The Manipulated (Joe Portugal Mysteries) (19 page)

“I love the man in New York too. Doesn’t mean we can’t be attracted to each other. We’re not going to do anything about it, are we?”

Again, her perfume filled my head.
She wants you to. Just one kiss. One little kiss. What harm could that do?

I took her hands, but as I did I took a quarter step back. “No,” I said. “We’re not. Maybe in some other universe we would, but not in this one. Go to New York, get married, have a couple of … well, go to New York and get married. Have a long happy life, and leave the crimefighting to me.”

Was she disappointed? I like to think so.

She let go my hands, zipped the windbreaker, adjusted the strap of her purse. “Joe Portugal, master crimestopper.”

“At your service,” I said.

The minute I got home: “I had lust in my heart for Claudia Acuna.”

“Meaning?” Gina said.

“She kind of came on to me and I kind of got turned on.”

“Did you do anything about it?”

“Of course not.”

“Then that’s that. Babe?”

“Uh-huh?”

“You don’t have to report to me every time you flirt with somebody.”

“I think it was more than flirting.”

“Scale of one to ten. One is checking her out when sheisn’t looking, ten is a night of torrid sex with toys, whipped cream, and jungle sounds.”

“Three, I guess. Somewhere between two and a half and three and a half.”

“Not reportable. Four is reportable. Five if you’re drunk or high. You know, I think she’s kind of sexy too. Reminds me of me, if I was six inches taller and had big boobs. Maybe you and she and I should—”

“Don’t even say it.”

I made a call. It didn’t take long to get through to who I wanted. Elaine knows a lot of people.

Eric Stahl couldn’t possibly see me until the following Wednesday. At least, that’s what his assistant told me. I accepted the slot and wondered whether he was avoiding me. Decided it didn’t matter.

The rain came again that evening. It continued overnight and into the morning, and kept up with hardly a break all weekend. It broke on Monday, but the sky stayed gray and the weather chilly. Showers drifted down every couple of hours. The folks at Channel 6 broke out their slickers and did on-the-spot reports and publicly wondered if the heavens would every be blue again.

It would have been a good time to stay indoors and cocoon by the fireplace. Too bad we didn’t have one. We would someday, in the bedroom, if the addition ever got finished. And if there was a
we
. The chances seemed better now. But it wasn’t something I would ever again take for granted.

I phoned around and used Gina’s computer to surf the Net and quickly came to the conclusion that I hadn’t the slightest idea what I was doing. By the time Monday, then Tuesday rolled around, the biggest progress I’d made was to stop by Office Depot and stock up on Pink Pearls.

Gina’d lollygagged on a proposal and spent most of the weekend working on it. She was gone all day Monday presenting it and, because she thought it hadn’t gone well, all day shopping Tuesday.

The Dennis Lennox saga still dominated the local news. Channel 6 had replaced Claudia as lead on the story with someone named Linda Madera. She was short and cute and very young, and she filled the Filipina quota. She put together a series on Hollywood murders. Starting with Thelma Todd, then Sal Mineo and Bob Crane. O.J., of course, though that always seemed to me more a sports murder than a Hollywood one. Robert Blake and Phil Spector.

Mike called every day, and twice on Sunday, to ask about my progress. I said I had a few things to follow up on. This seemed to satisfy him. On Monday he told me Lu was out of the hospital and staying at his place in Venice. She had a full-time nurse and was making an excellent recovery.

He also said the police had been around several times, questioning him about his whereabouts at the time of his son’s murder. Two detectives, both young and eager, both TV-star pretty. One was a man and the other a woman, and Mike had dubbed them Starsky and Bitch. When he said that I bit my tongue. He didn’t need any of my politically correct bullshit just then.

Each time the police came for a visit he told them he’d been home alone, watching TV. Were there any witnesses, they wanted to know. There weren’t. He didn’t know why the sudden interest on the cops’ part, but attributed it to frustration at the lack of leads. He didn’t hold it against them. Just doing their jobs.

