“My beautiful lost boy.” She brought the paper cup of coffee to her lips but pulled it away without taking a sip. “He has his own production company now. He’ll take care of his mother when the time is right.”
“Do you see much of Jagger?”
“Jason doesn’t approve of me so no, I don’t.” She straightened her back and stared aggressively forward. “As you may have guessed, Jason got custody.”
Frank hunched his shoulders and leaned over the table, trying to make himself seem as inoffensive and harmless as possible, a visual cue to the initiated that he was about to open a potentially embarrassing line of questioning. “I thought it was normal, in divorce cases, for the woman to be given custody of the children.”
“I was a drunk,” she said. “I used a lot of drugs then, too.”
“And Jason Starbal didn’t?”
A high-pitched chime sounded from her rattan-top purse. She unsnapped the catch and withdrew the offending cell phone, a sleek Nokia with a brushed platinum surface. “He drank and snorted coke almost as much as I did, but he held it a hell of a lot better than I could.” Her brow wrinkled as she read the caller’s number and she dropped the phone back into her purse, letting voice mail pick up. “It didn’t help that over the next three months I was arrested for drunken driving, drunk and disorderly conduct, and then, as the coup de grâce to my hopes of motherhood, felony cocaine possession. It wasn’t a lot of cocaine, but possessing any amount of cocaine in those days was a felony.”
“Still is,” Frank said. “But if everybody who did cocaine in Hollywood was caught, they’d have to hold the Oscars from county jail.”
She smiled bitterly, happy to find a cynical shoulder to gnash her teeth on. “I spiraled down after we separated and then Jason’s career took off. He could afford a good custody lawyer. All my money was tied up in drug lawyers. So the judge awarded him custody, and since then the more successful he’s become, the more difficult he’s made it for me to even see Jagger.” She hurriedly lifted a tissue from her bag to catch a tear sprung from anger more than sorrow. “But my personal faults and abuses aren’t going to help you sell newspapers, are they? I’m sure you’re more interested in hearing the dirt about Jason.”
“Why did your marriage break up, you think?”
“Whores,” she said, stuffing the tissue into her purse. “Jason couldn’t stay away from them. And I’m not talking about street whores, the kind that give you the clap if they don’t turn out to be a vice cop in drag.”
“I heard it rumored that he was in Heidi Fleiss’s black book.”
“I’m sure he’s been in every black book penned in the last twenty years. Before Heidi Fleiss it was Alexis Adams. She ran a call-girl service out of a house on Doheny Drive.”
“What drove him to visit whores?” Frank blushed, or at least pretended to, and scribbled a note in his pad. “I’m sorry, that sounds naive, I know, but bear with me.”
She flashed her hand across the table to cut him off. “I know exactly what you’re getting at. Jason liked rough sex. For a while I was perfect for him because, you know what? I was too drunk or stoned to care. But it wasn’t enough for him to dominate his wife. He needed new girls to conquer.” Her cell phone chimed again and she sighed, exasperated. “I should just turn the damn thing off.”
“Does your definition of rough sex include bondage?”
“Are you kidding? I’ve still got the strap marks.” She held up a single finger to pause the conversation while she lifted the phone from her purse. “Give me a second to get rid of this caller.”
She pressed the phone to her ear and answered with her name. Her expression shifted from annoyance to shock, and she glanced the supermarket across as though searching for someone. “What, were you going to chase me all the way to the frozen foods section?” Her voice rang in high indignation. “I just sat down for a cup of coffee and these two characters started asking me questions.” She dropped her head and listened. “No, I don’t respond to threats. Threats don’t work for me. What are you going to do, use your pull to force Bloomie’s to transfer me to the luggage section?” She tapped a burgundy, talonlike fingernail onto the countertop and nodded once. “That’s better. Okay, we have an understanding. You have all my particulars, right?” She disconnected, dropped the phone into her purse, and then held absolutely still, thinking through the ramifications of what she’d just agreed to.
“Was that Jason?” Frank asked.
