Heartbreak Hotel

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “Creative people like to see themselves as outsiders,” I said.

  “Creative people and fakers,” said Maxine Driver. “That was the topic of my doctoral dissertation: posers and hangers-on attracted to the short-term gratification of crime as entertainment. My primary thesis was the more ambiguous the product, the greater the opportunity for bullshit artists and criminals to move in.”

  “Mobsters at Hollywood parties,” I said.

  “And vice versa. But it went beyond socializing. Dirty money was routinely laundered through production deals because the studios needed quick cash and took out short-term loans from questionable sources. The ultimate meld was a guy like George Raft, a gangster who actually became an actor.”

  She smiled. “Mob-connected crooners we won’t even talk about.”

  I said, “Hoke was part of that scene.”

  “No, that’s the thing, he doesn’t seem to have been. In all the research I’ve done, I haven’t picked up a single shot of him at Ciro’s, not a word about his hobnobbing with the stars. When I told you he was obscure, I meant it.”

  “He kept out of the public eye.”

  “He certainly didn’t play to the press like the others. Nor have I found any association between him and other gangsters.”

  “Lone wolf.”

  “He had his own gang, you can’t pull off the jobs he’s suspected of as a solo artist.”

  “What kind of jobs?”

  “He was suspected of an armored car heist, kidnapping for ransom, a big-time jewel theft.”

  “Suspected but not arrested.”

  “His name came up in police reports but there was never any follow-up that I could find.”

  “Connections other than showbiz?”

  “Who knows? He did start out in Culver City and it was extremely corrupt over there—local police alerting bootleggers to raids.”

  She picked up a second slice. “A few of his associates disappeared permanently.”

  “Sweet guy.”

  “I suppose he had his charm. They finally got him for taxes, just like Capone.”

  She sipped beer. “What I find interesting, reviewing my material, is even though Leroy doesn’t appear to have associated with any other major bad guys, he didn’t inspire obvious animosity or competition. If he had, he wouldn’t have lasted as long as he did.”

  “Never ratted out by anyone,” I said.

  “Never shot at,” said Maxine Driver.

  “Disappearing associates would help.”

  “It would have discouraged loose lips but it wouldn’t have stopped one of the bosses going after him, they were utterly ruthless. Bugsy earned his nickname by being a mad-dog killer, but God help you if you called him that. He still got taken out, over in Virginia Hill’s house in Beverly Hills. Mickey’s house in Brentwood got bombed, though he survived.”

  First-name basis with her subjects. The same place Milo inevitably reaches with victims.

  She said, “Mickey was attacked while in prison. Survived and got released and died peacefully in his sleep. But as far as I’ve heard, no one roughed Leroy up in San Quentin. He died there.”

  “Where did he hail from?”

  “Oklahoma.”

  “Classic Dust Bowl story?”

  “If it was, he didn’t stay poor very long. His first address was in Culver, like I said. But his second address was a big house in the hills near the Hollywood Bowl. Torn down years ago—it’s all in the file.”

  I said, “Maybe rural roots led him to keep his own counsel.”

  Maxine Driver’s eyes widened. “Interesting you should say that, it’s another one of my themes: For all that criminals pride themselves on deviation from social norms, they’re conservative when it comes to race and ethnicity. Like the gangs of today. You get occasional racial crossover but for the most part, people stay with their kind. My family’s from Seoul and I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can study Korean gangs with detachment. Same story. People even remain loyal to their villages back in the old country. Now how about telling me why a psychologist working with the police is curious about Leroy.”

  “A homicide victim might have known him.”

  “That would have to be a cold, cold case.”

  “A brand-new homicide,” I said.

  She frowned. “Leroy died sixty years ago. Are we talking a victim who was a kid back then?”

  “A young woman. Possibly a girlfriend.”

  She put the pizza down. “Math isn’t my strong suit, but she’d still have to be pretty old.”

  “She was nearly a hundred.”

  “Wow,” said Maxine Driver. “And someone murdered her? That’s sick. Why do you think she knew Leroy?”

  “She visited his grave regularly and his name cropped up in her personal effects.”

