True Detectives

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “What time is it—oh, shit, it’s two twenty, man. Top of that, you screwed up a dream about Paris Hilton and her mom.”

  “One oh oh one Swallowsong Lane, Hollywood Hills.”

  Henry breathed hoarsely.

  Aaron said, “Did you get that?”

  “It can’t wait?”

  “Two Dr. Franklins sound like it can?”

  “You could drive down tomorrow, check it out yourself—”

  “That’s always true, and yet I call you, Henry. We’re talking exigent circumstances.”

  “More like an exigent expense account.”

  “Yours is not to question why, Mr. Stokes.” Aaron repeated the address.

  Henry said, “Two twenty for that—are you taping this?”

  “Why would I be, Henry?”

  “’Cause that’s what P.I.’s do. It’s one thing at work, I use an extension open to everyone. This is my friggin’ home line.”

  “I don’t tape.”

  “That guy with the Mafia connections, he probably said the same thing.”

  “Mafia bullshit,” said Aaron. “Mario Fortuno, he’s a wannabe, Henry. Not to mention a resident of the federal penitentiary at—”

  “Exactly,” said Stokes. “Because he taped.”

  “I don’t tape my friends, Henry. And what’s the big deal—you’re accessing public records for a small fee. Free enterprise.”

  “I’m so reassured.”

  “Why would I want myself on tape?” said Aaron.

  No answer.

  “Henry, have we ever had anything but cordial business relat—”

  “Yeah, yeah ... which is why calling at two thirty in the morning isn’t exactly friendly. I was sleeping, man. That dream ...”

  “Two hundred’s worth waking up for, my friend.”

  “Two plus an additional fifty for fantasy theft.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “You had to be there, man,” said Stokes. “You think Paris is hot, you should see her—”

  “Fine,” said Aaron. “Two Bens and a General Grant.”

  Stokes sighed. “I’ll never get the moment back. Hold on.”

  Ninety seconds later, he returned to the line, voice clearer. “You’re getting a bargain, dude. And I don’t want to be associated with any part of this. No matter how many dead prezzes show up for the party.”

  “Who owns the house?” said Aaron.

  “You don’t know?”

  “If I knew, why would I be calling you?”

  “Verification,” said Henry.

  “I can’t verify something I don’t know, Hank. And as you always remind me, I can always drive down to that moldy archive you guys keep and find out myself—”

  “Not exactly,” said Henry. “This case, you drive down and paw through the ledgers what you’re gonna learn is that the deed is owned by a holding company called Malibu Sunset Trust. And that’s all you’re gonna learn.”

  “You, on the other hand, know that...”

  “Aaron, you really need to promise me this isn’t going to go anywhere public. And that you don’t tape.”

  “I promise,” said Aaron.

  “I mean it, dude.”

  “I promise.”

  Henry said, “The tax trail leads from this Malibu Sunset outfit to Vision Associates, Inc., of Beverly Hills to Newport Management Trust, then clear out of state. Seven Stars Management, Las Vegas.”

  “Your basic paper chain,” said Aaron. “Now give me a person.”

  Henry breathed hard.

  “Vegas,” said Aaron. “You’re worried about some mob thing? Don’t sweat it, the place is all corporate now. People in stretch pants and Bermuda shorts lining up at the buffet.”

  Henry said, “Lem Dement.”

  Aaron checked his own surprise. His mind swelled and pulsed and raced.

  Henry said, “Now’m going back to sleep, maybe if I really behave, Paris and Kathy will show up again. Hey, maybe the sister, whatsher-name, will also put her little—”

  Aaron hung up and switched off the voice-activated tape recorder.

  The Internet could be Aaron’s best friend, but with someone like Lem Dement, overkill could render his computer useless.

  A single jab at the Enter button flushed out page after page of blogo-crap.

  He started with Wikipedia and fanned out.

  Lemuel Houston Dement, born in Flint, Michigan, fifty-four years ago, had been raised by a UAW organizer and a Ford Motor secretary, both admirers of Trotsky. Houston and Althea Dement despised capitalism on general principles, loathed their respective jobs in specific, raised their only child with a borderline-paranoid worldview.

