I kept ahead of João, always hopping from country to country and putting up stores, but when Jonny and Simone showed up at the same time three years ago, I knew I had to do something. And I knew what to do.
Going through the House of Liberté business files Bernie left behind, I found out that in all the dealings Bernie had with João, any money owed the Portuguese was sent to offshore accounts. In other words, João had the same philosophy about paying taxes that Leo had. Then I called Asher van Franck in Antwerp to find out what other deals João had been in. You couldn’t swing a dead cat in the European diamond business without Franck knowing about it.
I supplied the information to the Portuguese taxing authority. The source was supposed to remain confidential, but I had no doubt João would realize who turned him in.
I heard rumors from diamond traders that João had serious medical problems, but I would have laid odds that it was his way of ducking the bullet when tax investigators showed up at his house.
Now Jonny was back in L.A., at the same time I was. It probably was a coincidence, she liked the town, and by now she had to be around nineteen or twenty, old enough to do what she wanted. Maybe she was going to school here.
Despite the logic, I still had a hollow, exposed feeling between my shoulder blades as I walked down the street. But I shook it off. I had something more urgent to do than worry about being murdered by João. I had to wrestle a movie star who had big claws.
Walking down the street, I gave Cross a call.
“Still interested in security work?” I asked, when he got on the phone.
“Hey, not in L.A. They shoot straighter here than Angola. And for less reason.”
“Grab your starlet friend. I’m going to a charity banquet and need some backup.”
“What kind of charity banquet do you need backup at? Something thrown by the Cripps and the Bloods—at the same time?”
“Worse, I’m taking on Shelly Lane. She ripped off a necklace from me and I have to rip it back—literally.”
“Kiss your ass good-bye if you plan to mess with that woman. I hear she has a full-metal-jacket heart and a cunt that’s a revolving door. Megan was on location with her for a picture. The hotel staff claimed that when Lane called for room service, she really meant she wanted to be serviced. She likes a good fuck, but you fuck with her, you better start counting your balls.”
“Bring along Megan. Tell her I have the inside say on a part for her, a TV show that’s already short-listed for an Emmy.”
“Shit, bubba, look at you, hardly been in town and you’re already talking like one of those fuckin’ guys who hang around Spago’s and Le Dome, laying out lines of bullshit about how they’re on the A list.”
I almost said at least I wasn’t laying out lines of coke—which was more than I could say for Cross. We made arrangements for me to pick them up in a limo later and hung up.
Cross worried me. He backed me up in Angola, I owed him. When the mine came in, I took care of the debt with money I’d promised. And I was still ready to help him out if he asked.
He walked out of the mine deal with a cool two million, most of which he stashed offshore so he wouldn’t have to pay taxes. Every time I hit L.A., I looked him up. And every time he had put on more weight, ballooning up until he looked like a fat TV comic. And he had a runny nose from his sinuses rotting from the powder he sniffed. He was into drugs, big time. His apartment smelled like a dope den.
His girlfriend, Megan, was okay, she was worried about him, too. But she was too busy trying to make it as an actress to give him the support he needed. Not that he would have taken it if it was offered. Cross was a stubborn bastard. He didn’t take well to criticism or anyone sticking their nose in his business. I made a crack once that he was sniffin’ and smokin’ all the money he earned in Angola and got growls in return.
I asked Cross and Megan to come to the banquet with me so I would have company. I didn’t think there would be any real trouble with Shelly Lane. I’d just embarrass her into handing over the necklace. Her bodyguard would have to stay outside. Her reputation as a scrapper didn’t bother me, either.
What could a hundred-and-twenty-pound woman do against a hundred-and-eighty-pound stud like me?
I should have remembered that old expression about hell having no fury like a woman scorned. It applied to diamonds as well as love.
70
We climbed out of the limo in front of the banquet hall on Avenue of the Stars in Century City. News cameras, paparazzi, tourists, and star-spotters were lined up to see who got out. I heard the crowd immediately designate me as a nobody, Cross as a probable rap record producer, and a few recognized Megan as the actress in a couple of movies and a Friends episode.
We flowed inside with the other guests. The reception room, built around a fountain with grinning stone dolphins spitting water, was crowded with stylish people wearing designer clothes, pretending they enjoyed drinking cheap champagne out of plastic champagne glasses. The dinner room was up the stairways to the right, but I hoped I’d spot Shelly Lane and be out of there without having to sit down for two hours of boring dinner speeches.
I got separated from Cross and Megan when Megan spotted a producer she wanted to cozy up to. The stairs leading to the dinner room would make a good place to get a bird’s-eye view of the people in the room, so I started pushing my way through the crowd.
I had just reached the fountain when I spotted a woman at the top of the stairs and a bolt of surprise hit me.
Marni.
I almost shouted her name.
She was with several other people, moving out of my sight, in the direction of the dining room. She disappeared and that’s when I read the large banner hanging from the ceiling over the stairway: WORLD FOOD EVENT.
I hadn’t even bothered noting what charity the banquet was for.
