Hollywood Hills

FOUR

An extraordinary number of celebrity names turned up in crime stories during the first full year of the Great Recession. Many of them ended up on reports passing across the desks of Hollywood Division detectives. The police station in which the detectives were housed was an unusual place, perhaps the world’s only police facility where framed one-sheet movie posters decorated the walls. In the geographic territory of the station the bizarre was commonplace, and if something eerie or outlandish could not be explained or even understood, more often than not, the cops would just shrug and say, “This is fucking Hollywood.” After that, nothing more needed to be said.

During that last year of the eight-year federal consent decree, which finally ended in July, only about a dozen detectives remained at Hollywood Station, when there should have been three times that many. The LAPD had labored under the oversight of federally mandated watchdogs since the Rodney King riots, as well as the so-called Rampart Division scandal, an ignominy that turned out to involve exactly two felonious cops. But it was enough for the critics who had been lying in wait to bring down the proud, some would say arrogant, police department.

After charter amendment F stripped the LAPD chiefs of civil service protection, politicians began calling the shots, and hundreds of LAPD investigators were diverted to serve the monitors of that consent decree in “reforming” a police department that no LAPD police officer thought needed to be reformed. For years the plaintive refrain heard all around the Department was, “Charter amendment F changed our world.” And what with budget shortfalls and the fact that the state of California was itself on the brink of bankruptcy, all the street cops and detectives who were still doing actual crime suppression were overwhelmed.

There had been a rash of burglaries in Los Angeles that targeted young celebrities. Two of the main suspects among a group of seven were a young man and young woman in their late teens from Calabasas, a rather affluent suburb in the San Fernando Valley. They’d met in a remedial school, a kind of last-chance high school. Another of the young women involved in the burglary and fencing ring would boost celebrity magazines from newsstands and supermarkets, and pick out targets that would be researched on the Internet. Celebrity homesites were Googled and satellite maps of their homes were obtained, and their schedules could be followed online in celebrity blogs. Another one of the young women in the group of burglars had been part of a TV reality show that at first purported to show an ex-Playmate raising three wild kids.

The burglary victims included actors Orlando Bloom, Lindsay Lohan, Audrina Patridge, Rachel Bilson, Megan Fox, and famous person Paris Hilton. Some of the homes had security cameras, and on one video, a youthful man and woman were photographed during the crime. On the video from another of the celebrity homes, four of the young burglars could be seen parking their car on Outpost Drive and walking about a hundred yards, arm in arm backward until they were safely past the surveillance camera, at which point they turned around and tended to business.

They made several stops at residences they were casing before being satisfied, and they did not wear hoodies, trying not to look like the public’s conception of a typical burglar. They entered through unlocked doors, open windows, and doggie doors. Only occasionally would they have to pry open a window. There were even a few hot-prowl burglaries, committed with people at home, in the county area policed by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department.

The burglary ring stole clothing, jewelry, purses, some electronics, and cash. They burglarized Paris Hilton’s home a few times, but she knew about only one. When the police cracked the case, they called her at 3 A.M. and she came in to identify her stolen property, seeming delighted to have the loot returned. She claimed that its value was well into seven figures, but detectives, who lived in a more mundane world, had their doubts. Orlando Bloom, whom detectives referred to as “a gentleman,” was always helpful when called upon, and had there been such a thing, would have gotten the detectives’ favorite victim award.

Search warrants were served as far away as Las Vegas on one of the teenage females and on their fence, a twenty-eight-year-old who called himself a nightclub promoter. He handled the stolen goods and was charged with receiving stolen property and other related crimes. LAPD and LASD detectives believed that perhaps two dozen burglaries were committed during a two-year period.

Defense lawyers negotiated, offering to discuss the return of missing property if new felony counts were not filed, but it all ended in what detectives said was akin to “a failed hostage negotiation” after one of the attorneys walked out, saying, “I’m not in the property business.”

