Full Black

CHAPTER 30

“Not only do you have a lot of nerve, calling me,” said the voice on the other end of the line, “but you lied to my assistant, lied to her about one of my kids, to pull me out of a meeting?”

“I’m sorry,” replied Ralston. “I knew you wouldn’t take the call unless-”

“You’re damn right I wouldn’t have taken your call. In fact, I have no idea why I’m even still talking to you.”

Ralston knew why she was still talking to him, but he kept his mouth shut. They both knew. His giving voice to it would have only made her angrier, though, and that would have guaranteed the end of the conversation. Hot tempers ran in their family.

“Ali, listen,” he began.

“You don’t get to call me Ali.”

“Okay. Alisa,” said Ralston, relenting. He’d burned this bridge and he’d have to eat as much crow as she chose to dish out in order to be able to get across this river.

“In fact,” the woman plowed on, “the last time we spoke, I told you never to call me again.”

“I know you did. I wouldn’t call you unless it was important.”

“Important? You want to talk about important? My sister’s trial. That was important.”

Ralston had known, before even dialing her number, that she would go there. She still resented him. He didn’t blame her. Had their roles been reversed, he might have felt the same way.

“You were the only one,” she said. “The only one.”

She took a breath and Ralston didn’t attempt to fill the silence. She needed to vent, to be angry.

“Everyone testified against those two monsters,” she began again. “Everyone but you. And it’s because of you that those bastards never went to prison. They never served a single, solitary day for what they did to my sister. So fuck you, Luke. Fuck you.”

Ralston had met Alisa Sevan’s younger sister, Ava, not long after arriving in Los Angeles. He had been invited to his first “Hollywood” party, a Saturday afternoon barbecue at a director’s home in Malibu.

He saw Ava chatting with a group of friends out by the pool. She was stunning. She was wearing a bikini with a brightly colored sarong tied provocatively around her hips. Her thick black hair spilled over her shoulders. Ralston had never seen a more gorgeous woman in his life.

When he introduced himself, her friends found it cute that he had no idea who the twenty-five-year-old soap-opera actress was. She found him fascinating. Unlike the pretend bad-boy actors and models she had dated, he was the real deal. He was also in Hollywood, but not “of” Hollywood, which made him refreshing and quite a find. Even more important, he made her feel safe.

Their relationship was very passionate right from the start. Ava was a party girl and liked to have a good time. She drank, dabbled in drugs, and was an absolute tigress in the bedroom. Though Ralston could have done without the drugs part, everything else about her was spectacular and he chalked it up to being young, sexy, and successful in Hollywood. Doing coke or dropping some ecstasy from time to time was nothing more than a way to accessorize her lifestyle. Ralston, though, kept his recreational pursuits to cocktails. His motto was You always know what comes out of a bottle.

Not long after they began dating, Ava brought him to meet her family. Her father, one of L.A.’s premier criminal defense attorneys, lived in Pacific Palisades with Ava’s mother and her two Yorkshire terriers. That first dinner was also when Ralston met her older sister, Alisa. She was equally attractive, if not more so, but that’s where their similarities ended.

While Ava was wild and devil-may-care, Alisa was focused and traditional. She had gone to law school and had become a successful entertainment attorney, choosing to trade on her smarts instead of her looks. She had married an investment banker in her late twenties and they had three children. Though skeptical of Ralston at first, the family had come to appreciate him as a solid man who truly cared for Ava. Their hope was that he’d be a good influence on her. She needed to grow up, and everyone had been concerned about her substance-abuse problems.

As levelheaded as Ralston was, though, he’d fallen completely under Ava’s spell. Though he was tough as hell, he was entranced by her, and that led to making excuses for her behavior. He loved the merry-go-round they were on and he had no desire to get off. Was Ava a drinker? Sure, but she never missed a day of work and always delivered her lines perfectly. Drugs? Yes, she did drugs, but not enough to be worried about. Or so he had thought.

Ava actually had a bad addiction problem that was getting progressively worse. She tried to hide it from Ralston and the rest of the people who cared for her, but soon no one could deny it.

She and Ralston broke up three times and each time he took her back, thinking he could “fix” her. Finally, he insisted she get into some sort of rehabilitation program. Ava reluctantly agreed and enrolled in one not far from where they had first met. It was supposed to last for weeks. Within days, she was home, proclaiming herself “cured.” It was one of the saddest things Ralston had ever seen.

Ava held out for seven days, not even having so much as a sip of wine with dinner, then she fell right off a cliff. She not only began using again, it also became apparent that she had run up some pretty big debts.

Her jewelry went first. Then she traded in her leased Mercedes for a much cheaper hybrid vehicle. She could claim all she wanted that she was trying to “give the earth a hug,” but Ralston knew why she’d made the switch.