  “Leroy’s girlfriend,” she said. “Well, that would be a nice bit of new data. So, what, she lasts a century and someone gets her? Bizarre. But I can’t imagine it would relate to Leroy.”

  “Probably not but the cops are looking at everything. What can you tell me about Leroy’s love life?”

  “Nothing. If he was married, I’ve never found a record of it. The same goes for consorting with party girls, strippers, actresses, the usual gangster thing. Was your victim one of those?”

  “Don’t know, yet.”

  Red nails re-tweezed the slice of pizza. “I look for interesting subjects and Leroy wasn’t until now. What can you tell me about this woman?”

  “Nothing more, sorry.”

  “Oh, c’mon.”

  “Ongoing investigation.”

  Maxine Driver frowned. “I’ll accept that for the moment but when the cops do close it, you need to offer some reciprocity, I want a nice juicy publication out of it.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “More than fair. I’m serious, going to hold you to it.”

  —

  She drank half a beer, took most of the pizza to go, said nothing when I paid.

  Outside the restaurant, we shared a briefer, firmer handshake.

  I thanked her again.

  She said, “The way to thank me is to keep your word.”

  “Promise.”

  “A psychologist digging up the past for the cops, you really didn’t explain that but I’ve got to run. One thing I can tell you, Wild Bill wouldn’t have trucked with therapists. He preferred tossing mobsters off cliffs.”

  “Finesse,” I said.

  “Hey, it worked. He cleaned up the city and the mob never regained a foothold. There’s always a trade-off, of course. Order versus personal liberty. My priorities shift depending on the headlines.”

  “Mine, too.”

  She said, “I really do expect you to contact me once you’re able to be more forthcoming.”

  “Scout’s honor.”

  Frosty smile. “I was a Brownie. And by the way, I’m also conversant with your field. Double-majored, psych and history. Hated math, all those statistics courses for psych, so I did the humanities thing.”

  She studied me. “Sounds like you’re into the inhumanities. Maybe we’ve got something in common.”

  CHAPTER

  18

  I opened the envelope in my car.

  Generous receptacle, sparse contents.

  Maxine Driver had included the same list I’d pulled off the Internet, with Leroy Hoke’s name circled in yellow. Next came photocopies of Hoke’s black-and-white San Quentin mugshot and data card. The photo showed a fair-haired man with dark brooding eyes. The hair was wavy and piled high and the stats clarified the color. Red. Lighter patches at the temples that were probably gray; notable freckles on forehead and cheeks.

  Five-eleven, one hundred forty-six pounds fit the bony, knife-blade visage glaring at the prison photographer. Lantern jaw, off-kilter boxer’s nose, narrow mouth, skimpy unamused lips. The eyes, listed as Black, were narrow and accusing, set deeply and shadowed by a shelf of brow.

  A scar ran diagonally across a m
eaty cleft chin. One ear was set higher than the other, protruded a bit and was missing a section of lobe.

  Despite less-than-ideal parts, a surprising outcome for the whole. Not a bad-looking guy.

  The card listed scars on chin, arms, back, and buttocks. No tattoos, no warnings of violent tendencies, just a notation that the prisoner had led a “criminal enterprise.”

  Aliases: Oklahoma Red, Tulsa Red, Double-L, Okie King, Sir “H,” Monark.

  The remaining contents consisted of two sheets of paper containing photocopied snippets from articles in the L.A. Herald-Express, the Mirror, and the Times, again with Hoke’s name accented in yellow.

  Each clipping reported on unsolved crimes, beginning with a broad-daylight armored car robbery on Sixth Street, downtown, that remained “mysterious” after a year of investigation. Police had looked into “criminal gangs led by ‘Italians’ and other mobsters” including Mickey Cohen, L. L. “Tulsa Red” Hoke, and “colored kingpin Julius ‘Papa Blue’ Carpentier.”

  Similar outcomes were detailed for a smash-and-grab jewel theft at a posh store in Pasadena, bank robberies in Culver City, Mid-Wilshire, and San Gabriel, and the “enigmatic disappearance” of a truckload of furs intended for Bullocks Wilshire.