Another defense attorney, whose young client claimed to be working for a Christian organization that assisted people in need of housing, seemed to believe every word that his sobbing client told him. A detective said of the lawyer, “He’s the kind of guy who goes to a strip club and believes that the lap dancer really loves him.”

None of the young people were hard-core junkies but some of them smoked OxyContin, the equivalent of synthetic heroin, the drug du jour of countless young Americans and a powerhouse opioid that had even addicted America’s leading conservative talk-show host, Rush Limbaugh. The news photos of the pretty, female suspects in their low-rise jeans, hiding their faces but not their firm bare bellies, provided weeks of entertainment for TV and tabloids. They were dubbed “The Burglar Bunch” and “The Hollywood Hills Burglars” and, even more provocatively, “The Bling Ring.”

Local and national media described their antics as cautionary tales of the dangers to young people posed by the Hollywood celebrity lifestyle. The rationale was that it was constantly in their faces thanks to websites that detailed the shenanigans of celebutantes, along with reality shows that portrayed people their age living the life in Hollywood nightclubs. According to celebrity commentators who never eschewed a cliché, an abundance of danger to young people was out there on those “boulevards of dreams.”

There were a number of boulevard dreamers who couldn’t get enough of the Bling Ring, one of whom was twenty-two-year-old Jonas Claymore. He was a dropout from Hollywood High School who’d smoked way too much crystal meth during his final year of school and had never gone on to community college or done much of anything that his working-class parents had expected of him. The meth eventually led to terrifying attacks of paranoia where he became convinced that he was under twenty-four-hour surveillance by LAPD narks, and on one unforgettable evening, two of his former schoolmates decided to wean him off methamphetamines by introducing him to the wonders of 80 mg green tablets of OxyContin and other oxycodone drugs like Percocet, Percodan, and Tylox.

His current housemate, Megan Burke, was a twenty-year-old high school graduate from Bend, Oregon, who had been a good student, popular, and college-bound, before she’d developed a yen to “experience Hollywood,” as had so many thousands before her. She could not have specifically defined what that meant. Of course, she would have been embarrassed to admit that there were vague fantasies involving the movie business, and even then, she was too mature to think that she would be “discovered.” Yet it was always there at age eighteen, the notion that where life moves at twenty-four frames per second, anything is possible.

She had persuaded her mother to let her come to Los Angeles for the summer before college with a list of places in Southern California that she wanted to visit. She had explained to her mother that this was her “odyssey,” the journey of self-discovery that she and many of her classmates believed was essential for self-fulfillment. The original plan was to stay for two months working at the Gap for a former Bend neighbor who had moved to Los Angeles and managed the store. The woman had even arranged for Megan to share an apartment with two other girls, and the money she earned selling clothing had allowed Megan to support herself. She had hoped to send part of her earnings to her mother, who had raised Megan and her younger brother, Terry, after their father had deserted the family when the children were still in elementary school.

Experiencing Hollywood wasn’t anything like Megan thought it would be, especially after she learned how expensive everything was in L.A., but things went well enough until she was persuaded by her roommates to experiment with some of their trendy pharmaceuticals, like Xanax and Percocet. Those drugs led her to Vicodin and finally to OxyContin, by far the most addictive and powerful of the prescription drugs available to her, and OxyContin led her to Jonas Claymore, whom she met through a girlfriend at work.

Jonas was a valet parking attendant at upscale restaurants and he made good tips. He was tall, rail-thin, cute, and goofy, with a bush of cinnamon hair and a gap-toothed grin. He made her laugh easily and sold her OxyContin twice a week when he’d come by her apartment.

When they got high together for the first time, he said, “You won’t be offended if I drop trou and show you something, will ya?”

“Show me what?” she said uneasily.

“This,” he said, turning away from her and lowering his jeans and underwear. On one buttock was tattooed what. On the other buttock was tattooed ever. When he pulled his pants up he said, “Most of the girls I know think it’s kinda funny.”

