CHAPTER FOUR

 

 

The appointment Vickie made for me with Amos Decker let me sleep in the next morning. Not because it was a particularly late appointment, but because he and I lived in the same neighborhood. And then again, we didn’t. Malibu was too big to be a neighborhood. It wasn’t formally incorporated as a town, either, but people still referred to it as one, a very long, very narrow town squeezed between Santa Monica Bay and its namesake mountains and bisected by the Pacific Coast Highway, which ran just above the beach. Clinging to the roadway was a strip of houses that started and stopped and widened and narrowed as the topography dictated for a run of over twenty miles.

When Ella and I bought in in the fifties, our cottage had been on a stretch of beach the locals were already calling “the other Malibu,” meaning the wrong side of the tracks. Decker’s address was in “the Malibu,” the old Malibu Movie Colony, where the silent movie stars of the 1920s had built their weekend getaways. Since the coming of talkies, those properties had been changing hands steadily. Sometime after the war, the original movie star cottages–never as humble as the word “cottage” suggested—had started to disappear altogether, replaced by bigger and bigger homes on the same modest lots. The result looked like a used car lot for beach houses, one with way too much inventory on hand.

Amos Decker’s house, a collection of flat-roofed glass cubes trimmed in cedar, was one of the newer models, but then so was Decker. The late sixties—a brief, sometimes loving, sometimes violent period—had held the whole country upside down and shaken it, and it had been especially hard on Hollywood. The old studios, what was left of them, had lost millions turning out the kind of movies they’d always turned out, featuring names that had been bankable a few years earlier and now suddenly weren’t. In desperation, the studio heads had turned to kids barely out of film school who spoke the new language of the new times. And not just turned to them, but thrown them the keys to the kingdom.

I parked my company car, a Lincoln Continental Mark IV, next to an even newer Cadillac Eldorado convertible whose vanity license plate read “mogul.” A young woman in bra and panties lay across the car’s big backseat. She was so pale, I would have checked her for a pulse if she hadn’t been snoring away like Li’l Abner. As it was, I was tempted to put up the car’s top before the sun could get to her.

More bad signs for local real estate values stood on the concrete front porch: a double row of empty champagne bottles. I started to word a joke for whoever answered the door, something about the neighborhood being so nice the milkman delivered Bollinger’s. Then I asked myself what the chances were that anyone in the house would be old enough to remember when milk was delivered and gave the effort up.

The person who eventually answered my knock might not have remembered milkmen, but she did remember me. “Mr. Elliott,” she said and smiled.

Her name was Polly Hayden, and she was as near to being an established star as it was possible to be in those antiestablishment times. I hadn’t heard that she and Decker were an item, which showed how unestablished I’d become. Though she was in her early twenties, Hayden, delicately beautiful, with a waif’s big eyes and always short, always tousled blond hair, had so far limited her roles to teenagers, from what I’d seen of her work. Very lost teenagers, usually. At that moment, the lost part looked like typecasting.

She pressed the back of her right hand against one temple. “Amos said he had somebody coming. He didn’t say it would be you.”

“I’m surprised you remember me,” I said.

Hayden and I had met five years earlier, when we’d been members of a doomed expedition, a film crew sent in to shoot a few scenes against the background of the monster rock concert that had all but leveled Avenal, California. Hayden had been one of the actors, and I’d been the crew’s entire security staff. Its entirely inadequate security staff. It had been her first movie and very nearly my last.

“I’ll never forget Avenal,” she said. “I almost ran right back to Pasadena to get my teaching certificate.”

“I’m glad you didn’t.”

She smiled her now famous smile and asked me in. “I’m sorry about the mess,” she said. “We had a preview celebration last night for Amos’s new movie. But it’s always a mess. Amos likes it that way. He finds chaos stimulating.”

“Maybe he just likes having someone picking up after him.”

The living room was going to require several someones. Discreet someones, too, as the mirror-topped coffee table in the conversation pit was so liberally sprinkled with leftover cocaine it looked like it had been dusted for fingerprints. Not far away stood a refugee from a dentist’s office, a missile-shaped tank labeled nitrous oxide.

“Decker’s such a good host he even supplies the laughs?”

Hayden’s hand went back to her temple. “Laughing gas is supposed to boost creativity, believe it or not. I don’t touch that stuff myself. I think it might be dangerous.”

Before I could offer a couple of cautionary tales, an interior door flew open and Smokey the Bear came in. Or his stunt double, a big man, shaggy of head and limbs, heavily-bearded, and dressed, like the sleeper in the Cadillac, in underwear only. He descended into the pit and sat down next to the glass-topped table. Then he looked around at the empty seats and blinked.

“Where is everybody?” he demanded.

“Asleep or gone, Bimbo. The party’s been over for hours.”

“Shit,” the man said. He got up and marched out the way he’d come, the room shaking to each flat-footed step.

Hayden said, “Bimbo is a school buddy of Amos’s. As near as I can figure, he came out for a visit a year or so ago and decided to stay.”

“You just paraphrased the motto of Southern California.” Bimbo’s attire having prodded my memory, I told Hayden about the girl in the Caddy.

“Must be Mirabelle. She’s supposed to be an earl’s daughter or something. I’ve been wondering what happened to her. Bedrooms were at a premium last night. Private bedrooms couldn’t be had.”

Hayden sounded like she might be considering another dash to Pasadena. She shook it off. “Maybe you’d better wait out on the balcony, Mr. Elliott. I’ll find Amos.”

Instead of going off to look for him, she led me out onto the deck, which faced the bay and ran the width of the house. Then she lingered there, admiring the view. It was a view worth lingering over on that very clear morning, as it took in the whole of Santa Monica Bay, from Point Dume to the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

“I’m sorry about Avenal,” Hayden said without preamble. “I’m sorry we ran off and left you there. I’ve always felt bad about leaving you and that boy who died.”

We stood thinking about that dead “boy,” who’d been the age Hayden was now. Who would always be that age. Her apology solved a mystery for me, or so I thought. I’d been wondering why Amos Decker, a man I’d never met, had asked for me by name. It could have been a client referral, as Hodson McLean believed. But I was now sure that Polly Hayden had done the referring as an overdue compensation for Avenal—or a penance.

“What does Decker need exactly?” I asked. “Besides a live-in cleaning staff.”

“I don’t know,” Hayden said. “Whatever it is, I hope you can help him. He thinks he has the world by the tail, but I think the world has him. Hollywood has him. Amos and all the other geniuses who think they’re going to remake this place are getting remade themselves. He doesn’t see it.”

“Doesn’t see what?” a voice behind us asked.