Hollywood Hills (5 page)

"But I've got a job," Raleigh said. "And it's permanent, not temporary."

"If you're happy where you are, forget I mentioned it," Nigel Wickland said. "But Leona told me she'd pay seven thousand dollars a month to the right man, and of course you'd have luxury quarters to live in and meals you'd prepared yourself. You can buy anything you'd like from the markets and bill it to your employer's account. You'd have no living expenses. The job would probably end around the first of next year. After that, she's going to arrange for a luxurious retirement home for Marty Brueger when she sells the house. She'd do it now, but he refuses to go, and his lifetime care and contentment are prominently mentioned in Sammy's will, so she must accommodate him. But by year's end, his growing dementia will probably take care of things. The urgency here and now is that she wants to leave for a long holiday in Tuscany and she's in need of the right man ASAP."

Raleigh was quiet for a moment and then said, "Of course that's a whole lot more than I make, but my job's permanent. I don't know about quitting Mr. Hampton for a temporary job."

"How permanent is any job with a boss who's eighty-nine years old?" Nigel Wickland asked. "Do think about it and let me know if you're interested. I'm just doing this as a favor to my client Leona Brueger. It's nothing to me one way or the other."

Raleigh thought there was something not quite right, and he said, "I remember that when you and Mr. Hampton talked about Leona Brueger, you wondered if she was holding up well since her husband's death. It seemed like you didn't know all that much about her."

Then it was Nigel Wickland's turn to pause. He finally said, "Frankly, since I've been involved in the appraisal of her artwork, I've come to know her well enough that I've learned about her plans. Naturally I couldn't mention to Julius that I thought you'd be so much better off working for my client. If it weren't that you're just so perfect for this job, I wouldn't be bringing it up to you at all. So whatever you decide, mum's the word, Raleigh."

"I've got to think about this," Raleigh said.

"Yes, do have a think," Nigel said.

When Raleigh left Nigel Wickland, he decided that the prospect of earning that kind of easy money was tempting, but after the job ended, what would he do? He'd successfully completed his parole, but memories of prison had kept him superstraight. He'd even been afraid to tell lies on job resumes, and it was no cinch for an ex-con to get decent employment after mentioning a prison record. Yet it was true that with an eighty-nine-year-old boss, how permanent could his current job be? And he was sick of having to plead with the shyster who managed the Hampton trust fund to give him the pay he deserved.

Raleigh Dibble hardly slept that night. The next morning he phoned Nigel Wickland, and when he reached the art dealer, he said, "Nigel, it's Raleigh Dibble here. When can I have an interview with Mrs. Brueger?"

Chapter
Four.

AN EXTRAORDINARY NUMBER of celebrity names turned up in crime stories during the first full year of the Great Recession. Many of them ended up on reports passing across the desks of Hollywood Division detectives. The police station in which the detectives were housed was an unusual place, perhaps the world's only police facility where framed one-sheet movie posters decorated the walls. In the geographic territory of the station the bizarre was commonplace, and if something eerie or outlandish could not be explained or even understood, more often than not, the cops would just shrug and say, "This is fucking Hollywood." After that, nothing more needed to be said.

During that last year of the eight-year federal consent decree, which finally ended in July, only about a dozen detectives remained at Hollywood Station, when there should have been three times that many. The LAPD had labored under the oversight of federally mandated watchdogs since the Rodney King riots, as well as the so-called Rampart Division scandal, an ignominy that turned out to involve exactly two felonious cops. But it was enough for the critics who had been lying in wait to bring down the proud, some would say arrogant, police department.

After charter amendment F stripped the LAPD chiefs of civil service protection, politicians began calling the shots, and hundred
s o
f LAPD investigators were diverted to serve the monitors of that consent decree in "reforming" a police department that no LAPD police officer thought needed to be reformed. For years the plaintive refrain heard all around the Department was, "Charter amendment F changed our world." And what with budget shortfalls and the fact that the state of California was itself on the brink of bankruptcy, all the street cops and detectives who were still doing actual crime suppression were overwhelmed.

There had been a rash of burglaries in Los Angeles that targeted young celebrities. Two of the main suspects among a group of seven were a young man and young woman in their late teens from Calabasas, a rather affluent suburb in the San Fernando Valley. They'd met in a remedial school, a kind of last-chance high school. Another of the young women involved in the burglary and fencing ring would boost celebrity magazines from newsstands and supermarkets, and pick out targets that would be researched on the Internet. Celebrity homesites were Googled and satellite maps of their homes were obtained, and their schedules could be followed online in celebrity blogs. Another one of the young women in the group of burglars had been part of a TV reality show that at first purported to show an ex-Playmate raising three wild kids.

The burglary victims included actors Orlando Bloom, Lindsay Lohan, Audrina Patridge, Rachel Bilson, Megan Fox, and famous person Paris Hilton. Some of the homes had security cameras, and on one video, a youthful man and woman were photographed during the crime. On the video from another of the celebrity homes, four of the young burglars could be seen parking their car on Outpost Drive and walking about a hundred yards, arm in arm backward until they were safely past the surveillance camera, at which point they turned around and tended to business.

They made several. stops at residences they were casing before being satisfied, and they did not wear hoodies, trying not to look like the public's conception of a typical burglar. They entere
d t
hrough unlocked doors, open windows, and doggie doors. Only occasionally would they have to pry open a window. There were even a few hot-prowl burglaries, committed with people at home, in the county area policed by the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department.

The burglary ring stole clothing, jewelry, purses, some electronics, and cash. They burglarized Paris Hilton's home a few times, but she knew about only one. When the police cracked the case, they called her at 3 A
. M
. and she came in to identify her stolen property, seeming delighted to have the loot returned. She claimed that its value was well into seven figures, but detectives, who lived in a more mundane world, had their doubts. Orlando Bloom, whom detectives referred to as "a gentleman," was always helpful when called upon, and had there been such a thing, would have gotten the detectives' favorite victim award.