“One of his minions. Sorry, but I’ve got to go.” She clutched her purse to her abdomen and glanced at her coffee as though deciding whether to bring it along or abandon it with the conversation.
“Wait a minute, help us out here, we’ve just gotten started,” Frank said, rising to his feet as she backed away from the table and stood. “I’m happy that you’ve managed to use us to cut yourself a better deal, really I am, but I’m having sudden memory failure here. Our conversation was on the record, right? How would you like me to identify your quotes: as the venomously bitter former Mrs. Jason Starbal or as Meme Richardson, recovering drug addict?”
“You’re a bastard,” she said, as though she expected nothing less.
“Just doing my job,” he answered.
“You want to talk to the woman responsible for ruining my marriage?”
“I think I hear the conversation going off record again,” Frank said.
“Talk to Anabelle Lash.” She snatched her coffee from the table and prepared to flee. “That bitch has been satisfying Jason Starbal’s perversions for twenty years.”
28
NORMAL BUSINESS HOURS had long since ended by the time we crossed into the San Fernando Valley, but we drove with some prospect of reaching Anabelle Lash in her office that night. Neither of us was particularly knowledgeable about the phone-sex business—at least, Frank claimed not to be, despite his otherwise encyclopedic range of knowledge—but it seemed reasonable that call frequency would pick up in the evening hours, when the clientele returned from work to pursue their lonely fantasies of subjugation and domination. Frank began dialing Lash’s numbers—both office and cell—the moment we left Gelson’s. She didn’t respond to either.
A dozen cars were parked in the lot of the aging courtyard office complex where Lash worked, encouraging hopes we might find her in. We passed along a concrete walk into a courtyard decorated with dying plants, a standing ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts, and a lost-looking garden gnome standing on the end of a wooden bench. The names of some of the building’s other tenants suggested a line of business similar to Lash’s, which explained the crowded parking lot and the brightly lit windows circling the interior. Frank rang the bell to Lash’s office and waited, then rang again. The blue-white of fluorescent bulbs flickered behind the venetian blinds covering the window above the walk. Frank glued his finger to the bell and peered through the slats, seeing little more than a sliver of carpet at the base. When no one answered after two minutes of insistent ringing, he scribbled a brief message on a sheet of notepaper, asking Lash to contact him as soon as possible, and wedged it under the door. Across the courtyard, a pneumatic blonde and Cleopatra-esque brunette, both dressed in low-slung jeans and halter tops, stepped out of a door marked Wildebeast Productions and lit cigarettes for each other.
“You girls seen Anabelle Lash around tonight?” Frank called.
They shook their heads and turned away to discourage further conversation. I wandered over to ask them if they’d ever heard of Jason Starbal. The one on the left shook her head and looked away, but the one on the right noticed my camera and asked what I was doing. When I told her I was a tabloid photographer she introduced herself as Cherry Laurel, “like the poison,” she said. “You’re talking about the movie guy, right?”
“Cher,” her colleague said, the name spoken as a warning.
“What? Anabelle is a bitch.”
“So who isn’t?”
Cherry pursed her lips around the filter tip of her cigarette and
wrapped her arm around the neck of her colleague. “Take our photo?” she asked.
I pulled the lens cap from the digital camera and directed them toward the courtyard, where I could use a security light instead of a flash to illuminate their faces. I told them to have some fun and ran off a series of stills while they vamped for the camera, then displayed the results on the digital’s microscreen. They laughed and squealed at the more outrageous shots, the act of being photographed and then viewing the images animating them in a way mere life did not. Then a bearded head poked out the door and advised them that the cigarette break was over, time to get to work. Doing what, I didn’t ask.
“Give me your e-mail address, I’ll send you copies,” I said.
“My name’s my address,” she said, and listed a popular e-mail service. “And just so you know, I’ve never seen the guy you mentioned with Anabelle, I certainly didn’t see him at her office last week, no way she set me up on a date with him when I was just breaking into the business, and the rumors that he’s a complete fetish freak are completely untrue.” She gave me a big, cartoonish wink and slipped through the closing office door.
