Shooting for the Stars (14 page)

Chapter
25

M
Y
plane landed at LAX in Los Angeles a little after 11 a.m. local time the next day. I picked up my baggage, rented a car, and bought a copy of the
Los Angeles Times
, which had not put the story of my arrival on Page One. By noon, I was headed north up the I-405 freeway toward Hollywood.

Despite all the glamour attached to Hollywood, it looked remarkably ordinary. People walking around in short-sleeve shirts and shorts and casual clothes. Brand new office buildings, health food stores, and fast food places. I did pass some famous spots I recognized. Grauman's Chinese Theater. The Wax Museum. Frederick's of Hollywood. I kept going until I got to Hollywood and Vine, then parked the car and got out.

This was the legendary cross street in the heart of Hollywood, the place where dreams were supposed to come true. The Hollywood Walk of Fame was on the sidewalk here, with its roster of all the famous movie stars immortalized in cement. But for every one that made it, there were thousands more who didn't. They sometimes called it the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. I wondered if Laura Marlowe had stood here once, more than three decades ago, and dreamed about being a star. Off in the distance, I could see the hills of Hollywood with the famed
Hollywood
sign sitting
there like a beacon, calling all the starry-eyed dreamers to this town to have their hearts broken. Laura Marlowe followed her dream here, and it got her killed.

I got back in my car. It took me nearly an hour until I found an address in Santa Monica where the movie executive told me Glimmer Productions used to be. There was an office supply store there now. I parked in front and got out. It was a modern, one-story building that looked like it had been built within the past few years. I pushed open the front door and went inside.

“Can I help you?” a young woman behind the counter said.

“I'm looking for some information,” I said, flashing her my friendliest smile. “I'm a newspaper reporter from New York.”

I took out my press card and showed it to her. She was probably about twenty years old. She was wearing a T-shirt with the name of a band on the front that I'd never heard of. She had a ring through her nose. I suddenly felt very old talking to her.

“There used to be a place called Glimmer Productions at this address,” I said. “Did you ever hear of it?”

“No, but I've only worked here four months.”

“How long has this store been here?”

“About a year or two, I think.”

“What was it before?”

“A phone store.”

“And before that.”

“I have no idea. We're talking maybe five or six years ago.”

“The place I'm looking for was here thirty years ago.”

“Thirty years! Wow, I wasn't even born then. You might try the manager. He'll be in later. He's been here a lot longer than me.”

“How old is he?”

“Oh, very old.”

“Like what?”

“Maybe thirty-five, thirty-six.”

“Which would make him about five or six years old at the time we're talking about.”

She thought about that for a second. “Yeah, you're right,” she said. “No good, huh?”

“No good,” I smiled. “But thanks for trying to help.”

I went outside. I'd hoped it would be easier than this, but it never was. I looked up and down the street. There were lots of stores. A deli. A drugstore. A couple of restaurants. A dry cleaning store. A car wash. Maybe someone at one of them had been around thirty years ago.

It took me nearly an hour before I finally found what I was looking for. The owner of the dry cleaners proudly told me that his family had run the business there for nearly half a century. There was even a wall behind him filled with framed newspaper clippings about many of the celebrities that had come in there over the years.

“My father, his father before him, and now me at this very same spot,” he said. “There's not too many family businesses around these days. But we're one. My name is Louis Balducci. The third generation of the Balducci family to run this dry cleaning business.”

I told him what I was looking for.

“Oh, the movie place that used to be down the street,” he said.

“You remember it?”

“Sure. Of course, I was just a kid then. Working in my father's store. But I used to see all the pretty girls going in and out of that place. Let me tell you—I still remember some of them. It was like a young boy's fantasy, watching that parade of beautiful women.”

“I'm trying to track down someone who might have worked there. Hopefully, one of the people who ran it if they're still alive. I know it's a long shot, but . . .”

“Oh, I know who ran it.”

“You do?”

“Sure, she did.”

He pointed to the wall of framed newspaper clippings behind him. Then he reached up and took one down. He placed it on the counter in front of me. The headline said:
CALL HER MISS OR MS
.,
BUT DON'T CALL HER MADAME
. There was a picture of an attractive older woman posing in front of a mansion. The caption identified her as “Jackie Sinclair—businesswoman, entrepreneur, and legendary Hollywood party giver.”