After several drug experiences they became sexually involved, but it was never satisfactory for either of them because of Jonas’s drug-induced ED problems. Megan liked the other oxycodone products, like Vicodin, referred to as “norcos” or “watsons,” and she liked the Percocet, aka “perks,” but nothing could beat the 80 mg OxyContin, called “OC” or “ox” or “80s” or “beans.” Soon, Megan Burke fell passionately in love, not with Jonas Claymore, but with smoking ox. He loved it even more than she did and always seemed to have it in abundance. Then her life quickly fell apart. She lost her job at the Gap and got a part-time job at Denny’s as a waitress, but she lost that, too, and came to dread the desperate phone calls from her mother when the college plans were abandoned.

Megan finally sold her old Hyundai when money ran out, after she had been living with Jonas for nearly a year in a cheap apartment in Thai Town, but not with the knowledge of his landlord or her despairing mother in Oregon. By then, Megan had begun avoiding most of her mother’s phone calls and would not reveal her address or anything about Jonas Claymore, not wanting her worried parent to know how far she had fallen and how fast had been the descent.

After reading and seeing TV reports that members of the Bling Ring smoked ox, it had made Jonas Claymore proud that it was also his drug of choice. Ox was far more expensive than the crystal meth he’d formerly adored, and more than other pharmaceuticals that he’d use when he didn’t have enough money for the OCs. He was barely hanging on to his current job of parking cars at two of the newest Melrose Avenue restaurants.

It wasn’t often that Jonas actually read the L.A. Times or anything else, but when he thought there might be something in the paper about the Bling Ring, he’d run to the supermarket and buy or steal one. He adored reading about the designer wardrobes that the Bling Ring coveted and plundered, and especially the Chanel merchandise, Louis Vuitton purses, and Rolex watches they’d looted during their crime spree. They’d even stolen underwear that they could wear themselves while they dreamed. Jonas couldn’t get enough of the stories and searched for more on television and especially in the tabloids.

One summer evening, Jonas was sitting in the front seat of a BMW 535i that he’d parked, engrossed in juicy Bling Ring coverage. At the same time, his boss, a chesty and bossy Russian lesbian who ran the valet parking concession for both restaurants, was looking for her young employee in the parking lot. The lanky lad was disappointed that there was no photo of Paris Hilton in this particular story, and he was only halfway through the article when his boss came up from behind and jerked open the door of the Beemer.

“What the fock you do-ink, Jonas?” she demanded in that Russki accent that he had come to hate.

“Sorry, Ludmila,” he said, folding the paper and jumping out of the car. “Just taking a two-minute break.”

“That is shit!” she said. “I am look-ink everywhere for you. I am all ate up with you.”

“Fed,” Jonas Claymore said.

“What?”

“Fed. You’re all fed up.”

She stood glaring up at the gangly young man and said, “Do not laugh at me, Jonas.”

“I’m not laughing, Ludmila,” he said. “How about letting me get back to work, okay?”

“You do not know how to work. You do not know shit,” she said, and gave him an impulsive shove with her open hand.

“Hey!” Jonas yelled. “You just put your fucking hand on me. There’s a law about employers harassing employees.”

Two young women paused on their way to the nearest of the restaurants when they heard the raised voices in the parking lot. In what was left of twilight they saw a skinny, long-necked valet parking guy with a wiry thatch of cinnamon hair that was wind-tunnel wild from parking the cars with windows down. He wore a long-sleeved white shirt, black bow tie, and black pants, and was shouting at a burly woman identically clad, whose dark hair was cut as short as the guy’s.

“Do not do threats with me!” Ludmila yelled. “You no good, worth-noth-ink shit!”

“You can shove your job up your fat ass, you lesbo freakazoid!” Jonas Claymore yelled back, his bobbing Adam’s apple the size of a hen’s egg. He ripped off his clip-on tie and flipped it at her, catching her right in the eye.