I sat in bed Tuesday night with the newspaper, poring over coverage of the Lennox case. Gina was in the living room, watching an old Cary Grant movie. I put the paper down and went out there. I lay down on the sofa with my head in her lap and watched Cary do his debonair thing. A commercial came on, the one with the guy throwing the football at the tire at the end of a rope. It was the first time I’d paid attention to what they were saying. It was for some Viagra-like drug, and the football going through the tire was symbolic of, well, you know.

“Subtle,” Gina said.

“Like a truck.”

“You think you’ll ever do commercials again?”

I looked up at her. “Sure. Once this dies down.”

“Do you care?”

“Not particularly.”

“So you’re going to live off me.”

“At least until my private dicking gets going. Would that be a problem?”

The merest hesitation. “Not particularly,” she said.

I began to have second thoughts about my new career choice. I didn’t doubt that Gina was right. That it was high time I got some direction in my life. I just wasn’t sure this was the
right
direction. Because I wasn’t coming up with much of anything about Dennis Lennox’s murder.

But … one day in the mid-nineties I got a fortune cookie. I held onto the fortune, tucking it between my bedroom mirror and its frame. I’d look at it every few months, consider tossing it in the wastebasket, give it another reprieve.

Quietly and carefully contemplating or planning an action is part of that action.

The process would take as long as it took. In the end there would be a result. Or there wouldn’t. No crimefighter got his man a hundred percent of the time. But the bottom line was that I got a kick out of chasing people around the city and seeing what kinds of lies they could come up with. And of distilling the fairy tales they invented and watching the truth drip out the bottom of the still.

If I put some evildoer away, so much the better.

Early Wednesday morning Gina found out her presentation hadn’t gone as badly as she thought. She left for Malibu to meet with her new client. I made a mug of Yunnan from my kit and sat on the porch, watching the latest iteration of the lousy weather. It had been a difficult winter, and it wasn’t even winter yet. There’d been a hailstorm a couple of months back. It moved in, stalled over Watts, and dumped a foot and a half of hail in an hour. The next day the airwaves were filled with images of kids throwing hailballs, building hailmen, making hail angels. It was the kind of story local news stations covered best.

But on Wednesday it wasn’t hail, and within five minutes it wasn’t rain either. Ten more, and there was blue sky in the west. I went inside, put on something decent, and went off to badger Eric Stahl.

Lennox Productions had its offices on the Fox lot. I drove in the Pico entrance and up to the guard gate.“Joe Portugal, to see Eric Stahl.”

The guard inspected me. He moved on to my truck. It clearly wasn’t the sort of vehicle Eric Stahl’s visitors usually drove. His expression said he’d be awfully surprised if my name was on his list. He picked up his clipboard, leafed through a couple of sheets. “You’re not on here.” Now his look was one of boredom. He’d done this a thousand times. Booted people who tried to finesse their way onto the lot.

“I just spoke to him,” I said.“Probably didn’t have a chance to call down yet. Call his office.”

“Ought to be on the list.” He stared at me, like I was expected to admit my guilt and bolt. I stared back. Finally he picked up the phone and made the call. “Guy here says he’s got an appointment to see Mr. Stahl. Name’s—yeah, that’s him. Okay. Right away.” He hung up, regarded me with suspicion, wrote out a pass, gave me directions. As I drove off I glanced at the rearview. He was still watching me. I stuck my arm out the window and waved. When he turned away I gave him the finger. That ought to show him.

Eric Stahl’s office was in an older brick building, its trim freshly painted, neat and tidy in the emerging sunlight. I walked up some stairs and down a hall and into the office. Stahl’s assistant looked up. She was short and stout, with spiky black hair. She smiled at me like I was somebody important.“Mr. Portugal. Mr. Stahl’s on the phone. He’ll just be a minute. Can I get you anything?”

“I’m fine.”

“Have a seat. It’ll just be a minute.”

It was a lot more than a minute. I sat in a cushy chair in front of a cushy table and leafed through that day’s
Variety
. There was buzz about the upcoming Oscar nods. Some big exec I’d never heard of was getting married. His wife-to-be was a non-pro.

After the first ten minutes and the first four apologies from the assistant, I started to wonder if Eric Stahl was really on the phone. Maybe it was all a power thing. He was showing me who was boss by keeping me waiting.

Finally, after close to twenty minutes, he emerged from his office. He had short blond hair and a goatee the size of a postage stamp.

