The Ticket Out (18 page)

I hit the fourth slat. The vent opened. I reached up and felt around for the money.

It was gone.

No, it wasn't. It was there: someone had moved it.

I pulled out the money and wiped the dust off. There was only a part of one bundle left—six hundred dollars out of Greta Stenholm's twenty-thousand-dollar blackmail payoff. Lockwood had the rest. All except the nine hundred dollars I spent on my sister's rent and the weapons from Gun Galaxy.

The Metro guy was watching me. I asked him who'd been up there, and got the answer I expected: Detective Lockwood. Lockwood had supervised the moving of my furniture, noticed the attic fan at last—

And left the money there to test me.

I jumped off the stool and dragged the Metro guy back to the main house. I asked if he knew where Lockwood was. As it happened, he did. Lockwood had called in thirty minutes ago for a progress report; he was at the station.

I gathered up my things and drove out to Glassell Park in a rush. But I just missed Lockwood. Detective Smith said he'd gone home for a few hours of sleep. Smith looked like he needed sleep himself. He had black circles under his eyes, and his shirt was stained with chicken grease. An empty take-out box sat on his desk among the paperwork and files.

I told him I wanted to leave something for Lockwood. He asked if it involved new information in the Abadi or Stenholm cases. I said it didn't, and could I borrow a manila envelope? He shrugged and passed me an envelope.

I would've loved to know how their end was going, but I knew it was useless to ask. I stuck the money inside the envelope. I added my crime-scene notes, and the xeroxes of Greta Stenholm's address book and Filofax. Then I sat down at Lockwood's desk and wrote an apology. I tore up a couple of starts. I remembered what happened when I thanked him for saving my life; he didn't like effusion. And he had no belief in my sincerity. I'd screwed that when I screwed with his crime scene.

In the end I kept it plain. I didn't list everything I was sorry for, I just said I was sorry. I said I owed him nine hundred dollars, which he'd get back in installments. And I told him what I wanted to do next: pursue Scott Dolgin about Greta Stenholm's screenplay GB
Dreams Big.
Did he object? If he did, he should call me before 8
A.M.
tomorrow.

I folded the note and clipped it to the envelope. It was funny, I thought. I took the Lockwood assignment to prove I could do it, and to get the story I really wanted: Greta Stenholm. But things were different now. Now I had to know. I had to know who Lockwood was, and how he'd changed, and whether his life was ruined. I could feel his drama—and it was just as exciting as Greta Stenholm's rise and fall on the fringes of Hollywood. If I had to give on Greta to get his story, I was ready to give on Greta.

The money in the attic was a good sign. Lockwood could have impounded it but he didn't. He left it, and the stool, for me to find. It was his version of a personal moment. He'd ignored his official duty to make a personal gesture from him to me. He'd asked explicitly once before: did I know right from wrong? With the money he asked the same question another way.

I had to show him that he could trust me. He'd never talk to me unless he trusted me first.

I
RECEIVED
L
OCKWOOD'S
answer early Monday morning. He sent it via the new surveillance team to pass on when I woke up. Just be careful, the message said. That was all. No acknowledgment of the package, or anything I said in my note: be careful.

What a sphinx the guy was. But he hadn't discouraged my Scott Dolgin plan or warned me off other lines of action. So I decided to look on the bright side.

I cleaned up, popped some aspirin, and headed out for Culver City. I bought a coffee and muffin en route, and checked my mirrors constantly to make sure I wasn't followed.

Culver City was a middle-class dump on the south end of West L.A. What it lacked in aesthetics, I'd always thought, it made up for in movie history. The movies built Culver City. Hal Roach, Thomas Ince, and D. W. Griffith settled there in the teens. Sam Goldwyn followed, then the newly merged Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer moved into Goldwyn's facility in 1924. By the '30s MGM was It: Culver City's largest industry and the biggest, most “Hollywood” studio. When MGM declined in the '60s, so did Culver City. It wasn't a ghost town now; it was still crowded and commercial, and they'd done a lot of cosmetic updates. But the place felt worn-out to me—like it had shot its civic wad once and for all.

In-Casa Productions had a five-digit Washington Boulevard address. I assumed it would be on the old MGM lot, which Sony Pictures had bought ten years ago. I figured Scott Dolgin had a deal at Sony or one of its subcompanies, Columbia or TriStar.

