Hollywood Tough

Chapter 18

Nicky steered Shane through the double doors onto the hotel patio, near a small grassy courtyard. Shafting late-afternoon sunlight cut through the landscaped date palms and splashed the small patio, painting it orange. Waiters in red coats served champagne in fluted glasses and hors d'oeuvres with caviar centers.

Everybody at the party looked as if they were just out of college. Shane guessed the average age to be around twenty-two. Across the patio, Dennis Valentine was working the meager crowd. He seemed angry; his jaw kept clenching.

Shane stood with Nicky, off toward the back of the party near the patio door, observing the New Jersey mobster. He was about Shane's age and had a shock of curly black hair that hung down loosely on his forehead, a bad-boy haircut that Shane was sure Valentine thought the girls adored. He was dressed in a beautiful dove-gray suit, open at the collar. There were plenty of glittering accessories twinkling at his cuffs and on his fingers. He wore gold chains instead of a tie, and his teeth lined up like polished rows of tombstones. He had full, sensuous lips… the guy was a fox… at least a nine.

"Good-looking," Shane observed.

Nicky scowled. "He gets more ass than a redneck at a family reunion. Be sure and try the champagne. It's Taittinger."

"Who are these people?"

"Players… heavy hitters."

"Do any of them have their driver's licenses yet?"

"It's a young business, bubee. You hit thirty, you're as good as dead at the studios. We make films for preteen puberty cases. That's your audience today, everybody else is just theater-seat garbage. That teen audience skew gives younger executives positions of power."

After ten minutes, Dennis Valentine was closing in on them. He saw Nicky and a scowl cut deep lines in his handsome tanned face. He excused himself from the group he was talking to and came over.

"What the fuck happened?" he said to Nicky without preamble.

"Whatta you talking about?" Nicky turned pale. Shane thought he might have even flinched when Valentine spoke.

"These people are a buncha secretaries and assistants. Where're the players? It's like every heavy hitter we invited gave their fucking invitation to some flunky."

"They wouldn't do that," Nicky hedged.

"That one over there." He pointed to a pretty dark-haired girl with curly hair and jutting breasts. "She's a Xerox operator at the William Morris office. She copies scripts to go out to actors. Her boss gave her his invite."

"Oh, well, I'm sure-"

"And that guy with the eyebrow pierce. He's some agency guy's driver."

"Look, Dennis, one of the things you're gonna come to learn is that in the biz, these younger assistant-type people will shortly end up in positions of extreme power, and it never hurts to cultivate relationships with up-and-coming-"

"This fucking party is costing me a fortune!" Valentine interrupted. "I didn't throw it so I could get to know a buncha elevator operators and parking lot attendants."

"Yes… yes… well, let me get into this, Dennis."

"I'm gonna beat the cost a this bash outta you, a dollar at a time," Valentine fumed.

Nicky Marcella had turned the exact same shade of white as the lace cloth decorating the silver hors d'oeuvre tray that was just being thrust in front of them.

Dennis Valentine turned and looked at Shane. "Jesus. How'd you get in? You already grew up."

"Dennis, this is my new partner at Cine-Roma, Shane Scully." Nicky was trembling as Shane stuck out his hand.

"I don't shake hands. Germs. It's a thing with me," Dennis said.

"Right. How ya doing?" Shane asked.

"Not so hot."

"I can see."

"Well, gotta go," Shane said to Nicky. "I'm meeting Mike Fallon tomorrow at the Polo Lounge for breakfast. Ten o'clock. Why don't you join us?"

"Okay," the little grifter agreed. Then Shane started to shake hands again with Dennis Valentine but caught himself, pulled back and smiled.

"Sorry. Forgot. Nice to meet you." Shane turned and left Nicky Marcella to tell Dennis Valentine the tale.

Once he was off the patio and into the adjoining restaurant, Shane stopped and looked back through the tinted-glass window. He could see Nicky talking. Dennis Valentine was leaning forward, listening intently. At least the little grifter hadn't frozen this time. Shane didn't have to be there to read the result. Valentine had a hungry shark look on his heavy, masculine face. He was nodding and looking toward the door Shane had just disappeared through.

It was six-fifteen P. M. when Shane left the hotel, so he stayed off the freeway to avoid traffic and used surface streets to get to the office of Drug Enforcement on the fourth floor of Parker Center, downtown. He picked up the keys to the asset seizure house on North Chalon Road, then called Alexa and Chooch on their cell phones and made an appointment to meet them there at eight, suggesting they stop by the Venice house to pack overnight bags. After hanging up, he still had well over an hour, and there was something else he'd been meaning to do.

He called Alexa's office, got the new LAPD secure computer code from her adjutant, then accessed Carol White's home address from the Vice mainframe. She lived on Temple Street in Rampart, a few blocks west of Coronado.

Shane pulled up in front of a sad-looking two-story cream-and-brown apartment house. There was an old homeless woman decorating the curb out front. Parked on the grass next to her was a Vons market wire basket; a silver chariot crammed to overflowing with her priceless possessions. The woman was ageless, anywhere from thirty to sixty, dressed in fatigues and an old Army Surplus blanket cut like a poncho, with a hole in the center for her head. When Shane got out of his car and started past her, he could hear her moaning softly, so he stopped. He turned to find her rocking back and forth on her haunches, her lifeless eyes like holes cut in cardboard.

