I couldn’t deny it.
“That Rottweiler, he’s a special animal. Most animals would have died from shock with that kind of wound. I’ve handled animals all my life, and I still don’t know how you managed to carry him in here all by yourself. I’m pleased to know he has a special owner.” She paused, but not long enough to allow my escape, and the lines in her forehead deeply creased to underscore her sincerity. “If you see Angela Doubleday again, tell her there are a lot of people who considered her a role model, back when we were young women. Tell her we’re with her in spirit, will you? There isn’t much we can do for her except watch her films and admire the women she played, but maybe it will help if she knows people still care about her.”
As I drove north to Malibu I wondered what a strange world it had become, where the outsize personality required for celebrity could be so easily confused for substance and where people who performed work that really mattered to the welfare of the world looked for meaning to those whose most significant efforts produced nothing more than a few hours of flickering light, and who couldn’t guide their own lives without guile and tempest. What was it about movie stars that so touched the imagination of even the most dedicated and intelligent? Troy Davies wasn’t the only one who sought to fill a personal void with the shimmering persona of a star. Hundreds of millions around the globe sought daily refuge in the cinema to watch beams of light play upon lives that seemed to matter much more than our own. We could be ugly and unloved, broke, boring, and unhappy, unlucky not just in love but in every choice we ever made, but when the houselights dimmed we became, like everyone else in the audience, the same characters living the same story. For a few brief hours we might experience lives more coherent than our own, shaped not by raw chance but by the rules of drama, lived not in obscurity but glorified in shifting light, personified by actors gifted with beauty, charm, arid soulfulness we wished for ourselves. What right did I or any other tabloid journalist have to throw on the lights in that dark place and reveal that we filled ourselves with a blank, white screen?
Arlanda was standing at the checkout counter, signing charge slips, when I walked into the lobby of the Malibu Beach Inn. She looked good, long hair jet-black against an ivory suit that had been worn the day before by a Rodeo Drive mannequin. The bag at her side was new, too, a beige and gold model initialed LV.
“I have to get to the airport earlier than I thought to pick up Aunt Angela,” she said and gave me the side of her cheek to kiss to avoid smudging her lipstick. “I’m sorry I won’t have much time to talk.”
I shrugged, as though any time was better than none, and when she had signed her last slip, we wandered to the patio at the back of the hotel, overlooking the ocean. I felt rough and dowdy next to her. She kept her distance at the rail, said, “My aunt told me you saved her life.”
“Your aunt is a confused woman right now. The way I remember it, she saved mine.”
“She never would have escaped from that monster without your help. She thinks I was the reason you were there, that I sent you to find her. She thinks I saved her life, too. Did you tell her that?”
“I said a lot of things in the heat of the moment.”
The sun hung midmorning low behind us and cast the sky above the sea into hues of deep, silky blue. Pelicans skimmed the rolling surface just beyond the wave break, their heavy-beaked flights awkward until they soared skyward with sudden, improbable grace and dove at shadows below the surface.
“I know I behaved badly,” Arlanda said. “I said some really ugly things to you the last time we met.”
She didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t answer.
“And still, after what I said, you lied to protect me. You made me look better to my aunt than I really am.”
“When somebody points a shotgun at you, you say whatever you think will keep the trigger from pulling. I didn’t lie to save you. I said what I said to save me. I thought Davies would be less likely to shoot if he thought you sent me.”
“When I think about how much she must have suffered …” She stained her teeth with lipstick, worrying her bottom lip. “Everybody was telling me she was dead except you, and nothing else you said proved true. Do you blame me for not believing you? How was I to know?”
We both stared at the sea.
“Troy Davies was a monster,” she said. “I’m glad he’s dead.”
Arlanda had no truer idea of what happened in Lake Tahoe than my parole officer or the Rott’s vet or the newspaper accounts trumpeting Doubleday’s daring rescue. The reports were accurate in an unintentional way. I had saved Angela Doubleday—her identity if not her life—though my meddling had resulted in Troy Davies’ death. I wasn’t sure I wanted sole responsibility for the way things turned out.
“You believed me at first,” I said. “And you sent me to Harry Winston, which led directly to Troy Davies. The only reason I did some of the things I did was because I wanted to help you. Maybe your intentions weren’t always crystal clear, but you were just as important as anyone else in finding your aunt, and maybe the most important one of all.”
Her enormous eyes hung on mine, wondering if I believed what I said or merely wished not to speak ill of the dead, my kind words a eulogy of sorts for our personal relationship, which seemed about to be buried. I don’t know what conclusion she reached, but she offered a tentative smile. “My aunt has asked me to help her get through the next few weeks.”
“Good idea. I suspect she needs someone she can trust right now.”
“Longer than the next few weeks, actually. She wants me to move in with her, put the kids into private school. I’ll be something like her secretary. She said she wants to act again, she’ll need someone to help organize her personal life.”
“They call it a personal assistant in the business.”
She laughed, said, “You can see how much I know.”
