January Justice (25 page)

I wandered through some guest rooms, the solarium, and her screening room, which looked just like a little motion picture theater. I ended up in Haley’s office, sitting at her desk. Simon had not yet given me the key to the lap drawer, which was locked. I didn’t care enough about its contents to ask him for the key. Everything would be going to the Salvation Army soon anyway.

I opened the other drawers one at a time. There was just what you’d expect to see in a businesswoman’s desk. Files, basic office supplies, a small tape recorder for giving dictation. There was no tape in the recorder. Maybe that was for the best. I would have listened to it. I would not have been able to resist. But hearing Haley’s voice might have sent me screaming back to the mental ward.

The stack of screenplays were still there on the corner of her desktop. She once told me her office got about five a day. One of her assistants spent most of the time screening them for Haley. Only the best made it to her desk. I looked through the stack idly.

The third one down had the word “Guatemala” on the cover. I opened it. A one page treatment had been slipped between the pages. I looked it over. It was closely based on what I had told Haley about my first deployment to Guatemala. American missionaries in a remote mountain village had been caught up in the struggle between the Communists, the military, and a local drug lord. People had died, some of them heroically. It had always bothered me that nobody knew what happened in that village. It had bothered Haley, too, after I told her the story, which was why she wanted to make a film about it.

I skimmed the script. Some of it was too close to the facts. If Haley had filmed it the way it was written, she might have gotten me in trouble with the Marine Corps or the US Department of State. I got to the last page, and there at the bottom was a note in Haley’s handwriting: Get Malcolm’s okay.

I traced the cursive writing with my finger. What a woman.

Leaning back, I stared off across the room at nothing in particular. The shelves of books and walls of polished paneling faded as I wondered if it could be coincidental, or if Haley’s Guatemalan film really did have something to do with the URNG case. I went over everything I could remember. None of the details surrounding the murder of the American missionaries had surfaced in the URNG case. The kidnapping and murder of Doña Elena and Toledo had happened long after the missionary murders, and long before Haley and I met. Except for the setting in Guatemala and the fact that the URNG and the junta were both involved in the story that inspired the film, there didn’t seem to be any overlap at all. But at least the question had distracted me a while.

What I needed was more distraction. I decided to search the Internet for anything I could find on the Montes’s finances. I went back to the guesthouse.

Sitting at the computer in a corner of the living room I learned about the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007. In compliance with that law, the Office of the Clerk of the US House of Representatives published annual financial reports on every congressional representative. The reports showed overviews of their unearned income and details on their financial transactions, such as the purchase or the sale of stock or real estate. It turned out Hector and Doña Elena Montes had a lot of stock and real estate.

There were houses in Miami, in a town I had never heard of in Montana, in Aspen, and in Seattle, plus, of course, the estate in the canyon above Beverly Hills. They also had properties in the Caribbean, Italy, and South Africa, of all places. There was stock in dozens of companies and royalty income from a self-help book Doña Elena had written before she and Montes were married, titled Beyond Survival. The book was about the lessons she had learned during her recovery from the kidnapping ordeal.

More recently she had begun to bring in a lot of money from her acting career. She was nowhere near Haley’s pay scale, but when I added up her earned income over the past two years and divided by the number of motion pictures that credited her online, it appeared she was averaging around seven million per film. Not bad for four to eight weeks of work on camera.

The problem was, I had no way of knowing how much Doña Elena and Toledo had been worth before he was killed. She hadn’t even met Congressman Montes at that point, so there was no law mandating that those finances become part of the public record, which meant I was no closer to understanding the two-hundred-thousand-dollar question than before.

To get more information, I made some calls, mostly to the few real friends Haley had in the motion-picture business. Although none of them knew about our marriage, they did know that she and I had become close friends. They all took my calls in the spirit of “any close friend of Haley’s is a close friend of mine.” If they had known anything, I had no doubt they would have told me. But few of them even knew Doña Elena Montes, and most of them hadn’t met her until after the kidnapping and murder.