The article said she'd been the queen of the porn movie business once, turning out large numbers of them—first for second-rate movie houses and home projector use in the days before home video came along, then stuff for the VCR market. She published her own magazine, opened up a nightclub on Sunset Strip, and became known for the wild parties she hosted in the Hollywood Hills. It all came crashing down for her in the 1980s, when she was busted by the cops for running a ring of high-priced prostitutes. According to the charges, she catered to movie stars, executives of the major studios, and politicians. She was the Heidi Fleiss of her time, the original Hollywood Madame. But then, as quickly as the charges were brought, they were suddenly dropped. Since then, the article said she had made a fortune by investing shrewdly in the Los Angeles real estate market. She lived in a big house on Mulholland Drive that used to belong to Bobby Darin.

“She was the head of Glimmer Productions?” I asked.

“That's right,” Balducci said.

“And you knew her?”

“She came in here all the time. She even kept coming for a while after the movie place closed. That's why I put this up when I saw it in the paper. I hadn't seen her in a long time, but I sure remembered her. She's a part of the history of this store, of this block—just like all the other famous people that came in here.”

“I wonder if she's still alive?”

He shrugged. “Probably. That article wasn't written that long ago.”

I looked down at the newspaper clipping again. He was right. It was from five years ago.

“You wouldn't know how to find her now, would you?”

“God, no.”

I looked at the newspaper picture of Jackie Sinclair one more time, especially the house on Mulholland Drive behind her.

“That's okay, you've been a big help.”

I checked the map in my car for Mulholland Drive, then drove over there. It was a street filled with beautiful homes. I looked for one that resembled the one in the picture in the paper. I couldn't be sure, of course, she would still live there—but it was a place to start. It turned out to be a tougher job than I expected. There were too many houses, and a lot of them were set back from the road so far I couldn't see them very well. Finally, I stopped and asked a man on the street if he knew where Bobby Darin used to live. I asked it like I was a tourist on a tour of the stars' homes. He gave me directions to an address about a mile away. When I got there, I recognized the house as the same one in the picture. But there was a problem. A security fence surrounded the property. There was an intercom at the front gate. I pushed the button.

“State your business, please,” a deep voice said at the other end.

“Does Jackie Sinclair live here?”

“Who's asking?”

“My name is Gil Malloy, and I'm an attorney from New York City,” I said, giving him the little speech I'd rehearsed on the ride over. “A client of mine recently died, leaving a large amount of money to Ms. Sinclair. We're trying to track her down to make her aware of this inheritance.”

There was a long silence on the other end.

“Are you there?” I asked finally.

Still nothing. Then I saw someone walking down the driveway toward me. A security guard.

“You'll have to leave,” he said when he got to the gate.

“Why?”

“This is private property.”

“Is there any way I can reach her?” I asked.

“You can leave a number, if you want.”

“Will she call me?”

“You've got thirty seconds to do whatever you're going to do before I call the police,” he said.

I took out a piece of paper and scribbled down my name and phone number and the hotel where I was staying. I handed it through the fence to him.

“Tell her it's really important,” I said.

“Have a nice day,” he said as he began walking back toward the house.

Chapter
26

I
DROVE
into downtown Los Angeles and found Parker Center, where the police headquarters is located. I told them who I was and asked to speak to somebody who handled cult cases. Eventually, I wound up in the office of a lieutenant named Marty Dahlstrom. Dahlstrom said he was part of a special unit that had been set up to deal with cults and other violent groups.

“Did you ever hear of a group called Sign of the Z?” I asked.

“Yeah, it was a long time ago though.”

“They might have killed someone in New York.”

“Who?”

“Laura Marlowe.”

“The movie star? The one that's been dead for thirty years?”

“Yes.”

“Didn't they catch somebody for that?”

“They did, but it looks now like they got the wrong man.”

“Right, I heard about that.”

“There may be more murders too.”

“Who?”

“Abbie Kincaid.”

“The TV reporter who got shot?”

“Yes.”

“That was just a few weeks ago.”

“I know.”

“Anyone else?”

I took out a sheet of paper with the names Abbie had listed. I put it down on the desk in front of Dahlstrom. He read through the names.

“Okay, let me get this straight,” he said when he was finished. “You think that this Sign of the Z group killed Laura Marlowe thirty years ago and then killed this Kincaid woman last month? And along the way over the past three decades they may just have killed these other people too. Is that right?”

“It's possible.”

“Do you have any proof of that?”

“No.”

“Any evidence of any kind?”

“Not really.

“So this is all just a theory of yours?”

“I'm kind of winging it here,” I admitted.

I told him everything I knew. About my conversation with Abbie, the one where she told me about her serial killer theory. About finding the Sign of the Z verses. About how Abbie seemed afraid of something and was carrying a gun for protection.