  The final felony was another jewel theft in 1938, this one in Beverly Hills, accomplished in the dead of night.

  The wall separating Elena’s Dress Shoppe on Rodeo Drive from Frederick LaPlante Fine Jewelers had been breached, probably with hand tools. The burglary netted “countless bracelets, necklaces and rings and other faceted female finery.” An unconfirmed rumor said some of the glitz had been set aside for the tenth annual Oscars gala, held at the Biltmore Hotel.

  For that one, “publicity-shy” Hoke was described as a “serious person of interest,” then quoted as “denying his involvement unequivocally through a spokesman and offering an ironclad alibi: At the time of the robbery, he’d been in a back booth at Perino’s, “dining in full view of numerous citizens, including society notables.”

  That claim, the Mirror was happy to add, “was confirmed by our journalists.”

  No mention of Hoke’s suspected ownership of the Aventura Hotel.

  No photos of Monark with anyone, let alone a diminutive young moll named Midget.

  I drove home and worked the computer, using Driver’s information. Nothing, until I came upon a series of photographs commemorating Perino’s sixty-four-year run as an haute-cuisine hangout in 1940.

  A black-and-white photo spanned three groups of diners. Film folk on both sides, the reason the shot had been archived.

  It was the middle banquette that interested me.

  In the center, a fair-haired, dark-eyed ectomorph in a broad-shouldered tuxedo, with a half-eaten wedge of cream pie in front of him, nursed what looked to be a cup of coffee. To his left was a hulking, pug-faced man twice Leroy Hoke’s width, his beverage a crystal stein of foam-topped beer.

  To Hoke’s right sat a tiny blond beauty in her twenties. Nestled under the gangster’s arm, delicate fingers resting near a Martini glass.

  Pixie face, big eyes, darkly rouged lips. A black spaghetti-strap dress set off pale shoulders and a swan neck. Young enough to be Hoke’s daughter but nothing daughterly about the mischievous half smile she beamed up at him.

  Nothing fatherly about his hand dangling over her shoulder, a pinkie looped languidly around a strap.

  No way to be certain she was a young Thalia. Nothing said she wasn’t.

  I studied the picture, thought I found familiarity in the huge, lively eyes, the subtle amusement.

  My bet would be Yes. I’d take almost any odds.

  I stayed at my desk for another hour and a half, searching for info on any crimes linked to Hoke. No coverage of the earlier felonies in the Mirror piece, but the Frederick LaPlante robbery had been a big enough deal to merit ink in all four L.A. papers. Same story as the Mirror, nearly word for word, which meant regurgitation of an LAPD press release.

  Researching the jewelry store brought up a story about its opening four years prior to the heist, in The Beverly Hills Monitor, a free weekly, now defunct, with a flexible attitude toward syntax and style. The font looked as if it had been typed and mimeographed.

  Fine European Jewels Flock To The Verdant Hills of Beverly.

  There are considerable admirations of the gifts and talents of Count Frederick Charles Normandy Etienne De LaPlante, a post-World War I emigre from Paris, France, who has dazzled us constantly and most consistently due to his esteemed history as a noted desinatrace de bijoux who has formerly and prominently consulted to Cartier and other Gallic geniuses of glamour. Thus acquiring first-hand expert knowledge of both exquisitely rarified items and also Olde Worlde haute jewelry—artistry at the most demanding and discerning level.

  Included among the Count’s recent treasured acquisitions now brought to our temperate California shores under cover of discretion and taste, are a more than 15 karat flawless diamond said to have been worn by Marie Antoinette within hours of her decapitation at the hand of bloodthirsty, merciless revolters, also the massive Inca Goddess Emerald from the Andes of Peru presented in its original guanaco-lined case, an animal that only exists at the most alpine level of the Ande mountains. Eyes have glistened viewing so many others including the 57 karat Wine of the Nile ruby, said to have been excavated by daring explorers and orientalism near an ancient Egyptian pyramid.

  But these are not all, Count LaPlante’s sanctum of fabulous facets has items to satisfy any level of connoisseurship.

