Fun and Games

by Duane Swierczynski

  That was why she considered it a last resort. Untraceable poisons were the best—the heart-attack stuff, for instance, was a godsend. Car crashes could be investigated, but it wasn’t too difficult to have a vehicle do what you wanted. Falls were good, too, in a pinch. Bathtub drownings.

  Fires, though, were a motherfucker.

  She needed facts. Something that would help her firm up the new narrative. It shouldn’t be difficult; she knew how the story would end:

  Recovering starlet with history of drug abuse gets into a car wreck, freaks out, flees the scene, goes to a boyfriend’s house in the Hollywood Hills, is overwhelmed with guilt, shoots up again, and then sets the house on fire in a fit of drug-addled psychosis, thinking she can cover her tracks.

  Not Mann’s best story line ever, but considering this whole early-morning abortion of a job, it would have to do. But did the facts support it? Would they support the actress lighting the house on fire?

  And where did Charlie Hardie fit in?

  She had no idea.

  Where would the bodies be? What were they trying to do as the fire raged on? How did the fire even start? Was it one of those freak events where a charge from a cell phone ignited the gas in the air? Or did Hardie decide to light one up while he was waiting them out? No. Hardie didn’t smoke, according to Factboy, not for three years. Neither did the actress. So, what, then? Did they cause the blast?

  Were they dead or alive?

  O’Neal, up in the front of the van, was trying to figure that out. He used the dash-mounted scanner and a pair of headphones to listen to the progress of the firefighters just down the street. The fire was worst on the top floor, as expected, but smoke was everywhere. As they cleared each room, he waited for mention of a body. Either body would be welcome. Any sign of progress in this long, tortured morning.

  Finally there was excitement on the line. They’d discovered someone. Cries went out for medical assistance.

  O’Neal told Mann, “They’re pulling out somebody. Still alive.”

  “Okay,” Mann said. “Which one?”

  O’Neal held up an index finger, kept listening to the scanner chatter, trying to put the pieces together.

  “Tell me it’s the actress.”

  “Hold on. Male, they’re saying.”

  Silence on the line. Finally, O’Neal was back.

  “Shit, I think it’s A.D. They’re talking about getting him to the hospital fast—he’s alive but not doing so well. Vitals are crashing.”

  Mann ignored it. A.D. knew the risks; they had to stay focused.

  “Hardie and the actress have to be in there. Give the firefighters time to make their way through the house.”

  “Did you hear what I said? What’s the plan with A.D.?”

  “A.D. can take care of himself for now. He won’t say a word, and we’ll come up with something for him later.”

  Yeah. Like an air bubble in an IV line.

  A.D. wasn’t the focus right now; he was an unfortunate casualty. Horrible to admit, but you could find A.D.’s pretty much everywhere. Many young, creative minds were eager to break into this rarefied line of work. Confirming the field even existed took a great deal of effort and networking and background checks and psych exams—and only then, if you were lucky, would you be able to apply for a support-team job. Still, there were plenty of names on a list somewhere. If A.D. were to die, his corpse would be trampled into pulpy bits by the people eager to take his job.

  So forget A.D.; they had to keep their minds on the actress and her new friend, Charlie Hardie.

  O’Neal removed the headset, let his shoulders fall, and shook his head. It had been a long day, and it just didn’t seem to want to fucking end. And they had the other production later this afternoon. He hated the idea of rolling to another job with all of these loose ends still to clean up.

  Mann’s cavalier attitude toward the possible death of one of his crewmates didn’t help much either. What if it had been him down there? Up until this moment, O’Neal had assumed he’d have been rescued. One Guild member saving another.

  Goddamnit all to fuck.

  But at least their targets were somewhere in that smoldering house, and they were most likely dead. He had been watching the front, and Mann had the back—from two angles. Neither target had passed their line of vision.

  Let’s just find their corpses already so we can move on.

  There was a cough in the darkness.

  “Charlie?”