“She apparently thought there was a connection between the deaths of Laura Marlowe and all of the other people on that list. She was trying to find out what that connection was. Now she's dead. Ergo, maybe she was killed by whoever murdered all those other people. There is a certain symmetry to it all, don't you think?”

Dahlstrom stared at me blankly. He was probably about my age, but he looked a lot older—with a quickly receding hairline, a bit of a paunch that probably came from sitting behind a desk too much, and a colorless wardrobe. I figured him for a guy who was very
cautious. Not the type to make a lot of waves in the department or play a hunch. But he was all I had to work with.

“Let me tell you about Sign of the Z,” he said. “First off, we're talking about ancient history here. They haven't even been around since the early '80s. Like you said, the leader—this weirdo, Russell Zorn—was a Charles Manson wannabe. After the Sharon Tate killings and all the publicity over the Manson family, we got a lot of people who tried to be like Manson. Zorn called his group Sign of the Z—which fits nicely with his last name, huh?—and set himself up on an abandoned ranch out in the desert. People drifted in and out, but there was a hard core of regulars. Zorn; his sidekick, some guy named Bobby Mesa he hung out with; Zorn's girlfriend, a spaced-out chick named Sally Easton; and about a half-dozen other men and women followers. He seemed to have some sort of hypnotic power over them, I have no idea why. Maybe because they were all strung out on drugs most of the time. But like I said, this was a long time ago.”

“What happened to all of them?”

“Sometime back in '83 or '84, I think, they robbed a convenience store in the valley. When the guy behind the counter didn't open the cash register fast enough, Zorn shot him dead. Another worker hiding in the back of the store identified him to authorities.

“A whole SWAT team swooped down on their ranch. It turns out they were armed pretty heavily. They held off the cops for a couple of hours. When the SWAT guys did go in, they found them all dead except for Zorn, Mesa, and Zorn's girlfriend. Two of them had been shot by police bullets, and the rest did some kind of weird mass suicide so they wouldn't be arrested. Zorn and the girl surrendered. Some leaders, huh? Mesa somehow got away. But they eventually caught up with him too.

“Anyway, Zorn was convicted of first-degree murder, and he died in the gas chamber later. Mesa got a life sentence as an accom
plice to murder. He was stabbed to death in prison a few years after that. The only one still alive is the girl. Her name's Sally Easton. It came out at the trial that she was waiting outside in the car during the robbery, so they gave her a twenty-year sentence. She got out a while back, and now she's a born-again Christian affiliated with some kind of church up in Barstow. It sounds kooky to me. Once a kook, always a kook, I guess. But at least she's not killing people anymore.

“My point in all this is that it's pretty hard to imagine people from this group carrying out a whole series of murders over the past thirty years, including the one that just happened in New York. They're either all dead or in jail. When most of these other murders you're talking about happened. Including Laura Marlowe's death.”

“There could be another member of the group still out there,” I said.

“Unlikely.”

“But it is possible.”

“Anything's possible.”

“So will you look into it for me?”

“Look into what?”

“The group. The other killings on this list. Just see if there's any possible link between any of them.”

“Why?”

“Sometimes when you're looking for something specific like this, you see things everybody else might have missed.”

“After thirty years?”

“Sure, why not?”

I handed him my card with my cell phone number as well as the name of the hotel where I was staying in Los Angeles written in the corner.

“Get in touch with me if you find out anything, lieutenant.”

“Now why would I do that?”

“The exchange of information is crucial to a free democracy,” I said.

Dahlstom made a face and looked down at my card.

“Does that charming personality of yours usually get the cops back in New York City to help you, Malloy?”

“Well . . .”

“It won't here either,” he said.

When I got back to my hotel, I tried to figure out what to do next. There was a small balcony outside my room. I stood on it for a long time, thinking about Laura Marlowe. Below me, the evening traffic was starting to pick up on Wilshire Boulevard. Maybe the next Steven Spielberg was in one of those cars. Or a young Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, or Brad Pitt. The southern California sky was calm and still—and off in the distance I could see the hills of Hollywood. The Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Laura Marlowe had followed her dream here, and she wound up dead.

My phone rang. There was no caller ID visible, but I answered it anyway. What the hell did I have to lose?

“Is this Gil Malloy?” a woman's voice at the other end said.

“Yes.”

“My name is Jackie Sinclair.”

Aha!

“I understand you have some business you'd like to discuss with me, Mr. Malloy.”

“Yes, I'm an attorney here from New York and I . . .”

“Meet me at the bar of the Beverly Wilshire hotel in an hour,” she said.

Then she hung up.