Bloodthirsty

by Marshall Karp

  “Done.”

  “I have a question for Ms. Shwartz.” It was Anna.

  “Be my guest.”

  “Someone of your stature, with your busy schedule, doesn’t usually drop everything to handle a low-level plea bargain, and I was just curious—”

  “You’re wondering how I got involved.”

  “If you don’t mind my asking,” Anna said.

  “Robyn’s mother works with an old friend of mine, Judge Miriam Span. All it took was one phone call from Judge Span.”

  “So you’re not a friend of the family.”

  The tough little lady lawyer smiled broadly enough so you could catch a glint of gold from one of her back teeth. “I am now.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  “It’s on you boys,” Kilcullen said. “You gotta telescope.”x

  “Right. Telescope,” Terry said. “That’s management-speak for ‘do two things at the same time.’”

  “Three things,” Kilcullen said. “You need to bring in this drug dealer, interview the paparazzi who shot the abduction video, find Damian Hedge before they kill him, and catch the guy who murdered Barry Gerber.”

  “That’s four things,” Terry said.

  “What am I, a mathematician? See what you can get from these two shitheads who videotaped the kidnapping and then sold it to a TV station instead of calling 911. Then come back here. I put a call out to Irv Ziffer in narcotics. He was tied up in court, but he should be here by around four. If anybody knows anything about this Carlos guy, it’ll be Ziff the Sniff.”

  “We’re all over it, Loo,” Terry said. “By the way, you left your car at the crime scene when you hitched a ride with us this morning. You want us to run it back for you in our spare time?”

  “Kiss my fat Irish ass.”

  “Just trying to telescope,” Terry said.

  “There’s one more thing I have to do,” I said as Terry pulled out of the parking lot and onto Wilcox. I flipped open my cell phone. “I gotta check on that meddling limo driver who got stun-gunned.”

  I dialed Angel’s cell.

  “Mike,” she said. “I’m not allowed to keep my phone on in the hospital, but I knew you would call. Did you find Damian?”

  “No. How’s my father?”

  “He’s holding court. First Dennis came, and he stayed an hour. Now three of his teamster buddies are here. One almost got kicked out for smoking a cigar in the room. Then Diana called. She’s coming after she gets out of work. And Frankie got here about twenty minutes ago.”

  “Is Jim’s heart rate back to normal rhythm?”

  “Not yet. They’re going to take him downstairs at four o’clock. First they had to give him blood thinners. They want to make sure there are no clots. Otherwise, they could jump-start his heart and a clot could get loose, and…” Her voice started to get teary.

  “Angel, it’s not gonna happen,” I said. “He’s been through this before. He’ll be fine.”

  “I know, but I worry. There’s a chapel downstairs in the hospital. I prayed for a while and I lit a candle.”

  “It’s a lot smarter than lighting a cigar. Tell my father’s idiot friends to behave, or I’ll come over and arrest the whole lot of them.”

  “Don’t worry. Frankie is here now. He won’t let them do anything stupid.”

  I had to smile. It was hard to believe that my brother Frankie was in charge of not letting anyone do anything stupid. He’d come a long way in a short time. A year ago his gambling addiction had gotten so bad that someone had put out a contract on him. Daddy and big brother Mike to the rescue. I had the underworld connections, and Jim had the cash to bail him out. It wasn’t the first time, but it was the last. Frankie spent twenty-eight days in rehab, and for the past year he’s been going to Gamblers Anonymous meetings.

  I could hear Big Jim and his trucker buddies yakking it up in the background. “Angel, put my father on,” I said. “I want to talk to him.”

  It took about a minute. I could hear Jim shushing his friends. When he finally picked up the phone his voice was a feeble whisper. “Hello. Mike? Is that you?” It was pure Jim Lomax bullshit.

  “You sound fantastic,” I said. “So tell me, how did you come to be driving Damian’s limo today?”

  “Mike, my heart…” He took a deep, wheezy, theatrical breath. “My heart is still too weak for me to answer questions.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m…” He coughed a few times. “I’m sure. No questions.”