A few years back, the state mental institutions had decided to release all of their nonviolent patients to cut down on costs. These poor souls were now camped out in alleys and under freeway bridges all over town. The women were particularly pitiful, becoming constant rape targets who, because of their mental illnesses, could not defend themselves. Over the past few years Shane had taken many of these dazed sexual assault victims to County Hospital. Sometimes they couldn't even remember what had happened to them. They would be treated and released. Once back on the streets, the cycle of violence and sexual assault would begin all over again. Shane opened his wallet and handed the woman a ten. She looked up at him and smiled. Through her split lip he saw broken teeth. He was in the same dimension with her, but not anywhere in her vicinity. It occurred to him that most cops didn't give handouts to homeless people. Cops were supposed to be cynics. So what the hell was he doing? Why was he turning into such a bleeding heart?

He found Carol's name on the registry board, then climbed to the second floor and walked down the narrow corridor, inhaling old urine and mildew. He stopped in front of her apartment door, which still had yellow LAPD crime tape across its threshold, took out his lock picks and, in a few minutes, let himself in.

Carol White's apartment was another surprise. The forty-dollar street whore lived in a pink-rug and white-lace wonderland. The place looked like it had been decorated by a ten-year-old; cutouts of teen magazine fashion layouts were stuck on the walls, white teddy bears looked down from bookshelves. The three-room apartment was as frilly and innocent as Carol was broken down and used up. Most drug addicts stop doing housework and live in filth. It surprised him how clean everything was.

There was a bedroom and bath with a small kitchen and living room, all of it extremely neat, except for the graphite dust the Homicide print team had left behind. It darkened the doorjambs at shoulder height and was on a few kitchen and bathroom drawer handles. It didn't look like a very thorough dusting. Shane counted six general locations where the print team had smeared the hard surfaces with their number nine brushes full of dark powder.

On important murders, he had seen enough graphite to open a pencil factory. By comparison, this was pretty meager. Ruta was obviously doing a slapdash job in his effort to get done quickly and move on.

On the dresser, Shane found several old pictures of Carol in her beauty pageant days. She looked about fifteen, fresh and wholesome, standing in a white bathing suit and heels. A winner's sash was draped around her luscious body, displaying both magnificent curves and childlike innocence.

It was hard to believe that in two or three years, this beautiful child had been turned into the heroin addict he'd met a few days ago.

Shane shook out of a descending funk that was settling over him. He wasn't here to look at old pictures. He searched through the apartment but didn't find what he was looking for, so he sat in Carol's bedroom chair, across from an open window, and waited.

His mind began to wander back to Dennis Valentine. Shane had decided that a great-looking, criminally connected guy like Valentine probably wasn't used to being ignored, so that was going to be his play, but something told him to be careful. The relationship between Valentine and Nicky was complicated. Dennis had treated the little grifter like a flunky, not like the valued partner and adviser that Nicky had said he was. Shane now seriously doubted they were in a film agreement with each other.

He reached into his pocket and fingered the keys to the department's asset-seizure house, as his mind switched channels. He tried to envision living in such a magnificent home, even temporarily. Shane had been an orphan, raised by several different foster parents, all blue-collar families. But like a bony river fish, he kept being thrown back, and had ended up in a state-run group home. His idea of luxury was his small canal house in Venice; the house on North Chalon was going to be a whole new experience.

His mind flipped once more, now pondering Amac and Chooch. He found himself picking at that old scab again until it opened, oozing concern. Was Chooch going to do something stupid? Could he trust him to stay away from American? He had begun to sense there might be something else binding Chooch and Amac besides friendship. He wasn't sure what it was, but the more he thought about it, the more he suspected there was a hidden piece he didn't understand yet.

Then, what he had been waiting for suddenly arrived. It jumped off the tree limb outside and landed on the open windowsill, teetered there for a minute, then jumped down into the room.

Carol's marmalade cat.

"Hey, Franco," Shane said, remembering what Carol had named him. The cat froze, startled at seeing an intruder. Shane had spotted no food or water bowls in the apartment, so he got up and finally found some cat food in the kitchen, put it on a plate, then filled a bowl with water and set them both down.

Franco ran at the bowl of water, drank first, then settled on his haunches and started to devour the dry cat food.

After he finished, the cat turned and studied Shane. Cats were supposed to have only one expression, but Franco was definitely projecting sadness. Shane also saw grief and confusion in those large yellow eyes.

"She's not coming back, guy," Shane told him. "You can stay here and look for another sucker to feed you, or you can come with me."

The cat looked at him, moved his ears forward, then came over and started to wind around his feet. Shane reached down and picked Franco up, then held him and scratched behind his ears. The cat started purring loudly.

"Deal," Shane murmured.

He gathered up some cat supplies, found the litter box and emptied it into the trash, then packed everything up in the box. Balancing the supplies under one arm and Franco under the other, he left Carol's apartment.

He put Franco and the supplies into the Acura, while the old lady on the curb watched. He pulled away from the apartment with his new pet, leaving the pitiful homeless woman behind.

Only one stray at a time, he thought, then got the hell out of Rampart.

The drive from Carol's depressing, paint-peeling apartment building to the drug dealer's beautiful, two-story Colonial on North Chalon Road was a short freeway trip out of desperation into the American dream. The two neighborhoods were separated by only twenty minutes and fifteen miles, but they were light-years from one another.