37

The security cameras at the top corners of Burke’s gilded gates may not have been manned twenty-four hours a day but if the house was as wired for video as Finley claimed I didn’t mistake them for decoys. Signs warning of electronic security measures and private armed response decorate half the houses in LA. Many are a bluff, nothing more than a stake in the ground or a decal glued to a window. I didn’t think Burke’s system was a bluff. An obsidian buzzer rested in a brass plate on the gate post. I pressed it, stepped back and took a flash picture of the camera lens. I wanted Earl to know I watched them as closely as they watched me.

He made his appearance about ten minutes after I’d rung the bell, strut-waddling down the granite drive in the heavy-footed style typical of over-pumped body builders. I noted with some pride the bandages at his elbows, gained from his slide down the hill the day before. He grinned and puffed out his chest as he neared the end of the drive. Through the bars of the gate gleamed the white block letters printed on his T-shirt, SHUT UP BITCH.

‘I know it’s late,’ I said. ‘Did I catch you in the middle of a wank?’

‘What’s a wank?’

‘It’s what you used to do before you took so many steroids your pecker fell off.’

His grin flattened. ‘If you’re trying to trick me into beating the shit out of you, you’re very close to succeeding.’

‘You’re good at beating the shit out of people, aren’t you?’

‘I’ve had some practice.’

‘You know the King’s Road Café on Beverly?’

‘Not my kind of place,’ he sniffed.

‘I’ll meet you there in thirty minutes. We’ll talk about the photographs.’

The King’s Road Café and neighbouring newsstand were prime sources of show-biz information. The pre-war neighbourhood apartment buildings and duplexes bordered the talent agencies of Beverly Hills, attracting a core of young actors and actresses who aspired to but couldn’t yet afford the 90210 zip code. Both newsstand and café were good spots to catch candids of young celebutants thumbing the film and gossip magazines. Tables lined the sidewalk to allow customers to soak up automobile exhaust with the fresh California sunshine. The tables stayed out at night to accommodate tourists and the half-dozen or so tobacco smokers left on the Westside. The vast majority of non-smokers sat inside, watching the puffers out the plate glass windows like animals in a zoo.

Earl looked like he belonged inside less than the smokers. The clientele of the Kings Road Café favoured the flat biceps, distressed blue jeans and can’t-remember-my-last-haircut look of the professional arts set. Earl carried far too obvious a load of testosterone in his razor-cut head and baby-bull shoulders to blend anywhere except a gym. He had the sense to drape a black leather jacket over his SHUT UP BITCH T-shirt.

I’d chosen a table with clear sight lines to the front and back doors and sat with my back to the wall. In my right jacket pocket I fingered the canister of pepper spray. I kicked out the chair opposite mine when he came up to the table. He turned it around and sat with pneumatic forearms curled around the tines of the backrest. I’d grown up with that style of sitting. My dad sat that way all the time.

‘Sorry about your husband,’ he said, not sorry at all.

‘It was a green card marriage, strictly business.’ I focused on a spot six inches behind his head when I spoke, my eyes flat of anger and mercy. He didn’t mean anything to me, the look said, he was just there. It was the kind of look I gave any predator to convince it I’m not just meat, I have teeth and claws of my own. ‘I needed the money. Still do.’

‘The real-estate agent told me what you wanted.’ The barbed way he said that gave me the idea Peter St John had a rough time after I’d left. ‘He seemed to think you didn’t know your husband was blackmailing us.’

‘Like I said, we weren’t particularly close. You mind telling me the asking price?’

The lie creased his eyes before it passed his lips. ‘A hundred grand.’

‘That’s a lot of money.’

‘Woulda been if he’d lived.’

‘If I were to find a set of prints, offer them to you instead of the tabloids, would the price still stand?’

‘You don’t know shit, do you? A hundred for the negatives. Prints would be worth far less, maybe twenty.’

‘I thought you had the negatives.’

