Hollywood Hills E-Book

Joseph Wambaugh

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

For the streetwise cops of Hollywood Station, dealing with the panhandlers, prostitutes and costumed crackheads of the boulevard is all in a day's work. If they're lucky, surf-mad partners Flotsam and Jetsam can spend the morning calming the crazies and the afternoon policing the babes on the beach. But beyond the lights and the crowds on the Walk of Fame, the real Los Angeles simmers dangerously. And when things heat up, even veterans like Viv Daley will see things that they'll wish they could forget. In the hills above town, it's a different world, where sports-car-studded driveways lead to sprawling villas stuffed with clothes and jewels. Up here, pickings are easy for the Bling Ring - a group of photogenic young addicts who knock off celebrity cribs to fund their next fix. Even experienced cop and wannabe filmstar Nate "Hollywood" Weiss has struck gold in the hills. Leona Bruger, wife of an Industry Mover and Shaker, has taken a fancy to him. Although he knows the Hollywood maxim - you don't pet the cougars, especially if they belong to the boss - Nate reckons that a leg-over might be just the leg-up he needs. What Weiss doesn't realise is that his new flame's crooked art-dealer is about to pull a forgery scam right under his nose. And when a pair of desperate junkies hit on a foolproof plan to pay their drug debts with a stolen painting, things get very complicated indeed...

Leseprobe

The legendary Hollywood Hills are home to wealth, fame, and power – passing through the neighbourhood, it’s hard not to get a little greedy.

LAPD veteran ‘Hollywood Nate’ Weiss could take or leave the opulence, but he wouldn’t say no to a shot at celluloid immortality. And it looks like he may get his chance when he catches the eye of a B-list director or – more to the point – the appreciative eye of the B-list director’s predatory fiancée. Nate knows the Hollywood maxim – you don’t pet the boss’s cougar – but he’s got to keep his silver screen dream alive, so he agrees to add her hillside mansion to his beat.

It really shouldn’t be a problem, but this is Hollywood and although the air may be a little more rarefied in the hills, when night falls, just like in the city, anything can happen...

Up here, an ex-con-cum-butler is trying to go straight, a nattily-dressed-but-destitute art dealer has his eye on an opportunity that just might save his floundering business, a drug-addled pair of petty thieves are about to get very lucky... and Nate’s flirtation in the Hills is going to leave the crew at Hollywood Station with a deadly situation on their hands.

Hollywood Hills is a raucous, dangerous roller coaster ride: Joseph Wambaugh on irrepressible form.

Joseph Wambaugh, a former Los Angeles Police Department detective sergeant served with the department for fourteen years. The author of The New Centurions and The Choirboys, Wambaugh is internationally recognised as one of crime fiction’s Grand Masters. He lives in southern California.

Hollywood Hills

ALSO BY JOSEPH WAMBAUGH

FICTION

Hollywood Moon

Hollywood Crows

Hollywood Station

Floaters

Finnegan's Week

Fugitive Nights

The Golden Orange

The Secrets of Harry Bright

The Delta Star

The Glitter Dome

The Black Marble

The Choirboys

The Blue Knight

The New Centurions

NONFICTION

Fire Lover

The Blooding

Echoes in the Darkness

Lines and Shadows

The Onion Field

JOSEPH

WAMBAUGH

Hollywood Hills

First published in the United States of America in 2010 by Little, Brown and Company.

This edition first published in Great Britain in 2011 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Joseph Wambaugh 2010.

The moral right of Joseph Wambaugh to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-84887-876-1 (hardback) ISBN: 978-1-84887-877-8 (trade paperback) eBook ISBN: 978-1-84887-879-2

Printed in Great Britain.