  “Right here.”

  More coughing, hacking, hand waving in the near dark.

  “Where are we?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The only people who could answer that question were dead.

  In 1925 a bootlegger named Jimmy Smiley from Philadelphia went west to spend some of his ill-acquired fortune. Through the early part of the decade, Philly had been a wide open town. He’d made money hand over fist selling beer and brown lightning to the mooks in the row houses—that is, until the city brought in a Marine general to clean things up. Smiley sensed the glory days were over and lammed it out to the sleepy, sunny farm town that was L.A. Oranges. That sounded good to Smiley.

  Back then, Beachwood Canyon was a new development, and Smiley’s money was as good as anyone else’s. Smiley thought big, and he thought ahead. He found a plot of level ground that looked to be higher than anyone else’s in the immediate area and set about re-creating his East Coast manse out in California—only bigger. He made sure the castle had five garages—again, thinking ahead, he knew that Los Angeles was so sprawling that the more cars you had, the more power you’d enjoy. He made sure each of his six children had their own large, sunny bedroom. He made sure his wife had the kitchen of her dreams.

  And Smiley made sure his mistress had a place as well.

  Back on the Main Line, Smiley had bought the young lady her own apartment near Reading Terminal Station, just a train ride away.

  But out in Hollywoodland, Smiley decided to keep her a little closer.

  So he purchased a plot of land a little farther down the mountain and had a four-story “upside-down” home built for her. And since it wouldn’t do to be seen by his neighbors trotting on down the lane for nightly visits, Smiley had a second construction crew build a secret tunnel connecting the main house up on top of the hill to the mistress’s bedroom down below, boring straight through the bedrock of the mountain itself. Smiley hinted to the construction crew that the tunnel was for “business purposes.” The winking crew filled in the blanks; they knew how Smiley had made his dough back East; sex never even entered their minds.

  Smiley kept the only key and made sure the door on the other side was hidden at the back of a large walk-in closet. Finally, he bribed the county officials to conveniently lose the architectural plans to both homes, which explained why—almost ninety years later—Factboy didn’t uncover a trace of this tunnel during his initial check on the Lowenbruck house.

  And why Hardie and Lane were surprised to find themselves in a dank, stone-lined staircase in a corridor that seemed to stretch up into a dark forever.

  Thick black smoke had poured in behind them; there really was no time for debate. Charlie used his forearms to push away the semirotted wood and clear the entranceway. There seemed to be nothing behind the wall at first, but Charlie figured nothing was better than dying from smoke inhalation. Maybe there was a crevice between the house and the mountain, and they could squeeze themselves out through it.

  “Go,” Charlie said, hacking. “Go go go…”

  Once they were inside the passageway, their eyes began to adjust, and they saw the stone walls, the cement stairs. They crawled up into the darkness. After a few steps Charlie reached out and grabbed Lane’s arm. She clutched his hand in return, holding on tight and limping all the way up the cement staircase into what seemed like total darkness.

  She wondered if Andrew had any clue this passageway was here. She assumed not. He loved talking about the house, and he wouldn’t
have been able to resist talking about a secret corridor. For a second, Lane thought he’d be excited by the discovery, but then she remembered his house was burning down, along with everything he owned and created.

  Mann kept her eyes on the scene of the fire, trying to pull in any kind of detail that would be useful. Every few seconds she would ask O’Neal:

  “Anything?”

  “Nothing.”

  Her eyes hurt, though. Their sockets were tender and her face throbbed so much that she couldn’t stop tearing up. She couldn’t take anything for the pain, because that would just fog her thinking. The more she stared up at the house, the more tears came. Blinking was agonizing, so she did it as little as possible. And with every blink, Mann was convinced the damage to her eyes worsened.

  But she couldn’t leave. There was no one else to keep watch. What had begun as a team of six eyes had dwindled down to a pitiful two and a half—that’s all Mann really had, a kind of pathetic half vision.

