Hollywood Hills (3 page)

Sammy Brueger proved them wrong and did it with a slogan that his first wife dreamed up: "You can't beat Sammy's meat." And then, early in the presidency of Richard Nixon, Sammy started following the New York Stock Exchange and became interested in a stock for no other reason than that its NASDAQ symbol, POND, was the maiden name of his wife. He was a born gambler, and when he learned that POND stood for Ponderosa Steak House in Dayton, Ohio, he thought that Lady Luck was calling him. The stock symbol bore his wife's name, and the product was something that he bought and sold every day--meat! So Sammy plowed everything he had into that stock and it zoomed upward an astounding 10,000 percent and he became very rich. He divorced the wife named Pond and married a failed actress whose surname never helped him, and neither did she. Because of the prenuptial, the second one wasn't so expensive to unload.

His third and final wife, Leona, thirty-two years younger than Sammy, told other trophy wives at her Pilates class that the meat slogan had certainly been true in the last ten years of the old man's life, and she thanked God for it. She still shuddered when she thought of him in his old age crawling over her at night like a centipede.

Leona Brueger was still a size two, and was trainer-firm, with expressive brown eyes, delicate facial bones, and a Mediterranean skin tone that bore no evidence of the considerable work she had bought in order to stay looking so good at the age of sixty. Her last birthday had been devastating, no matter how much she had tried to prepare for it psychologically. Leona Brueger's natural hair color had been milk chocolate brown at one time, and she hated to think what color it would be now if she ever stopped the monthly color and highlights.

On a summer afternoon while sitting by the pool skimming Elle and Vogue and reading Wine Spectator cover to cover, she happened to see a mention of a Beverly Hills art gallery where Sammy had bought three very expensive pieces of Impressionist art, two by French artists and one by a Swede. Leona couldn't remember much about the artists and hardly noticed the paintings back when Sammy was alive, opining to girlfriends that trees and flowers should look as though they were living things distinct from the land that nourished them. And the nearly nude body of a peasant woman feeding a kitten in one of the paintings depressed her. She feared that she would look like that when, despite Pilates and a weekly game of tennis on the Brueger tennis court with her Pilates partners, her ass finally gave up and collapsed from boredom and fatigue.

But the article she was reading made her wonder why it had taken her so long to have the paintings appraised after Sammy died, trusting him that they were of "museum quality." He'd always said that the very pricey pieces should hang exactly where he'd place
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hem: in their great room, the dining room, and along the main corridor of "Casa Brueger."

She strolled inside from the pool, sipping an iced tea, wishing it were late enough for a nice glass of cool Fume Blanc, and studied the three oldest pieces to try to see why anyone would think they were so valuable. She stood before the largest, the one of a woman squatting beside what looked to Leona like a pond or a lagoon. She decided to call the Wickland Gallery on Wilshire Boulevard to ask Nigel Wickland when he'd be coming back for the appraisal. The art dealer had stopped by a week earlier at her request and taken a preliminary look, but he'd said he needed to "research the provenance" before he could give her accurate information. It was hard for her to think about appraisals or any other business when she was about to embark on one of the great adventures of her life.

She'd leased a villa in Tuscany for three months and was going there with Rudy Ressler, the movie director/producer she'd been dating off and on for more than a year. Rudy was amusing and had lots of show-business anecdotes that he could relate by mimicking the voices of the players involved. He wasn't as young as she would like if she decided to marry again, but he was controllable and an amazingly unselfish lover, even though that didn't matter as much as it used to. And he still knew enough people very active in show business to ensure that they'd always have interesting dining partners. His one Oscar-nominated film had kept him on the A-list for the past twenty years. If they ever married, she figured she'd end up supporting him, but what the hell, she was bucks-up rich. Sammy had left her more than she could ever spend in her lifetime. And that reminded her again that she was now sixty years old. How much of a life did she have left?