“Does the offer appeal to you?”
“Compared to selling real estate in a town where the only thing more worthless than the land is my sex life? In a word, yes.”
I picked up her bag, walked her out to her rental car.
“We’ll be staying at the Beverly Wilshire,” she said.
The most luxurious hotel in Beverly Hills.
“You’ll fit right in.”
“Think so? I’m a little nervous, seeing my aunt again.” She opened the door, keys in hand, ready to go. “How’s Baby? I’ve been so worried about him.”
“The vet thinks he might limp a bit, but other than that he’ll make a full recovery,” I said.
“I’m so happy to hear he’s okay.” She offered me her cheek to kiss again, shut the door, and wasted no time accelerating onto the coast road. Some people aren’t good at good-byes. Maybe she was one of them. Maybe Arlanda and I had learned too much about each other too quickly. Not all friendships are for life, and the ones that fail to endure are no less genuine during their brief moments than those that thrive. I should have expected to see more of her, now that she was moving to Los Angeles, but I feared I’d never see her again, except in passing, at a premiere or awards function, where she’d be escorting her aunt down the red carpet and I’d be one of the jostling horde behind the gilded ropes, popping flashes and shouting blandishments.
Ben looked every one of his years on the day the hospital released him, shuffling unsteadily down the corridor with his neck braced and left arm in a shoulder cast. I’d bought him a pair of chinos a size too big, a button-up flannel shirt, and baseball cap, and he wore those for his release, one arm of the shirt cut away to accommodate the cast. The cap covered a twelve-stitch wound at the crown of his head. He refused my arm, intent on walking out the front door unassisted. Past the entrance, the walkway ramped toward the sidewalk to allow wheelchair access. He leaned back in anticipation of pitching forward, as though the angle in front of him was as sharp as the descent of a roller-coaster ride. The brace on his neck kept him from looking down, he said. When the ground sloped away, he couldn’t se
e his feet.
I extended my arm a second time. He took it.
“They offered me a wheelchair, the sons of bitches.”
“Who?”
“The doctors.”
“Why’s that?”
“They didn’t think I should walk out.”
“You’re showing them, aren’t you?
“Damn right. Bastards would be happier seeing me go out in a box than on my two good legs.”
“They probably thought walking wouldn’t get you out the door fast enough. With your attitude, you’re lucky they didn’t send you out by cannon.”
He grunted at me, annoyed that I wasn’t taking his side. I popped the, Caddy’s trunk and tossed his kit bag into one of the boxes that contained the possessions I’d scavenged from the ruins of his trailer. The sight of his things surprised him, and he picked out a framed publicity still of a costumed Angela Doubleday from Desire Under the Elms, immersed in the role of Anna. The glass in the frame had broken, and shards obscured the inscription she’d penned at the bottom.
“I wasn’t able to save much,” I said.
“You saved more than I expected. I thank you.” He started to tear up, and that embarrassed him. He turned away and shuffled to the passenger side. “I miss seeing that funny old toothless dog of yours. I trust he’s mending a bit faster than I am?”
We ate at a café a few blocks from the beach, one of those places with waitresses old enough to be your mother and a nine-page book of a menu, three pages for breakfast alone. We talked about Arlanda’s new life as Doubleday’s personal assistant, neither of us mentioning that we would be unlikely to see much of her in that new role. Ben waited for the food to arrive before he said, “What I don’t understand is how the coroner misread the X rays to begin with. A lot of grief could have been avoided if he’d said it wasn’t her from the get go.”
“He didn’t misread the X rays, not really.”
He salted his eggs vigorously, glanced up at me with a dubious look, and shook the pepper so forcefully I thought he might pop the head off. “He said the body was Angela’s while the lady was being held prisoner up in Lake Tahoe. If that isn’t misidentifying a body, I don’t know what is.”
“I didn’t say he didn’t misidentify the body.”
“Didn’t you? I thought you did.”
“I said he didn’t misread the X rays.”
“Same difference.” He picked up a piece of toast, glanced at the sealed minicontainers of butter and jam, tried to figure out how he was going to get his toast buttered with only one arm.
“I’m not trying to cover up for the guy.” I peeled open the butter and jam containers, picked up his other piece of toast, dipped my knife into the butter. “But the forgery was clever, and he had no reason to suspect it, not at first.”
His face reddened, and he slapped his knife to the table. “I’m not helpless. I can butter my own damn toast, thank you.”
I slathered on the jam and took a bite. “I’m not buttering your toast, I’m stealing it,” I said.
“Go on, eat my whole damn breakfast if you want. Guess I’ve been spoiling for a fight ever since the morning.” He wiped his eyes dry with his napkin, said, “Forgive me if I’m such a dumb old man, but what the hell are you talking about? What forgery?”
“The X rays.”
“Can you do that? Forge them?”
“Takes time and equipment, but the Belgards proved it could be done.”
“Okay, you got me hooked now.” He took a big bite of egg, part of the yolk dripping down his chin. “How’d they do it?”