I started pushing harder through the crowd. I bumped into a woman who spun around, ready to throw a drink in my face.
“Watch where—”
She stopped and grinned. It was Shelly Lane.
“Well, if you’re going to push me, pal, I’ll tell you where my erogenous zones are.”
“Shelly Lane, as I live and breathe.”
“The one and only,” she said.
She was wearing the diamond necklace. It looked stunning on her. She also had had a few too many to drink. Her grin was a little lewd, a little cockeyed. Everyone knew she was a lush, so she had probably started long before the banquet.
“Now that you know my name, tell me yours.” She leaned forward, breathing whiskey in my face. That wasn’t champagne in her glass. “Tell me that you’re not some fuckin’ actor looking for a role, tell me that you’re one of those billionaire dot-com nerds who are fuckin’ stupid about everything but a computer and who’ll finance a movie for a blowjob.”
“Right now, I’m in the repossession business.”
“Repossession? You mean like cars and refrigerators?”
“I mean like diamonds. I’m Win Liberte, and that’s my necklace you’re wearing.”
She felt the necklace. “You’re the guy who gave me the necklace?”
“I’m the guy you stole the necklace from. You can either give it back, or I’m going to embarrass you by taking it.”
“Embarrass me?” She shook with laughter. “Why you poor stupid boob, you don’t know what fuckin’ embarrassment is.” She leaned in closer with ninety-proof breath. “How’s this for embarrassment?”
She threw her drink in my face.
“Fuckin’ bitch!”
She hit me in the face with her glass and cocked back her fist to slug me. I caught her right cross as it came at me, twisting her around and lifting her up by her butt and threw her right into the fountain.
Just as she left my arms, going airborne, a paparazzi’s hidden camera flashed.
Everyone in the place froze as Shelly Lane made a big splash.
Cross was suddenly at my side, grabbing my arm.
/> “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
71
“I can’t believe it was her after all these years.”
“You sure it was her?” Cross asked.
“It was Marni. It’s also the organization she works for, that world food group.”
We were in the limo, heading downtown, which didn’t mean the same thing as heading to “downtown” New York or San Francisco or most other big cities where the action was. Unlike other metro areas, there was really no heart to this town. There was little in downtown L.A. except high-rise towers of law offices and accounting firms, government buildings, some convention hotels, and hovels for the poor. The only reason you went downtown was to appear in court or go to a meeting at your lawyer’s office. And then it wasn’t that pleasant, even in the daytime.
The homeless exercised some vague constitutional and moral right to camp out on the green area alongside the government buildings, stopping on their way to the soup kitchen to piss on the sidewalks and panhandle. Along with the homeless, the town was populated by a lot of hard-working poor people, mostly Latinos who lacked money and green cards, but busted their butts working jobs no one else would do. They lived on beans and tortillas, often sleeping on the floor, six to a room, so they could send a few dollars home each month.
We were on our way to the hottest new restaurant in town located in a warehouse in the almost abandoned downtown industrial area, the kind of neighborhood where you could plan on getting murdered if your car broke down. L.A. restaurants were like music groups—they popped up, hit the limelight if they were an in-place that people went to be seen . . . and then another one opened and the old one faded away. The highs and lows in the restaurant business weren’t caused by the movement of great chefs from one establishment to another, but the movement of people in “the industry.” No one gave a damn that they were eating mediocre food at an outrageous price. If a star frequented the restaurant, they wanted in. When the star moved on to another restaurant, so did the crowd.
For me, Cross’s suggestion that we hit this place had the extra appeal of being a neighborhood where we wouldn’t run the risk of running into Shelly Lane’s bodyguard. Cross assured me she would send the guy out on a kill-or-cripple mission. We hadn’t stayed around to fish Lane or the necklace out of the pond.
Cross, and a lot of other hip people, thought it was cool to go to a restaurant in the worst neighborhood in town, an area where you had to walk over blood, dogshit, and worse things on the sidewalk to get inside a converted warehouse with cement walls and floor and exposed plumbing and air vents.
I thought it was stupid. I wasn’t impressed with L.A. restaurants, period. There was always something too parvenu, nouveau riche about them. In New York, waiters had an attitude, one that was often mouthy and pugilistic. In L.A., they didn’t insult you or start a good argument. Instead, they acted like they weren’t really waiters at all but a Somebody, that you were privileged to get waited on by them and they were only serving you while they waited for the next casting call.
But I didn’t argue with Cross about his choice of restaurants. I owed him another one, he’d gotten me out of the banquet hall before Lane’s bodyguard found me and ate me.
“Did Marni see you?” he asked.
“No, but by now she’ll know who caused the splash at her fund-raiser.”
I called my PR person, Pat, the moment I was inside the limo. I instructed her to call Lane’s PR person and have them concoct a story as to why I threw the star into the fountain. I didn’t want a scandal about the necklace. Publicity was good, but a scandal could turn off future wearers and open the door for other jewelry firms. Her immediate reaction was a lover’s quarrel. I told her, “I don’t care if you say we were fighting over our brands of lipstick, just keep the necklace out of it.”