She responded with a blow. Not a bitch slap. A real punch. A straight right-handed corker with a lot of hefty shoulder behind it, and Jonas Claymore’s upturned nose exploded in a blood spray and he fell back against the BMW, dropping to his knee for a second.

Then he leaped up, screaming, “I’m gonna tear your throat out, you commie cunt!”

One of the two women watching from the sidewalk took her cell phone from her purse and dialed 9-1-1.

By the time 6-X-32 of the midwatch showed up, both combatants were down on the pavement exhausted from having wrestled and punched and bitten and clawed for several minutes. Jonas Claymore clearly had gotten the worst of it. His face bore scratches and contusions, and his buttonless shirt was hanging out and blood-spattered. His breath came in short rasps and his hairless concave chest heaved as he pawed at his right ear where a tiny snippet of the lobe had been bitten off. His former boss had a purple mouse under one eye and a bruised lower lip and her left shirtsleeve was completely ripped away.

The black-and-white squealed into the parking lot and two blue-uniformed cops got out, the shorter one carrying a side-handle baton.

Jetsam said to his partner, “I’ll take the female, bro.”

“Roger that,” Flotsam said, walking toward Jonas Claymore, who was standing, hands on his knees, bent over and trying to catch his breath.

Before the tall cop could speak, Jonas said, “That Russki douche bag started it! She pushed me and then she slugged me. I was just defending myself.”

“You didn’t do too good a job of it,” Flotsam noted.

“She suckered me!” Jonas hollered, loud enough for gawking passersby to hear.

“Keep your voice down,” Flotsam said. “And tell me what happened.”

Meanwhile Ludmila was trying to tie her white shirt together in order to cover her size 46 E cup bra, and she said to Jetsam, “He is no-good bum. I hire him. I pay him good. He never share tip with nobody. He is worth-noth-ink shit!”

“How did the fight start?” Jetsam asked.

“He is say-ink rude things to me. He use his dirty mouth and make me fight.”

“Are you saying that you got physical before he did?”

“What?”

“Did you hit him first?”

“Well…,” Ludmila said, as though she were contemplating an exceedingly difficult question. “Is depend-ink how you see si-too-ation.”

“Uh-huh,” Jetsam said. “I had to be there, right?”

Flotsam suggested that Jonas tip his head back and press the remnants of his shirt to his nose and hold it there.

“Are you really interested in making a battery report?” Flotsam asked. “And a private person’s arrest?”

“Wouldn’t you?” Jonas pulled the balled-up shirt away from his face for a moment.

“I’d have to think about it,” Flotsam said. “She’s a woman.”

Jonas said, “She’s a slit-licking lizzy warthog! She ain’t no woman.”

“According to the law she is,” Flotsam said. “We’ll do what you want. You could make a private person’s arrest and we’ll be glad to transport, but then we’ll expect you to follow through all the way. Think about going to court and telling in public how that babe clocked you. It could be way embarrassing, dude. Up to you, though.”

That stopped Jonas cold. He thought about it a moment, about the humiliation and all the hassle, and he said, “Well, what if we forget about it, the both of us? Can we do that?”

“Okay with us,” Flotsam said. “But I don’t wanna get another call about you two duking it out again.”

“You won’t. I’m going home,” Jonas said. Then he yelled to Ludmila, “You can’t fire me! I quit, you goddamn commie carpet muncher!”

“Fock you, stupid head!” his former employer said and flipped him the bird.

That afternoon when Jonas Claymore got back to his apartment that he shared with Megan Burke in Thai Town, she was lying on the couch watching an old TCM movie in a Percocet fog.

She was shocked when she saw him, and said, “Jonas! What happened to you?”

“I got in a fight at work,” he said, “with some fucking Russian. Hollywood’s full of commie trash. There ain’t no Americans in charge of anything these days.”

Megan said. “You’re hurt.”