Corvus

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd Ormond House 26-27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

www.corvus-books.co.uk

CONTENTS

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

As ever, special thanks for the terrific anecdotes and great cop talk goes to officers of the Los Angeles Police Department:

Art Arguirre, Randy Barr, Kevan Beard, Charles Bennett, Vicki Bynum, Don Deming (ret.), Nicole Garner, Brett Goodkin, Mike Gray, Richard Guzman, Tracy Hauter, Craig Herron, Jack Herron (ret.), Don Hrycyk, Oscar Ibanez, Bart Landsman (ret.), Al Lopez, Kathy McAnany, Alfred Morales, Dan Myers, Bruce Nelson, Jeff Nolte, Thomas Onyshko, Al Pesanti (ret.), John Robertson (ret.), Sunny Sasajima, Tom Small, Mark Stainbrook, John Thacker, Geraldine Thomsen, Obie Vaughn, Jeff Von Lutzow, Carl Worrell

And to officers of the San Diego Police Department:

Brigitta Belz, Meryl Bernstein, Cindy Brady, Sarah Creighton, Jessie Holt, Ron Ladd (ret.), Joe Lehr, Lynda Oberlies, Mo Parga, Jesus Puente, Tony Puente (ret.), Donna Williams

And to officers of the Lompoc Police Department:

Jon Bailey, Jason Flint, Ron Hutchins, Joe Rapozo (jailer/dispatcher)

And to officers of the Chula Vista Police Department:

Greg Puente, Brian Treuel

Hollywood Hills

THE BUTT-FLOSS BUNNY’S busted, bro,” said the alliteration-loving, sunbaked blond surfer. He was already in his black wet suit, lying on the sand and ogling the photo shoot thirty yards farther south on Malibu Beach on a late summer day that made Southern California’s kahunas wonder why the rest of the world lived anywhere else.

“They can’t jam her, dude,” his taller surfing partner said, hair darker blond and also streaked with highlights, as he squirmed into his own black wet suit. “The ordinance says no nude sunbathing. Well, she ain’t sunbathing and she’s wearing a gold eye patch over her cookie and a pair of Dr. Scholl’s corn pads over her nibs. So she ain’t technically unclothed, even though she is, like, hormonally speaking, as naked as Minnie the mermaid who haunts my dreams.”

“Anyways, everybody can see she ain’t no surf bunny,” said the shorter surfer. “Even her toenails are way jeweled up and all perfectamundo. So if chocka chicks wanna go denuded for a professional photo op, they deserve a pass.”

“She deserves more than that for putting up with that met-sex woffie, for sure,” the tall surfer said, referring to the skeletal metro-sexual photographer in a tight pink T-shirt, with a fall of so casual highlighted hair draped over his non-camera eye. The photographer was yapping orders to his perspiring young male assistant, whose gelled hair was combed up from the sides in a faux-hawk ’do, almost as fast as he clicked photos of the redhead.

“If she gets a ticket, it should be for littering a public beach with those two hodads in rainbow rubber, not for displaying her fabuloso physique,” the shorter surfer replied, alluding to the two male models sharing the photo session as mere backdrop.

One was wearing a cherry-red wet suit with a white stripe up one leg, and the other a lemon-yellow wet suit equally offensive to the observing ring of sneering water enforcers who claimed this part of Malibu as kahuna turf. They viewed anyone wearing anything but a solid black or navy wet suit as dissing surfing traditions, and as a legitimate target to be surfboard-speared if they dared enter the water to claim a wave.

That lip-curling judgment was further confirmed by the leashes attached to the spanking-new longboards being used as props, surfboard leashes being almost as objectionable as colored wet suits to the gathering group of surfing purists watching the goings-on. The longboards, one turquoise, one violet, were positioned directly behind the magnificent redhead, who kept changing poses for the photographer. He was carefully framing provocative body shots fore and aft, unfazed by the L.A. Sheriff’s Department black-and-white pulling into a parking space reserved for emergency vehicles.

“Here comes five-oh,” said the taller surfer to his partner when two uniformed deputies, a young man and an older woman, got out and strode across the sand toward the photo shoot.