When I hung up the phone, Cross asked, “How come you never contacted her, all the times you’ve been in L.A.?”
“I didn’t know she was here. In the back of my mind I imagined she’d be off in a jungle somewhere, handing out food to hungry people. Besides, she let me know in no uncertain terms that she didn’t want to see me again.”
“Shit, I’ve tried that and you keep landing on my doorstep. Why don’t you get off your high horse and contact the woman? I can tell from that wimpy sound that your voice gets when you mention her name, that you’re hurting for this lady.”
He was right. I dialed Pat again.
“At the banquet, there was a woman named Marni Jones. She might have changed her name if she married, but there aren’t that many Marnis in this world. Find out her address, where she works, if she’s married.”
“That might be tough. If this woman isn’t somebody with a capital S, you literally have to hire an investigator.”
“Whatever it takes, and I want the information yesterday.”
“Of course. And about the splash, at the banquet, the story being fed the press is that you and Shelly Lane were a number, she kicked you out of bed, and you went into a jealous rage. She’s looking into a restraining order because you won’t take no for an answer and have been parked outside her place for several nights in a row.”
“Jesus Christ, why didn’t she just tell them I’m HIV positive, too?”
“Don’t suggest it—and pray she doesn’t think of it. By the way, she wants matching bracelets for the necklace. She says you owe it to her for all the publicity. You can bet that picture will make the front page of whatever tabloid that paparazzi works for.”
“Tell Shelly if she ever wants to leave the movie business, I know people in the Mafia who’d hire her as a negotiator. I’ll have the bracelets messengered over.”
“Oh, and one more thing. She likes the way you manhandled her. She wants to see you again.” Pat’s voice was coy.
“You know, I don’t think Shelly Lane takes manhandling well, no matter what she says. What do you think the odds are that she’d have me chopped up for dog food if I actually showed up at her place?”
“First she’d fuck your pants off. Shelly isn’t one to waste a good man.”
We signed off and I turned to Cross.
“I’ve been busy, too busy for the Marnis of this world, a woman who needs time and affection. That’s the only excuse I have. But when I saw her, it felt like someone had kicked me in the balls. What does that sound like to you?”
“You’re fucked, man, it’s love, not lust. Lust is when it feels like she’s licking your balls.”
Something else was bugging me. Earlier, when I picked him up at his place, Cross had come out of his apartment after Megan, giving her a few minutes to talk to me before he got in the limo. She told me that she was worried about him, that he was shooting everything up his nose. “He’s starting to sell things,” she told me.
I promised her I would help in any way I could. When a druggie starts to sell personal effects, you know everything’s gone to hell. I wanted to do something for him, but dealing with him, trying to get him to take a helping hand, would be as easy as sticking your hands through the bars to pet a hungry tiger.
“You’re wasted, sitting around on your ass,” I told him, as we neared the restaurant. “Clipping coupons from your investments, that’s no way for a real man to do it. Why don’t you come back to work with me? You can start out as head of security at the Beverly Hills store. You like it and I’ll make you national security director.”
“Do I look like I need a job, dick-head?”
I sighed. “No, actually, you look like you need electro-compulsive shock treatment and a frontal lobotomy. And maybe a penile implant.”
72
A week later, I sat in my car across the street from a day-care center in Brentwood and re-read the investigator’s report that sent me there.
Marni wasn’t married, at least not presently. Whether she’d gotten married sometime overseas, the investigator didn’t know. But she did have a child, a five-year-old girl. She dropped the child off each morning and picked her up in
the afternoon. The tough schedule single moms and dads have to tow.
Her home address, make and model of car, unlisted phone number, social security number, credit history, employment history, all were in the packet. That stuff was easy to come by. Any good investigator had a contact at a credit-reporting agency who supplied credit reports for a price. Nowadays, of course, the provider of the information might be a computer hacker.
He also wasn’t able to tell me if there was a man in her life or if she lived with someone. She lived in a “security” apartment building and he couldn’t get in and talk to neighbors but didn’t see any man with her as she came and went.
One thing I knew—since she had a five-year-old kid, she hadn’t waited long to get involved with some other guy after she walked out on me. My ego told me she went to someone else on the rebound.
What I didn’t know was what my reception would be. What do I say to an ex-lover who I hadn’t seen in over six years and who probably thought of me as someone who lied to her and betrayed her?
Add in the big splash I made at the charity banquet, and she probably thought I was a madman. Worse, she probably thought I lived in Los Angeles and wondered why I had never contacted her. She might have even read about me in the papers before the Shelly Lane fiasco.
She hadn’t done badly for herself since dumping me. She was now a full, tenured professor at UCLA with a long string of published works about the socio-economic problems of the Third World. The titles alone looked intimidating. She had a UN award for her work and had attended a luncheon at the White House. I had an invitation to a White House luncheon, too, but it came with a string—a campaign donation. I passed on spending half a million on a plate of chicken salad.
Heat of Passion Page 33