  Taught that school was just another bourgeois trap, young Lem obliged with chronic misbehavior and rotten grades that belied his IQ. A month after high school graduation he was riveting axle bolts on the Ford assembly line. Ten months of that lit up the Exit sign in his head and he gave community college a try. Decent grades enabled a transfer to Wayne State, studying sociology for three years, then transferring to U. Mich-Ann Arbor, where he talked his way into the film school. Once in, he chased women, smoked dope and dropped acid, did minimal work, barely passed.

  Cursed with a sluggish metabolism that heaped on pounds, and a face reminiscent of a boiled potato, Dement was compensated with a sour yet strangely appealing charisma that made him moderately successful with women, a gift for dialogue and the ready quip, and, most important, an innate understanding of how to lie with a camera. Nearly thirty and broke, he slept with the right woman and lucked into a gig directing industrial safety training loops.

  By day, he shot his close-ups of snarling machinery spliced with stock footage of mangled limbs. Nights were spent on his art: pseudo-documentaries starring friends and neighbors that highlighted the malevolence of Every Corporation.

  In a New York Times interview, years later, Dement described those days: “I never spent a second in therapy but I sure understood my true motivation: My parents thought what I did was fascist-lackey garbage and I wanted to redeem myself in their eyes. Then they died in a house fire, I was a basketcase for a long time. But in the end, being orphaned freed me.”

  Twenty-two months after learning his parents had left more debt than estate, Dement wrote, directed, filmed, and exhibited a docudrama about pollution in Lake Erie at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Maybe it was the deliberately grainy use of black and white, maybe he was just ahead of his time; no one paid much attention to Brown Water.

  Next came an exposé of an alleged cabal among GM, the Catholic Church, and the Zionist Organization of America.

  Half of Dement’s crew quit over that one.

  Several lean years followed, during which Dement, pushing forty, married to a former dancer and saddled with a slew of kids, worked as a truck driver and a drywall installer. Then a populist assembly candidate from Flint named Eddie Fixland needed someone to produce campaign commercials on a shoestring budge. Dement got the job by working for free, Fixland won his seat in the House, and though two years of scandal got in the way of reelection, his campaign’s class-warfare ads featuring long shots of dying rust-belt towns and sunken-cheeked retirees living in trailers caught everyone’s attention.

  Dement became the go-to guy when you wanted hard-edged cinéma-politique. He grew prosperous, moved to a big house in Birmingham, rewrote and reshot his Lake Erie film using a bigger budget: full color, megadoses of the innuendo and hyperbole he’d perfected working for Fixland.

  Brown Water, version II, was nominated for an Oscar. Won a statuette. Lem made a brief, nasty speech, moved to L.A., took meetings, fielded offers. Using other people’s money, he shot an exposé of emergency room practices spiced with gobbets of gore inspired by his factory-accident flicks.

  Red Rooms was nominated for an Oscar and might’ve won if a heartrending portrayal of a nine-year-old, blind poet prodigy hadn’t surfaced just before the submission deadline.

  Upon hearing the verdict, Lem was
reputed to have fidgeted in his seat at the Kodak Theatre and murmured, “How can you beat a fucking walleyed Helen Keller incarnation?”

  He denied the quote.

  The next two years saw Dement’s fortunes dip as he tried his hand at “serious cinema.” A tale of Shakespearean lust garnered more plagiarism suits than profit. A historical action film depicting both sides in the Civil War as slavering, self-serving barbarians went straight to video, as did a “postmodern shake-up” of Othello that recast the tragedy as a metaphor for the Arab-Israeli impasse, with a villain named Iago Bernstein.

  Lem Dement’s name faded from the buzzosphere, as did tabloid shots of the now three-hundred-pound artiste at The Right Parties, bursting out of a custom tuxedo, his trademark limp-brimmed fishing hat studded with lures perched jauntily on a massive, grizzled head.

  Dement went “into seclusion to center myself.” Emerged three years later with a four-hour, unspeakably violent depiction of the earliest days of Christianity, shot during a thirty-two-month stay in Turkey.