I was wrong. I found 10203 Washington on the block across from Sony. I parked out front and remembered seeing this place a thousand times. It faced the east end of the studio lot, opposite the Thalberg Building where I often went for press screenings. I'd logged it as another movie-inspired architectural folly—the kind L.A. was full of.

It was a Spanish-style courtyard apartment painted champagne color and trimmed in red. You entered the court under a stucco arch inscribed
CASA DE AMOR.
Eight matching bungalows, four to a side, faced each other across a central walkway. The walkway was lined with every shade of red rose. There were red roses everywhere—in pots, on bushes, on climbing vines. The back wall of the court was a solid trellis of roses.

I stopped inside the arch and laughed out loud. The whole thing was too wild.

The motif of the courtyard was Love. A pair of interlocked hearts, molded in stucco, hung over the front windows. Wrought-iron railings featured wrought-iron hearts; hearts were painted on the porch tiles. All the front doors had heart-shaped knockers, and all the windows had heart-red awnings. Halfway down the walk, a stone Cupid dribbled water into a heart-shaped fountain.

The bungalows weren't numbered or lettered, and there was no one around to ask. I checked for a tenant directory but saw something better. The first bungalow to my left had a shingle on the porch rail. The shingle said
IN-CASA PRODUCTIONS.

I started up the stairs right as the screen door of the bungalow opened. I fixed my face to greet Scott Dolgin and—

Lockwood stepped onto the porch. He was wearing latex gloves, and he looked fresh and rested.

I was only surprised for a second. I started to say, “Where's your car?” A slight sign from him, a slight shake of the head, shut me up. I waited for my next cue.

He said, “Can I help you with something?”

I got the immediate drift. I said, “My name's Ann Whitehead. I'm here to see Scott Dolgin.”

“For what reason?”

I improvised. “I was supposed to see him this morning about an interview—I'm a journalist.”

“If you would come with me, please, Miss Whitehead.” Lockwood held the screen open and followed me inside.

Dolgin's living room was crammed with men in latex gloves. Detective Smith had the search warrant in his hand and stood reading a list into the telephone. One guy packed plastic bags into a cardboard box; another guy closed up a fingerprint kit. There were traces of fingerprint powder on every flat surface. A lab man was down on his knees examining the coffee table. A photographer stood over him with a camera ready.

Lockwood took my arm and pointed out the picture window. The Venetian blinds were down but open. I sited along his finger at the bungalow across the way. A woman was standing on the porch. I hadn't noticed her before because of the climbing roses. She was a well-preserved older woman dressed in dirty gardening clothes. Her eyes were riveted on Dolgin's place. She didn't blink or move.

Lockwood said low, “That is Mrs. Florence May. She's owns these apartments. I didn't want her to know that we knew each other.”

“Why not?”

He said, “Come and look.”

Lockwood walked me back to the bedroom. I checked the place out. The interior wasn't absurd like the exterior; it was museum-grade '30s Moderne. The furniture was chrome, velvet, and leather, and the colors matched in pale greens and creams. The floor plan was typical for a courtyard bungalow. Living room and dining room in front, kitchen and bedroom in back, and a bathroom squeezed into the hall.

Two suitcases lay open on Dolgin's bed. The clothes inside belonged to a woman. Lockwood flipped through the clothing to show me. T-shirts and jeans, underwear and sweaters—nothing fancy. And nothing to identify an owner, except the tags on the suitcase handles. Greta Stenholm.

Lockwood held the tags for me to see. I said, “This means—”

He cut in. “Have you heard of someone named Isabelle Pavich?”

“Jesus, Isabelle Pavich!”

“I thought you might help.” Lockwood took me back to the dining room. He steered me along ahead of him; he was walking fast.

Dolgin's dining room doubled as his business office. There had obviously been a fight there. The table was shoved off-center; two chairs were knocked over. A curtain had been ripped off the rod. Dried, rust-colored stains trailed across the carpet onto the floor in the kitchen.

I stopped to stare at the stains. Lockwood caught me staring and pressed my arm. He wanted me to look at an object on the table. It was a straw basket. I stood still. It was—it had to be—Isabelle Pavich's purse. She was carrying it the day she came to see me. The purse was splattered with the same rust-colored stains.

