Dream Town

Chapter 64

Today, under the sun, Bel Air was just as pretty as the less affluent parts of LA, Archer thought.

At least on the outside. The inner core was a whole other sordid tale.

He stopped in front of the Jacoby estate. The tall, skinny palm trees waved to him in the wind like flitting fingers.

He knocked on the door, and the hinged-butler statue answered after a bit of a wait.

“I’d like to see Mrs. Jacoby. I was here before. The studio said she was at home today when I phoned earlier.”

“Who in the hell are you?”

Simon Jacoby was looking over the butler’s aged shoulder. He had on dark tweed pants and a salmon-colored shirt under a white cotton sleeveless golf sweater. He seemed well hydrated and had a tumbler of what looked to be scotch in hand. Archer had another marker to test that hunch: The man reeked of it.

He squinted at Archer. “Don’t I know you, fella? You look familiar, and not in a good way.”

“Name’s Archer.” He showed the man his official ID. He thought maybe Jacoby had seen him at the casino, while he’d been losing at kiddie poker.

Jacoby’s face flushed as his anger hit another level. “A private investigator? What the devil are you doing showing up at my—”

“I’ll take care of it, Simon,” said a voice. A moment later Alice Jacoby appeared. Her hair was down and she had on a colorful bandana. She wore a pair of jeans with a green sweater and low heels. Her cheeks were flushed, and she looked like she might have been crying. When she turned to the side, Archer saw a yellowish bruise on her cheek and a blackened mark around her eye. He glanced at her husband and felt his hand curl to a fist.

“Who is he?” demanded Simon. “What is he doing here? By God, if—”

She put a calming hand on his arm. “He’s trying to find Ellie Lamb. She’s gone missing. I told you, dear. I spoke to him before. It’s all right. It has nothing to do with... us.”

“D-damn right, it d-doesn’t,” he sputtered, glaring at Archer and finishing his drink.

“Mr. Archer, this way, please.”

Simon Jacoby shouted after Archer, “And a wife can’t testify against her husband. You remember that, Mr. PI.”

She led him quickly down the hall. Archer looked back once to see Simon Jacoby staring at the floor like he wasn’t sure what he was actually standing on.

She led him into a small study and closed the door, then turned and faced him.

Archer eyed the room. It looked insubstantial, profoundly wanting after the grand space he had been in previously here. And Alice Jacoby looked smaller, too, less significant, as though she had gone from the lead role to a bit player, diminishing the woman in every meaningful way.

“Did he do that?” asked Archer, pointing at her injured face.

She subconsciously worried at it with her long fingers. “It was a misunderstanding.”

“No, it was a beating.”

She shot him a dull-eyed glance, although it still carried gravitas.

“That’s how most men handle misunderstanding.” Then she pulled at her wedding band like it was a tumor she wanted to excise.

“Is that what he meant when he said you couldn’t testify against him? He’s wrong. You can if you’re the victim. If you’re in danger.”

“Which I’m not. Not really. He’ll be fine after he... after the drinks... ” Archer didn’t believe this and she didn’t seem to, either.

Archer took off his hat and twirled it between his fingers. “He sticking to his Vegas betting limit?”

“He has to, doesn’t he?” she said resignedly.

“Nice to hear. Gloria Mars is a good friend of yours, but friends have their limits, and she has her own misunderstanding to deal with at home.”

“Yes, I know. There’s an awful lot of misunderstanding in this town.” She motioned to one of the two chairs in the room. “Please, sit.”

He did so, while she remained standing.

“Do you need a drink?” he asked, staring at her.

Jacoby wouldn’t meet his eye. “I would very much love one, which is why I’m not going to have one.” She glanced in the direction of the hall, where her drunken husband was probably still standing and wondering where he was.

“A good friend of mine was shot last night, nearly killed.”

Her face flushed as she looked down at him. “What?”

“A block over from the Jade. The truck with a dope shipment was heading there. They’d already dropped off the people they sell.” He stopped twirling his hat. “Is that selling-people bit in Eleanor Lamb’s script? And how do you design a set for something like that, I wonder. Do you just describe the interior of the truck, or the shithole where they keep those poor souls before they get delivered straight to hell?”

