20

KARISSA

On the morning after the funeral, Karissa drove to the far west side of Hollywood and parked in the free lot by the Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park and Mortuary. She was surprised by its deceptive size. Located on Glendon Avenue, the cemetery was tucked away between tall buildings and not visible to the street. Karissa had read up on the site before coming and learned that it originally opened in 1905, but it had been a burial ground since the late 1800s. Many of Hollywood’s elite were buried there, but the graveyard also contained many people who were not famous at all. Besides traditional graves in the ground with markers and tombstones, crypts in walls surrounded the property.

It was a fresh, clear morning, and already tourists were wandering around the grounds searching for their favorite stars’ resting places. Even Karissa was impressed by the roster. She’d known about some of them like Marilyn Monroe and Natalie Wood, but she also saw crypts and markers for Burt Lancaster, Don Knotts, Ray Bradbury, Hugh Hefner, Fanny Brice, Truman Capote, Dean Martin, and so many more that it was overwhelming. Karissa had to smile at the humor exhibited on some of the stones. Jack Lemmon’s read simply, “Jack Lemmon in,” as if it were a movie poster. Billy Wilder’s epitaph was “I’m a Writer but then Nobody’s Perfect.”

Karissa finally found what she was looking for. It was a simple marker flat on the ground, not far from where Eva Gabor was interred.

BLAIR KENDRICK 1928–1949

That was it. Nothing to indicate who she was. No one had placed any flowers on the grave.

Karissa wished she had thought to bring a bouquet or an arrangement. She sighed, not particularly understanding why she had felt the need to visit the cemetery. Looking at her watch, she realized she had to get to the Stormglove office. It was going to be a busy day.

Late afternoon. Karissa shut down her computer and prepared to head home. Marcello had left earlier, as he had some personal errands and also wanted to check out something. It had been a long day of reaching out to contacts at various studios. Both she and Marcello had gone through their address books in attempts to find a producer or company executive who might be willing to listen to their pitch to make the Blair Kendrick movie. Karissa had also written a long, passionate letter to Barbara at the festival, hoping that she would listen to reason. Perhaps she would realize that whatever pressure Ultimate Pictures was putting on her to drop Stormglove from the endeavor was steeped in the personal history of the Hirsch family. That alone should not be criteria for canceling Stormglove’s involvement.

Karissa was also intrigued about the older woman they had seen at Ray Webster’s funeral—the one with the white hair who had played the piano. It was entirely possible that she had been a contemporary of Ray—and, in turn, Hank Marley. How could they find her again? Gregory Webster and his wife Carol had also piqued Karissa’s interest with their surprising reaction to her approach. More important, they had seemed genuinely unsettled by her presence.

And then there was the man in the car across the street, watching them with binoculars. Could it be possible that the Websters knew he was out there? Who was that guy?

Her cell phone rang before she stood to leave her desk. Marcello.

“Yes, sir?” she answered.

“Barry Doon.”

“What?”

“I believe that’s his name. The guy who was watching us at the funeral. In the BMW.”

“Oh my God, Marcello, are you a goddamned mind reader? I was just thinking about him!”

“Well, I think I found out who he is; that’s what I went to check out. He’s an executive vice president at Ultimate Pictures, but he’s really a modern studio fixer. He makes the studio’s problems go away.”

“His name is Barry Doon?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“How did you find out?”

“I reached out to my bro, Lewis, in LiUNA, the utility workers’ union for our favorite industry—Hollywood motion pictures. He was recently on a couple of productions at Ultimate. I described the guy, and Lewis thought it might be Doon. Are you still at the office? Bring up Google.”

“I was just about to leave. I’ll look on my phone.” She put him on speaker and switched apps. “Okay, I’m typing in his name.”

There were a few hits for Barry Doon—IMDb and a few mentions from trade sites.

“Click on Images,” Marcello prompted.

Sure enough, the bald man appeared in a handful of candid shots.

“Oh my God, that’s him.”

Doon was in a couple of pictures with Justin Hirsch, the eighty-year-old head of the studio, and with various stars in others. There weren’t many.

“Now we know what we’re dealing with,” Marcello said.

On the way home, Karissa stopped at her Chase bank drive-through ATM to get some cash. She slipped her debit card into the slot, punched in her PIN, and requested a hundred dollars. A message appeared on the screen—INSUFFICIENT FUNDS.

“What the hell?” she said aloud. Reached through the driver’s-side window once again, she punched in her request a second time. INSUFFICIENT FUNDS.

Now alarmed, she went back to the main menu and pressed the command to see her balance. Her heart pounded in her chest when she saw the result—$0.00.

“No, no, no, that’s impossible!” she snapped. She retrieved her card and drove out of the lane. She was about to pull into the bank’s parking lot when she saw that the bank had closed for the day.

“No!”

She found a customer service number at the back of her debit card and, using the Bluetooth capability in her car, gave the voice command for her phone to dial it. Nothing happened. Karissa pulled her cell phone out of her purse and manually dialed the number. Again, it was as if the phone was dead. It was turned on, but the app didn’t work.

“Oh my God …” Now, panic overtook anger.

What to do? It was after hours. Should she go to a police station?

No, the Stormglove office had a landline. She’d head back there.

