THE GIRL with the beads and pendants came swinging out the front entrance of the concrete and glass high-rise at thirty minutes past noon, flanked by two women barely out of their teens, both dressed in the tight-fitting spaghetti-strap tops and miniskirts popular among those in the workforce more interested in getting boys than getting promoted. I watched from behind the wheel of the Cadillac, parked at a meter down the street from the entrance. The Rott snoozed on the seat beside me, his head in my lap. The three crossed with the light at the next corner, swaying with chatter and laughter as they walked toward a strip of boutique fast-food restaurants next to Museum Square. I elbowed open the door, gently lifted the Rott’s head from my lap, and slipped out of the car. The Rott gave me a look that suggested no more than passing curiosity about where I was going and went back to sleep.
Across the street, Luce and her friends filed through the door of a skinless chicken franchise. I walked past the winking chicken on the sign, peered through the front window. The choice was fine with me. The Rott liked chicken, too. The three approached the service counter and placed their order. I gave them time to collect their drinks, find a table for four, and sit. The two girls flanked Luce like bookends until they reached the table. I figured they worked together as receptionists or entry-level clerical. They looked excited and full of hope, the type of young women men love to exploit at work, in bed, or anywhere they can.
I ordered a half chicken for the Rott and chicken salad for me and moved to the drinks dispenser for a large cup of iced tea. When the cup filled I capped it and wandered toward the girls’ table, turned my head sharply as though surprised, and called out, “Luce?”
She glanced up, green eyes treading water, not knowing who I was or what I wanted. Her face was too round for the camera to consider her classically beautiful and one eye looked slightly higher than the other, but an eccentric charm animated her features and emotions played across her face like images on a screen. She was one of a thousand young actresses all vying for the same few roles but I didn’t have any trouble imagining her as the one who makes it. I stepped toward the table and pitched my voice to the high tones of giddy excitement. “I can’t believe it’s you!” I said. “We were just talking about you!”
One of the advantages of L.A.’s casual dress code is that nobody knows how important anybody is just by looking. The slob in a baseball cap, satin windbreaker, and ratty sneakers could be a television director, at least until he jumps into anything less than a BMW. I knew her name, sounded excited to see her. I could have been a production executive coming fresh from a casting meeting where her rightness for a role had been discussed. I could even have been the most important person on earth to an actor: a casting director. So she did what every other aspiring actress in L.A. would do. She smiled, a bit uncertainly, and waited for more information.
I slid onto the chair on the opposite side of the table. “I just saw Theresa yesterday and you remember that role she’d been cast in? The one where she plays a terrorized girl driven out into the desert and murdered?”
Even though I was nodding as though absolutely nothing was wrong, no reason to panic, the smile dropped from her lips and a look of sudden absence washed over her eyes, as though she wished to be anywhere but there, talking to me.
I gave a little wave of the back of my hand, said, “They hired another writer at the last minute and rewrote her part while they were shooting, if you can believe that.”
“They did?” Her voice came out like a squeak and her hand went to her throat, just above a small pendant strung around her neck. The pendant, shaped like a cage around a grayish-white fragment, hung above multiple strands of swaying beads.
“The rewrite changed everything.” I said it like a friend sharing good news with another friend. “Instead of taking a bullet in the back of the head, like in the first draft? She gets rescued while they’re walking her out to get killed. That’s the way they filmed it, too. She wanted you to know about it.” I spun my fists in circles, pantomiming a fast run. “She’s talking to everybody, you know, cranking out the publicity. Careers are so short these days you have to make the most of every break. But I don’t have to tell that to a pro like you.”
The girl next to Luce, her eyes sweetly crossed above a lipsticked smile, said, “That’s so cool! You’ll be next, Luce. Wait and see. I’m psychic about these things.”
A number blared over the public address speakers and the girl next to me jumped to her feet, saying, “That’s ours.”
Luce dropped the hand from her throat, watched her friend trot off to collect their order, said, “In the first draft they were going to kill her?”
“Sure, anybody with any production experience knew that.”
“Nobody told me.” She tried to put the force of conviction behind her statement but her voice cracked and failed her.
I pulled a business card from my pocket, wrote the number of my cell phone on the back, pushed it across the table. “Remember what happened to Theresa if you ever get cast in a similar role.”
She hid the card beneath her palm as though afraid someone might see her with it. Her head cocked to the side and she looked at me as though she wanted to ask something, then decided against it. “I’m glad it worked out for her.”
“I like your necklace,” I said. “Can I take a closer look?”
Her face stiffened and she covered the pendant with the palm of her hand. “It’s kind of private.” She smiled to hide her panic.
“But you’re so proud of it,” the cross-eyed girl said, trying to be helpful. Legs fluttered beneath the table and the girl flinched, her ankle kicked.
“It looks like bone.” I reached for the silver strand on which it hung. “Is it bone?”
“No, it’s just nothing, really.”
The other girl slid two plastic trays laden with salad on the table, said, “It’s a penis bone.”
