“Take the lid off, let it cool that way,” I suggested.
“So you can take a hard corner and spill hot coffee in my lap? Rather burn my tongue, thanks.”
“They went up like tiki torches,” I said.
“What?” Frank thought I meant his tongue.
“The trees. They were so dry they burst into flame before the fire even got there, just from the heat. They burned so hot and fast they took the house with them. If they’d been healthy, they might have braked the fire.”
Frank peeled the lid from the takeout coffee but spread his legs wide to prevent a sudden scalding of his trousers. “You think the trees were deliberately poisoned so they’d burn faster six months later?” He blew across the rim of the cup and took an exploratory sip. Still too hot. “That would make it first-degree murder and one with considerable foresight. Not many murderers think all that far in advance.”
“So Doubleday murdered someone and buried the body beneath the trees. You like that idea better?”
“Could be one other thing.”
“What’s that?”
Frank tried another sip and this time it went down without a face. He capped the cup and said, “The gardener is a lying drunk.”
The chauffeur’s address matched the brass numbers on a two-story, one-wing apartment building nestled into an oak-strewn hillside off Las Flores Canyon Road, one of a dozen routes that switch through the mountains between Pacific Palisades and the county line just beyond Mulholand. The building had survived the routine threats of earthquake, flood, and fire but had not weathered gracefully the slambang shoddiness of its construction—brown stucco sprayed over wire mesh for the exterior walls, gypsum wallboard for the interiors, studs and maybe a little fiberglass insulation in between—the kind of place where a guy slams the door too hard in 1A, half the tenants hug the carpet thinking the big one just hit. The rent was twice that of a similar apartment further inland, but as we climbed the sun-cracked stairway to the second floor the view opened to a striped horizon of sea and sky, and the vast populations in the cities over the hill seemed millions of miles away.
The chauffeur cast a broad-shouldered shadow when he stepped from the doorway of the top corner unit to greet us. My eyes flicked from the shadow to the real thing. His shadow didn’t lie. His nose flared too broadly and the lines in his skin etched too deeply to make his face merely pretty but he had a ruggedly sculptured look, as though nature had cut him like the wind and sea carve rock. Stick a Stetson on his head, he could have been a cigarette cowboy. He asked in a rumbling voice if we were the reporters he expected. Frank assured him we were and produced a business card to verify it. He glanced at the card and then at Frank, as though the face proved the name on the card.
“Scandal Times, sure, I see that at the supermarket checkout lines all the time. Can’t say I’ve read it, though.” He pocketed the card, led us into the living room of a one-bedroom apartment. Photographs crowded the bone-white walls from the entry to the back hall, where a closed door to the bedroom blocked the rest of the gallery from view. The photographs were nearly all variations of his striking face, taken in close proximity to movie stars, celebrities, and men whose satin windbreakers, beards, and baseball caps identified them as directors or producers. The one thing not a photograph on the walls was a poster of the movie Independence Day.
The chauffeur observed me staring at the poster and said, “I was in that picture. Played one of the pilots. That’s me and Will in the photograph to the side. Good buddy of mine.”
With a gregarious sweep of hand he invited me to take a closer look, and I did. He stood in pilot uniform, arm around the shoulders of the star of the film, who was looking far off camera as though unaware of the man grinning contentedly at his side.
“You’re an actor, then.” I said it brightly, as though impressed. It’s my job to photograph actors in candid situations, and I know how to pitch my voice to a flattering tone while ducking the bodyguards of the famously surly ones.
“Been in six films so far, over a dozen TV shows.”
“How’d you get your start?”
“Miami Vice. The casting director picked me out of the crowd. I was just a kid. It wasn’t a big part, just a couple of lines, but I caught the acting bug and haven’t been able to shake it since. I do commercials too, if the product’s right. I got to drive a bulldozer in the last one, played a construction worker with aching feet for a foot-cream company that gave me a whole case of the stuff after the shoot.”
I said, “Wow.”
