank.
Saturday, she did some crack and went to the auction. She’d found herself in an alien world again. Nobody knew that she was Jack’s real love. Janet Orson walked around with her nose in the air. Maxi Poole did a news story, acting like she owned the world. Debra Angelo didn’t even bother to show up, even though all the money was going to her kid, according to the news reports. Everybody was talking about Jack Nathanson. But she, the woman he loved more than any of them and all of them, couldn’t say a word.
She hooked up with that weirdo, the actress who bought the cross. God knows what she was on—the woman was out of it. But Zahna had sensed a kinship, had felt that she could talk to her, share Jack Nathanson stories. She’d connected with her, offered her pot, followed her out to the beach. And she was staggered when Meg Davis led her right to Debra Angelo’s house, then proceeded to babble about saving the kid’s soul. What the hell was that about? A nutcase.
She got stoned again on Sunday, with nothing to do and nobody to do it with, as usual, so she drove back out to the beach. And sure enough, there was Ms. Crazo again, just as she said she’d be, guarding the house, or casting a spell, or whatever the hell she thought she was doing.
Zahna got off watching her watch them for a while, then, to her amazement, Maxi Poole, wife number two, came over and took Meg Davis by the hand and brought her up to see Debra Angelo, wife number one. This was better than watching Saturday Night Live! Meantime, Zahna noticed, the ditso had left her bag, her books, and that bizarre cross on her blanket.
Zahna ambled over and snatched the cross, then dashed to her car and raced home. That’s when she got the idea to go over to Jack’s house and see if she could find some of the things she’d given him, expensive gifts that she couldn’t afford and was still paying off on her credit cards, like the Sony CD player and the antique gold pocket watch. Or the exorbitant black leather jacket he had admired in Bijan’s window—it actually looked terrific on her. Now that Jack was dead, why should Janet Orson have her things? She would take them back.
And maybe she’d snatch that twenty-carat diamond engagement ring People magazine said Jack gave Janet, or the white ermine jacket she read he gave her at the glitzy birthday party he threw for her at The Palm. And other pricey baubles, things he should have given Zahna. Janet Orson had everything, and Zahna had nothing. She hadn’t meant to kill anybody that night at his house. She just wanted… something.
For Jack had never given her anything significant. Cheap, sexy underwear, a bottle of perfume, a teddy bear. Guess he thought his scintillating presence was enough for her. But he gave his wives everything. Cars, furs, jewelry, exciting nights on the town in limousines, first-class trips abroad. She would read about it in the columns. And he gave them marriage. Legitimacy. But Zahna wasn’t even good enough to introduce to his ex-wife once removed.
She’d always believed that he would come around to her eventually. He had made her think he would. He’d only married Janet Orson to jump-start his career, get the acting jobs she could throw his way. Everybody knew that. Once he was back on his feet he would drop Janet and marry his Zahna. For keeps.
But now he was dead, and she had nothing, only his picture cut out of the newspaper to remember him by. Early in their relationship, her engineer had snapped a photo of the two of them in the KBIS studio while she was on the air. She’d had it enlarged, put it in a silver frame from Cartier, and gave it to him as a gift. He took it, but he told her he hated having his picture taken, she was never to let that happen again. He said he loathed being photographed because the paparazzi were always snapping away, invading his privacy. Later she’d realized that he simply didn’t want to be photographed with her. She was sure he’d accepted the gift just to get rid of the photograph. Now some other woman’s picture was probably ensconced in the expensive frame.
Since the day he was murdered, she’d been growing more and more enraged. She stayed stoned night and day, on the job and off, and now it took more stuff just to get high. That’s when she started adding crack to the mix of powder, pot, and pills. Rocks were faster and more intense, made her feel powerful. And Sunday night, when she was coked up, gripped with obsession and seething with rage, she’d headed over to Jack’s house to snag some things that should have been hers.
She’d had copies of his keys for a long time. He used to have her drive with him to the airport. It was precious time they could spend together, he’d tell her. Oh sure! He just wanted taxi and delivery service, with a quick feel thrown in. He liked to have his cars serviced while he was away, so he’d pick her up, she’d ride with him out to LAX, then drive his car back into town and drop it off at the shop, and his mechanic would have somebody run her home.
A couple of times, while driving his car, she had taken his key ring into a hardware store and had his keys duplicated, when he was living with Maxi, and then Janet. She liked having her secret keys. She knew his alarm code; he’d used the same combination of numbers for twenty years, he’d mentioned once, for his home alarm system, his PINs, his computer passwords, to retrieve messages on his answering machines, wherever he needed digits. It was always 25225. On a Touch-Tone phone, those numbers spelled out the word “black,” for his biggest hit picture, Black Sabbat. He would never forget his codes, he’d said. Neither would she.
On Sunday night, back at her place, she’d put three tens in a pipe and went flying. She could do anything! She changed into a black sweater and black jeans to suit her mood; then, as an afterthought, she’d put that nutty costume on over her clothes. Every Halloween, the gang at the station dressed up and got crazy, and she had picked up this year’s rage, a Dracula outfit. With it, she’d pulled on a black hooded mask she’d bought, which covered her entire face except for her eyes.
And the cross! The Black Sabbat prop was the capper to her disguise. When she’d got home from the beach the night before and flipped on the TV, she saw footage of Meg Davis and her precious cross all over the news. Now Zahna had that cross, she had the keys and the alarm code, she was ripped out of her mind, and she was ready to do the caper, ready to break into Jack’s house. She’d seen in the trades that Janet Orson planned to move out of the mansion and take up residence at the Beverly Hills Hotel that weekend. So she figured the house would be vacant. If the house looked empty, Zahna was going in, and if anybody saw her, she would just wave the cross and spout some witchcraft gibberish and run like hell.
There was no way anyone could recognize her, and even better, they were sure to think she was that freaked-out Meg Davis. Everyone who watched the news or read the papers knew that this was Meg Davis’s cross, and it wouldn’t be hard for them to believe that this was the kind of thing Meg Davis would do, because she was obviously somewhere on the planet Blippo!
The house was dark. She had tried several of the keys until one of them fit, and she’d eased her way in. She pounced on the alarm box and punched in the code numbers, no problem. It was all working; it felt so right. She had no trouble finding the master bedroom on the ground floor. She’d switched on a light and was having a party, rummaging around grabbing cash, jewelry, and anything expensive-looking that she could carry.
She just hadn’t figured on Carlotta. Carlotta had always worked for Jack; with Jack gone, it hadn’t occurred to Zahna that Carlotta might still be there. Carlotta had surprised her in the doorway of the bedroom suite. Still, she never would have killed her. She waved the cross and chanted some shit, and was about to power right past her and scram out the door. But Carlotta’s eyes popped and she shrieked, “My God, it’s Zahna!”
When Jack lived alone in the Stone Canyon house, Zahna would sleep over sometimes, and hang out by the pool after he went to work. Carlotta used to call her Miss Zahna and bring her iced tea. And often, when she was on the air at night, Jack told her he would keep the radio on, piped through the speakers in the house, to listen to her music and her sexy rap. Zahna Cole’s whiskey voice was distinctive—low and raspy and sultry. A good chunk of Los Angeles knew that voice. And Carlotta knew that voice. So Zahna had no choice that night.