The cross-eyed girl laughed, leaning across the table with her hand on her chest, and the other girl laughed even louder, still at the age when all jokes about sex are funny. Luce’s face pinked like a second-degree sunburn.
“Go ahead, Luce, show her,” the other girl said.
“Whose penis?” I asked.
The girls laughed again, voices bright and cheerful, keenly enjoying Luce’s embarrassment but not understanding the true reason for it.
“A dolphin.” Luce pulled her hand away from her chest as though defiant of contradiction.
A camera was not part of my act and I regretted leaving it in the car. The fragment of bone was no more than a half inch in length and jagged on both ends, as though recently splintered from a larger segment. The public address speaker blared the number to my order.
The cross-eyed girl leaned across the table, her voice a just-us-girls whisper. “Dolphins are really sexual creatures. Luce is hoping it helps her get lucky.”
I suspected Luce hoped to get lucky in a completely different way than the one suggested by the cross-eyed girl. Behind the wheel of the Cadillac I listened to cell-phone messages while I tore the roast chicken into bite-sized strips, fending off the Rott with my elbow. Girls like Luce don’t need to get lucky. They’re born lucky. Luce didn’t need charms to enhance her sexual attractiveness. But in a city populated by attractive young women all wanting the same thing, she might want a charm to help her get it first and then hold it. The message from my parole officer was brutal and short: call soon or bear the consequences.
I piled the chicken strips onto the take-out container, using it like a bowl, and set it on the seat. The next message was from Frank. He’d tracked down the owner of the warehouse in North Hollywood, a real estate speculator with an office in Beverly Hills, and wanted to know if I was available for a little guerrilla journalism. The Rott inhaled the chicken and looked at me, disappointed there wasn’t more. I started the engine and pulled away from the curb. I’d scared Luce but I didn’t expect her to run that afternoon. She might fear exposure and arrest but she wouldn’t act, not until after work. I even hoped that she’d call me and I’d be able to broker a deal. She seemed genuinely shocked to hear that her coconspirators had wanted to kill Theresa. The aspiring in Hollywood will often submit to any degradation and commit any act, criminal or not, that might further their ambitions. Her complicity in my sister’s murder wouldn’t have surprised me but she projected so much innocence and hope that I began to doubt she even knew anyone had been murdered that night.
Just inside the border of Beverly Hills I spotted Frank edging into traffic to wave me to a free parking spot behind his Honda Civic. A true friend, he fed coins into the parking meter while I collected my camera gear from the rear seat. I slung the bag over my shoulder, shut the trunk, and called above the buzz of traffic, “Hey, Frank, do dolphins have penis bones?”
He banked the meter up to two hours, said, “I’ve been waiting my whole life for someone to test my encyclopedic knowledge of sex trivia like this.”
“That’s why I asked. You seem like the kind of guy who’d know.”
Frank pointed at a boutique courtyard building across the boulevard that looked like a cross between a Spanish hacienda and a mini-mall, the style of building that attracts lawyers, accountants, and others in the white-collar professional crowd. “The guy we’re after, the guy who owns the warehouse, has a ground-floor office in that building.” He scuttled toward the street corner, his eyes on the traffic light to cross with the next green. “His name is Daniel Sopwell and his company is called Sopwell Holdings. I’ve already done a walk-by. It’s strictly small-time, a two-person operation. His secretary said he’s at lunch. We’ll ambush him when he returns.”
I kept stride next to him, asked, “So do they or don’t they?”
“Do they or don’t they what?”
“Have a bone there.”
“I thought you were kidding.”
Sleek foreign steel knifed through the air in front of us, accelerating through the amber light.
“So you don’t know the answer.”
He stepped off the curb in front of a BMW straining to stop on the red, as if daring it to hit him, then half turned and flipped off the driver when the bumper slid over the white crosswalk stripe. “I’ve been asked some pretty arcane questions before but yours sets the record. Go ahead, ask me how big a whale penis is.”
“I don’t want to know that,” I said, two steps behind.
“Fifteen feet.”
I caught up to him, said, “Jealous?”
“Are you kidding? Of course I’m jealous. I know this might be confusing to someone with your lack of experience, but men don’t literally have bones, no matter what the slang infers. We have something called erectile tissue, which is entirely a different thing. I can show you, if you’d like.”
“No thanks.” I followed him across the sidewalk and into the courtyard. “My interest is completely hypothetical.”
“Then hypothetically I’d say a dolphin’s penis is boneless too, and I don’t even want to know why you’re asking.” He stopped before brass letters hung on an oak door. The letters spelled SOPWELL HOLDINGS. “I told the secretary we’re interested in profiling Sopwell as our land pillager of the month, so she expects us.”
I opened up the aperture on the Nikon and slowed the shutter speed for low-light conditions. Frank knobbed open the door and stepped into the lobby. A permed woman in her mid-forties smiled cheerfully from behind the reception desk. “He should be back any second,” she said, gesturing toward a couple of leather chairs at the far wall. “Please, make yourselves comfortable.”