Lockwood got out his notebook and pen, and I told him what I knew. How I'd seen Pavich at Barry's party. How Pavich had been tugging at Dolgin's sleeve. How she'd come to the pool house two days later. How she'd angled for movie material and information about the murder. How she'd put me onto Edward Abadi with “Friends of Greta Stenholm tend to get dead.” How I hadn't seen or heard from her since. How I hadn't told him about her visit because I thought she wasn't relevant.

Lockwood didn't look up from writing. “She stated to you that she met Mr. Dolgin at the party.”

“But she acted odd about it.”

“In what way, ‘odd'?”

“When she rang at the back gate, I couldn't place her. Then I remembered the party, and her trying to get Dolgin's attention, so I said, ‘Did you ever talk to Dolgin?' I thought it was innocuous, but Pavich dodged the question. She said, ‘What? We haven't ... No, what do you mean? I never met him before the party.' I hadn't asked her when she met him. Ergo, odd.”

Lockwood wrote fast, flipped back a page, and made another note. He said, “Someone searched Mr. Dolgin's filing cabinet. I need you to go through the contents and tell me what you see.”

The filing cabinet stood by the door to the kitchen. A big old photograph hung beside it; it was a tinted enlargement of the Thalberg Building under construction. Lockwood went to talk to Smith. I opened the top drawer of the cabinet.

The drawer was full of financial records. I skimmed through the bank statements first.

Dolgin appeared to be personally solvent. He had fifteen grand in his checking and savings accounts. But In-Casa Productions seemed to be broke.

I looked for bank letters, articles of incorporation, deal memos—any paperwork to prove that In-Casa was a viable entity. All I found was a letter of agreement between Scott Dolgin and Barry Melling dated March 2001. Barry agreed to advance Dolgin ten thousand dollars to get In-Casa started. He also agreed to additional funding for a six-month period, to be repaid as Dolgin made his deals.

I found In-Casa's bankbook. It showed no record of a ten-thousand-dollar deposit last March. Only small additions were noted over the six-month period—five hundred to nine hundred dollars, tops.

I went through the middle drawer. I found back issues of
Variety
and
Hollywood Reporter,
and a voucher book filled with coupons. Dolgin was paying off a 2000 Range Rover; he was into his fifth month.

The bottom drawer contained chewed-up screenplays. There were two by Penny Proft, three by Hamilton Ashburn Jr. And two by “B. N. Hecht”—also known as Neil John Phillips. They were duplicates of scripts I'd found in his garage. I looked twice, but there was nothing by Greta Stenholm.

I stood up and brushed the fingerprint powder off my hands. Lockwood came back with his notebook open.

I said, “She thought In-Casa was a farce, and it looks like she might've been right. It looks like Dolgin spent Barry's seed money on a swanky truck. It also looks like Dolgin was working with some SC people, including Greta's old writing partner, Phillips. But there's no evidence of any producing deals, or anything that proves Dolgin was working with Greta. I didn't expect to find
GB Dreams Big,
because Dolgin called PPA looking for it. But he told Jack Nevenson at the party that he was developing several projects with her.”

Lockwood was writing. “How do you know that?”

I told him about my talk with Len Ziskind and Jack Nevenson last Friday morning. Dale Denney had pushed it right out of my head.

I said, “Do you believe Ziskind? Why would Greta's calendar say she had meals with him if she didn't?”

Lockwood shut his notebook. “We're going to the residence of Miss Pavich right now. I want you to meet us there.”

He gave me Pavich's address and hustled me out of the bungalow. As I drove off, I checked the side street by the Casa de Amor. There were the cop cars, and Pavich's little roadster.

 

I
WAITED FOR
Lockwood on the sidewalk in front of Pavich's building. She lived in West Hollywood, a block off the Boys' Town strip. The street was quiet, and her building was bland and new. The front gate was set in a tall security fence with surveillance cameras mounted on top.

The police arrived in three separate cars—Lockwood and Smith together, and another crew of technicians. Lockwood had Pavich's straw purse with him. He rang her buzzer a couple of times, then used her keys to open the security gate. Her apartment was on the fifth floor. Lockwood knocked at the door and called Pavich's name. When nobody answered, he started trying keys in the dead bolt.