Ava’s father called him a week later and told him that Ava had reached out for a sizable loan. He wanted to confirm what it was for and Ralston told him the truth. Ava’s drug problem was completely out of hand. The soap opera had placed her on a leave of absence. Even their makeup artists couldn’t hide what Ava was doing to herself.

Though Ralston probably should have left her for real and allowed her to hit bottom, he couldn’t. He stayed with her, but to his credit, he never gave her a single cent. Neither would her father, as it turned out, but Ralston didn’t learn that until later.

Ava’s family-her mother, father, and Alisa-had joined in a united front. They would pay for rehab, if she would fully commit to it, but other than that, she was on her own.

Alisa kept in contact with Ralston from that point forward. Ava was so angry with her family for not “helping her out” that she stopped speaking to them.

When Ava finally lost her apartment, Ralston knew that if he didn’t let her move in with him, some opportunist would take her in and get her to do God only knew what. As screwed up as she was, he loved her. He wasn’t a complete idiot, though. He still had to work during the day and so cleared all of the booze out of his house, along with anything of value she might be tempted to steal and pawn for drugs. He also quit drinking, hoping that by setting a good example, he could help her get clean. It didn’t work.

Ava used the brains her family was renowned for, and what little of her looks she had left, to get what her addiction-riddled body needed. Bad people reentered her life from an earlier time, before Ralston. Alisa, though, did know them, and she warned him to keep them away from her. Ava was circling the drain. There was little Ralston could do, short of kidnapping her and taking her deep into the mountains somewhere to go completely cold turkey.

He decided that there was no other option. If she kept going like this, she was going to kill herself. He began looking for a cabin to rent and started studying the phases of detoxification and what to expect.

Alisa bought a stack of nutritional books aimed at rebalancing the body and had them sent over to his apartment. She also offered to pay for half of the expenses for renting the cabin. Ralston appreciated her offer. He wasn’t exactly rolling in money.

He was wrapping up a project with a studio and figured he could be on the road to the cabin with Ava in two weeks. Ava had even mentioned that if they could “just get away,” she thought she could hit the reset button on her life. It made him feel better about his plan. Maybe there was hope after all.

That hope faded after about two days. Ava’s hybrid was repossessed, and at first Ralston thought that might be a good thing. It was better that she wasn’t driving. Then she took another turn for the worse.

She disappeared for three days and came back with needle marks in her arms. When Ralston asked her where she had been, she told him she didn’t want to talk about it. She pushed past him and went into the bathroom to take a shower. She was in there for hours, and Ralston could hear her crying the entire time. He needed to get her the hell out of L.A.

He called the producer he was working for at the time and asked to be let go early. The producer said that they couldn’t afford to replace him at the moment and said that he was sorry, but Ralston would have to stay.

Ralston went in to work the next day and when he came home, Ava was gone again.

At two in the morning, she called him crying. She was incoherent, but he managed to get her to tell him where she was.

The abandoned house was near Crenshaw Boulevard in L.A.’s dangerous Hyde Park area. Ralston kicked in the door. There were empty liquor bottles, beer cans, and cigarette butts, but no Ava.

In the back portion of the house, he found a filthy mattress lying in the middle of the floor. A couple of portable lamps were positioned on each side. They had been switched off, but were still warm to the touch. Nearby was the plastic packaging for a particularly vile sex toy. Ralston’s heart sank. He’d been on enough movie sets to know what he was looking at. He needed to find her.

As he stepped into the kitchen, he heard a noise from outside. It sounded like the lid of a dumpster had been dropped. When he made it to the alley, he saw two men in the distance, running away. He also found a dumpster. Without opening its lid, he knew what he was going to find inside.

Praying to God, Ralston eventually found the strength to lift the lid. What he saw broke his heart wide open. By the time he dialed 9-1-1, the men he’d seen running from the alley were long gone.

In the days that followed, the cops asked him a lot about Ava’s drug use. They wanted to know who she bought from. Ralston couldn’t help them. He had no idea. Alisa provided the police with a ton of information. Ava had met her dealer through one of the soap opera’s crew members. Alisa even knew the identity of the next person up who supplied her dealer.

The detectives found her depth of knowledge interesting, to say the least, and wanted to know how she knew as much as she did. Alisa was no fool. She was an attorney, after all, and never answered the officer’s questions, at least not truthfully. That didn’t come out until the trial.

Alisa and her father had paid off both the dealer and the supplier to not provide Ava with any more drugs. Both of the subhumans had agreed at first and then tried to extort more money out of the family, threatening to hook Ava on even worse substances. When they refused, the drug pushers had made good on their threat.

Both Alisa and her father were convinced it was the same two men who had been responsible for Ava’s death. Putting them at the scene of the crime would have been all that was necessary to secure a conviction. But as much as Ralston wanted to see the people responsible for Ava’s death pay, he hadn’t seen the faces of the men in the alley. He couldn’t ID the two drug dealers as the figures he’d seen running away from the dumpster.

