by Neil Russell
“I’ll have to slip an extra hundred grand in his pay envelope.”
Mallory stood. “At the risk of losing the bonus, might I say that dinner is timed precisely for eight and that you have an unnerving habit of not looking at clocks.”
Kim spoke up. “We’ll be there. I guarantee it. Whatever you’re cooking has been in the air all day, and I’m already fantasizing.”
I took the Benson & Hedges out of the bag, threw them to her and handed the beer and wine to Mallory. “Get the Stella on ice, would you. I’ve been at Benny Joe’s, and I’m going to need one.”
“Stella, yum. Who’s Benny Joe?” asked Kim as she tore open the cigarettes.
Mallory frowned. “A perfectly dreadful little man,” he said.
Then he headed toward the kitchen, and I changed the subject. “So what did you get into while I was gone?”
“Oh, I poked around a little. Found a big pool table in the billiard room, which is probably where it belongs. You any good?”
“I know which end of a cue to use.”
“I’ll take that as a warning. There’s also a hell of an accumulation of vehicles in that unbelievable basement garage. Jesus, what a place. But why are they all either red or black?”
“I’m not exactly sure. Seems like every time I like something, that’s what it is. Think I should see a shrink?”
She laughed. “If they were Mary Kay pink, I’d say run, don’t walk, but I think red and black check out okay with Freud. By the way, your car wash guy, Angelo, was here.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Is that what he called himself, ‘my car wash guy’?”
“Not exactly, I hung that on him when he started soaping up your Morgan. What year is it?”
“1968.”
“I was close. I guessed ’70. Great-looking car, but Angelo said your legs are too long to drive it.”
“He was being charitable. I can’t even get my ass down in the seat.”
“So why buy it?”
“Because it’s beautiful.”
Kim thought for a moment. “Like not having room to hang a Calder but not being able to resist it.”
“Bingo.”
“So who’s Angelo?”
“He used to be chief mechanic for Ford Racing.”
“That’s a big deal, right?”
“Right.”
“And he’s another friend. Somebody you did a favor for who stops by now and then. And he probably washes your cars because…he can’t keep his hands off them.”
“Give the lady a cigar.”
“I’d rather have one of those Stellas.”
We had dinner on the patio. Mallory’s world-famous Sicilian pot roast with a side of porcini risotto washed down with PlumpJack—no ice. It was magnificent.
Kim didn’t offer any more details about the night before, so I kept the conversation loose. Mostly talked about what a pain in the ass it is to own a big house, especially an old one, and how I’d kill for a really good terra-cotta guy.
Later, we went into the screening room, and I threw Papillon on the DVD. If there’s something better than a good meal, a great-looking woman and Steve McQueen, I don’t know what it is. Well, actually, I do, and we found ourselves doing it on one of the sofas sometime after Steve’s first escape. Then we toddled off to the bedroom for Round Two.
Next morning, I was up first again and done with my laps before Kim found her way outside.
“You ready to go home yet?”
“You throwing me out?” She laughed.
“Nope, just that it’s Monday, and I figured you’d have to go to work.” I saw her flush, then recover quickly.
“I’m between jobs.”
I didn’t say anything, but after breakfast, I got up and went to the phone.
“Who’re you calling?” she asked.
“Beverly Hills Taxi.”
“I thought you were going to ask me some more questions.”
“I was, but your end of the deal was to tell the truth.”
She flashed angry. “What are you talking about?”
“Well, the name you gave me is almost right. Actually, it’s Dana Kimberly York, and you live at 429 Princeton St. in Santa Monica. You’re current with your bills, have never been arrested and earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in art history from Penn and a PhD in European masters from the University of Paris. But here’s where the story gets interesting.
“First, 429 Princeton St. is titled to an Alexander Connor Cayne, whose Social Security number indicates he’s been dead since 1975. Further, you’ve got a restraining order out against somebody named Brandi Sue Parsons, who coincidentally is also on the Pasadena Police Department’s missing persons list. And finally, you do have a job—a serious one. You’re the editor-in-chief of the Getty Museum’s art journal—and P.S., you called in sick about an hour ago.”
