City of War (6 page)

When the boxes arrived at Dove Way, they sat in the dining room until Mallory got tired of stepping around them and started leaving clumps of pictures all over the house. I got the message and sat down one afternoon and went through them.

Mostly they were what families usually leave behind—shots of long-forgotten birthday parties, picnics and vacations. The difference in these, however, was that the Thaws had taken the time to jot notations on them, giving the year, place and names of the people. A photographic family history, as it were, and the voyeur in me enjoyed the tour for an hour or so.

I’d pretty much made up my mind to send them anonymously to the Pittsburgh Historical Society when I came across an old Islay’s Ice Cream bag in the bottom of one of the boxes. Inside were half a dozen square negatives of a baseball game. They were in pretty bad shape, and I couldn’t
make out much, so I called Benny Joe, whom I’ve known since he came west.

They turned out to be pictures of Babe Ruth batting at Forbes Field. And he was in a Boston Braves uniform, which meant it was May 1935, the last week of his career and possibly the day he hit his final three home runs, including Number 714.

Benny Joe was just about coming out of his skin when he called me. “These fuckers were taken on a Rolleiflex, which means once I get them restored, they’ll be fuckin’ sharp. And I’m just finishing a new program that’ll make them look almost digital. You have any idea what the fuck these are worth if there’s a home run on one?”

I didn’t, and I didn’t think he did either, but I was glad he was enthusiastic.

Now, as we stood in his living room, he said with an edge in his voice, “If you’re here about the Babe Ruth shit, I told you it’s gonna take a couple of fuckin’ months. And I don’t like people pushing me.”

“Like I said before, take as long as you like. I’m here about this.”

I handed Benny Joe the photograph from the morning paper. The one showing the crash.

“You think you can improve it?” I asked.

He set his beer and gun on an end table, took the picture and looked at it. Then, with thinly veiled irritation, he said, “What the fuck are you? Some kind of clown? I can’t do shit with a newspaper picture. You get me an actual print, and I’ll win the guy a fuckin’ Pulitzer. Get me the negative, and fuckin’ museums will call.”

“That’s the answer I was expecting, but I’d like you to look at it anyway.”

He took a swig of Pabst, rolled his eyes. “Which fuckin’ part?”

“Anything that might help identify the two guys in the van or its plate.”

Benny Joe said something rude, then went upstairs. I
watched the dogs for a while, and they watched me back. Pretty soon, I heard him coming back down.

“It was taken on film. Good fuckin’ camera too. Probably a Nikon. The answer to your question is who the fuck knows. Get me the fuckin neg, man.”

5

And Along Came Dana

My friend at the
Times
who could tell me how to find the guy who’d taken the accident picture wouldn’t be around until Monday, so I headed home. Remembering the Benson & Hedges, I stopped at a liquor store on Sunset. I also had the manager dig out another couple of bottles of PlumpJack and grabbed a six-pack of Stella Artois. Then I stood in line behind a shirtless guy with a tattoo of a giraffe covering his back, who kept his hand on his purple-haired girlfriend’s ass while he glanced over his shoulder and grinned toothlessly.

Late for a Mensa meeting.

The clerk put my purchases in a bag with the cigarettes, but before ringing me up, he said, “Hey, man, it’s none of my business, but that Belgian beer is shit-fuck expensive. We’re runnin’ a special on Keystone Light. You could get you a 12-pack for almost the same price.”

I thanked him and passed. So he asked if I needed ice for the wine. Benny Joe came to mind. Fuck!

Kim was sitting in the solarium talking to Mallory.

She looked up when I came in. “I’ve put on all my best moves, but Mallory won’t tell me anything about you. Just that you’re kind and generous.”

“I’ll have to slip an extra hundred grand in his pay envelope.”

Mallory stood. “At the risk of losing the bonus, might I say that dinner is timed precisely for eight and that you have an unnerving habit of not looking at clocks.”

Kim spoke up. “We’ll be there. I guarantee it. Whatever you’re cooking has been in the air all day, and I’m already fantasizing.”

I took the Benson & Hedges out of the bag, threw them to her and handed the beer and wine to Mallory. “Get the Stella on ice, would you. I’ve been at Benny Joe’s, and I’m going to need one.”

