The Murder Artist

CHAPTER 43

There are dozens of ways Boudreaux could have learned I was on to him, but the fact that he knew where I was staying narrows the field of potential sources to people in L.A. Because no one else knows I’m here.

Maybe it was the kid at the bookstore, or one of the magicians I spoke to at the Castle. I left the hotel number when I placed all the calls to the Yellow Pages magicians, so that if they called back, they wouldn’t have to make a long-distance call to my cell.

It doesn’t matter. Byron found me and he let me know about it, got right in my face. It’s Shoffler’s smirk factor – big-time.

In some ways his intrusion is good news. It means that he’s breaking cover. It means he wants to play. Maybe he’ll slip up and I’ll find him.

But I can’t just sit around and wait for Byron and Mertz to come after me. Four days.

In the morning, I have an appointment with the information broker. I park near his office in a down-at-heels neighborhood near Mann’s Chinese Theatre. I make sure to lock the car, given the sketchy neighborhood. Tourists crouch on the various squares of concrete, fitting their hands into the imprints made by Arnold or Clint or Julia. Something about the way they pose and joke and smile for the camera depresses me. They’re tourists, having fun. I guess it reminds me of the day the kids and I went to the Renaissance Faire.

“Got your phone call,” the broker tells me. He shakes his head. “Carrefour was a complete dead-end. Sublet everything, leased his car. The tax ID was a fake, checked back to some retiree in Iowa. Your guy is a ghost. Had every document you need to survive in the information age, but none of it was legit. I checked the Boudreaux name, too. Got nothing. As for this guy Mertz, I did a little better.”

“The house in Beverly Hills?”

“Barrymore Drive. A nice place. Mertz was renting it, but he left last year.”

“Is there a forwarding address?”

“P.O. box. But he closed that six months ago.”

I wasn’t really expecting much, but even so, it’s another dead end. And it’s almost more than I can stand. I can’t afford any more culs-de-sac; I can’t spare a minute. A bead of sweat crawls down my spine. As I get to my feet, I reach for my wallet to settle up with the broker.

“Hold on,” he says. “I did find something that might interest you.”

“What?”

“Doing the courthouse search, I stumbled on something. They got it computerized now, you know? I was looking to see if the guy paid property taxes in Beverly Hills – which he didn’t – but his name popped up in a court case.”

“What kind of case?”

The broker leans toward me. “Customs. They seized some videos from Mertz and he sued to get them back.”

“What kind of videos?”

The broker shrugs. “I don’t know. But I copied the filing. Me – I can’t get to it until tomorrow. But if you’re in a hurry, you could just follow up on your own.”

The name of the customs officer who testified in the Mertz case is Michael Aguilar. At the time he worked at LAX; and he still does.

I’m about a block from my car when he finally comes to the phone. He tells me he gets off his shift at noon. “So if you want to talk then, I’m down with that.” He pauses. “Damn it. My daughter must have taken my cell phone. Tell you what – there’s a bar in the concourse at TBI. We could meet there.”

“TBI?”

“International terminal. Tom Bradley International Terminal.”

“I’ll be there. Say twelve-fifteen?”

“Perfect.”

I want to check my messages at the hotel, maybe give Shoffler a call. See if he has any advice.

I unlock the car. There’s a brochure on the driver’s seat. At first I just pick it up and put it on the dash, but then it comes to me: I locked the car.

On the front of the brochure, a large infinity logo seems to float over the words HOLLYWOOD FOREVER. The front fold also displays a photo of an obelisk near a lake and four oval cameos of old movie stars. (I recognize Rudolph Valentino and Jayne Mansfield.)

I unfold the brochure and find that the interior is a map – street names and roads, lakes and trees – the map of a cemetery. Not far from the entrance, off to the left on Memorial Lane, two little stickers have been pasted: twin golden angels, side by side.

My hands are shaking and my head screams with unanswerable questions. A map of a cemetery? Does this mean my boys are dead?

I start the car and hang a U-turn, earning long bleats of displeasure from several drivers. I know about this cemetery. I know where it is – down Santa Monica in a gritty neighborhood near Plummer Park, the part of L.A. with a concentration of Russians.

We did a piece on Russian organized crime in the U.S. and shot some footage in this part of L.A. And sure enough, soon I’m passing storefronts with Cyrillic lettering. Stopped at a light, I roll down my window and call out to a pedestrian.

“Excuse me? Can you tell me where the cemetery is – you know, Hollywood Forever?”

The man turns to me, smiles. “Sure, buddy,” he says, his voice thick with a Russian accent, “one hundred percent. Ten blocks down on your right. You’ll see it.”