For a moment Leona couldn't remember what she was about to do, but then she remembered: call the Wickland Gallery. She got Nigel Wickland on the phone and made an appointment for the following afternoon, when he would have a closer look at th
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hirteen pieces of art. She'd have to make a note to ask the gallery owner if he thought her security system was adequate to protect the artwork while she was in Tuscany. But then she thought, screw it. Sammy had the art so heavily insured that she almost hoped someone would steal all of it. Then she could buy some paintings that were vibrant and alive. It was time for Leona Brueger to get out and really live, away from her palatial cocoon in the Hollywood Hills. She might finally take the risk and buy a vineyard and winery up in Napa Valley.

Raleigh L. Dibble was in his third-floor apartment in east Hollywood, getting ready for the part-time job he was doing that evening on the only day off from his regular work. It paid chump change, but it helped with the rent and the car payment on his nine-year-old Toyota Corolla, which needed tires and a tune-up. He stood before the mirror and adjusted his black bow tie, a real one, not one of those crappy clip-ons that everyone wore nowadays. He fastened the black cummerbund over his starched dress shirt and slipped into his tuxedo jacket for a big dinner party in the Hollywood Hills celebrating the release of a third-rate movie by some hack he had never heard of.

All Raleigh knew about the homeowner tonight was that the guy was a junior partner in a Century City law firm who needed an experienced man like Raleigh to augment his hired caterers and make sure that things ran smoothly. Raleigh's past life as the owner of a West Los Angeles catering business had qualified him for these quasi-butler jobs where nouveaus could pretend they knew their ass from corned beef. Raleigh had met a lot of wealthy people and earned a good reputation, which brought him a small but steady income and had kept him from drinking the Kool-Aid after his business had gone belly-up.

He thought he didn't look too bad in the tux. Mother Nature, the pitiless cunt, had put macaroni-and-cheese handles around hi
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iddle, and it was getting scary. At only five foot seven he wasn't tall enough to carry the blubber overload. Though he didn't have much hair left, what he had was nutmeg brown with the help of Grecian Formula. And his jawline was holding up, but only because the extra fat had puffed his cheeks like a goddamn woodchuck. Now he had a double chin--no, make it a triple. If he could ever earn enough money, he hoped to get a quarter of his body siphoned into the garbage can by one of the zillion cosmetic surgeons plying their trade on the west side of Los Angeles. Then maybe a hair transplant and even an eye lift to complete the overhaul, because his eyes, the color of faded denim, were shrinking from the encroachment of the upper lids. Enough money could rectify all of that.

Before he left the apartment for that night's gig, he figured he'd better call Julius Hampton, his full-time boss for the past six months. The old man had just turned eighty-nine years of age when he'd hired Raleigh, who was thirty-one years younger almost to the day. Raleigh had been hired the month after Barack Obama took office, and it was an okay job being a live-in butler/chef and all-around caretaker six days a week for the old coot. He was being paid by a downtown lawyer who administered the Hampton trust fund, but the lawyer was a tight ass who acted like it was his money, and Raleigh had had to practically beg for a wage increase in early summer.

Julius Hampton had been an indefatigable and flamboyant cruiser of Santa Monica Boulevard in his day, but he'd never made any kind of pass at Raleigh even before learning that his new employee was straight. Raleigh figured that gay or straight, it wouldn't matter to the old man anyway, since Raleigh was no George Clooney, and the geezer was through with sex. Julius Hampton was left only with fantasies stoked by their weekly visits to west Hollywood gay bars, more out of nostalgia than anything else.

This boss had been a longtime friend of a lot of other rich ol
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en on the west side, not all of them gay by any means. Raleigh had driven Julius Hampton to many dinner parties where Raleigh would hang around the kitchen with the other help until the party was over or his boss got tired. On nights when the old man's phlebitis was bothering him, Raleigh would bring the collapsible wheelchair from the car and wheel him out to the old Cadillac sedan that his boss loved and Raleigh hated. Raleigh figured that in his day, Julius Hampton probably had a lot of boy sex in that Cadillac, back when his plumbing still worked. Maybe sitting on those beat-up leather seats brought him delicious memories. In any case, his boss had dismissed the suggestion every time Raleigh urged him to junk the Cadillac and buy a new car.