“Stella, yum. Who’s Benny Joe?” asked Kim as she tore open the cigarettes.

Mallory frowned. “A perfectly dreadful little man,” he said.

Then he headed toward the kitchen, and I changed the subject. “So what did you get into while I was gone?”

“Oh, I poked around a little. Found a big pool table in the billiard room, which is probably where it belongs. You any good?”

“I know which end of a cue to use.”

“I’ll take that as a warning. There’s also a hell of an accumulation of vehicles in that unbelievable basement garage. Jesus, what a place. But why are they all either red or black?”

“I’m not exactly sure. Seems like every time I like something, that’s what it is. Think I should see a shrink?”

She laughed. “If they were Mary Kay pink, I’d say run, don’t walk, but I think red and black check out okay with Freud. By the way, your car wash guy, Angelo, was here.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Is that what he called himself, ‘my car wash guy’?”

“Not exactly, I hung that on him when he started soaping up your Morgan. What year is it?”

“1968.”

“I was close. I guessed ’70. Great-looking car, but Angelo said your legs are too long to drive it.”

“He was being charitable. I can’t even get my ass down in the seat.”

“So why buy it?”

“Because it’s beautiful.”

Kim thought for a moment. “Like not having room to hang a Calder but not being able to resist it.”

“Bingo.”

“So who’s Angelo?”

“He used to be chief mechanic for Ford Racing.”

“That’s a big deal, right?”

“Right.”

“And he’s another friend. Somebody you did a favor for who stops by now and then. And he probably washes your cars because…he can’t keep his hands off them.”

“Give the lady a cigar.”

“I’d rather have one of those Stellas.”

We had dinner on the patio. Mallory’s world-famous Sicilian pot roast with a side of porcini risotto washed down with PlumpJack—no ice. It was magnificent.

Kim didn’t offer any more details about the night before, so I kept the conversation loose. Mostly talked about what a pain in the ass it is to own a big house, especially an old one, and how I’d kill for a really good terra-cotta guy.

Later, we went into the screening room, and I threw
Papillon
on the DVD. If there’s something better than a good meal, a great-looking woman and Steve McQueen, I don’t know what it is. Well, actually, I do, and we found ourselves doing it on one of the sofas sometime after Steve’s first escape. Then we toddled off to the bedroom for Round Two.

Next morning, I was up first again and done with my laps before Kim found her way outside.

“You ready to go home yet?”

“You throwing me out?” She laughed.

“Nope, just that it’s Monday, and I figured you’d have to go to work.” I saw her flush, then recover quickly.

“I’m between jobs.”

I didn’t say anything, but after breakfast, I got up and went to the phone.

“Who’re you calling?” she asked.

“Beverly Hills Taxi.”

“I thought you were going to ask me some more questions.”

“I was, but your end of the deal was to tell the truth.”

She flashed angry. “What are you talking about?”

“Well, the name you gave me is almost right. Actually, it’s Dana Kimberly York, and you live at 429 Princeton St. in Santa Monica. You’re current with your bills, have never been arrested and earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in art history from Penn and a PhD in European masters from the University of Paris. But here’s where the story gets interesting.

“First, 429 Princeton St. is titled to an Alexander Connor Cayne, whose Social Security number indicates he’s been dead since 1975. Further, you’ve got a restraining order out against somebody named Brandi Sue Parsons, who coincidentally is also on the Pasadena Police Department’s missing persons list. And finally, you
do
have a job—a serious one. You’re the editor-in-chief of the Getty Museum’s art journal—and P.S., you called in sick about an hour ago.”

Kim looked like she’d been slapped.

I gave her a minute, then said, “So you tell me,
Doctor
York, where do we go from here?”

She took a long moment, then she said tightly, “Well, for starters, I hate the name Dana, so I never use it. And Alexander Cayne was my father, a navy commander flying off the
Enterprise
. A month after I was born, he was shot down over North Vietnam and captured alive. We know because his name and picture were in a Hanoi newspaper. But like two thousand other dads, brothers and sons, he never came home.