There was only one comment I found interesting, from an agent friend of Haley’s named Meredith Pendleton. She told me about a conversation she once had with Doña Elena’s manager at some producer’s cocktail party. She said the manager had implied the Beyond Survival book-sales figures were inflated.

“Did he tell you why he thought that?” I asked.

Meredith said, “Not exactly. We were talking about New York Times best sellers, and how some producers were optioning self-help titles these days, which we thought was kind of crazy, because, I mean, a picture has to have a story, you know?”

“I’m just a driver, Meredith. I don’t know anything about that.”

“Haley told me a few things, you know. You’re just a driver the way Streep is just an actor.”

“What was the connection between this conversation about options and the sales for Doña Elena’s book?”

“Well, Homer, that’s her manager’s actual name, if you can believe it. Homer. He said he had just sold the rights to Beyond Survival, and I said I had no idea how they could make a decent picture out of it, and he said the only way it worked was with a bait and switch. You let the writers blue-sky a story that touches down in one or two places that have something to do with the book’s premise, but basically the book people read and the movie you make are two completely different things.”

“Most films I’ve seen that were supposed to be based on novels are like that.”

“Well, exactly. That’s what I said. But Homer, if you can believe that name, he said novels and nonfiction are different, because sometimes you get a moneymaker from a novel nobody has ever heard of, but just try that with a nonfiction premise. It won’t work. That’s what he said. With nonfiction, you’re not optioning a good story; you’re optioning a million actual nonfiction readers, minimum. At least you’d better be, or the film will go straight to rental.”

“I assume you pointed out that Beyond Survival was a New York Times best seller with a million readers.”

“Well, exactly. And he laughed.”

“Laughed?”

“I think he was laughing. With Homer you can never be quite sure.”

“He didn’t think the book sold that many copies?”

“Exactly. Otherwise, why was Homer laughing?”

I did a little more research. Beyond Survival had been published by Victory Books about twelve months after the kidnapping and murder. According to the State of California’s records, Victory Books was owned by DET Holdings LLC. With a little more digging, I learned that the president and secretary of DET Holdings LLC was originally listed as Doña Elena Toledo.

I ordered a copy of the book and had it shipped overnight. It arrived at ten the next morning. I took it out to a chaise longue on the patio along with a cup of french roast and sat down to read. An hour later I put the book down and started rubbing my temples.

Beyond Survival was a collection of pep talks culled from those motivational posters they hang on the walls in sales offices. The chapters had one-word titles like “Dreams,” “Achievement,” and “Challenges,” with taglines like “To avoid failure, wake up every morning determined to succeed.” There were many references to Doña Elena’s “ordeal,” and how she had used “the force of personal willpower” to survive and escape from her abductors. Details of what that actually meant were almost nonexistent.

I thought about the woman I had met, sitting behind a wall of glass in the hills above LA, cushioned in white upholstery, hair done perfectly and face perfectly made up, a bottle of Chablis under her belt and another bottle on the way. It seemed obvious the book had been ghostwritten to capitalize on the kidnapping. It was callous and opportunistic, and Doña Elena should have been ashamed of herself. But it was Hollywood, where any publicity was good publicity if you could turn it into more publicity. In fact, Doña Elena’s was a much more tasteful path to stardom than some had recently taken. Film yourself having sex. Pretend somebody else leaked it to the Internet. Pretend outrage. Become famous for being famous. Star in your own reality show. Start a clothing line. A perfume line. A housewares line. Attention shoppers, meaningless sex and random violence now selling on aisle six. Get it while it’s hot.

I rubbed my throbbing temples harder. When that kind of shameless self-absorption was celebrated and rewarded, it made me wonder if my tours in places like Bosnia and Afghanistan had been worth the sacrifice. So many good marines dead or maimed forever… I wanted to believe we had fought for a country and a people who still cared about old-fashioned ideas like dignity and honor and integrity. I wanted to believe in a culture that made heroes out of those who served their fellow man unselfishly.