She was wearing a baggy T-shirt and cutoffs and her legs looked even knobbier and paler than the last time Jonas paid any attention to them. When he’d met her, she had healthy dark brown hair in a stylish bob that ended a couple of inches below her ears and looked like a dark hoodie. She liked to wear those cute tights from Target then, but now the tights and most of her clothes were gone, and her hair was longer, dull, and frizzy. He figured that pretty soon it would be bleached out and falling to her shoulders with bangs reaching to her eyes like Lady Gaga’s. A lot of the girls he knew did that to themselves, trying to look like the singer, but they ended up looking like shot-out skeezers, all sunken-eyed, pruned, and shriveled. There were dark circles under Megan’s nervous violet eyes and altogether he thought she looked like shit.

“Just get me a damp washcloth and a towel,” he said. “I gotta lay down.”

When he was lying on the couch, she returned and started dabbing at his wounds, causing him to yelp when she touched his damaged earlobe.

“Jonas,” she said. “You’ve lost a chunk of meat from your ear! How did that happen?”

“A bite,” he said.

“He bit you?” she said, shocked.

“Fucking Russians shoulda been nuked to the Stone Age,” he said to the ceiling.

She said, “He hurt you pretty bad.”

Then Jonas said, “You shoulda seen the damage I did. It wasn’t one-way.”

She dabbed at his ear with a soiled dishtowel, saying, “I’m sure you kicked his butt.”

“I knocked the shit outta that Russian pus bucket,” Jonas said to the wall. “Then I almost get busted by the cops for defending myself. Me, the victimized American.”

Megan said, “Just rest now and don’t think about it.”

“This is why my grandpa killed communists in Vietnam?” Jonas said to the coffee table littered with fan magazines, candy wrappers, and pizza boxes, as well as OC paraphernalia, including a 6 × 10 inch piece of tinfoil creased in half, a cigarette lighter, and a ballpoint pen with the ink tube removed lying beside it.

“Try to calm yourself,” Megan said.

“So a commie dirtbag could come to Hollywood and sucker me when I wasn’t looking?”

Megan said, “Your nose’ll start bleeding again. We’ve got half an eighty left. Do you want to chase the dragon?”

“A half of one bean?” Jonas said. “But I gave you a Ben Franklin yesterday!”

“It was three days ago, and Wilbur’s charging us eighty-five per ox. And we smoked a piece of it when we did those watsons and perks. You’re having a brownout. Don’t you remember any of it?”

He vaguely recalled the Vicodins and Perocets, but he couldn’t recall smoking half of an 80 mg OxyContin tablet. “It’s that goddamn screw-top wine,” he said. “It fucks up my memory. Can’t you go boost a better bottle somewhere? I’d even settle for a couple forties of OE.”

“I’m not a thief,” Megan said.

Jonas was getting heart palpitations and was sweating cold. His knee joints and right shoulder were aching, which he blamed on the fight. But when he looked more closely at Megan he saw that she had broken into a sweat as well, and she couldn’t stop yawning and scratching herself. That is, when she wasn’t coughing.

“Goddamnit, Megan, look at us,” he said. “We’re jonesing. I gotta chase the dragon and I mean right now!”

She jumped up, ran to the bedroom, and got the last piece of the OC tablet, bringing it to the coffee table and placing it in the crease of the foil.

“This ain’t a complete half,” Jonas accused. “You smoked a bite off it, didn’t you?”

Megan didn’t reply and he was too desperate to press her.

“Just hurry up,” he said.

Megan placed the flame of the lighter underneath the foil and heated the OxyContin tablet. Jonas picked up the empty ink tube, which, unlike a drinking straw, would not burn easily, and put it in his mouth. Megan tilted the foil, and as the heated fragment slid down the crease propelled by gravity and heated from beneath the foil, Jonas hungrily inhaled, and even swallowed as much rising smoke as he could, chasing that smoking ox down the crease before it burned up completely.