“After the war, the navy declared him dead, but my mother didn’t believe them—not even after she remarried, and her new husband, Truman York, adopted me. So she never filed
the paperwork to have Dad’s name taken off the house. No one cares anyway, as long as the taxes are paid, and I think she was always half-expecting that one day, he’d come up the walk, and everything would be like it was. And later, after my mom and stepfather died in a crash, I couldn’t bear to change it either.”

“The POW/MIA debacle is a national stain,” I said. “And it’s on every president who didn’t force the Vietnamese and the Defense Department to come clean.”

Kim bowed her head, and I could tell her eyes were wet. “There are no words to describe what the families went through—the same people who were so loyal to their country that they absorbed the lies in silence. You know, I never even knew my dad, but I always felt connected. I think my mother’s love for him was so great and her grief so profound that it became part of me too.”

Kim took a deep breath and went on. “Now, Brandi Sue Parsons. You can starve on what museums and galleries pay, so I took the journalism route. I was always good at getting people to talk, and I got lucky and picked up regular free-lance pieces for some of the more prestigious art publications. I was doing pretty well too—at least I was eating—but like a lot of people with my degrees, I was dead certain I could find undervalued works and resell them for a fat profit. So when I wasn’t writing about lost Caravaggios or forged Warhols, I hung out a shingle as a consultant.

“Mrs. Parsons, who is two years younger than me, was a former Miss Universe runner-up and the brand-new trophy wife of a wealthy Pasadena developer. She hired me to locate something outstanding for the new mansion her husband was building her. And I did—a wonderful pair of Kubicek watercolors. But the owner would only sell them as a package, and the price was $400,000, twice what Mrs. Parsons had authorized.

“When I explained it to Brandi Sue, she went to see the paintings—a still life and a landscape—and fell in love with the landscape, which was valued at $180,000. So I told
her I’d scout around and see what I could do. I got lucky. I found an investor willing to put up $200,000 in return for an eighty percent share of what the still life might eventually bring. I borrowed against my credit cards for the balance. Case closed. That is, until I sent the still life to Sotheby’s to be auctioned.”

“Let me guess, somebody bought it for half a million.”

“Not even close. One million, six hundred sixty-five thousand, five hundred. It turned out to be one of the artist’s lost works. It had disappeared from the Spanish royal family in 1808, probably looted by one of Napoleon’s officers. Mrs. Parsons read about the sale in the paper and came looking for what she considered her share of the money—which by her logic was all of it.

“Her opening line was, ‘You thieving fucking bitch. You set me up!’ Then she hired a lawyer and accused me of pushing her to buy the landscape when it was the still life she wanted all along.”

“Naturally.”

“The judge threw the case out, but she kept at it with harassing phone calls and poison e-mails. Then one day, as I was crossing the street in front of my apartment, she tried to run me down with her Mercedes. I managed to dive out of the way, but I felt the bumper graze my skirt.”

“Hence the restraining order,” I said.

Kim nodded. “I was really scared. The funny thing was, a few months later, her husband came to see me. He was beside himself. He said Brandi Sue had taken all the money she could lay her hands on, pawned her jewelry and left town with the foreman who’d been overseeing the construction of their new house. She’d also taken the Kubicek landscape, and he wanted to know if maybe she’d contacted me about selling it.”

“I guess he didn’t know the history,” I said.

“I think he was so hung up on her, he wasn’t thinking clearly. He was absolutely sure his foreman had coerced her,
maybe even used force. So sure, in fact, he’d made a police report.”

“I’m sure the Pasadena cops jumped right on it.”

“They called me about three weeks later, but there wasn’t much urgency in their questions. I think they figured it for what it was.”

“Gotta watch those Ms. Universes,” I said.

“I think it’s just the runner-ups,” she smiled. “And finally, I do work at the Getty. My Kubicek find—lucky as it was—got me noticed, and they asked me to start a journal for them. And because I’d had a windfall, I could afford to take the job. I also edit their catalogues and write most of the captions for the exhibits. And for the record, I just couldn’t face going to work today. I don’t even know why I lied about that.”

She looked drained.

I said, “Well, Dr. York, now that the truth serum has taken effect, and you have the day off anyway, why don’t we run over to Ralphs and have a look at the scene of the crime.”