  A headshot at the top portrayed a wax-mustachioed dead ringer for Errol Flynn, if Flynn had put on midlife weight.

  I keyworded LaPlante’s full title and name, found an article dated six years after the heist in the New York Post.

  This one was anything but puff:

  Fake-Frog Scamster Unveiled as Count-Me-Out Count

  A phony French nobleman palming himself off as an art consultant to the rich, famous, and gullible, has been revealed as an all-American con-man who’s coasted for years on the stupidity of the moneyed set.

  Fred Bullard Drancy, born in a working class section of Boston, and convicted as a young man of numerous shams, swindles and scams, managed to go almost clean for a few years when he worked as a delivery driver for Shreve, Crump and Lowe in Beantown. A few years later, he’d moved to California, was palming himself off as a Gallic hoo-hah with the unwieldy moniker Count Frederick Normandy De LaPlante.

  Police say Drancy’s m.o. was to leverage his fake aristocracy in order to consign expensive jewelry from other merchants with no down payment. The items were then marked up and unloaded on hare-brained heirs and heiresses.

  Though chronically late paying his suppliers, Drancy did eventually come through and the scheme worked so well that he was able to open a jewelry store on Rodeo Drive, the poshest shopping street in Beverly Hills. There, he kept raising the stakes by “investing” in progressively more expensive gewgaws that he continued to peddle to naïve West Coast celebrities. It was only when a robbery cleaned out Drancy’s stock and exposed his lack of insurance that furious gem dealers began digging into his background and uncovered his shady past. Drancy hightailed it from LaLa Land, laid low for a while, then had the chutzpah to re-invent himself as an Old Masters expert in Manhattan without even changing his ersatz name.

  Drancy’s Gotham scheme finally met an end when a Long Island City storage unit housing paintings he’d “borrowed” was broken into and looted. Drancy is currently in The Tombs awaiting arraignment on multiple charges, though word has it that he may be able to skate because fancy-pants Upper East Side art dealers will be reluctant to expose themselves to ridicule at being shellacked by a career con-man with a sixth-grade education.

  No mention of suspects in the art burglary. At the time, Leroy Hoke had resided in San Quentin.

  I paired Hoke with a succession of keywords: laplante, drancy, midget, thalia, mars. The last pulled up gazillions of hits on the joys of a
stronomy and the virtues of candy bars.

  The lack of anything else was consistent with Maxine Driver’s characterization of Hoke as publicity-shy. If he had masterminded the LaPlante job, entrusting his legitimately employed girlfriend with the take also fit. So would using her as his agent while in prison.

  Thalia’s path to fortune was another nice mesh: Parlaying a cache of stolen jewelry into legal real estate purchases was Laundering 101.

  A cute little city accountant could avoid scrutiny if she bought steadily and slowly. She’d certainly avoided scrutiny about living in a luxury hotel suite whose rent far surpassed her salary.

  A tribute to her smarts? Or had she inherited connections from Hoke during the pre-Parker days when corruption was a municipal pastime?

  If her wealth had been rooted in crime, had she come to feel guilty nearing the end of an astonishingly long life? Trying to atone with spontaneous acts of charity but, not content with that, deciding it was time to talk to someone about it?

  Milo likes to say psychologists are the yea-sayers of our times. Who better than a psychologist who’d worked with the cops and knew something about the criminal mind when it came to setting a former moll’s mind at ease?

  Or perhaps Thalia was just fine with the way she’d lived her life and the spawn of a man whose associates tended to disappear had shown up wanting to talk about that life.

  Some scion of Monark’s family tree ferreting out Thalia’s link to his ancestor and believing himself entitled to whatever remained of Hoke’s fortune.

  Scion or scions.

  The Birkenhaars from Austria. Fake accent, most probably a fake name.

  Assumed names, like the inflated biographies of celebrities and politicians, were often crafted to impress. Case in point: Fred Drancy aka Count Frederick et cetera LaPlante.

  Was it a bud from his family tree that had sought to take root in Thalia’s life?

  Lots of possibilities, but no facts. I couldn’t even be certain that the girl at Perino’s was Thalia.