“Never a cop when you need one, bro,” the shorter surfer noted. “And we don’t need one now. The last time the little scallywag jiggled, one of her corn pads popped loose, which was like, too cool for school.”

The taller surfer said, “Roger that. She is fully hot. Fully! But personally, right now I’m all dialed in to see what happens if the pair of rainbow donks actually hit the briny on their unwaxed logs.

The surf Nazis’re gonna go all return-of-Jaws berserk when they smell that kooker blood in the water.”

“Get your happy on, bro,” his partner said. “Forget the two squids. Just wax up and enjoy the gymnosophical gyrations of that slammin’ spanker.”

“Gymno . . . ?” said the tall surfer. Then, “Dude, I hate it when you take community college classes and go all vocabu-lyrical instead of speaking everyday American English.”

Just then, the woman deputy, a tall Asian veteran with her black hair pulled into a tight bun, moved ahead of her burly young Latino partner to confront the photographer, who reluctantly stopped shooting and faced her.

“This is attracting an unruly crowd,” she said. “It’s not the time or place for a photo session of this nature on Malibu Beach. I’d like you to shut it down and take it to a more private location.”

As the deputy said this, the redhead was performing splits on the yellow surfboard that one of the male models had placed flat on the sand as a pedestal for the next flurry of shots. But when the redhead got into the splits position, she lost control of her eye patch thong, attached by a string that rode over her hips and disappeared between the cheeks of her liquid-tanned buttocks. When the eye patch got crumpled against her upper thigh, her shaved genitalia were exposed, and a cheer went up from the raucous ring of twenty young men, most of them in wet suits, now completely surrounding the photo shoot. A salvo of lascivious commentary followed as the young men pushed in closer.

“See what I mean?” said the woman deputy to the photographer. “Shut this down now.”

“About her thong,” the photographer said. “If she puts one on that’s made of wider material, will we be all right? I mean, I’ve been told that if there’s a patch over her tulips and enough material in back so that her cheeks don’t touch each other, it cannot be considered nudity on a public beach.”.

The giggling redhead, seemingly aroused by the male effluvium enveloping her like funky smoke, said to her boss, “You mean it’ll make my costume legal if my cheeks don’t touch?”

And with that, she arched her back, grabbed a buttock in each hand, and spread them slightly, all the while winking at her play-surfer colleagues in rainbow suits. Both of them had declined her offer to whiff a few lines just before the photo shoot and now looked unnerved by her coke-driven behavior.

The one in the lemon-yellow wet suit whispered in her ear, “Gloria, this is not risqué, this is fucking risky. We’re surrounded by testosterone-crazed animals.”

“That’s it,” said the woman deputy as the model rearranged her thong. “You’re in violation of the law. Get off this beach and stand by our car. Do it now.”

The photographer sighed in disgust, hands on his narrow hips, and gazed up, muttering to the vast cloudless sky over Malibu and the Pacific Ocean before reluctantly saying, “Okay, kids, it’s a fucking wrap.”

“I was just getting into it!” the redhead cried, snatching a towel from a folding chair.

And though alcohol consumption was prohibited on the beach, the grungiest of the nonsurfers were hammered, and an open can of beer was thrown from the back of the crowd. It soared over the heads of the nearest surfers, striking the deputy on the back of the head just above her bun of hair, splashing beer onto her tan uniform shirt.

“Owwww!” she yelped, whirling toward the mob.

“I saw which one did it!” her partner said, barging through the ring of wet suits, running down the beach after a fleeing teen in a torn T-shirt. As a result of having sloshed down two 40s of Olde English and a six-pack of Corona, the teen tripped over an obese, snoring tourist in plaid golf pants who was tits up and turning bubblegum-pink under the late afternoon sun.

The deputy wrestled the kid to the sand, looking as though he were trying to decide whether to grab handcuffs or pepper spray, when his partner, blood droplets wetting the collar of her uniform shirt, ran up and pounced on the thrashing teen, who yelled, “I didn’t mean to hit nobody! It was just a lucky shot!”