Even the district attorney tried privately to convince Ralston to testify against the two men. They were career criminals with horrific records. It didn’t matter if they were really the ones who were responsible. They had been responsible for untold suffering, and if they didn’t kill Ava, they were going to wind up killing someone else’s son or daughter.

The arguments were not lost on Ralston. At the very least, these were the men who had gotten Ava hooked on drugs and continued to feed her addiction. But Ralston had only one thing that truly belonged to him in life: his honor. As much as he wanted to kill both the pushers with his bare hands, he couldn’t lie. He could not positively identify them as the two men from the scene.

Without his testimony, the case had fallen apart and so had his relationship with Ava’s family. They had needed him, and in their minds, he had let them down.

Now, several years later, he needed them. “I understand why you’re still angry,” he said.

“Are you patronizing me? Boy, do you have balls. You know, I should have had you drummed out of the business.”

“Alisa, I need your help.”

The woman laughed. “You want my help with something? Let me rephrase my prior statement. You have colossal balls.”

Ralston considered telling her that not a day went by that he didn’t think about Ava; that he didn’t wish for some sort of penance he could perform for letting Ava down. Though he knew Ava’s addiction was just that-Ava’s addiction-he still felt incredibly guilty for her death. He tortured himself wondering whether, if he had quit the movie he’d been working on, he could have gotten Ava up to that cabin and gotten her sober. He wondered what would have happened if he’d chased those men down the alley. Would he have been able to ID them in court? Would he have even survived the altercation? All he had was the tire iron from his car. What if they’d been carrying firearms?

“I never wanted Ava to die,” he said. “Please.”

There was silence, several moments of it.

“Please,” he repeated. “I need your help.”

Alisa knew that Ralston was a good man. She also knew that the men accused of Ava’s death were the ones who were responsible. She was one hundred percent sure about that. Ralston had allowed Ava’s killers to go free. It made it very difficult to hear from him now, much less be asked to help him.

“If this is about cozying you up to one of my firm’s clients to help you get some movie deal, I swear to God I’ll make good on my promise to kill you. Do you understand that?”

“It’s not about business. I’m in trouble.”

“If you need a lawyer, you’ve come to the wrong place,” replied Alisa. “You’ll have to find somebody else.”

“No,” said Ralston. “I don’t need a lawyer. At least not yet.”

She had no idea what was going on, but he definitely had her attention. “What have you done?”

“I’ll explain it when I see you.”

“Oh? Just like that we’re having a meeting?” she replied. “Sorry, I’m booked.”

“Damn it, Ali. This is serious.”

“What this is, Luke, is my time, which gets billed at eight hundred and seventy-five dollars an hour. At least, that’s what I get paid when I am working, which is what I was doing before you called pretending to be from my children’s school and pulled me away from my client and a very important negotiation I’m trying to hammer out for her.”

Ralston decided he was going to have to give her something to get her to meet with him. And as strained as their relationship had been, she was the closest thing to family he had. “Did you hear what happened at Larry Salomon’s house?”

“Did I hear about it? Everyone’s heard about it. It’s all people in this town are talking about this morning. Why would you ask me,” she said, her voice suddenly trailing off. “Tell me you had nothing to do with what took place at Salomon’s house.”

“I need to see you. I need a favor.”

“Oh, my God.”

“Ali, please,” he said. “I need to see you.”

“Did you kill those people?”

“No comment.”

“No comment?” she replied. “Oh, my God.”

“Ali, come on.”

“What happened to Salomon?”

“He’s fine,” said Ralston. “He’s with me. He can vouch for everything.”

“Then I suggest you two turn yourselves in to the police. Pronto.”

“We can’t. At least not yet. That’s what I need to talk to you about.”

Alisa was quiet as she thought about how to handle it.

“Are you still there?” Ralston asked.

“Quiet,” she replied. “I’m thinking.”

Ralston remained quiet.

“Where are you?” she finally asked. “Are you somewhere in L.A.?”

Ralston was hesitant about answering, but realized he was going to have to trust her. “We’re south.”

“How far south? San Diego? Mexico City?”

He decided that for the time being it was better for all involved if he didn’t give her too much information. Until he knew for sure that she was on his side, he was going to be very careful. After all, she had promised to kill him. And though he doubted that she really meant it, there was still part of him that knew better than to cross her, or her father. “Can you get down to Manhattan Beach?” he asked, picking a quiet beach community just north of where he was.

“Well, you certainly can’t come up and meet me in my office, can you?”

It was a rhetorical question that Ralston didn’t need to answer. “How soon can you be there?”

Alisa checked her watch. “I’ll have to figure out what to tell my client and cancel the rest of my appointments. Depending on traffic, I can probably be there in about an hour.”

They picked a place to meet and Ralston said, “Thank you. I really appreciate your doing this for me.”

“Don’t thank me just yet. Wait till you get my bill. I charge double for travel.”