Kim looked like she’d been slapped.
I gave her a minute, then said, “So you tell me, Doctor York, where do we go from here?”
She took a long moment, then she said tightly, “Well, for starters, I hate the name Dana, so I never use it. And Alexander Cayne was my father, a navy commander flying off the Enterprise. A month after I was born, he was shot down over North Vietnam and captured alive. We know because his name and picture were in a Hanoi newspaper. But like two thousand other dads, brothers and sons, he never came home.
“After the war, the navy declared him dead, but my mother didn’t believe them—not even after she remarried, and her new husband, Truman York, adopted me. So she never filed the paperwork to have Dad’s name taken off the house. No one cares anyway, as long as the taxes are paid, and I think she was always half-expecting that one day, he’d come up the walk, and everything would be like it was. And later, after my mom and stepfather died in a crash, I couldn’t bear to change it either.”
“The POW/MIA debacle is a national stain,” I said. “And it’s on every president who didn’t force the Vietnamese and the Defense Department to come clean.”
Kim bowed her head, and I could tell her eyes were wet. “There are no words to describe what the families went through—the same people who were so loyal to their country that they absorbed the lies in silence. You know, I never even knew my dad, but I always felt connected. I think my mother’s love for him was so great and her grief so profound that it became part of me too.”
Kim took a deep breath and went on. “Now, Brandi Sue Parsons. You can starve on what museums and galleries pay, so I took the journalism route. I was always good at getting people to talk, and I got lucky and picked up regular free-lance pieces for some of the more prestigious art publications. I was doing pretty well too—at least I was eating—but like a lot of people with my degrees, I was dead certain I could find undervalued works and resell them for a fat profit. So when I wasn’t writing about lost Caravaggios or forged Warhols, I hung out a shingle as a consultant.
“Mrs. Parsons, who is two years younger than me, was a former Miss Universe runner-up and the brand-new trophy wife of a wealthy Pasadena developer. She hired me to locate something outstanding for the new mansion her husband was building her. And I did—a wonderful pair of Kubicek watercolors. But the owner would only sell them as a package, and the price was $400,000, twice what Mrs. Parsons had authorized.
“When I explained it to Brandi Sue, she went to see the paintings—a still life and a landscape—and fell in love with the landscape, which was valued at $180,000. So I told her I’d scout around and see what I could do. I got lucky. I found an investor willing to put up $200,000 in return for an eighty percent share of what the still life might eventually bring. I borrowed against my credit cards for the balance. Case closed. That is, until I sent the still life to Sotheby’s to be auctioned.”
“Let me guess, somebody bought it for half a million.”
“Not even close. One million, six hundred sixty-five thousand, five hundred. It turned out to be one of the artist’s lost works. It had disappeared from
the Spanish royal family in 1808, probably looted by one of Napoleon’s officers. Mrs. Parsons read about the sale in the paper and came looking for what she considered her share of the money—which by her logic was all of it.
“Her opening line was, ‘You thieving fucking bitch. You set me up!’ Then she hired a lawyer and accused me of pushing her to buy the landscape when it was the still life she wanted all along.”
“Naturally.”
“The judge threw the case out, but she kept at it with harassing phone calls and poison e-mails. Then one day, as I was crossing the street in front of my apartment, she tried to run me down with her Mercedes. I managed to dive out of the way, but I felt the bumper graze my skirt.”
“Hence the restraining order,” I said.
Kim nodded. “I was really scared. The funny thing was, a few months later, her husband came to see me. He was beside himself. He said Brandi Sue had taken all the money she could lay her hands on, pawned her jewelry and left town with the foreman who’d been overseeing the construction of their new house. She’d also taken the Kubicek landscape, and he wanted to know if maybe she’d contacted me about selling it.”
“I guess he didn’t know the history,” I said.