“Unlucky for you, asshole,” the Latino deputy said.

“I can hook him up,” the woman deputy said to her partner as they grappled, “if you’ll get his goddamn arm twisted back.”

“I’m suing you!” the kid hollered. Then to the milling crowd of onlookers, “You people are witnessing police brutality! Give me your names and phone numbers!”

After their prisoner was handcuffed, they jerked him upright and started dragging him toward the parking lot.

Then another of the grungier beach creatures, in board shorts, inked-out from his neck to his knees with full-sleeve tatts on both arms and missing an incisor and two bicuspids in his upper grille, yelled, “Let him go. He didn’t do nothing. Some nigger threw the beer and ran off.”

He drunkenly slouched toward the deputies, full of booze and bravado, holding the neck of an empty beer bottle like a hammer, and the young deputy drew his Taser and pointed it at him. The female deputy immediately talked into her rover and requested backup while she kept her eyes on the increasingly rowdy mob, at the same time trying to decide which of the half dozen nonsurfing sand maggots could be a real threat.

She didn’t realize that backup was much closer than she thought, and it arrived in a violent explosion of energy that stunned everybody. The tall blond surfer and his shorter partner issued no warnings, but running full speed, the taller one surged in low like a blitzing linebacker and slammed his shoulder into the lower spine of the guy with the beer bottle, who sailed forward, back bowed, and crashed hard against two surfers, knocking both of them flat on the sand. One of the other sleazed-out beach lice in ragged jeans instantly leaped on the back of the tall surfer as he was getting to his feet and tried for a stranglehold. He let go when the shorter surfer grabbed his hair, jerked his head back, and dug three piston punches into the guy’s kidneys, which made him drop to the sand, howling louder than his wounded mate.

“Get him to your car fast!” the tall surfer yelled to the deputies.

He picked up and brandished the beer bottle, standing shoulder to shoulder with his partner, facing off the jeering gaggle of now-hesitant surfers as the deputies continued dragging their handcuffed prisoner across the warm white sand of Malibu Beach.

The remainder of the surfing crowd suddenly had to rethink the whole business after seeing the two beach rats get cranked by the dynamic duo, whoever the fuck they were. And besides, since the wicked wahini and her crew were scampering to their SUV, the sexy rush was over. They figured that pretty soon there’d be more cops.

And anyway, they’d been out of the water too long. Adrenaline started gushing and synapses snapping when they saw half a dozen other surfers digging through the breakers. The surf was peaky and a young ripper came slicing in on a hugangus juicy while other surfers hooted him on. So what the fuck were they doing on dry land dicking around with these cops anyway?

Suddenly, as though on command, they all turned and began scrambling toward the ocean like a raft of clumsy sea lions, but once in the water and on their boards, they were transformed, and they darted, sleek as otters, through the shore break, with cops and even the redhead utterly forgotten. Their only concern was not getting cut off as they paddled from break to break in waves punchy and raw, waiting for a big one because this . . . this was what it was all about. They had discovered the meaning of life.

After the deputies got their handcuffed prisoner strapped into the backseat of the caged patrol unit, the tall surfer and his shorter partner heard the yelp of sirens as the LASD black-and-white units came roaring into the parking lot.

“Dude, I mighta rearranged a few disks in that sand maggot’s back,” the tall surfer said to his partner. “If we don’t wanna get bogged to the ass in paperwork and lawsuits and shit, I think we should, like, fade out at this point and maybe frequent Bolsa Chica Beach for the next few weeks.”

“I hear ya, bro,” his partner said. “The sleazed-out surf rat that I nailed is gonna be pissing blood for a few days, so I ain’t ready to answer a bunch of questions about why we didn’t ID ourselves and advise them of their rights and give them all a chance to kick the shit outta the deputies and us, too. I say, let’s bounce.”