“Works for women too. I’ll give you a tube before you go.”
I stepped back and framed his face in the viewfinder. He looked, directly into the lens and shifted his head to a rehearsed angle, aware of how he photographed and careful to position himself in a flattering pose. I saw nothing wrong with the pose but no matter how I shifted the lens his eyes refused to catch the light, like the blown-out window frames of a beautiful but gutted building.
“I want to make sure I got your name right. Mind spelling it for me?” Frank didn’t know the man’s last name at all. The sisters gave us his telephone number, said his name was Toy.
“Troy Davies,” the chauffeur said and spelled it out.
“Age?”
“Thirty-two.”
“You worked for Angela Doubleday, drove her around, what, Fridays and Sundays?”
“That’s right. Other days too, if she requested it.”
“Did she?”
“Did she what?”
“Request it?”
“About once a month. Sometimes more, sometimes less.”
“Where did you drive her?”
“Around, mostly.”
“Around were?”
“We rarely had a destination. We just drove around. Take me to Beverly Hills, she’d say, and I’d drive Sunset to Rodeo, cruise past the shops, then drive her around the big estates or maybe over to Bel Air. Sometimes, she’d tell me to take her to one address or another where she knew somebody.”
“Then you’d stop?”
“We’d slow down. She’d always make an excuse, bless her heart. Didn’t feel like talking to anybody that day, nobody expected her, that sort of thing. Then she’d ask me to take her home.”
Frank didn’t believe it. His voice jumped an octave. “You never stopped anywhere?”
“Her accountant’s. We stopped there. And the drive-through window at McDonald’s, though I don’t suppose that really counts. She liked the fries there, sometimes ordered a milk shake, too.”
Frank glanced around the walls again. He couldn’t decide whether the chauffeur was holding back the truth or telling it straight. He knew I’d followed Doubleday’s limousine. The chauffeur’s account jibed with what I’d seen. But he hoped for a more sensational angle. “Was she the only one you drove for?”
“She was my only private client. Sometimes I drive for a limo service when business is slow, like during the actors’ strike. You want tabloid fodder, boy, I can tell you some stories about celebrity sex and drugs in the backseat of a stretch Lincoln.”
“You seem to know an impressive number of show people.” As Frank spoke his shoulders rounded and he turtled down his head, playing the hapless fat-boy reporter researching a puff piece. “I remember seeing you in that movie too, you played a pilot, right?”
Davies bobbed his head. “That’s right. Will’s great to work with, real funny, just like you’d expect. We were ad-libbing all over the place, just bombing away.”
“What did Ms. Doubleday think about your acting career?”
“You’d think she’d be condescending as hell, wouldn’t you? How can you impress someone with four Oscar nominations? But she wasn’t. Acting gave us a special bond. She could relate to me. I don’t have her talent, that’s for sure, but she was real supportive.”
“When did you start working for her?”
“A little over a year ago, after her last driver moved on.”
“What do y
ou mean, moved on?”
“Quit, was fired, whatever.”
“Which one was it? Quit or fired?”
“Can’t tell you. Angela complained about him, I know that much. Didn’t treat her right, she said.”
“Didn’t treat her right how?”
“Like a star.”
“And you did?”
“She was a star. I didn’t treat her any different than she deserved.”
“What was she like to work with?”
“An angel.”
Frank plugged a pinky into his left ear and swirled it around like a Q-Tip. “I heard she was unhappy could be difficult even.”
“Angela was a diva. That was her temperament. Divas are supposed to be difficult. And she was a diva who cut herself off from her fans, her friends, maybe even her family for all I know. Divas are supposed to be center stage. They feed on it. She was like somebody starving but wouldn’t eat. So, yeah, she was unhappy. She was the most miserable person I ever met.”
“Then why an angel?”
“Because miserable as she was, she still carried herself with dignity and that something special stars have—charisma, great theatrical presence, whatever you want to call it. That woman would’ve been a star stranded all by herself on a desert island. I mean, the monkeys would line the trees like an audience, watching her.”