  If they were dead…

  And this was where you went after you died…

  Then they must have stumbled into a part of the afterlife that was still under construction. Hardie looked around at the buckets, the scaffolding, the painting tarps. The room reeked of caulk and cement and dust and paint, and harsh light blazed through uncovered windows. Still, you could tell that you were standing inside what most people would refer to as a castle.

  And all at once, Lane figured it out.

  “Oh God,” Lane said. “I know where we are.”

  “A new wing of Hell?”

  “No. We’re in the Smiley Castle. You can’t see it from the street, but it’s the next house up on the hill. This director I know bought the place a few months ago. He wants to do a movie about the guy who built this place. A real nutcase who turned into a cult leader.”

  “I’m guessing your friend hasn’t moved in yet.”

  “No. He’s having the whole place redone—he’s restoring it to the way it looked back in the nineteen thirties, from the flooring to the roof to the fixtures. Half the place is on order from antique dealers around the world, and it won’t be finished until early next year. It’s kind of his dream home and dream movie project wrapped up in one.”

  “Groovy,” Charlie said.

  Lane had read a long piece about it online a few months ago. Eventually, the massive room they were in would be restored to its Depression-era glory. Before that, it was a recording studio. Before that, a storage center for pornographic VHS cassettes. Before that, a playroom. Before that, a crime scene. And before that, not long after its construction, Jimmy Smiley’s secret full-service Polynesian-style bar, where the former bootlegger-turned-Hollywood-producer-turned-devil-worshipper would take a few nips of brown lightning before descending the concrete staircase to bow at the feet of his mistress—who, in time, would ascend to the level of Dark Satanic Goddess.

  “Come on,” Lane said.

  They wound their way through a series of halls until they reached the front doors. Outside, the roiling black smoke from the Lowenbruck house was filling the sky, and fire truck sirens were cycling down. Hardie and Lane were up too high on the hill to see the burning house below, so they had the illusion that the faux castle was floating on a polluted cloud. Behind them was the hazy apparition of the Hollywood sign, which only completed the picture. If he hadn’t been engaged in a desperate struggle for survival, Hardie might have stopped to appreciate it all, to savor the view. But they had to keep moving in case their tormentors realized they weren’t dead.

  Hardie told Lane they needed to get the hell off these mountains and back on relatively flat ground—well, flat for California.

  Lane shook her head.

  “No. We need to go up.”

  19

  It was a grim, desperate struggle for existence,

  and all of a sudden I was stirred by it, excited by its drama,

  stirred by its stark, lethal beauty.

  —James M. Cain

  UP?

  Up seemed insane. A dead end at the top of some mountain peak. Enough time to touch the H in the Hollywood sign before kissing your ass good-bye.

  “Trust me,” she said. “I know this area. I used to go running around here all the time.”

  “What’s up there?”

  “Come on.”

  Hardie followed her up a set of concrete stairs that ran away from the castle along the side of one steep slope. Then they were back on Durand Drive and headed up again. None of this made sense. Who the fuck designed Hollywood, anyway—M. C. Escher? Homes were stacked on either side of the road, offering a corridor of sorts. And the road kept climbing up, up, up. The ascent was hard, sweaty work—definitely not something a man who’s been skewered and poisoned and choked and nearly burned to death should be doing. Hardie was about to complain, when he saw that Lane was still limping, biting her lip with every step. She was suffering, too.

  As they walked past windows, Hardie imagined one of their surprise tormentors popping out of a window, bow and arrow or some other crazy weapon in their hands (Why didn’t they carry guns? What the hell was it about guns?), ready to take them both out. Halfway up, Charlie realized how hard his heart was pounding, how much his lungs were burning and heaving. Steep fucking steps. Lane, meanwhile, who didn’t have nearly as much muscle, bone, and fat to transport, darted up like a dragonfly skimming the surface of a pond.