“Joe. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.” He shook his head. “Agents. Ought to take them all out and shoot them.”

“My cousin’s an agent,” I said.

“Well, not all of them. Come on in. Did you want anything to drink?”

“I didn’t, and I still don’t.”

I followed him into the inner sanctum. The desk was impressive. Polished wood, nice detail. There was a small sofa and a couple of chairs, leather, black, uncomfortable-looking. A huge window overlooked the lot. Not far off, a couple of space aliens walked down a turn-of-the-century street.

The office was loaded with pictures of kids, two boys, on the wall in baseball outfits, on a coffee table at the beach, on the desk in one of those Sears-finest shots. He saw me looking, picked up the Sears one, brought it over to where I’d planted myself on the sofa. “This is the most recent,” he said. “Brian’s ten and Ricky is eight.”

“You can’t be more than—”

“Twenty-six. They’re my stepkids. Their mom was quite a bit older than me. She died four years ago.”

Did Ronnie know about the kids? My guess was there was a lot about Eric Stahl she didn’t know. “Sorry,” I said.

“Thanks, but … thanks.” He put down the photo and clapped his hands together, signaling a change of subject. “But you didn’t come here to talk about my kids. You want to talk about Dennis.”

“Yes.”

“You realize, of course, that I’ve gone over everything half a dozen times with the police.” He looked me over, and evidently decided it was okay to be seen with me in public. “This might take a while. Let’s get lunch.” He didn’t wait for my reaction, stepping into the anteroom and saying, “Becky, get us a table at Silversmith.” He stuck his head back in. “Come on, let’s go. Suddenly I’m starved.”

“I—”

“Don’t worry. I’m paying.”

I followed him out and down and to the minivan in his private parking place. I removed the baseball glove on my seat and dropped it among the McDonald’s wrappers at my feet and we were off.

Silversmith was on Beverly Drive, south of Wilshire. Reservations for dinner were supposed to be scarce as hens’ teeth and lunch was even tougher. But when we walked in, after leaving the van with a parking attendant who looked like Johnny Depp, we were immediately escorted to a table.

Ramon Silversmith had been a short-order cook at the Norm’s on La Cienega. Then he won twelve million dollars in the lottery. He took it in a lump sum and partnered up with a long-time restaurant manager named Robin Boston and hauled out all his parents’ Argentine recipes. They took over a space that had housed half a dozen restaurants in as many years and turned it into an overnight success. Industry types flocked there. Scenesters made it their destination. S. Irene Virbila crowned it with one of her scarce three-star reviews in the
Times
.

I knew all this because Robin Boston was an old girlfriend of Gina’s. After they broke up they stayed friends, and when Robin partnered up with Ramon Silversmith she hired Gina to do the interiors. We got to go to the opening-night party, hated it, left after stuffing ourselves with hors d’oeuvres. I never expected to be back.

But there I was, and in the company of, if the staff ’s behavior was any indication, their favorite customer. By the time we’d been there five minutes we’d been visited by two waiters, three busboys, the sommelier, the water sommelier, and Ramon Silversmith himself, who greeted Eric with kisses on both cheeks and me with a hearty handshake. He hung onto my hand, trying to figure out where he knew me from. I told him. He said, Ah, what Gina did for this place, I should give her a cut, then sniffed the air, grimaced, dashed back into his kitchen.

Bread, water, tapenade appeared on the table. A young woman with collagen lips materialized. Eric introduced me. She fluttered her eyelashes at me.

Eric watched her walk away. “Dennis would have loved that,” he said. “Quite the ass on her, huh?”

Anyone else, I would have said something like,“I thought her nipple was going to poke me in the eye.”

But I said nothing.

He broke off a piece of flatbread, dipped it in the tapenade, tossed it down the hatch.“Did you see the parking attendant?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Looked like Johnny Depp.”

“It was Johnny Depp. Doing research for a role.”

“Really.”

“I’ve been trying to get him to do a guest shot on
Protect and Serve
. He says he’s not interested, but that’s all part of the game.”

Who did this guy think he was fooling? Johnny Depp’s
21
Jump Street
gig notwithstanding, him being on a cop show was as likely as me being featured on
Meet the Press
.