Beware Beware (2 page)

“You want to know if he's selling?”

There was a rustle on the other end of the line, a wordless shake or nod. “Yes,” she said a few seconds later.

“Do you have any reason to think he is?”

“Other than that it would be so in character for him to start doing something stupid for easy money?” She chuckled, a little trickle of sadness. “I don't have anything solid. He mentioned once that he had a friend who was slinging, and it stuck with me. If he's really back to using all the time, I know that's how dealers get started.”

“Okay,” I said. “I'll follow him around for a few days. Where can I find him?”

“His place is in West Hollywood, but his roommates say he hasn't been home either. I'd start at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. That's where he told them he was going to party, apparently. He didn't bother to tell me, and that was on Wednesday.”

“Okay, let me get his address anyway.”

She gave me an address near Santa Monica and Crescent Heights, on Havenhurst Drive. “Just find him for me, please. I need to know what he's been up to.”

“I'll report to you tonight. What time do you go to bed?”

“Call anytime. I'll pick up.”

*   *   *

The Roosevelt was an old, historic hotel on the loudest stretch of Hollywood Boulevard. Marilyn Monroe called it home for two years, and in 1929, it provided the venue for the first Academy Awards. It fit right into the glitzy story of tourist Hollywood.

I had little use for this part of town, a dingy neighborhood dressed up with buzzing neon lights and the dull trodden stars of the Walk of Fame. Grown men dressed as Spider-Man and SpongeBob SquarePants showed up day after day and suffered startling heat during most of the year to make lousy livelihoods posing for photographs in front of the Chinese Theater. They might have looked lively to a passing bus of tourists, but I saw them whenever I drove by, and I knew the sight was a picture of desolation, of crushed dreams dressed in grimy fourth-hand garments.

I circled the hotel for a good ten minutes before giving up on street parking. I pulled into the valet station and made a note to expense the fee. It was guaranteed to be costly.

It was five in the afternoon and the lobby buzzed with people. It was a nice space with a Rat Pack vibe, with heavy drapes and tall floor lamps built to look like wrought-iron torches. Small pillars met small arches, and a Spanish-looking fountain grew waterless from the center of a burgundy tiled floor. A man in a gray pinstriped suit paced with a cell phone clamped to his ear; a young couple held each other's knees on a long, low sofa upholstered in tufted tobacco leather. I never figured out who stayed at the hotel. I'd been inside a few times to eat and drink, and the place seemed constantly busy, spilling at each entrance with skinny blond women and men in shiny shirts, every night of the week. The clientele fit a type, but it wasn't native Hollywood. Maybe Jamie Landon would give me the answer.

I took a seat on an armchair and opened a book, my heart jumping more than I liked. Stakeouts were boring, but they kept me skittish. I always brought a book that I could never quite enjoy. I looked up after every paragraph with whatever stealth I could manage. It was like fishing—I hated almost all of it, but there was a small joy in reeling in the fish.

I studied the picture Daphne sent me on my phone. Jamie Landon, twenty-nine years old. He had a good-looking face, as far as I could tell, that looked vaguely familiar. The shadow of some celebrity, or a cluster of white male schoolmates who shared his features. He was supposed to be five-foot ten, around a hundred and fifty pounds. He favored plaid shirts and hoodies, slim designer jeans. He could be easy to spot or impossible.

After a quiet half hour, I walked across the floor to the cocktail bar. I ordered a bloody mary and carried it back into the lobby, where I repositioned myself on one of the sofas in reach of a coffee table.

I was halfway through my second drink when Jamie Landon hurried out of an elevator, eyes washing over the ground ahead of him as if he were wielding an invisible vacuum cleaner. He was easy to spot, as it turned out, though his jittery walk was at least half the picture. The other half was pleasant enough. His hair was a mess, but a good-looking mess, bedhead, thick and brown with the kind of beachy, loose curl I could never quite coax into my sheet-straight hair. I knew he was almost thirty, but he looked impossibly young.