He had decided on the way over how he was going to play this. Just blast it out like water from a fire hose. But it was actually a subtler move than it looked to be.

She first turned white, and then crimson, and then gray in her own little version of a bastardized rainbow.

Now she sat. It seemed her legs could no longer support her full-figured body. She took out a pink Kleenex from her jeans pocket and dabbed at her eyes.

Archer watched her. “Cecily Ransome was really bowled over by Lamb’s script. I think she wants to direct it, so your wish of working with her might come true. By the way, how did you and Lamb get inside the Jade to do the research? Or did you just feed her what she needed? Because my witness was right — you have been to the Jade, multiple times. Which means you lied to me.”

Jacoby rubbed her thighs, her hands moving in jerky motions as though she had partially lost control of them.

“See, my friend who almost died would like to know. And so would I. Because this is all tied to the Jade. And now, so are you.”

“D-does this have to be a p-police thing?” asked Jacoby hopelessly.

“I don’t know. Does it?”

She lifted her gaze to his, her eyes promising depth, but there was really nothing in them that Archer could see. Except stark fear. He could certainly understand that one.

“Do you know where Lamb is?”

She shook her head, the eyelids fluttering, like they had come loose from her face and were desperately trying to hang on.

“Do you know why she disappeared?”

Another shake of the head; the hands were now kneading the thighs with more vigor than was probably required, but Archer didn’t stop her. He didn’t care really what she was doing to herself. Willie Dash’s almost dying had changed pretty much everything for him.

“Your friend is a blackmailer, you know. She got her claws into Gloria Mars for all the money she needed to buy and fix up the Malibu place. Did you know about that?”

Jacoby managed to say something, but her voice was too low.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear your answer.”

“I knew,” she said more boldly.

“What makes no sense to me is how somebody like you goes into a place like that and just, what, looks around? Darren Paley doesn’t like people just looking around. But he is a guy who will do pretty much anything for money. So did you pay him? Did you tell him you just wanted to experience Chinatown? I don’t see why, since there’s nothing really Chinese about it. Hell, you could have designed it on one of your little mockup boards. But then again, he really doesn’t strike me as a guy who would buy into that bullshit no matter how much dough you flung at him.” As Archer had been talking, his gaze had been wandering.

Until it reached a large tapestry hanging on the wall. He rose and walked over to it, studied the design, knowing that he had seen it before.

On a bed at the Jade.

He turned to her. “What does that symbolize?”

Jacoby looked up at where he was pointing with the rim of his hat. She slowly rose and joined him. “It’s the Chinese symbol for fire.”

“They have that in their damn baijiu, that’s for sure.”

“Fire. Which, in the Chinese culture, can mean strength, persistence, vitality.”

“Just that?”

“No, it can also mean... destructive behavior. As in fire burns everything to ash.”

He looked at her, his face flushing because he could feel the waves of revulsion slamming over him. “Well, that fits the old Jade, doesn’t it?” He pointed accusingly at the tapestry. “You didn’t pay Paley so you could go to the Jade and snoop around. He paid you, Miss Set Designer, to decorate all the rooms there, didn’t he?”

She turned and dropped back into her chair like all the blood had flowed right out of her, leaving empty veins and a useless heart.

Archer said, “They were all the same because they were designed by somebody who knows little about the actual subject, but put together something that looks authentic on the surface.”

Still no answer. She was kneading her thighs again. Part of Archer wanted to stop her, twist her arm, hear the woman cry out in pain. But he didn’t. That would make him like her husband. And that was a line he would not cross.

Tears slid down her face, making trenches in her makeup and causing her bruises to glisten.

“I mean, with this big house, big gambling bills, three adorable kids, and a drunk of a hubby who’s probably going to lose his job and slap you around even more, you probably needed the commission.”