“You’re not worried about me, are you, Jonas?” Megan said. “Don’t you think I need a taste, too?”

Jonas said to her, “You call this chasing the dragon? All you left me was a crumb. There ain’t enough ox here to chase a fucking lizard.”

He waited for the rush, but all he got was an anemic feeling of lethargy. They were developing such a tolerance that for weeks neither of them had felt the warm flush of the skin or the wonderful drowsy euphoria that they used to get when there was enough for them both. When they weren’t so addicted.

“Wilbur only deals in cash, no credit,” Megan said between coughs. “I tried hard to talk a couple of OCs out of him when he came on to me, but he smells awful. I wouldn’t ever let him so much as touch me for anything, Jonas. There’re some things I won’t do.” She gulped back a sob and said, “I don’t want to ever come to that!” She threw herself facedown on the sofa then and wept.

He looked at her, thinking, yeah, pretty soon she’d have the Lady Gaga hair and a tramp stamp or two, like the last woman he’d let live with him. She’d probably end up peddling her ass on Sunset Boulevard. Then he tried to remember the girl he’d met when she was selling clothes at the Gap. Why was it that every girl he met turned into a degenerate?

“Goddamnit,” Jonas said, “we need enough bank for that fucking quack over in Echo Park. He’ll write us scrips for anything we want if the money’s right.”

Then Jonas felt a deep depression envelop him and he stopped looking at Megan and said, “I got fired,” to Cuddles, her calico cat, who was squatting on a kitchen chair sleepily watching all the human drama unfolding.

The calico cat just yawned, lifted a back leg, and licked her ass, but Megan sat up and said, “You what? Oh, Jonas, what’re we going to do?”

“Don’t worry,” Jonas said. “For quite a while I been thinking a lot about the Bling Ring. They only fucked up and got caught ’cause they didn’t stay focused. I think they had a cool idea, though. You and me, we could do it right.”

“Do what right?”

“Walk into the houses of celebrities and other rich people and take what we want. And make enough to live decent and stop slaving for all the foreign shitbags that’re taking over the whole town.”

“You’re not making sense,” Megan said. Then she started coughing again and her sweating increased.

“I’m making sense for the first time in a long time,” Jonas insisted.

“Let’s talk about it tomorrow,” Megan said, wiping her face on her T-shirt. “It’s stressful to talk like this when you’re all beat-up and not thinking.”

“Baby, it’s easy,” he said, “and the Bling Ring had a blast doing it.”

“It’s not like running out and boosting from department stores,” Megan said. “Breaking into houses? That’s very different and very scary.”

“Whadda you mean ‘breaking’?” Jonas said. “Those rich morons up in the Hollywood Hills, they leave their houses wide open. Know where Paris Hilton kept her house key? Under the fucking doormat. And they leave their windows unlocked. And you’re getting so skinny these days, you could crawl through a doggie door too small for a fucking Chihuahua. Nothing could stop us from getting into any house we want.”

Megan Burke suddenly flashed on how it had been in the beginning with Jonas Claymore, back when she was someone else and so was he. At first, they’d smoked pot on dates before doing zannies and benzos. It was carefree and it was fun at first. Then came the perks and norcos. And then they’d started smoking OxyContin, and after riding the ox for all these months, they had become unrecognizable people. Megan didn’t know this Jonas, and in fact, she didn’t even know this Megan that she had become.

“Can we please talk tomorrow, Jonas?” Megan pleaded. “This is nerve-racking and it’s making me burbly.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Jonas moaned, eyes rolling back, not wanting to be reminded that he, too, was experiencing bouts of diarrhea since the jonesing episodes started. “I ain’t got enough tribulations in life, I gotta hook up with a chick with irritable bowel syndrome? Why can’t I catch a break just for once?”

“Sorry. Gotta do number two,” Megan said, getting up and running to the bathroom.

“Go ahead, jingle bowels,” he said. “Drop a deuce for me while you’re at it.”