The younger, Latino deputy was busy corralling the photo crew as witnesses for his reports, and the older, female deputy was gingerly touching her injured head and scanning the growing crowd of looky-loos, but she couldn’t find the surfing pair who’d decked the beach rats. She definitely needed them for the arrest and crime reports now that they were going to book their prisoner for the felony assault on a peace officer, but the arriving backup units caused a traffic snarl and she had to direct cars out of their way. This allowed the tall blond surfer and his shorter blond partner, hiding behind the throngs of beachgoers, to slip away, collect their boards, and scurry unobserved to their pickup truck in the parking lot.

They drove off and headed for the closest In-N-Out Burger, where they each devoured two cheeseburgers and fries. They arrived at work in time for a shower, a shave, an allowable application of hair gel, and a quick change into uniforms, ready for the 5:15 P.M. midwatch roll call.

All of the other police officers at Hollywood Station referred to this team of surfer cops as Flotsam and Jetsam.

FOR YEARS, HE had been dubbed “Hollywood Nate” because he carried a Screen Actors Guild card and was forever seeking stardom, as were thousands of Los Angeles bartenders, waiters, parking attendants, receptionists, window washers, dog walkers, and even people with vocations and professions, all nurturing similar hopes and dreams. Hollywood Nate’s mother and older sister had always maintained that if only he had not been cast in a couple of TV movies early in his police career — back when Hollywood still made TV movies — the bug might not have bitten him so hard. Lots of cops from Hollywood and other police divisions worked the red carpet events or were hired as off-duty technical advisers on feature movies or TV shows, and that was the end of their emotional involvement with show business. But Nate was different.

Hollywood Nate’s handsome hawkish profile and wavy dark hair, now going gray at the temples, along with his penetrating liquid brown eyes and iron-pumping build, had gotten him more than just sleepovers from below-the-line female employees on nearly every production he’d worked. Nate had also been given lots of paying jobs as an on-camera extra, and he’d even gotten those few speaking parts in TV productions, soon gathering enough credits to get a SAG card, which he proudly kept in his badge wallet beneath his police ID card. The “Hollywood” moniker would be his for the rest of his police days because the LAPD had always loved having a “Hollywood Lou” or a “Hollywood Bill” among its ranks, and since the seventeen-year LAPD veteran “Hollywood Nate” even had a SAG card, that made it better.

The thirty-eight-year-old cop had been somewhat indulged for a few months by his fellow coppers on the midwatch during a time of deep sadness for all of them. It came after Nate’s partner, Dana Vaughn, had been shot dead by a thief whom Nate then killed with return fire. Nate had grieved intensely for Dana Vaughn and had needed to surmount overwhelming feelings of survivor guilt and deep regret for never having told her certain intimate things, like how she had touched his heart and what she had meant to him in the short time they had worked together as patrol partners. Now he had recurring dreams of telling her those things, and in the dreams, she never answered him but would smile and chuckle in that special way of hers that always made him think of wind chimes.

It was during that mournful and restless period that Hollywood Nate had been offered an audition that came from working the red carpet on a warm summer night at the Kodak Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. There were thirty cops there that night, all happily drawing overtime pay. Rudy Ressler, a second-rate director and producer who once had coproduced an Oscar-nominated movie, attended that affair with an up-and-coming pair of young beauties known only to people who spent their lives watching nighttime TV designed for Gen X-ers. Ressler’s personal escort that evening was a UCLA theater major skinnier than Victoria Beckham and younger than his own daughter. When the event ended and the Kodak was disgorging the multitudes, Nate had occasion to apply some muscle to the stampeding paparazzi that had crowded in on the foursome as they walked to the director’s rented limo.

It wasn’t that the aggressive paparazzi were interested in shooting photos of the director, but Brangelina, moving fast, had emerged from the crowd right behind the Ressler foursome. Things got very unruly very quickly, and the frightened UCLA coed began whimpering when an obese paparazzo with a camera hanging from a strap around his neck and a Styrofoam cup in his hand backed against her, mashing her into Ressler’s hired limousine.