“I think he was so hung up on her, he wasn’t thinking clearly. He was absolutely sure his foreman had coerced her, maybe even used force. So sure, in fact, he’d made a police report.”
“I’m sure the Pasadena cops jumped right on it.”
“They called me about three weeks later, but there wasn’t much urgency in their questions. I think they figured it for what it was.”
“Gotta watch those Ms. Universes,” I said.
“I think it’s just the runner-ups,” she smiled. “And finally, I do work at the Getty. My Kubicek find—lucky as it was—got me noticed, and they asked me to start a journal for them. And because I’d had a windfall, I could afford to take the job. I also edit their catalogues and write most of the captions for the exhibits. And for the record, I just couldn’t face going to work today. I don’t even know why I lied about that.”
She looked drained.
I said, “Well, Dr. York, now that the truth serum has taken effect, and you have the day off anyway, why don’t we run over to Ralphs and have a look at the scene of the crime.”
As we rode down the hill into the relative civilization of the 90210, the radio in the Rolls was on. Steve Hartman and Petros Papadakis—the Jimmy Neutron and Jack E. Leonard of Los Angeles sports talk—were, as usual, making intelligent, insightful points. Unfortunately, they were doing it at the same time. Hartman and Papadakis are the two heavyweights in town and have separate shows, mostly because you can’t shoehorn that much IQ, ego and certitude into one studio. But management apparently thinks it’s good radio to jam them together every once in a while, step back and watch the ignition. I wonder if they’ll feel the same way the day their two biggest stars go fists, teeth and key man policies over the desk at each other. In the meantime, though, while the bosses smile, the audience listens…and waits.
When I couldn’t decipher what they were shouting about, I turned it off. Kim was quiet, which elevated her another notch in my book. People who have to fill every silence with conversation make my ass tired, so it was nice to just ride along with my own thoughts.
I kept turning her story over in my head, but it didn’t quite mesh. Like what was the real reason she hadn’t wanted to call the cops last night? Naked or not, most people’s reaction is to scream for a police officer if a dog is barking three blocks over, let alone if they’ve just escaped a kidnapping.
I was pretty sure that if her car was eventually found, the clothes she’d been wearing would be in it. But why take the car at all if you were just going to dump her in the drink? Why chance getting picked up in a vehicle that isn’t yours? Unless somebody wanted to go through it first, thoroughly.
Kim said she hadn’t been raped, and after her reaction in bed, I believed her. Women who’ve been sexually abused aren’t usually interested in making love a couple of hours later. But bad guys holding a woman they’re going to kill anyway generally aren’t paragons of restraint. Usually only pros have that kind of self-control. Or men who’ve been sent to do a job by someone they deeply fear.
And why did Tino get out of the van? You have to figure if you’ve botched an abduction, you’d want to get as far away as possible as fast as possible. Why let half of the drivers on the 405 get a look at you?
I concluded she was holding something back. Maybe without even knowing it—but that’s not what my gut said.
I turned off Santa Monica into Century City and honked my horn as we passed my law firm’s offices. Miguel, the parking valet, saw my Rolls, gave a big grin and waved. Where else but L.A. can you valet park to visit your lawyer.
“Somebody else you’ve helped?”
I smiled. “Miguel does just fine on his own. He and his cousin, Jorge, have the Century City valet parking and car washing concession. They probably make more than half the people working in the offices. My attorney did the negotiations for them. No charge, providing he got free valet service and clean cars for life. That’s his building.”
Jake Praxis has been my attorney and friend for a while now. He started life as a navy aviator, but that ended during a night carrier landing when a cable snapped and flipped his F-14 into the South China Sea. When they fished him out, he had a broken back, and his flying days were over. And in Jake’s words, “Once you’ve flown a shit-hot jet, you can’t bear watching somebody else doing it.”
So with that career plan gone, he tried law school and discovered it was a lot like being a pilot. You get to call the shots, and if your passengers don’t like it, they can get the fuck off your plane.