“When did you start sleeping with her?” Frank said it just bang like that, a fact that needed a simple confirmation of date. The glimmer in Davies’ eyes dimmed at the question, and then his face relaxed, as if willing, by an actor’s trick, all genuine emotion to sink beneath the surface of his features. He smiled like a salesman who sells his charm more than any product, no matter what he sells, and stepped to a rack of videocassettes beside the television.
“I made a show reel of my performances, you know, scenes from the films and TV shows I’ve been in. Why don’t you make yourselves comfortable on the couch and I’ll rack it up for you?”
Frank did not move so much as the tip of his pen. He said, “We know you were having an affair. We just don’t know exactly when it began. Was it love at first sight, or did it take time to develop?”
Davies’ muscled brows worked to summon the right combination of hurt and indignation, but the emotions weren’t genuine, and when he said, “I never slept with Ms. Doubleday,” he sounded like not even he believed it.
“That’s not what our eyewitnesses say.”
“You don’t know what it’s like to work in a small household.” Davies’ voice dropped and it forced Frank nearer to catch the words. “The gardener, I forget his name, is a drunk. The housekeepers, Maria and Yolanda, they’re nice women and I like them but they’re not show people. No way they could understand the relationship between me and Angela. They’re village women at heart, bossy and full of gossip. They see the way Angela looked at me or how I looked at Angela, and they think when the door closes we’re banging each other’s socks off. But that isn’t what it was like. We were both artists. I appreciated her because she was a brilliant actress, a theatrical artist of the first order, and she appreciated me because I knew just how good she was.”
“Did you love her?” I asked.
“Not in the way you think. She was my teacher.” He closed his eyes, struggling with a thought. “No. That doesn’t do her justice. She was more than my teacher. She was my master. Not because I was her chauffeur. That’s not what I mean. She was my acting master, and I was her disciple.”
That was when the first tear emerged. Most people hide their head or wipe their eyes in shame when they cry, but Davies tilted his chin up, so the tears might roll more slowly down his cheeks. That was the image Scandal Times would print, real tears to go with the story of blood boiled from Angela Doubleday’s body, and though I was suspicious of the staging, I was moved by the sincerity of his feeling for her. I shot out the roll and, knowing I couldn’t do any better, packed the camera away.
Frank thanked him for his cooperation and asked if it would be okay to call with follow-up questions, if any should occur to him.
“Sure thing, let me give you my mobile-phone number, in case I’m on the set when you call.”
Frank said he appreciated that, because deadlines were strict in the newspaper business and he might have to reach him in a hurry.
“Hold right there a second.” Davies trotted down the hall and we lost sight of him for a moment behind the bedroom door. He returned bearing gifts. “These are for you, my compliments,” he said and handed each of us an autographed eight-by-ten portrait, what’s called a head shot in the business, and a boxed tube of foot cream.
I suspected someone had been in my apartment after I keyed the top lock on my door and the key didn’t turn to the left. When the door is bolted the key turns twice to the left to disengage the dead bolt from the frame. I wrapped my hand around the untucked tail of my T-shirt and tested the knob. The knob resisted, firmly locked. I keyed open the door and paused at the threshold, listening. My boom box rested on its brick-and-board shelf next to the pair of pewter candlesticks I’d bought for mood lighting, in the unlikely event I slept with somebody. The Rott brushed my leg aside and trotted to the bathroom for a drink from the toilet bowl. Okay, I thought, I’m imagining things. Nothing looked out of place at first sight, but as I moved about the apartment, unpacking groceries and stripping down for a shower, little inconsistencies continued to jab at me: the closet door ajar though I preferred it shut tight, the clothes on shelves in the closet pressed too far back against the wall, the plastic bottle of ibuprofen placed at the rear of the medicine cabinet when I normally kept it in front. Nothing obviously out of place but off register just enough to spook me.
I asked the Rott, “What do you think? Your senses are better than mine. Smell anything different?”