“What have you got that I don’t?” Frank asked, walking up to me.
“A camera,” I said.
“The pen may be mightier than the sword, but who uses swords anymore?” He sidled up to the camera to view the images I’d just shot and asked, “Didn’t you tell me Christine went to Starbal’s mansion with a friend making a professional visit?”
“And we thought that referred to Rakaan,” I said, advancing from shot to shot. “You think she could have been referring to Anabelle Lash instead?”
“She does practice a variant of the world’s oldest profession.”
The possibility that Christine accompanied Anabelle Lash to Jason Starbal’s estate troubled me for several reasons, primarily because it meant Dr. Rakaan might not have been complicit in her killing. I’d wanted him to be guilty because I considered him a user and abuser and I just didn’t like him. As I drove back to the beach that night, I played through my mind scenarios of what might have happened that day. Lash was well aware of Christine’s aspirations to be an actress and could easily have invited her along when she visited Jason Starbal. Christine would have gone thinking that she’d visit the mansion of a rich Hollywood producer, might get the chance to meet him, and if he met her, who knows, maybe he’d like her enough to cast her in one of his films. Her diary hadn’t mentioned that she’d met Jason Starbal, only his kids, but she might have lied about that, or a meeting might have been arranged later.
It all made a perverted kind of sense to me. Christine was a beautiful young woman educated in the techniques of sadomasochism, a rare combination. Of course Starbal would want her. Lash wouldn’t hesitate to make the offer if she could convince Christine to participate. Would Christine agree? Maybe she’d been given ruffies to ensure that it wouldn’t matter whether she agreed or not. Or maybe she’d gone willingly and drugged herself to take the edge off the humiliation of having sex with a man for purposes of career advancement. The shadow visible in the lower right corner of the video may have been Anabelle Lash’s; given her extensive experience in adult film, she’d know how to set lights and operate a video camera. The only detail that didn’t fit was Christine’s appointment with the supposed producer of one of Johnny Depp’s films; Depp had never appeared in one of Starbal’s films, and if Lash arranged the meeting, Starbal had no need of the deception. Like a card that doesn’t fit the hand I was playing, I discounted it.
I intended to take a run when I returned to the apartment and got as far as laying out my sweats, exciting the Rott with the prospect of late-night exercise, but instead of running I collapsed on the bed, exhausted in a way that felt new to me, dropping like dead weight through semiconsciousness and down into a deep sleep. When the doorbell rang sometime later I felt jerked from the depths into a gasping kind of consciousness. Cassie and Pop had argued, I thought, and she’s hitchhiked back to Venice to seek refuge. I glanced at the clock on my way to vertical—an hour before midnight, not late at all.
The Rott stood before the front door, attentive but not excited. I put my eye to the peephole and was neither greatly surprised nor terribly pleased to see Sean’s stubbled face in the parabolic lens. I thought about rushing to the bathroom to splash my face with water, freshen my breath, and spike my hair but decided against it. That he hadn’t called before deciding to come over annoyed me. I figured he didn’t want to call because phone records can be checked, his extracurricular visits to an ex-con documented by the call lists phone companies keep on their customers. I wanted to inch the door open just wide enough to tell him to go away, but within seconds of seeing him I broke into a pheromone sweat as powerful as any drug and instead I opened the door wide.
“I woke you,” he said, and tried to back away.