Behind him was a middle-aged man in a tight graphic T-shirt and faded blue jeans with artful tears at the knees. He wore sunglasses and a tweedy fedora, but it took me only a couple seconds to recognize him as Joe Tilley.

I swallowed my drink and made a quick exit to the valet stand while the two men settled up at the front desk. I was still waiting for my car when they came out the door after me.

There were about a dozen people within view of the front entrance to the hotel, and a strange hush came over them all when Joe Tilley appeared. No one looked at him with anything amounting to pointed interest, but there wasn't a person with eyes who didn't know he was there. The man had star power—that was clear enough.

I ventured a closer look. Despite the stupid hat, he was a pretty sight. His face was almost generically good-looking, well angled and masculine with a strong, broad jaw. He was shorter than he looked on-screen, about five-foot-nine on the generous end. His T-shirt had a paper-thin, overwashed look, and it stretched translucent against his chest, showing the meaty outline of his pecs, the textured points of his nipples. I wondered if he was shooting a movie, or if he worked out every day of the year.

Jamie stood in front of him, somehow shrinking himself in the foreground as he handed the valet his ticket. My car came first.

I tipped the valet and sat in the driver's seat playing with my phone while Jamie waited for his car.

The car that crept into my rearview mirror was a yellow Ferrari, waxed to eye-searing brilliance, by my estimate not more than a day or two old. Jamie got behind the wheel, but I guessed the movie star was the legal owner.

I left the lot before I imprinted my Corolla's plates on their short-term memory and idled down the block for the thirty seconds it took for them to drive out.

In my time with Chaz, I'd gotten a fairly good grasp on the art of tailing. My car was gray and forgettable, and I could follow any unsuspecting driver across the city without getting obvious. Flashy sports cars just made my job a little easier.

It helped, too, that Jamie drove slowly. I guessed driving a celebrity's two-hundred-thousand-dollar vehicle made one a little cautious. He avoided lane changes and signaled at every turn. I followed them out of Hollywood on Sunset, then up north toward Griffith Park and into the Los Feliz Hills, where the streets became smaller and strictly residential. The houses flanking both sides of the drive grew big and splendid, structures of alarming taste and beauty tucked into the hill like luxe pocket squares. I followed the Ferrari at a safe distance for as long as I could manage, then started to lose it in spurts as it climbed the hill. Just as I was about to give up and wait at the bottom, the car turned into a grand driveway.

This belonged to a magnificent house, a Spanish-style mansion with a look of perfect preserved grandeur. It was a corrupt clergyman's house, or a real estate king's, or an A-list actor's. The actual structure was a good quarter mile in from the street, obscured from most angles by a thick wall of brambly hedges manicured to a well-managed chaos. The better to block out cameras, I supposed.

I passed the house after a quick disciplined gawk and parked uphill facing back down. Five minutes later, a dusty silver BMW nosed its way out of the driveway. Jamie drove, alone, looking exhausted.

I laughed out loud, tickled by a sudden jab of recognition—Jamie looked familiar because I'd met him once before.

It was a parking encounter a few months earlier, one of those silly interactions that happens every second in Los Angeles. I'd had a depressing day, one of many in a row, and Lori insisted on going out to dinner at a popular restaurant in Los Feliz. I searched for fifteen minutes before finding an empty spot. I signaled, finally triumphant, and a second later a silver BMW swooped in to take it. When the driver got out, I rolled down my window and said something impolite. He looked at me, and his eyes went wide. “Oh, shit, don't tell me,” he said. “I ate your lunch right out of the fridge.”

My anger deflated. “As long as you know what you did,” I said.

He offered to move, and when I waved him off, he insisted. “I'm offering to vacate a parking spot. How often does that happen in this city?”

Before I could decline more sincerely, he hopped in his car and drove away. That was all there was to it, but I remembered it clearly. It was a rare sparkle of decency that left a deep impression—an episode of mundane anger transformed in an instant to one of flushed pleasure.

I was sorry when he left. I wouldn't have minded getting his name. Now I knew—that was Jamie Landon, and I wasn't exactly repaying his kindness.