  “That’s what I figured,” I said. “That’s why I told the TV crew to forget about interviewing you in your hospital room.”

  “You what?” His voice came booming over the phone. “The press is different. I can muster up enough strength to give them a few sound bites.”

  “No,” I said. “I can tell you’re getting agitated already. I did the right thing. Get some rest. I’ll see you later.”

  He was in mid-yell when I snapped the phone shut.

  Terry had heard enough of the conversation to figure out what was going on. “So how’s your father doing?” he said.

  I was grinning. It was probably the first time I smiled all day. “He’s sounding better every minute.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Downtown LA was one of Joanie’s favorite hangouts. We’d drive there on weekends, soaking up the little pocket neighborhoods that are built around fashion, finance, theater, art, and all varieties of commerce. She would drag me around for hours, stopping at galleries to gawk at paintings I could neither understand nor afford, bargaining with the local merchants for a copper teapot or a string of Japanese paper lanterns, and ending up in some incredible hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Chinatown, Little Tokyo, or Olvera Street.

  The LA Convention and Visitors Bureau advertises downtown Los Angeles as the heart of the most vibrant city in the western hemisphere. And when Joanie was alive, it was.

  The vibrancy is gone for me now, and I get a pang every time I go back. It’s not on Diana’s radar, so I don’t go there often, but Scott and Julian Beeby, the guys who caught the abduction on video, had a loft on Mateo Street in the Warehouse District. The neighborhood is sketchy, and if you walked along Mateo late at night, you’d look over your shoulder and pick up the pace. It’s a part of downtown where you’d swear even the homeless don’t want to live.

  Boy, would you be wrong.

  Number 847 had a grimy frosted-glass front door that was reinforced with steel mesh. The panel of doorbells on the outer wall had a few readable names, but the name Beeby wasn’t on any of the bells, so we rang one that said Photog.

  The intercom was crisp and clear. “State your business.”

  “Detectives Lomax and Biggs from LAPD,” I said. “We’re looking for Scott and Julian—”

  I didn’t finish. We were buzzed in. “Third floor,” the voice said.

  The lobby, if you could call it that, was devoid of furniture. Paint was flaking off the walls and ceiling, and it smelled a little dank. We bypassed the elevator and took the stairs. There was a green metal fire-door on the third floor that had three locks, each covered with pry-proof plates. The sign on the door said, The Brothers Beeby. Tutto è possibile.

  “My Italian’s a little rusty,” Terry said, “but I think it says we can get our pants pressed while we wait.”

  The door opened and a man in a maroon warm-up suit said, “Hi, I’m Julian Beeby. My brother and I have been expecting you.”

  He looked like the guy who had played Seinfeld’s neurotic friend George—about forty-five-years-old, short, stocky, not fat but closing in on it. His hair was pretty much history, and he had about a week’s worth of scraggle on his face.

  We stepped through the door and were practically knocked on our asses. The grunge on the outside had been part of the camouflage. Inside was fantastico.

  “Holy shit,” Terry said. “It’s huge.” His eye caught the staircase. “And it’s a duplex.”

  “Yeah,” Julian said. “Two floors,
7,000 square feet, original bow truss ceilings, sliding glass walls, skylights, huge modern kitchen, four bedrooms, three baths, photography studio, makeup room, and tons of space for work, parties, or if you’re a film company, we’ll rent it out to you.”

  “We’re not renters,” Terry said. “We’re cops.”

  “I know,” Julian said. “I’m just saying.”

  A tall, extremely good-looking man came down the staircase and walked across the oak floor. “Hi, I’m Scott Beeby.”

  He was about six-two, thirty-five years old, with a smooth chiseled face that is best described in this town as soap star handsome.

  “You’re brothers?” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know,” Julian said. “All the men in our family are short, fat, and bald. Scott’s a freak of nature. A genetic aberration in the Beeby lineage. But my parents felt sorry for him, so we decided to keep him.”