Shaking, Karissa drove out of the lot and merged onto the road back to La Brea. The entire way she cursed and hit her fist on the steering wheel, urging the traffic to move faster. It was maddening. The rush-hour chaos on the Hollywood streets bottlenecked and eventually the Murano came to a complete stop two blocks away from the office. Tears formed in her eyes as she prayed that she hadn’t been hacked. Perhaps it was just a freak computer glitch going on with her bank account and phone.

Finally, traffic moved. She made it to the storefront and parked in her designated spot. Karissa got out, ran up the outer stairs to the door with the Stormglove logo on it, unlocked it, and went inside. She grabbed the handset off the phone on her desk and—there was no dial tone.

“No!”

She slammed the receiver down and collapsed in her chair.

And then Marcello rushed in, his eyes wide, sweat pouring down his face. He had his cell phone in hand.

“Karissa! My goddamned phone isn’t working. I came back to use—”

“I know—mine, too, and our landline is dead.”

“Wait, what? Yours, too?”

“It’s worse than that, Marcello. My bank account has been emptied. I stopped by Chase on the way home, and there’s no money.” She slapped a hand on the desk. “Damn, I didn’t think to check the Stormglove account, I just looked at my personal one. Oh, Jesus, what the fuck, Marcello?”

“What? Your bank account? What about mine?”

They drove together to another Chase and discovered that the Stormglove account had been emptied and frozen, as well as Marcello’s personal checking account. Then they visited an AT&T outlet to inquire about their cell phones. They were told that both accounts had been closed a few hours earlier. They filed official reports of fraud. The representative worked on their accounts and, after nearly an hour, eventually got everything restored. Marcello immediately called his wife and asked her to check other personal financial accounts held in her name. Then he called Stormglove’s attorney, a man named Tony Davenport. Karissa phoned Chase customer service and reported what had happened.

When all was said and done, the couple was reassured that everything would be fixed and that no funds would be permanently lost. However, it might take up to forty-eight hours for the “investigation” to be completed and the money returned.

Deciding that they both needed a drink, Karissa and Marcello went to the Parlor on Melrose Avenue and ordered some stiff ones.

As they collapsed in weariness from the adrenaline expenditure, Karissa asked, “So is this the work of Barry Doon and Justin Hirsch?”

Marcello just looked at her. “Who else?”

It was after sunset when Karissa reached her home in Sugar Hill. She pulled into the garage, got out of the car, and unlocked the garage door to the house. It still felt as if she was entering a palace much too large for a single person to occupy. It was too soon for Karissa to feel completely “at home” here, but she did love it. She couldn’t wait to throw a party in the house, but that would have to wait until she had something to celebrate. The start of production on a new film would be nice, but even that was the least of her worries after the day’s events.

Karissa walked through the kitchen to the hallway that led to the entry foyer. Mail was on the floor, having fallen through the slot. She opened the front door and stepped out on the porch to scan the street, making sure no suspicious BMWs were in surveillance mode. Then she noticed a small package wrapped in brown paper at her feet. It was slightly too large to have fit through the mail slot. The package was addressed to her, but there was no postage on it. It had been hand-delivered by someone. Karissa took a quick look at the street again and returned inside, locking the door behind her.

Yesterday she would have thought she was being paranoid. There hadn’t been a real reason to fear Barry Doon or any other studio henchmen that Ultimate Pictures sent out to intimidate her. Hollywood could be a rough town, but there usually wasn’t a need to be overly dramatic.

But after what had happened that day, the game had changed.

Justin Hirsch had accomplished what he had set out to do—kick Stormglove off the festival project and scare them with financial terrorism—but there wasn’t a legal foot for him to stand on when it came to stopping an independent production of their film. She was reminded of how William Randolph Hearst had done everything in his power to halt the making of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. RKO Pictures refused to buckle under Hearst’s pressure, and the picture got made anyway. Unfortunately, none of Hearst’s newspapers would advertise the movie, and Kane tanked at the box office during its initial run. It was nearly two decades later that the film was dusted off, reevaluated, and declared one of the greatest motion pictures ever made.

Not that she and Marcello could produce anything of that caliber. But still …

Karissa took the mail into the kitchen. She disposed of the junk in the recycling bin and then opened the small package with a pair of scissors. The box contained a jewelry bag made of black velvet, tied with a golden drawstring.

What?

Karissa undid the easy knot and pulled the thing open.

The bag held three old coins. Karissa poured them out into her palm. She didn’t recognize them as anything in circulation today, and she wasn’t completely sure they were from the United States until she examined them. One was about the size of a quarter, a very dull and faded silver, with a man’s head in profile wearing a wreath of leaves in his hair, like a Roman orator. The year on the coin was 1901 and the words “In God We Trust” arced above the head. Another was a discolored gold or bronze with an Indian head on it, dated 1911. The back featured an eagle, with the words “United States of America” above it and “Ten Dollars” beneath the bird.

A ten-dollar coin? What would it be worth now?

The third coin was also a dull silver color. It had a woman in profile wearing a headband with the word “Liberty” written on it. The year marked it to be from 1817.

“Oh, my Lord,” Karissa muttered. “That’s old.”

What is this all about? Who put this box on my porch?

Then she recalled—when Eldon Hirsch was killed, his safe had been opened and robbed of a rare coin collection.

“Oh, shit.”