The waitress popped into the conversation with a friendly, ‘How we doing tonight?’ She poised the tip of her pen on the order pad and smiled like we were all good friends. I said everything was fine, thanks, and ordered a plain coffee. Earl asked for herbal tea. When she took the order to the kitchen I said, ‘Of course you have the negs. You set the guy up, waited for him to show, then took the keys and tossed the apartment, right?’

‘We didn’t set the trap. The voice on the phone did.’

‘What voice?’

Earl amused himself by bending his spoon into a circle. ‘The Brit didn’t call. Some other guy did. Said he could broker a deal for the negatives. Some days later he called again. Turned out he couldn’t talk him out of publication, at least, that’s what he told us. Said he felt real bad about it. If we wanted to throw another party, he’d make sure somebody showed up with a camera. We set it up and he was right, the Brit didn’t have a clue he’d been back-stabbed.’

‘So you beat him up and tossed his apartment.’

‘You have a genuine talent for being half-right. The apartment was already trashed when I got there.’

‘And the voice?’

‘Never heard from him again.’

If I believed what Earl said then somebody else searched Gabe’s apartment first. The voice on the phone knew the apartment would be empty. But if the voice had searched the apartment and found the negatives he would have followed through with the sale. Either the negatives weren’t in the apartment or they were later taken from him. The problem with that logic was that I didn’t particularly trust what Earl told me. ‘According to you, the negatives are still out there somewhere.’

He gripped his fork and without taking his eyes off me twisted the metal into a neat spiral. ‘I wouldn’t be talking to you if they weren’t.’

‘That why you attacked my agent – you thought I had them?’

‘You mean that little queer in Santa Monica? Never touched him.’

‘Like you didn’t kill the Brit, right? He crawled into the lake all by himself. You thought he’d lied to you, is that what happened? Or did Burke lose control, kill him while you went to get the negatives?’

‘Some people make the mistake of thinking because I’m big and like to work out I’m stupid. You going to be one of those?’

There are times to talk and times to keep your mouth shut and this was a time for silence but the crack about Lester provoked me. ‘I don’t think you’re stupid at all. If anything, you’re too clever. You beat the location of the negatives out of my husband and tossed his apartment. When you got back to the estate you found Burke confused reality with the movies and committed murder. You dumped the body in the lake with enough cocaine on him to make it look drug related. You told Burke that somebody else got to the apartment first and stole the negatives. When the voice called again – I’m guessing it was another paparazzo named Dave Schuman – you killed him. You knew you couldn’t get away with blackmailing Burke so you struck a set of prints and sent them to Mike Finley with a demand for a quarter million. You’ve let me snoop around this far because as long as I’m still alive Finley will think I’m the one blackmailing him. I wish I was as smart as you. But if I come up with another set of prints you’ll have to deal with me and the price will be much dearer than twenty grand.’

I saw the move before he made it but had forgotten the speed and strength a violent man is capable of. Glasses and silverware flew across the laps of the people sitting next to us and crashed to the floor. I drew the canister of pepper spray from my jacket pocket as I sprang to my feet but Earl came up with the entire table in his paws. Before I could get my hand up he charged forward. The edge caught me at the waist and he rolled forward to flatten me against the wall, the table at my throat. Then he flexed his deltoids and squished me against the brick like a bug.

‘Somebody want to call the police?’ The request came out with my last wheeze of breath.

There must have been a dozen cell phones in the room but nobody moved. I love LA.

‘Nobody’s gonna help you, bitch.’ His jaw moved an inch from my ear, the breath a mix of poison and mint. ‘Not anybody in here and certainly not the police.’ He tossed the table aside like a film prop and walked out, his splay-footed waddle no more hurried than when he came in.

The couple next to me picked stray silverware from their platters of skinless roast chicken. Nobody looked at me directly, as though offended by the bad taste of getting assaulted in public. Restaurants had long been favoured by the city’s lovers as the ideal location in which to break up an affair. Scenes like the one I’d survived happened all the time. They probably thought I’d just told Earl I was sleeping with his personal trainer.