Raleigh L. Dibble had been in the catering business almost continually since his high school days in San Pedro, the third child and only son of a longshoreman and a hairdresser. As a young man he'd begun concentrating on using good diction while he was on a job, any job. He'd read a self-improvement book stressing that good diction could trump a poor education, and Raleigh had never gone to college. All he'd ever known was working for inadequate wages in food service until he went into business as a working partner with Nellie Foster of Culver City, who made the best hors d'oeuvres and gave the best blow jobs he'd ever known. They'd done pretty well in the catering business when times were good, working out of a storefront on Pico Boulevard. But they'd gotten into some "difficulties," as he always described his fall from grace.

Raleigh had been forced by circumstance to write several NSF checks, and after that was straightened out, the IRS got on them like a swarm of leeches, sucking their blood and tormenting them for over a year until a criminal case for fraud and tax evasion was filed in federal court. Raleigh had done the manly thing at that time and taken the bullet for both himself and Nellie, claiming to authorities that she knew nothing about the "edgy paperwork" that had helped to keep them afloat temporarily.

He'd been sentenced to one year in prison to be served at the Federal Correctional Complex in Lompoc, California, and the night before he had to report to federal marshals, Nellie gave him a tearful good-bye and thanked him for saving her ass. She promised to write and to visit him often. But she'd seldom written and never visited, and she married a house painter two months after Raleigh was behind bars. And he didn't even get a farewell blow job.

Raleigh had served eight months of his sentence, gotten paroled, rented a cheap apartment in a risky gang neighborhood in east Hollywood, and lived by hiring out as a waiter to various caterers he'd known when he was in the business. Then he'd stumbled into the position with Julius Hampton as what the old man called his "gentleman's gentleman." Julius had seen too many English movies, Raleigh figured, but he made sure his diction was always up to par when he was in his boss's presence.

The dinner party in the Hollywood Hills that night turned out to be disastrous because the lawyer homeowner had hired a Mexican caterer to serve what was supposed to be Asian fusion. As far as Raleigh was concerned, there was nothing more dangerous than a Mexican with a saltshaker, and everything tasted of sea salt. Raleigh played his role to the hilt, but Stephen Fry as Jeeves the butler couldn't have saved this one. His feet and knees were killing him when the night finally ended and he could get home to bed.

The next morning Raleigh was up early and on his way to pick up Julius Hampton to take him to Cedars-Sinai for a checkup with his cardiologist. After that, they went back to the Hampton house, where the old man had his afternoon nap, and he was raring to go again when he woke up and remembered that it was the night for his weekly lobster dinner at the Palm. Raleigh had never been crazy about lobster but he could have a rib eye and a couple of Jack Daniel's to get him through the rest of the evening at one of the west Hollywood gay bars that the old man still liked to frequent at least one night a week.

By the time they'd finished dining and arrived at the gay bar, it was filling up with other customers also arriving after dinner, and they were lucky to get a small table. The sweating waiters couldn't deliver drinks to the customers fast enough. Raleigh and his elderly boss were sipping martinis close enough to the three-deep bar patrons for the old letch to gawk at all the muscular buns in tight pants, some of which Raleigh figured were butt-pad inserts. Many of the younger hustlers wore tight Ralph Lauren jerseys with jeans or shorts, and the old boy gazed at them with melancholy. Raleigh was certain that their crotch mounds were from stuffing socks in their Calvins. He figured the youthful hustlers must buy socks by the gross at Costco.

Julius Hampton recognized Nigel Wickland before the Beverly Hills art dealer recognized him. "Nigel!" he said as the art dealer was passing their table on his way back from the restroom.

At first Raleigh thought that Nigel Wickland was about sixty years old, but up close, he looked more like sixty-five. He was tall and fashionably thin, with a prominent chin, heavy dark eyebrows, and a full head of hair so white that it looked mauve under the mood lighting. He wore a tailor-made, double-breasted navy blazer, a pale blue Oxford cotton shirt, and an honest-to-god blue ascot impeccably folded against his throat. Raleigh wondered if the blazer was Hugo Boss or maybe Valentino, or was it a Men's Wear-house copy? And how about the shoes? Were they O
. J
. Simpson Bruno Maglis or knockoffs? Nigel Wickland wore his clothes so well that you couldn't tell if they were the real things.