Jacoby gripped the arms of her chair, having apparently reached her limit with Archer’s taunts. She rose and exclaimed, “You have no idea how hard I’ve worked. How much I’ve had to sacrifice. What I’ve had to do to get where I am. To escape where I came from.” The voice, tone, and posture were all different now. It was like someone had heated a rock to such a stark temperature that all sorts of things were oozing out of it. And she wasn’t yet finished oozing. “How dare you come here and insult me like this. Nothing was given to me. You know nothing about me and what I’ve had to do to make it here.”

Archer did not retreat an inch. “Sure I do. I hear it from everybody every day in this goddamn town. Everybody has their sob story. ‘I was born on a stinking farm,’ or ‘in a shack’ — or, in your case, ‘a holler.’ With nothing. Well, most people are born with pretty much nothing and they never get to where you got to. They never live in a place like this. But they don’t complain. They just live their lives. And my friend who almost died? He’s got no sob story. He owns his mistakes. He doesn’t make excuses. He taught me to do the same. And it comes in handy because I tend to make mistakes. But not with you, I don’t think. And you won’t own up to them, lady, because you don’t have the damn guts. Only in your mind is your life perfect. And you can’t see it any other way.”

“I want you to leave. Right now.”

“And I want my friend to not be in the hospital with a bullet wound that nearly killed him. But sometimes we just can’t have what we want. And one more thing. You obviously figured out what Paley was doing at the Jade with the dope and the slaves and fed it to Lamb, because it’s in her script. So why do I think you never told Paley that this was also about you getting to set-design a movie that was simpatico with Cecily Ransome’s sensibilities? Because I’m not sure he’d be all that happy about it. And when that man gets unhappy, everybody gets unhappy, trust me on that one. That thought ever cross that little, self-absorbed mind of yours?”

“Please leave!”

“Did you find out what goes on in those pretty little rooms you decorated? Did you maybe have people there to spy for you, take dirty little pictures, do written reports for you? Like the little ‘that way, honey’ gal with the leg tattoo they got there? She snoop around for you? Feed you stuff? If so, she’ll be fish food if Paley ever finds out. But maybe you don’t care. It’s just one little Chinese gal, after all, they got lots more of them. But you should care, because Paley has a way of making people spill their guts before he kills them with a knife or a gun. And then he’ll be coming to Bel Air. And you won’t like it one little bit. And neither will your drunk punk of a husband. Or your three innocent kids. Why don’t you think about them instead of just yourself for a change?”

She looked up at him with a miserable expression. “You don’t understand anything.”

“I understand you and Lamb want Samantha Lourdes to play the lead in your movie. I wonder why? Could it be you saw her there doing something she’d rather keep secret? Did you take pictures? Did you get parts of some of the filming they do in there? Could it be you and Lamb wanted to blackmail her into doing the role to give it star power?”

“You have no idea what—”

“I have every idea, lady. But let me tell you something. You have just as much of a chance of corralling Lourdes to be in your crummy movie as I do of marrying her. Which means zero. She’s got way too much class and brains to get mixed up with pathetic amateurs like you and Lamb.”

“What in the hell do you want from me?”

Archer put on his hat. “I have to think about it. And then I’ll call you. And then you’re going to do exactly what I tell you to. Or else, yeah, this becomes a police thing.”

He walked out of the room and down the hall. Not surprisingly, Simon Jacoby was still there looking at the floor. He glanced up at Archer. “What the hell are you still doing here?”

“I’m leaving.”

“Not fast enough, bub.”

Jacoby swung a fist, but Archer easily caught it and twisted it behind the man’s back. Then he jacked the doughy man face-first against the wall, causing a framed painting of a stately horse in front of a stately manor to fall and crack.

And if that wasn’t poetic justice filled with a pound of irony.

Archer drove the man’s elbow so far up Jacoby’s back the man cried out in pain and belched up some of his scotch onto the fine wallpaper.

Into his ear, Archer breathed, “Just give me a reason, pal. And you lay another hand on your wife, they won’t find all the pieces to put you back together again. Scout’s honor.”

He pushed a weepy Jacoby to the floor, stepped over him, and walked out the front door into the daylight. And he still felt like he was in the grip of hell.

But it was just Bel Air. On a good day.