  Given its creator’s sensibilities, everyone expected Saul to Paul: The Moment to be an indictment of organized religion. What they got, instead, was a paean to the severest aspects of fundamentalist dogma that trumpeted the virtues of forced conversion and portrayed Arabs, Phoenicians, Mesopotamians, and Jews as hook-nosed heretics.

  In a full-page Variety ad, Lem Dement announced, “I’ve been born again in the truest sense. My art and my heart are now focused upon sacraments of truth, purity and redemption.”

  Quickly condemned as racist agitprop by the Hollywood establishment and the mainstream press, and protested serially by Muslim and Jewish civil rights groups, the film enjoyed a limited release in leased art houses and church auditoriums. Word of mouth grew. Theater chains signed on. Within three months, Saul to Paul had taken in four hundred million dollars. Foreign revenues added another hundred fifty.

  Lem Dement announced his “retirement to a life of contemplation” and moved to a “multiacre estate” in Malibu.

  Same city where Rory Stoltz went to school. Honing his Industry ambitions.

  Where Caitlin Frostig had gotten straight A’s.

  Aaron pushed back from the screen. Paced his office.

  Malibu was more a concept than a locale, stretching thirty miles up the coast. But the Pepperdine-Caitlin-Rory link couldn’t be ignored.

  Aaron considered waking Henry again, to find out if Lem Dement’s spread was anywhere near the sprawling campus. Decided against it. If Henry had managed to revisit his dream, busting his fantasy a second time would breed too much ill will.

  Plus, at the early stages of the investigation, he needed to be careful about tunnel vision.

  Caitlin goes to school in 90265, ditto Rory.

  Rory has the gate clicker to a Hollywood Hills house owned by Dement, whose main crib is in 90265.

  He flashed back to the house on Swallowsong. The winding driveway implied a big-view lot. High-priced real estate ... maybe the place housed one of the stoners Rory had chauffeured.

  In a Hyundai?

  Had to be camouflage. So did leaving the club through the back— that was celeb behavior.

  Was one—or both—of the stoners a VIP? That synced with Rory waltzing into ColdSnake.

  Aaron returned to the keyboard, paired Rory Stoltz with Lem Dement, and Googled.

  Did you mean demented roar?

  No, I didn’t, Meddling Cyber-Wienie.

  He sat there for a long time, feeling his brain turn to sludge.

  Three ten a.m. What he craved was sinking his teeth into the case, ripping and shredding like a rabid dog until the facts bled.

  What he did was slog upstairs to Play Land, undress, fold his clothes neatly over the brass-and-teak valet, slip naked between Frette sheets.

  Guessing Caitlin’s face would appear in his dreams. He hoped she would.

  Back when he’d been on the job, he’d embraced the classic Homicide D’s self-congratulation.

  We talk for the dead.

  And sometimes, the dead talk to us.

  CHAPTER

  13

  Moe arrived at his desk at eight a.m., thinking about the Rory Stoltz-Mason Book connection.

  Two messages from Aaron sat next to his computer. Crumpling and lobbing easy two-pointers into a nearby wastebasket, he Googled the actor.

  Nearly four million hits. Midway down the second page were accounts of Book’s early-morning suicide attempt by wrist-slash.

  Paramedics responding to a 911 call at the Hollywood Hills house of heartthrob ...

  Facts were in short supply, but no shortage of lurid rehash: anonymous sources claimed Mason Book was addicted to every drug known to humankind, the hush-hush VIP admission to Cedars-Sinai had cost a heavy six figures for a one-week stay ...

  Moe found a couple of grainy, dark infrared shots of a guy who might’ve been Book being ushered into a black SUV at a hospital service door. Another hit quoted a plea by Book’s unnamed mouthpiece to “respect Mason’s privacy during this difficult period. Mason needs to concentrate all his energies on getting well. He thanks everyone for their support.”

  Moe was about to log off when he noticed the date of Book’s wrist-slash.

  Printing the citation, he left the D room, turned around a sharp corner, hustled over to the familiar unmarked door, and knocked.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s Moe, Loo.”

  “’s not locked.”

  The room was so small that opening the door brought Sturgis’s rhino frame into immediate close-up. Almost like being charged by a bull, and after all these months still kind of jarring to Moe.