Search warrants were served as far away as Las Vegas on one of the teenage females and on their fence, a twenty-eight-year-old who called himself a nightclub promoter. He handled the stolen goods and was charged with receiving stolen property and other related crimes. LAPD and LASD detectives believed that perhaps two dozen burglaries were committed during a two-year period.

Defense lawyers negotiated, offering to discuss the return of missing property if new felony counts were not filed, but it all ended in what detectives said was akin to "a failed hostage negotiation" after one of the attorneys walked out, saying, "I'm not in the property business."

Another defense attorney, whose young client claimed to be working for a Christian organization that assisted people in need of housing, seemed to believe every word that his sobbing client told him. A detective said of the lawyer, "He's the kind of guy who goes to a strip club and believes that the lap dancer really loves him."

None of the young people were hard-core junkies but some of them smoked OxyContin, the equivalent of synthetic heroin, th
e d
rug du jour of countless young Americans and a powerhouse opioid that had even addicted America's leading conservative talk-show host, Rush Limbaugh. The news photos of the pretty, female suspects in their low-rise jeans, hiding their faces but not their firm bare bellies, provided weeks of entertainment for TV and tabloids. They were dubbed "The Burglar Bunch" and "The Hollywood Hills Burglars" and, even more provocatively, "The Bling Ring."

Local and national media described their antics as cautionary tales of the dangers to young people posed by the Hollywood celebrity lifestyle. The rationale was that it was constantly in their faces thanks to websites that detailed the shenanigans of celebutantes, along with reality shows that portrayed people their age living the life in Hollywood nightclubs. According to celebrity commentators who never eschewed a cliche, an abundance of danger to young people was out there on those "boulevards of dreams."

There were a number of boulevard dreamers who couldn't get enough of the Bling Ring, one of whom was twenty-two-year-old Jonas Claymore. He was a dropout from Hollywood High School who'd smoked way too much crystal meth during his final year of school and had never gone on to community college or done much of anything that his working-class parents had expected of him. The meth eventually led to terrifying attacks of paranoia where he became convinced that he was under twenty-four-hour surveillance by LAND narks, and on one unforgettable evening, two of his former schoolmates decided to wean him off methamphetamines by introducing him to the wonders of 80 mg green tablets of OxyContin and other oxycodone drugs like Percocet, Percodan, and Tylox.

His current housemate, Megan Burke, was a twenty-year-old high school graduate from Bend, Oregon, who had been a good student, popular, and college-bound, before she'd developed a yen to "experience Hollywood," as had so many thousands before her. She could not have specifically defined what that meant. Of course
,
she would have been embarrassed to admit that there were vague fantasies involving the movie business, and even then, she was too mature to think that she would be "discovered." Yet it was always there at age eighteen, the notion that where life moves at twenty-four frames per second, anything is possible.

She had persuaded her mother to let her come to Los Angeles for the summer before college with a list of places in Southern California that she wanted to visit. She had explained to her mother that this was her "odyssey," the journey of self-discovery that she and many of her classmates believed was essential for self-fulfillment. The original plan was to stay for two months working at the Gap for a former Bend neighbor who had moved to Los Angeles and managed the store. The woman had even arranged for Megan to share an apartment with two other girls, and the money she earned selling clothing had allowed Megan to support herself. She had hoped to send part of her earnings to her mother, who had raised Megan and her younger brother, Terry, after their father had deserted the family when the children were still in elementary school.

Experiencing Hollywood wasn't anything like Megan thought it would be, especially after she learned how expensive everything was in L
. A
., but things went well enough until she was persuaded by her roommates to experiment with some of their trendy pharmaceuticals, like Xanax and Percocet. Those drugs led her to Vicodin and finally to OxyContin, by far the most addictive and powerful of the prescription drugs available to her, and OxyContin led her to Jonas Claymore, whom she met through a girlfriend at work.

Jonas was a valet parking attendant at upscale restaurants and he made good tips. He was tall, rail-thin, cute, and goofy, with a bush of cinnamon hair and a gap-toothed grin. He made her laugh easily and sold her OxyContin twice a week when he'd come by her apartment.

When they got high together for the first time, he said, "You won't be offended if I drop trou and show you something, will ya?"

"Show me what?" she said uneasily.

"This," he said, turning away from her and lowering his jeans and underwear. On one buttock was tattooed what. On the other buttock was tattooed ever. When he pulled his pants up he said, "Most of the girls I know think it's kinda funny."

After several drug experiences they became sexually involved, but it was never satisfactory for either of them because of Jonas's drug-induced ED problems. Megan liked the other oxycodone products, like Vicodin, referred to as "norcos" or "watsons," and she liked the Percocet, aka "perks," but nothing could beat the 80 mg OxyContin, called "OC" or "ox" or "80s" or "beans." Soon, Megan Burke fell passionately in love, not with Jonas Claymore, but with smoking ox. He loved it even more than she did and always seemed to have it in abundance. Then her life quickly fell apart. She lost her job at the Gap and got a part-time job at Denny's as a waitress, but she lost that, too, and came to dread the desperate phone calls from her mother when the college plans were abandoned.

Megan finally sold her old Hyundai when money ran out, after she had been living with Jonas for nearly a year in a cheap apartment in Thai Town, but not with the knowledge of his landlord or her despairing mother in Oregon. By then, Megan had begun avoiding most of her mother's phone calls and would not reveal her address or anything about Jonas Claymore, not wanting her worried parent to know how far she had fallen and how fast had been the descent.