He dug his nose into the doggy bowl and pushed it around the linoleum. I split open a two-pound wrap of hamburger and broke three eggs into the meat. “You want me to add salt and pepper to this? Maybe a little cayenne?”
The Rott stood unwavering at the corner where I’d fed him before, eyes suggesting I stop fooling around. I mixed the egg and hamburger by hand and set it down. “If you stick around much longer,” I said, “I’m going to turn into one of those fruitcakes talks to animals all the time.”
I washed my hands in the sink, and when I started to unpack my camera bag, I walked backward as though pulled by a string to the closet door. I knelt to the floor and slid out the two cardboard file boxes that hold my prints and negatives. Prints are filed alphabetically by subject matter and negatives by date of exposure, the date and subject of every shot I take recorded in cheap black notebooks. The notebooks look alike and someone not familiar with my system might not return them to the proper order. Someone hadn’t. They looked correct, stacked in the corner of the box as before, but the five notebooks had been misordered. The prints were correctly filed, but not the negatives. It’s not so easy to read which side is which on a negative and someone had flipped a few of them front to back.
The officer who answered the phone at the Pacific Area burglary desk had little difficulty understanding why I was calling to report that my apartment had been broken into, because the moment I admitted that I’d found no signs of forced entry and that nothing had been stolen, he concluded I was one of the many crazies who call the LAPD to report unprosecutable crimes such as aura theft and harassment from space aliens. “If something is stolen, ma’am, that’s burglary. If somebody witnesses an intruder breaking into your place of residence or you find signs of forced entry, that’s breaking and entering. But if nobody sees anything and nothing is stolen, it’s kind of like a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it. Hard to prove it made a sound.”
He had a sense of humor, this one.
The Rott thought we were going for a walk when I opened the door. I straddled his shoulders to hold him in place while I examined the dead bolt for signs it had been picked. There wasn’t anything to see. I thought bac
k to the morning I had left the apartment but could remember nothing that might have distracted me from engaging the dead bolt. Someone had picked the lock clean, then methodically searched the apartment, careful to return everything to its original position. Not wanting me to know he’d been inside, looking for something. Paying special attention to the boxes that held my prints and negatives. Maintaining the presence of mind to lock the doorknob before he left. Thinking I wouldn’t notice the dead bolt or would attribute it to my own failure to lock it.
Or I could have been imagining things.
I sat in the corner of the room and stared at the door. The Rott lay on his back, and when I scratched his chest his tongue lolled like a red rag. No matter how long or from what angle I looked at the door the conviction remained that someone had been in my apartment, and I didn’t know why. I picked up the landline and called Ben Turner for advice. I felt foolish explaining that, yes, I clearly remembered turning the dead bolt to the locked position before leaving the apartment and, no, nothing was taken, but absolutely yes, someone had rifled through my prints and negatives. He was good about it. Didn’t laugh once. Said if I thought somebody had been in my apartment, messed with my things, that was good enough for him.
I said, “I’m thinking it might be connected to the arson fire.”
“Sure, that’s a possibility.” His voice hitched, like he didn’t confuse possible for probable. “But it doesn’t matter so much who it was. Point is, you believe someone came in without your permission. What kind of hardware you got on the door?”
I described the locks to him. An hour later his Chevy Blazer wheeled into a parking spot up the block. He emerged from the cab carrying a gray toolbox and a thick paper bag with “Ace Hardware” lettered on the side. He shook a new dead-bolt lock and a six-pack of Miller from the sack. The toolbox was a big one, the top trays beveling up and out to configure a portable shop. I’ve always admired men familiar with the inner workings of everyday items most take for granted and who can fix anything mechanical with the right set of tools. I like to imitate what I admire and could have changed the lock myself with little trouble, but I appreciated his taking the time and effort to do it for me, even though I wasn’t sure a new lock was going to solve the problem. I popped the top from a Miller and handed it to him.
Burning Garbo Page 8