*   *   *

I followed him back onto Sunset, the direct path from Los Feliz to his apartment in West Hollywood. The slow ooze of Friday traffic let me keep a loose, steady tail until we reached our destination.

The neighborhood was not quite as royal as the one we'd come from, but it was pleasant, respectable, and I guessed the rent was moderately high. The building was old but well maintained, a one-story complex that might once have been a giant single-family home, parceled into a handful of units. The exterior walls were a bile-colored stucco, broken up by a few square windows. Jamie parked his car on the street, a lucky break for his tail.

The clock in my car said 8:50
P.M.
I called Daphne.

“Well, he was at the Roosevelt,” I said.

“Did you see anything?”

“Joe Tilley was with him. Jamie dropped him off at his house. I guess he'd left his car there. They're close, huh?”

“Joe likes Jamie. Their work is pretty intimate and they hang out often, from what I understand. I don't know anything about them hanging out in a hotel together, though.”

“Joe Tilley—is he a family man?”

“He has a son and two daughters. None of his kids live with him, though.”

“Wife?”

“Number three. Willow Hemingway. Actress. C-list.” She spoke like she was directing me to an unattractive item in a mail-order catalog.

“She's at home?”

“As far as I know.”

I stretched the fingers of my free hand on the steering wheel, let the knuckles crack in percussive succession. “So he's leaving her at home overnight to hang out with Jamie. Does he have a history of drug abuse?”

“Might be his most famous relationship.” She drew in air through her teeth. “I guess they could be doing drugs together.”

“I'll keep watching him.”

*   *   *

I pulled out my laptop, found some unguarded wireless, and did a little background research. Internet stalking was the first and handiest tool for any private detective, and I made good use of it before and after I got the job. I wondered sometimes in an idle way if private detectives weren't already going obsolete. Information was our primary ware, and it was plain enough that the Internet was bad news for all middlemen.

I ran a search for Joe Tilley, figuring he'd be the easiest player to look up. I skimmed his long, detailed Wikipedia entry and scrolled through the column of his life's work on IMDb. Everything Daphne had told me was publicly available, as was a surfeit of boring factoids made newsworthy by his fame.

Jamie Landon had an IMDb page, too. Sparse, with a small headshot and a few writer credits in shorts and small productions. Nothing else really came up. No one cared where he ate his breakfast.

I lingered on his picture and wondered if I should tell Daphne about the coincidence of our prior encounter. It was a funny story, but it was almost too trivial to mention. I decided against it without much thought—I only remembered him because I'd found him attractive, and there was no need for her to know that.

I looked up Daphne next, more out of interest than anything else. I googled “daphne freamon artist” and the first result was a feature review in a prominent New York magazine. I whistled—Daphne Freamon appeared to be somebody. The review was fairly involved, and it included photographs of both Daphne and her paintings.

Daphne was black, as it turned out, and my brain experienced a brief delay as it processed that minor revelation. I'd heard an uninflected accent, a nonethnic name, and pictured, without thinking, a white girl. I may have grown up Korean in Los Angeles, but my brain couldn't quite shed those middle-American default settings. She hadn't mentioned her race, but why would she have, anyway? It hadn't occurred to me to mention mine. I felt a scorch of shame at my own surprise.

She was also very pretty, but that part didn't surprise me at all. I had a lot of Raymond Chandler in my PI training.

The review was laudatory, though it struck me as somewhat tone-deaf. The critic was a white dude, and I couldn't help but cringe at his lingering praise for the “lusty,” “voluptuous” “sensuality” of her work. I had a high school kid's appreciation and understanding of art, but even I could see there was more to Daphne's paintings than sexual heat. I found several of them all over the Internet, and spent a good fifteen minutes taking in her portfolio. The paintings were striking, haunting, bloody and visceral in bright splashes of color, and they made me feel uneasy. That probably meant she had talent. Good for her.

Daphne was my age, and for a second, I wondered what I had done with my life. To my relief, I felt admiration rather than jealousy, a sort of creeping desire to be her friend.

I googled myself—nothing at all. All things considered, a blessed result.

*   *   *