“Davies provided them with plaster casts of Doubleday’s teeth, one that showed all her dental work. They’d smuggled a cadaver out of UCLA Medical School and drilled and filled her mouth, taking X rays in between, so every one of Doubleday’s fillings showed up on the final X ray.”
While I was talking, Ben snatched one of the strips of bacon from my plate and popped it into his mouth. “Then they broke into her dentist’s office and switched out the X rays from her file?”
“Didn’t even have to break in. Walked in when nobody was working the reception desk, hid in an unused room until closing, then walked out. The chart matched the X rays, the X rays looked like they’d been taken over a period of twenty years, and most importantly, the last X ray taken matched the teeth found in the ruins of Doubleday’s estate. The coroner had no way of telling it was a forgery, except for one thing, and there was no way he was going to look for it. No reason to suspect anything, right?”
“What was the thing? The one thing he missed?”
“Two mouths, twice the number of fillings. The first X ray, supposedly taken when Doubleday was under thirty, already had the dental work of a woman of fifty—the age of the cadaver—plus all of Doubleday’s original cavities.”
“You figured all this out?”
“Doubleday’s dentist did.”
That satisfied him through half of an egg and a couple sips of coffee. “So you figured it had to be Davies because he was the only one who could have known the Belgards?”
“Pretty much.”
“You followed him to Lake Tahoe and he caught you sneaking around the cabin. That the gist of what happened?”
“My mobile phone rang—can you believe it?”
“That was a stupid thing to do. You want to know why?”
“I’ll remember to turn off my phone next time, don’t worry.”
“The phone isn’t the issue. Going to the cabin was a stupid thing to do, period.”
“Stupid?” Nobody had said that to me before. “Why so?”
“One of the most important lessons you learn as a cop is you don’t cowboy around. You do something the least bit dangerous, you have backup. You went in there without backup. That’s why it was a stupid thing to do. Understand?”
I put my fork down, folded my hands in front of me, said, “Yes, Dad.”
“You’re lucky he didn’t kill you.”
“He’s dead. I’m not. End of story.”
We stared each other down for a while, then he reached out with his good hand, gave me a gentle punch on the jaw.
“You’re such a hard-ass,” he said. “Too bad you can’t be a cop.”
I smiled then, because maybe I was a thirty-year-old ex-con without much of a future, incorrigibly stubborn and prone to trouble, but I had a good dog and a few good friends, and that was so much more than I expected from life I considered myself blessed.
Acknowledgments
The novelist’s ability to convincingly render the most arcane subjects is often due to the guidance given by persons truly knowledgeable about things novelists only pretend to know. The experts whose advice guided me in the preparation of this manuscript included dentists, veterinarians, parole agents, lawyers, filmmakers, and photographers. Special thanks are owed to Terrence J. Moriarty, DDS, who patiently informed me about the mysterious workings of dental offices one afternoon in Tucson; to Alien Plone, who seems able to answer every question I ask of him; and to Sandi Erba, who tracked down information for me when I was too far from the field of action to do so personally. Geri Orthmeyer, RVT, and Richard Bruga, DVM, kindly reviewed and answered my questions about veterinary medicine. To those who generously shared their knowledge with me but were too modest to want mention or were prohibited by their jobs from sharing information they shared anyway, my silent and anonymous thanks.
This manuscript was edited by Amanda Murray at Simon & Schuster, who proved an ideal reader.
I owe a debt of hospitality to the inhabitants of the city of Prague and the Catalan village of Sant Pol de Mar, Spain, where this book was written. Děkuji Vám, přátelé. Moites gràcies, amics.
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A graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz and a UCLA film school dropout, Robert Eversz lives, at various times, in Los Angeles, Prague, and Sant Pol de Mar, on the coast of Catalonia. His Nina Zero novels have been translated into ten languages. More informati
on about him can be found on the website www.ninazero.com.
Who’s Digging (Up) America’s Dead Celebs?
A death in the family reunites excon-turned-paparazza Nina Zero with her long lost sister, a runaway at 16 who now touts herself as a successful real estate agent. Who cares if her sister looks like she’s lived a life as battered and fake as the designer luggage she totes?
0-7432-5015-X
Available in 2005
Nina is too busy to question her sister’s tale because she’s chasing down the grandmother of all tabloid stories—the mysterious thefts of celebrity bones from graveyards around the United States. Are the robbers kids playing games with the devil, cult scientists intent on cloning dead movie stars, or members of a shadowy Hollywood sect? In the world of tabloid reporting, the impossible is not only possible, it’s required.
But murder soon follows an unexpected betrayal, and Nina’s quest to find the grave robbers turns into a personal vendetta.
With her sidekick Frank—a slovenly assassin of celebrity reputations—and her beloved, toothless Rottweiler in tow, Nina returns in an emotionally riveting tabloid thriller fit to please her own cultish following.
“A wonderful fictional voice.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“Nina is tough, talented, witty and unafraid—a perfect protagonist.”
—Detroit Free Press
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