  Scott smiled, all blue eyes and white teeth. “And I’m Julian’s wingman. If it wasn’t for me, he’d be picking up skanks.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, and if it wasn’t for me, Scott would be picking up his paycheck at the unemployment office instead of living in a veritable palace. What do you think? You like it?”

  “The paparazzi business must pay pretty damn good,” Terry said.

  “The media buys lots of shots of celebs,” Julian said. “But sometimes we make more money not selling pictures. Come here, come here, look at this.”

  He walked us over to a corner of the loft, where about thirty cameras were mounted to a brick wall. Broken cameras. Cases smashed, guts exposed, lenses shattered. Beneath each camera was a plaque that had a date, a famous name, and an amount of money.

  “Is this what I think it is?” Terry said.

  Julian clapped his hands together. “What are you thinking? What are you thinking?”

  “Each one of these little brass plaques is a celebrity who got violent, busted your camera, and the amount is what you collected in the lawsuit.”

  “Close enough,” Julian said. “Every one of these…you should pardon the expression, stars…got pissed off enough to get physical with us. And that cost them. Most of the time there was no lawsuit. We love settling out of court. And where you see the big amounts, like this one here for $650,000, not only was the camera broken, but my nose and two front teeth.”

  “For some reason they hit Julian a lot more than they hit me.”

  Terry studied the wall. “Sean Penn, Russell Crowe, Justin Timberlake…so you go after the hotheads.”

  “Oh yeah. Oh yeah. We get in their face and either get their picture, get them to throw a punch, or if we’re really lucky, both. And if they’re with their wives or girlfriends, and they got a little alcohol in their blood, it’s practically a guaranteed twenty-, thirty- thousand-dollar night. They don’t give a shit. They spend that much on blow.”

  “Which brings us to the subject at hand,” I said. “We saw the video, but it was less than two minutes. We want to see everything you shot this morning at Damian Hedge’s house.”

  “Be my guest,” Julian said, “but we shot about four hours’ worth.”

  “Four hours?”

  “Well, about three hours of it is you and the other cops working the crime scene. It won’t sell for big bucks, but we’ll get something. Especially with you two guys. You’re pretty famous, as cops go.”

  I heard a whirring and turned. Scott was across the room pointing a camera at us. “Put it away,” I said.

  “Hey, it’s my place of business,” he said. “You can’t stop me from taking pictures.”

  I walked right at him, giving him my best pissed-off copper look, which came easy. “One more shutter click and you’re going to my place of business,” I said. “And trust me, you’ll get photographed, printed, and you’ll spend the night in a room about one-thousandth the size of this loft, with a bunch of crackheads you can’t sue after they get violent with you.”

  Scott put the camera down. “Sorry. We’re here to help. We want you to find Damian and bring him back safe. He’s one of our meal tickets, man.”

  “Forget what we saw on the video,” I said. “And we’re not watching four hours of crime scene crap. What did you witness before we got there?”

  “Okay, okay, okay, relax. We’re all on the same side,” Julian said. “I got there about five. Scott and I work in shifts. He was still here sleeping.”

  “You got where?” I said. “Where were you shooting from?”

  “Oh, there’s a nice hilly area in Holmby Park across the street from Damian’s house. We have a little setup behind some bushes. It’s like a duck blind. I don’t know what the hell we’re going to do when he moves to that big house with the gates over on—”

  “Mr. Beeby,” I said. “Get back to the duck blind.”

  “Right. I didn’t shoot anything till the limo pulled up. Then I started rolling camera.”

  “Did you see any activity before the limo got there?” I said.

  “Just the local traffic. A few financial types leaving for work early. A couple of joggers.”

  “Any pickup trucks?”

  “You mean like did they do a dry run and drive past the house before the limo got there? I don’t think so. But I’m not watching the cars. I’m waiting for Damian to come out of the house, and maybe there’s somebody who’s coming out with him. Someone who was invited for a sleepover.”

  “Like who?” I said

  “Like anyone. Jennifer Aniston would be ideal, but I wouldn’t care if it was Phyllis Diller, Queen Latifah, or the entire string section of the LA Philharmonic. All the media whores care about is who Damian Hedge is banging these days.”