  “Hang on,” Hardie said. His chest wound was killing him, his thighs ached, and he was so incredibly light-headed that at any given moment, that hazy feeling in his skull threatened to transmogrify into a giant rock, and then his head would slam into the ground, his body following.

  Lane said, “We’ll rest at the top.”

  Up.

  Why the hell were they headed up instead of down?

  Lane had quickly explained: the killers probably expected them to go back down. This was a canyon; all roads funneled back to Franklin, and it was easy to have that covered. But if they continued up into the hills, they could dart around the Lake Hollywood Reservoir and sneak back down on the Burbank side—and then find someplace to hide and sort everything out.

  Burbank? Charlie thought. Wasn’t that an entirely different city? Not even in Los Angeles?

  But he said nothing and followed her up, up, up. This was Lane’s town. What the hell did he know, other than that he’d just fucked up royally. Sure, a house he’d watched had burned before. But back then, he had saved boxes of irreplaceable items from the soon-to-be-burned-out shell. (Like the stuff in his missing carry-on.) Hardie hadn’t saved jack shit from the Lowenbruck house.

  “Why don’t we bang on somebody’s door and have them call the police?”

  “You saw what they’re capable of, Charlie. Yeah, we might get a cop sent out here. But they might intercept the call and send a bunch of their own guys in uniform. And then we’re done.”

  Hardie hated to admit she was right—God, it was all so Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Trust no one! Warn everyone you see! Look out for trucks full of mysterious-looking pods! But she did have a point. There was only one man he really trusted. And Hardie wanted to make sure they were somewhere safe and quiet before he made that call.

  “So, what then?”

  “We keep going and go somewhere I can think.”

  “You mean we keep going up.”

  “Yeah.”

  Across the street, O’Neal watched the firefighters continue their work on the house with hoses and water, soaking the living fuck out of everything in sight. They didn’t want to be the ones to let this blaze run loose up and down the hills. Mother Nature was bad enough with her cleansing fires. There was no room on the schedule for stupid accidental house fires.

  O’Neal stood on the side of the road, pretending to be a land-scaper doing a little rubbernecking. Pretty soon he would be shooed away—already he was getting the eye from the captain on site. They needed eyes inside the house, badly. It was possible that Madden and Hardie had found
really, really great hiding spots, so good that even the firefighters hadn’t been able to find their bodies yet. But that seemed highly unlikely. You’re stuck in the middle of a fire, you don’t go hiding. You try to get out, at all costs.

  Look at the 9/11 jumpers. O’Neal thought that pretty much said it all.

  Rather than attract more attention, O’Neal climbed into the driver’s seat, adjusted his mirrors, then started the van. He drove up Durand until he reached the point where the road met the downward-sloping hill, then made a hard right, gunning it up the hill until he reached the giant wrought-iron gates that stood in front of the road leading to the Smiley Castle.

  O’Neal had been to a party at the castle a bunch of years ago—before he was part of the Industry and still had his mind on movie dreams. He remembered the crazy drive up to the main house and thinking he’d landed on Mars, not in the Hollywood Hills. He’d spent much of the party buzzed by the history of the place.

  Pulling a pair of bolt cutters from the back, O’Neal quickly snipped the chains locking the gates, pulled the loose strands free, curled them up into a heavy ball, then tucked them behind a bush. Construction crews toiled on this place nonstop during the week, but it was Saturday. Day off.

  Then he gunned the van up the long hill to the castle at the top. At least up here nobody would be able to see him, and maybe he could set up some surveillance from a turret or something. Give this whole operation a little class.

  While waiting for word from O’Neal, Mann allowed herself a glass of water from the kitchen tap. Her stomach rumbled, but she didn’t dare open a cabinet to scavenge for food. There was already so much to clean up, to reinvent, to explain, to fix. This production should have been over last night. There was no excuse for why it had taken so long, other than dumb, rotten luck. Until today, Mann had always believed that you make your own luck, you create your own fate. Now she wasn’t too sure.