One hundred percent. I remember the phrase from when we did the piece. It’s what Russian émigrés say when they’re sure of something.

Right now, I’m not sure… of anything. I was so certain that August 10 was it…

But now… Hollywood Forever.

I’m terrified.

I remember seeing Diane or Barbara interview the young entrepreneur who bought the cemetery and rescued it from bankruptcy. The last resting place of many Hollywood greats – Cecil B. DeMille! Rudolph Valentino! Jayne Mansfield! Douglas Fairbanks (junior and senior) – had fallen on hard times. Then it was bought, renamed, and refurbished – for tourists as much as for the dead. As I recall, it’s still a working cemetery – one of its specialties being filmed tributes, archived on site and available for viewing, so that after visiting the earthly remains, family and friends can also watch films starring the deceased.

I drive in through the gates. It’s clear from the Russian and Latino graves that the changing demographics of the neighborhood are represented here. When I seem to be in the area marked by the angels, I park by the side of the road and get out of my car.

Nestled against a stone wall are the graves of children. Displays of toys, bronzed baby shoes, photographs, statuary of angels, heartbreaking testimonials of love and loss, crowd every tiny gravesite. I stumble past them, searching for I don’t know what, until I reach the end of the row. And there – on a bare patch of earth, two plastic horses ridden by two plastic knights face each other, lances drawn. Looking on are two identical blond-haired Fisher-Price figures, their painted faces locked in perpetual grins.

For a moment, I’m paralyzed and then I’m running toward my car. It takes me a while, but eventually I persuade a woman who works at the cemetery administration building to accompany me back to the children’s graves. We ride in her car, a somber black Mercedes. She is so used to talking to the distraught that my agitation doesn’t seem to faze her. Periodically, she places a reassuring hand on my arm.

At the site where the plastic knights face off, she uses her cell phone to call the administrative center. Then – while fixing me with sympathetic eyes – she recites the number of the plot and its coordinates. “Call me back with the status on this, okay? I’d like to know the identity of the interred – date of interment, responsible party, whatever you’ve got. Great.”

We stand there, waiting. “There’s supposed to be a stone,” she tells me. “But sometimes that takes a while.”

I can’t say a word. To her credit, she gives my arm a squeeze and lets it go at that. We wait. She seems to be studying the cloud patterns. I can’t take my eyes off the plastic knights, the Fisher-Price figures, the raw earth.

Her phone rings, a discreet chirp. She turns away from me as she talks.

“No?” she says in a hushed voice. “You’re kidding. Oh, God, people are something, huh?”

She puts the phone back in the holster on her hip and looks at me, a tiny frown marring her serene expression. “This is somebody’s idea of a bad joke,” she tells me, bending down to scoop up the toys from the dirt. “There’s no one buried here. This is one of six plots that we’ve taken off the market. We’re putting in a fountain here, for the little folks’ area.” She cocks her head, looks at me, puts her hand on my arm. “Look, it’s a big place, it’s easy to get confused. This isn’t the only location where children are buried. If there’s someone in particular you’re looking for, you should go to the graves registration office. It’s in administration, where you found me. Okay? I’ll give you a ride.”

She starts to walk off toward the car and I fall in step next to her. We both hear it at the same time: the crystalline notes of a flute. It’s a haunting and beautiful sound.

“Isn’t that pretty,” she says as we turn in unison to look for the source of the music. “I didn’t know there were any ceremonies this morning.”

And then I see him – leaning casually against a gravestone not thirty feet from me. He’s wearing khakis, a white shirt. He holds the flute to his lips.

“Hey!” the woman protests as I take off after him, but I’m gone, running between gravestones, crashing past startled cemetery visitors. I ran the four hundred in high school and although I’m out of shape, I’m still fast – and I’m gaining on him. He’s heading toward a small lake, the grounds around it beautifully landscaped with trees and shrubs, interspersed with family mausoleums. The area provides so many places to hide that I lose him a couple of times – but each time he pipes a tune and then emerges from behind a tree or gravestone.

My lungs are burning, my quadriceps screaming by the time I see him run onto a little causeway that leads to an island in the middle of the lake. I accelerate: it’s a dead end for him. I can practically feel it, his body under me when I launch myself and take him down.

We’re running alongside the large mausoleum on the island and I’m so close that I can see what brand of shoe he’s wearing – Nikes. He reaches the end of the structure and turns the corner. I’m seconds behind him, and yet when I turn… impossibly, he’s not there. He’s vanished.