“I can sleep later.” I grabbed the lapel to his leather jacket and pulled him inside. He kicked the door shut with his heel while I kissed him, hesitantly at first but then hard and fast, his stubble scraping against my lips like sagebrush. I yanked off his jacket but pushed him away when he came at me, let him get closer before I pushed him away again, then slipped behind to wrap my arms around his chest and bite his neck. A sound escaped his lips, midway between a moan and a roar, and he spun around, catching me from the back so deftly I couldn’t have escaped the move had I wanted to. My hands dropped to his belt while he kissed my neck and when he paused, expecting the jolt of skin-on-skin pleasure, I gave him just the smallest bit of pain instead and turned at the moment of surprise to push him back and lift his shirt above his stomach. He raised his arms to help me strip it off, then pulled me toward him, his hands jerking at my blouse in retaliation. If our first session of lovemaking had been spontaneous and the second smoothly deliberate, our third time together pitted strength against strength and weakness against weakness, the act of making love a physical contest not to cause pain—not much, anyway—but to dominate each other through the force of pleasure. We finished an intertwined jumble of limbs, our skin sweat-slick and flushed with blood, agreeing in our pleased exhaustion to call the contest a tie.
“Are you a mountain person, an ocean person, or a desert person?” he asked, cradling me from behind.
I turned just enough to catch him out the corner of my eye with a look that wondered why he was asking. “That’s the great thing about L.A., you got all three within walking distance so you don’t have to choose.”
“I thought we’d try the desert this weekend,” he said.
I considered that for a moment, then rolled on top of him.
“Were you going to ask me if I wanted to go, or just abduct me?”
His teeth glowed in the dark like a Cheshire cat’s.
“Which would you prefer?”
“I don’t abduct easily, so you’d better ask,” I said. “And Stewart Starbal’s funeral is coming up, so next weekend is better.”
“How’d you learn that? I thought it was private.”
“Frank heard about it,” I said. “He probably bribed the mortician.”
Sean kissed my neck and sat up, saying he wished he could stay but he had to check on some things. I suspect we both appreciated spontaneity more than predictability in a relationship, and mystery far more than certainty. The weekend after next was still far away. I didn’t worry about it. “I heard Logan came by to see you this morning,” he said, hunting in the darkness for where I’d flung his pants. “Everything okay?” He spotted one leg hanging from the top of the bedroom door and shook his head, amused.
I told him about the envelope I’d found in the mailbox. At the mention of Luster he sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at me in a way I couldn’t interpret, the streetlight outside my bedroom window glinting across the surface of his eyes.
“Why didn’t you call me last night when you found it?” he asked. “I’d left you, what, fifteen minutes before. I could have doubled back, easy.”
> “And done what?”
“Helped,” he said, exasperated. “You have some guy watching your apartment, you get threatening stuff in the mail, maybe I’d like to hear about it.” He jumped to his feet and pulled his jeans over his hips, tracked down his shirt, shoes, and socks in the other room. “I’m not trying to set the tone for a relationship here. I’m not implying that you’re weak and I’m strong, or that I’m here to protect you, or any other kind of sexist bullshit. But I have a skill set you should be using. I have contacts and resources that can help you. And no, I’m not going to compromise an ongoing investigation by feeding you information you don’t already know, but this looks like a particularly dangerous time for you and I can help keep you safe.”
“If I call every time a little trouble comes my way, you’ll need a twenty-four-hour hotline,” I said.
“You got my numbers, call anytime you want.”
I threw myself into a robe and went to the kitchen, thinking I’d pour myself a drink, then decided against it. “Do you think Logan is a good investigator?” I asked.
“You don’t make RHD without being a good investigator.” Sean hopped into a shoe as he followed me toward the kitchen. “The question is whether he’s the right investigator for this case.”
“Why?” I asked. “Was he beaten as a child with a rolled-up tabloid?”
Sean gave that the laugh it deserved and eyed the bottle of Jack Daniel’s I’d set on the kitchen counter. I poured three fingers into a tumbler for him and he limped over, one shoe on, one off, to get it. “Why are you so interested in attending the Starbal funeral? The poor kid’s dead, for Christ’s sake, let him rest in peace.”
“I don’t think he’s going to rest in peace, ever.”
“He sure as hell won’t if you tabloids keep hunting him.” He sank half the bourbon in one go and bent his leg to slip on the second shoe, looking like an awkward, one-legged bird while he tied the laces. “You know that cops often moonlight in the movie business, right?”
Zero to the Bone Page 24