And if there are two things Jake’s good at, it’s calling the shots and firing clients who try to tell him how to do his job. You’ve got to respect that. He’s the best, and if you don’t want to listen, get yourself another lawyer. According to the L.A. Times, he represents eight of the top ten box office stars, five of the biggest earners in sports and all of the studio heads. Not bad for a ranch rat from East Jesus, New Mexico.
Jake represents so many Hollywood players that he sometimes finds himself on both sides of a negotiation. Anywhere else, that would be a conflict of interest, and one of the parties would have to get another lawyer. But if Jake represents you, you sure as hell don’t want some Number Two going up against him. So when it happens, everybody signs conflict waivers, and Jake goes into a room and makes the deal with himself. He says he likes representing both sides. It’s easier to sort out the overreaching.
He’s also the first call for reporters when something big breaks in show business or sports. But except for his pet environmental causes, you can’t drag a quote out of him. Talking to the press is not how you end up owning a Century City high-rise and homes from Sun Valley to Sorrento. Neither does having your face plastered across television screens.
“Why would I do that?” he asks. “To get more fuckin’ pain-in-the-ass clients?”
So, unless you’re an insider, you wouldn’t recognize him—even in his courtside seats at Lakers games.
“That was Jake Praxis’s building, wasn’t it?” said Kim a block and a half later. “Is he your attorney?”
I nodded.
“No shit.”
“You know him?”
“Hardly. But he’s on the board of the Getty, and I shook his hand once at a cocktail party. He had an Italian actress on his arm who could have stood next to a Ferrari and nobody would have noticed the car.”
“Only one?”
Kim grinned. “I’ve heard he’s quite the man. How’d you meet him?”
“Did a favor for one of his clients.”
“Back to the favors. You must be quite the fucking guy to know. What was it? Another ‘watcher’ operation?”
I smiled. “I wish it’d been that easy. The client is a big action star who coincidentally happens to live up t
he street from me. The guy had a bad case of couldn’t-keep-it-in-his-pants and liked living on the edge. Jake warned him more than once about fooling around with women he didn’t know, but like a lot of people—especially actors—when his boxers bowed, his brain went out for a smoke.
“Then he got himself paparazzied in a Brentwood bar licking the face of a Colombian drug lord’s seventeen-year-old daughter who was in town visiting colleges. The photographer was a whole lot smarter than the actor. He followed the happy couple to a poolside suite at the Four Seasons and got more shots of them playing lap trampoline in a hot Jacuzzi.”
Kim whistled. “Colombians don’t send warnings. They just kill everything that breathes, including your goldfish.”
“Actually, when it comes to their daughters, they like to torture the goldfish first.”
“Seventeen-year-old chocho. At least it was a piece of ass the guy was going to remember.”
“Yep, but not in old age. The actor got my name from a friend, and by the time he called, he was nearly hysterical, holed up and surrounded by more security than an Israeli ambassador. He swore up and down the girl told him she was twenty-three and an illegal from Guatemala. I believed him, but so what? Guys who use the phrase ‘Swiss bank’ in the same sentence as ‘remote landing strip’ don’t much care about the pure of heart. I wanted to tell the schmuck he didn’t need me, he needed a priest.
“But the guy was crying so hard I felt sorry for him. He was supposed to start a picture in a month, but he was too terrified to leave the house. Eventually, I said I’d make a couple of calls—mostly so I could just get the hell out of there.”
“You’re not going to tell me the actor’s name, are you?”
“Nope.”
“That’s okay. There’s a big star who’s got such an attitude that I’m just going to pretend it’s him. Go ahead.”
“I got in touch with a friend in the DEA who told me this particular bad guy, Wilson Garza, liked to straighten out personal problems by strapping offenders to a drum of gasoline and shooting it with a grenade. Probably fitting for an actor who couldn’t keep his dick under control, but tough on the studio that was paying him thirty mil. But my DEA guy also told me that Garza was in the middle of a power struggle he was probably going to lose. It might take six months or so, but sooner or later, he was going to be taking a MAC-10 nap.”