Nate had stepped in then with pap pressing on all sides and hooked a low elbow very hard into the belly of the fat guy, causing him to let out a woooo, double over, and spew Jamba Juice all over other paparazzi. Nobody in that crush of nighttime fans, including other pap, had seen the surreptitious elbow chop, and even the groaning paparazzo didn’t know what had hit him. But Rudy Ressler saw it, as did one of the security aides of the LAPD chief of police. The aide waited by the chief’s ominous-looking SUV with its dark-tinted windows.

When the Ressler party got into their limo, the director turned and said to Nate, “Thank you for helping us, Officer. If there’s anything I can ever do for you . . .” And he handed Nate a business card.

Hollywood Nate said, “You may regret that rash remark, sir.” And he took the badge wallet from his pocket to show Rudy Ressler his SAG card, and said, “At the station they call me Hollywood Nate because of this.”

“I’ll be damned,” the director said. He laughed out loud, turning to his companions and saying, “This officer is a SAG member. Only in Hollywood!”

“Have a good evening, sir,” Nate said with a hopeful smile.

“Call me when you get a chance, Officer. I’m serious,” the director replied, looking at Hollywood Nate appraisingly this time.

Before the limousine pulled away, Nate heard Rudy Ressler say to the driver, “We’re dropping Ms. Franchon at her sorority house and then you can take the rest of us to Mrs. Brueger’s home in the Hollywood Hills. Do you remember where it is from last time?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Ressler,” the driver said.

The limousine drove off, leaving the other cars blowing horns and flashing their high beams at the inevitable traffic jam, and the paparazzi still snapping pictures. Hollywood Nate decided to take a better look at the chief’s SUV and at the LAPD security aide standing beside it, who looked familiar. When he got closer, he recognized the wide-bodied, balding, mustachioed Latino cop in the dark three-piece business suit. It was Lorenzo “Snuffy” Salcedo, an old friend and classmate who had served with Nate in 77th Street Division when they were boots fresh out of the police academy, as well as later, when Snuffy had worked patrol at Hollywood Station for two years.

Snuffy had served nine years in the navy before becoming a cop and was ten years older than Nate. But he wasn’t showing the effects of his forty-eight years. He had competed in power lifting in the Police Olympics and had a chest like a buffalo. Snuffy had acquired his nickname from his habit of tucking a pinch of Red Man chewing tobacco inside his lower lip and spitting tobacco juice into a Styrofoam cup. Some cops mistakenly thought that he was dipping snuff. Nate remembered that their training officers at 77th had threatened to make Snuffy drink the contents of his cup if they caught him, but at Hollywood Station, once he was off probation, he’d kept his lip loaded most of the time. He was always the division champ when it came to chatter and gossip, in a profession where gossip was coin of the realm.

Back then, their late sergeant, whom they’d called the Oracle, was often tasked by the watch commander to deal with Snuffy’s droopy ’stash. But the Oracle would simply say to him, “Zapata is dead, Snuffy. Trim the tips off that feather duster next time you’re clipping your nails.”.

Snuffy seldom did and the Oracle didn’t really care. Then Nate thought of how much he missed the Oracle, who’d died of a massive heart attack on the Walk of Fame in front of Hollywood Station. The stars in marble and brass on that part of Wilcox Avenue were not there to commemorate movie stars but as memorials to the Hollywood Division coppers who had been killed in the line of duty.

Nate’s reminiscing stopped when Snuffy Salcedo left the LAPD chief’s SUV at the curb and jogged toward the red carpet parking area, arms outstretched. Under the mustache his toothy grin was glinting arctic white from all the lights on Hollywood Boulevard.

Nate said, “Snuffy Salcedo, I presume?”

Snuffy said, “Hollywood Nate Weiss! Where the fuck you been and how are you? Abrazos, ’mano!”