We sat, Frank bearing a pleasantly blank expression, as though he waited for the bus and not to ambush Sopwell. The light would be difficult to work with, fluorescents above and a smoked plate-glass window beside the door. I attached the flash and stopped down the aperture. A man dressed more for the entertainment business than real estate—Persol sunglasses, designer sport coat, knit cotton jersey, slacks, and sneakers—slipped through the door a few minutes after we sat and cast a sidelong glance at us as he moved toward a private office behind the secretary’s desk.
“These people are here to interview you for a newspaper column about real estate?” The secretary’s voice rose uncertainly at the end of her sentence. “Something about being the land optimizer of the month?”
Sopwell turned to greet us, making a show of flashing open his sport coat to slip his sunglasses into the inside breast pocket. Armani, the label read. From the top of his forehead to the crown of his head his hair grew in sparse clumps that looked like recently planted tufts of crabgrass, the result of a series of hair-implant procedures. Except for the hair he was movie-star handsome, eyes gray as granite and rugged chin adorably dimpled. The chin in particular looked familiar and I wondered where I’d seen it before. With a face that handsome he must have been really bummed out about losing his hair. It must have seemed like a personal tragedy. I stepped to the side of Frank’s shoulder and put the Nikon’s viewfinder to my eye.
Frank stuck the tip of his pen to his writing pad and, pitching his voice to a tone heard most commonly in district attorneys prosecuting capital crimes, asked, “Could you comment on the current police investigation regarding your involvement in the robbery-homicide at Hollywood Forever Cemetery?”
His eyes blanked with the shock of the question and like he didn’t know what hit him he said, “What the fu…?”
I squeezed off the flash.
“Sources tell us that one of your warehouses is the secret base of the gang responsible for the crimes. Are you part of the gang or its sponsor?”
“Who are you?” Anger infused his eyes with some life. He whirled toward his secretary. “Call security!”
“Maybe I’ve made a mistake,” Frank said, suddenly contrite.
“You bet your ass you’ve made a mistake.”
“Records registered with the County of Los Angeles indicate you are the owner of a warehouse located at…” Frank glanced down at his notes, then back up again. “Nine thousand two hundred Leadwell. Is that not your building?”
“I own a lot of buildings.” He opened the front door and swept his hand toward the opening. “Now get out.”
“You don’t deny owning that building in particular?”
“I have security on the line,” the secretary announced. “What do you want me to tell them?”
“You can tell them we’re leaving.” Frank nodded to me to take the lead out the door. He followed me out but turned at the threshold. “One last question. Do you expect to be indicted for murder or just accessory to murder?”
Sopwell slammed the door so hard I glanced up to the roof, expecting a few red tiles to come tumbling into the courtyard. “Great work,” I said. “You can print the text of that interview on the head of a pin.”
“Take a shot or two of the exterior office,” Frank said, and stepped back out of the way. “Did you get the deer-in-headlights shot?”
I crouched on the paving stones for a low-angle shot of the office. When questions come out of nowhere to surprise an interview subject his eyes widen and reflect the light. Frank was so adept at triggering the look with a shock question that we’d coined a phrase for it. “Like a deer in the headlights of a truck doing ninety,” I said.
“That look alone will convict him in the eyes of the readers.” He lit a cigarette, puffed it out the corner of his mouth while he jotted down notes, said, “I didn’t need him to say anything. I’ll write a basic denial-of-truth story.”
“Headline: ‘Suspect Denies Being Murderous Slimeball.’ ”
“Ninety percent of readers won’t even register the denial.”
I turned the lens on Frank, took a quick low-angle portrait, framed by sky. “Sopwell look familiar to you?”
“Careful, you’ll break your lens,” he said, his smile bitter, then shook his head. “Never saw him before.”
“It’s the chin, the dimple.” I shouldered my bag, images clicking through memory like snaps in a slide show, and strode toward the street corner. I’m good with faces. Most photographers are. The stick-figure signal flashed red. Frank shouted at me from the courtyard, alarmed that I’d left him so quickly and wordlessly behind. I ran across the boulevard as the light turned amber and popped the trunk of the Cadillac. I plucked a copy of Halliwell’s Who’s Who in the Movies from a case of reference material I kept on hand to research and identify celebrities.
Frank wheezed up behind me, the cigarette still smoldering between his fingers. “I need the film before you go,” he said. “You’ve been leading a high-risk lifestyle lately and it would be a shame to lose the pictures if the risks catch up to you.”
“Meaning I get killed,” I said, flipping the pages.
“I worry about it night and day.” He took a drag on his cigarette and coughed, lungs sore from the exercise of running across the street. “Particularly if you get killed with next week’s headline still in your camera.”
Not many photographs run in Halliwell’s pages but the book offers capsule biographies of most notable current and former movie stars. The capsules include date of birth, a filmography, and, if applicable, birth name and date of death. I paged to the entry for Chad Stonewell and underlined it for Frank with my thumbnail. Chad Stonewell was born in 1950 as Charles Sopwell.
“Thanks for your concern,” I said. “But I don’t think I’ve shot the issue’s front page, not yet.”