  The lieutenant had squeezed his bulk into a wheely-chair, long legs propped on his flimsy desk. Additional cold cases were stacked to the left of a cold computer screen. Sturgis’s heavy jaw flexed.

  “Got a second, Loo?”

  Sturgis removed the cigar and rolled it from finger to finger, like a carny doing a trick. He pointed to a chair in the corner.

  Moe didn’t consider himself claustrophobic but he didn’t like to be hemmed in. He remained standing in the doorway and told the Loo about Rory Stoltz working for Mason Book, Riptide’s past life as a Hollywood hangout, saving the best for last: Book had slit his wrists exactly one week after Caitlin’s disappearance.

  Sturgis said, “You’re wondering if he did something to her and felt guilty?”

  “I know it’s remote, Loo, but right now it’s all I’ve got.”

  “Remorse as a motive is predicated on Book having a conscience. Does he?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Sturgis laughed—that vaguely threatening, phlegmy chuckle of his. “He’s an actor, Moses. A dope-fiend actor, which is maybe repetitive. But sure, check it out, why not. Pick up any new cases?”

  “Nope,” said Reed.

  “Me neither. Damn slow.”

  For a second, Moe thought Sturgis might offer to work Caitlin. But the Loo just cursed and rubbed his face. “If the citizens know what’s good for them, they’ll start killing other citizens so we can earn our pay. For all the service we’re offering, we might as well be goldbrick politicians—not that I’m demeaning all your good work on poor Caitlin.”

  “I’m demeaning it, Loo. Haven’t learned squat.”

  “Some cases are like that.” Sturgis jammed the cigar back in his mouth, picked up a file, flipped through it, shook his head. “Like this one. So cold I could use it to ice my knee. Sayonara, lad.”

  Moe said, “One more thing. Book was admitted to Cedars. Your ... partner is in charge of the E.R. there, right?”

  Sturgis shut the file. “Moses, there’s something called doctor-patient confidentiality.”

  “I know, sir. I was just wondering if perhaps he could direct me to ... some kind of source.”

  “Go ask him. Richard Silverman, M.D. He’s listed in the Cedars registry.”

  “That’s okay with you?”

  “I’m not his parent, Moses
. I’m his”—unfathomable smile— “partner.”

  During Moe’s brief absence, Aaron had called a third time. Moe’s fist closed around the slip with sudden, crushing force that surprised him. Rather than go for the easy layup, he aimed at a can fifteen feet across the room.

  Swish. Three points.

  Perversely self-satisfied, he got Dr. Richard Silverman’s number and called. Silverman sounded busy—harried, even—and Moe dropped the Loo’s name before introducing himself.

  “What can I do for you, Detective?” Kind of frosty; no Oh, yeah, he’s mentioned you.

  No reason for Sturgis to mention him.

  He asked if the doc could direct him to someone with information about Mason Book’s hospitalization.

  Silverman said, “I assume you don’t mean our official spokespeople.”

  “That’s correct, Doctor.”

  “Book wasn’t my patient, but I still can’t talk to you. Not that I would, if I could. Apart from legal issues, there are general ethical principles.”

  “I understand that, Doctor, but—”

  “You were hoping that because of Milo, I might relax my standards.”

  Moe didn’t answer.

  Silverman said, “I’m not trying to give you a hard time. It’s simply something I can’t do.”

  “I understand, Doctor. It’s just that this is a murder investigation and a really tough one.” He summarized Caitlin’s disappearance, making her out to be a saint, pumping more pathos by describing her father as a withering, tragic figure.

  Silverman said, “Poor girl.”

  “Her mom died when she was young, she was all her father had,” said Moe.

  “And Mason Book’s relevant to this because ...”

  “Honestly, Doc, he might not be, but I need to follow up on any lead I get. Turns out Caitlin’s ex-boyfriend works for Book, which in and of itself doesn’t mean much. But then I learned that Book’s suicide attempt happened one week after Caitlin disappeared and I felt I had no choice but to—”

  “A week?” said Silverman. “I’m not getting the point.”

  “It’ll probably turn out to be nothing, Doc, but what if the boyfriend did collude with Book on some terrible deed and Book felt guilty and that’s why he cut his wrists?”