  “So you didn’t see anything before the limo got there. Then what happened?”

  “Then it’s what you saw on the video. Damian comes out, driver helps him in the car, pickup drives by, they zap the driver, Damian bolts, they chloroform him—”

  “How do you know it was chloroform?”

  “You can’t make it out on the tape, because he was struggling, but I could see it with the naked eye. The guy put a cloth over Damian’s nose, and he went down. Had to be chloroform or something like it.”

  “How about the second person? The driver. Male or female?”

  “I’m pretty sure it was a woman. It’s hard to tell on the video, because I was jerking the camera from here to there. But there was something I could feel about the way she moved. Woman.”

  “Can you describe the truck?”

  “A Chevy pickup. I don’t know if the camera picked up the logo, but I got a glimpse of it. It was dark blue, which is hard to tell on the tape because there wasn’t a hell of a lot of light, but I’m pretty sure it was dark blue.”

  “Did you get a license?”

  “No. I pointed the camera at the back of the truck, but it didn’t read. I think that maybe they could have muddied it up.”

  “What did you do after they drove off?”

  “I called Scott. I told him to come right over and keep shooting whatever went down next, while I tried to sell what we got.”

  “I can vouch for that,” Scott said. He had relocated to a plush green armchair and lit up a cigarette.

  “Thanks, wingman,” I said. “If I need you to verify anything, I’ll ask.”

  In a lame act of defiance he blew smoke in my direction. I ignored him and went back to Julian. “Did you ever think of helping the limo driver, or calling the cops?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did think about it. But I didn’t want to get involved.”

  Nobody in Hollywood likes the piranhas with cameras who earn fortunes invading people’s privacy, and these guys were easier to hate than most. “What the hell are you talking about?” I said, raising my voice. “You photograph a crime in progress, you run off to sell the film, and you didn’t want to get involved? Did it ever dawn on you that maybe the limo driver needed to get to a hospital? That every minute you wasted could have cost him his life?”

 
Julian backed up three feet and Terry stepped in between us.

  “Calm your partner down, will you,” Julian said. “Let me finish, let me finish.”

  “I’m not here to calm anyone down,” Terry said. “Finish.”

  “You have to understand my frame of mind,” Julian said. “This is my livelihood. Getting footage like this is a once-in-a-lifetime event.”

  “Well that excuses everything,” Terry said. “I think that’s the same thing those French photographers told the police when they ran Princess Diana’s car into a wall.”

  The wisps of hair on Julian’s head were wet, the pits of his warm-up suit were dark. “Jesus, what are you comparing me to? I didn’t make this thing go down. All I did was shoot it. I knew if I called the cops, they would take the video. So I decided I would give the limo driver a couple of minutes to come to. If he didn’t, I was going to phone it into 911 anonymous. But he was only out about a minute or two. You can see it on the tape. Believe me, I wasn’t gonna let the poor fat bastard die.”

  “You’re one hell of a good Samaritan,” Terry said. “We’ll pass that on to the poor fat bastard who is now in the hospital.”

  “Do that, do that, do that. And tell him we’d be glad to send him copies of the video. I’ll put it on DVD. Whatever he wants. No charge.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be overwhelmed by your generosity,” Terry said. “And I can’t for the life of me understand why all these idiot movie stars would want to beat the shit out of you.”

  “I know, I know, I know,” Julian said. “It’s a scummy job. But look around. Look at the payoff. How else could a guy like me get to live like this?”

  “And the two of you are perfectly happy to watch another human being get kidnapped and not call the cops, just so you can live in a 7,000-square-foot loft with bow truss ceilings and sliding glass walls, and rent it to movie companies?”

  Julian Beeby rubbed a pudgy hand over his well-fed scraggly face. He shrugged. “Hey, man, everything’s relative.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Damian Hedge was not a smart man. Not that it mattered. Intellect has never been a prerequisite for movie stardom.