It was one of the reasons why I wouldn’t let Haley’s reputation be destroyed. In a world where sleaze and mockery and infidelity were celebrated, she had risen to a kind of hero status through very hard work, discipline, constant refinement of her talent, and an unfailing allegiance to her own code of honor. In a world where self-interest and pleasure seeking were default settings, she had never thought of her wealth and fame as hers alone. I had watched behind the scenes as she had built hospitals, orphanages, shelters, schools, factories, farms, and shops for people all around the world, and not one of them was named for her, not one of them had been mentioned by her publicist, not one had made the headlines as “a Haley Lane production.”

I cared about defending Haley’s legacy because I loved her. But I also loved Haley for her legacy. She had been living proof that marines weren’t the last Americans who were “always faithful.” She might have blushed to hear me say it, but
Semper Fi
had been her motto, too.

I rubbed my temples again and considered the injustice of a woman like that dying before her time. My thoughts might be true, or they might not, but they were certainly not excellent or noble or praiseworthy. I tried to focus, to think about something good. I thought about the bottle of Glenlivet in the kitchen, but it wasn’t even noon. I decided time was nothing but a relative concept. I got up and went inside for the bottle.

From the trash can in the kitchen came a slight smell of something that had started to rot. I made a face and bent to pull the drawstring on the plastic trash sack. Gradually, as if someone had lowered a screen into my head to project a memory upon it, I realized I was looking down through the open door of Haley’s trailer, and standing below me was a man who held a waiter’s tray, and on it were two covered plates, silverware, cloth napkins, and a half bottle of pinot noir. It was dark inside my mind, too dark to see his face, but at long last he was there. And something else, one detail that seemed particularly true: the overwhelming scent of rotting fish.

My stomach roiled. I gagged on the memory of the putrid stench, which was far worse than anything in the kitchen trash can. I went to the telephone and pulled a card out of my wallet. I dialed the number, and then a voice on the line said, “Russo.”

“It’s Malcolm Cutter, Detective.”

“Okay. What?”

I imagined him on the other end of the line, listening with an expression of disdain. It obviously pained the man to have to speak with me, one of the butchers of Laui Kalay. I wondered how long he would keep my secret.

I said, “I just remembered something you need to know. The guy who brought the meal to Haley Lane’s trailer that night.”

“Yeah?”

“I can’t remember his face. Maybe that will come. But I do remember something strange. There was the smell of rotten fish.”

“You saying the food was spoiled?”

“No, that can’t be it. We wouldn’t have eaten anything that smelled as bad as I remember.”

“Okay then, what?”

“I don’t know. I just flashed on a real strong memory of rotten fish, and this guy standing outside in the dark with a tray full of food.”

“What did he look like?”

“I told you, I can’t remember.”

“Black? White? Short? Tall?”

“It’s more of an impression than a mental picture.”

“No details to identify the guy? Nothing else?”

“If I remember more,” I said, “I’ll call you.”

“You better.”

He hung up.

27

My stomach still felt queasy.
It was as if the putrid smell was inside my nostrils, even after all that time. Some people say memories of scents go deeper into the subconscious than sights or sounds could burrow. I belched and nearly vomited. I swallowed several times. I went back into the kitchen and splashed some Scotch into a water glass, and I drank it in one gulp. It burned the nausea away and replaced it with a cozy feeling. I figured if a little Scotch could do that, a little more could do it better. I poured myself three fingers and took the glass and the bottle out to the chaise longue on the patio. I lay there drinking and looking up toward heaven as the palm leaves overhead swayed in the ocean breeze and gulls wheeled and soared and small tufts of clouds sailed inland. Haley filled my thoughts, and I tried to remember it made no sense to be angry with a God who thought it best to take her from me. I tried to remember I might as well be mad at gravity.