He gave Nate a rib-crushing embrace, and up close Nate saw that bulge under Snuffy’s lower lip.

Snuffy said, “I saw you spear that chubby pap, you rascal. Glad to see you still got the chops you learned back in the day with me.” Then he did an Elvis impression and sang, “Down in the ghet-to!”

Nate said, “I see you still got that revolting wad of manure inside your lip. Does the big boss let you drive with a cup of tobacco juice in the cup holder?”

“It disappears when Mister shows up,” Snuffy said.

Many of the veteran LAPD cops had never accepted this chief of police, the second one to be imported from the East Coast since the Rodney King riots. This chief had come seven years ago, and when the coppers referred to him privately, it was not with “Chief” before his surname but with “Mister,” the ultimate invective, meaning that he was just another imported civilian politician and could never be a real LAPD copper.

“So how do you like driving for this one?” Nate asked.

“Have you ever had a colonoscopy?” Snuffy said.

“Why’ve you stayed in Metro all these years, Snuffy?” Nate asked. “Aren’t you sick of it yet?”

“The overtime money driving for this one has been keeping me where I am,” Snuffy said. “Mister is the first LAPD chief to need security aides everywhere but in his bathtub. You’d think a guy that’s been married as many times as he has woulda picked a babe that cooks this time around, but there’s no food in their house and they go out every night to eat. On his weekend days off, he even needs us with him. We’re a full-service detail with this one. There’s five of us security aides and we’re all getting richer than Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.”

“I had a feeling his Irish twinkle might mask a gloomy Celtic interior,” said Nate.

Snuffy Salcedo said, “In addition to an ego that makes him think the MetLife blimp should have his face on it instead of Snoopy’s, I think Mister’s got something like OCD. He has a thing about stoplights and he counts them. I might get yelled at if I take a route with too many of them. And he’s obsessed with wiping his face with Kleenex. If there was even half the oil coming out of Mister’s pores that he thinks there is, we wouldn’t need any more imports from Saudi Arabia. Since I don’t have a degree in abnormal psychology, I just concentrate on the overtime money when he’s like that. By the way, did you get married again?”

“Not a chance,” Nate said. “And no kids.”

“You were so lucky her casabas never got to producing dairy products. Me, I’ll be paying for our kids till Jesus returns.”

“Even without kids I know what divorce costs,” Nate said, nodding. “Twelve months of eating Hungry-Man nukeable food until I could afford an occasional lamb chop.”

“I used to call mine RK,” Snuffy said, “because during sex she was about as active as roadkill. Yet she talked me into paying for a boob job for both her and her sister, and she went wild after that. Four new mammaries and I had no access to any of them. I was the boob.”

Nate said, “Me, I’m not gonna marry another Jewish woman no matter what my mother wants. My ex turned scary mean the minute her blood sugar rose with morning orange juice. It took a while after the divorce till she stopped breaking eggs on my car.”

“Guys like you and me should mix ’n’ match,” Snuffy said. “And always marry outside our tribes.”

“I’d sure like to see you transfer back to Watch Five at Hollywood Station ,” Nate said sincerely. “It’d be like old times . We could partner up. I’d even let you keep your spittoon in the cup holder and try not to puke all over myself when you used it.”

“What!” Snuffy said incredulously. “You haven’t heard?”

“Heard?”

“I’ve finally had enough of this driving gig. I’m transferring back to Hollywood in time for the next deployment period. I thought there’d be notices on the bulletin boards by now, and pictures of me in the roll call room right next to the Oracle’s.”

“Fantastic!” Nate said. “Wait’ll I spread the word. Snuffy Salcedo’s turning in his chauffeur’s cap and coming home to roost.”

“Long overdue,” Snuffy said. “I’ve driven for three chiefs. The only one I liked was the first one that City Hall imported from the East Coast. I wish the mayor hadn’t gotten rid of him when he found out the dude wouldn’t trade his Las Vegas jaunts for eternal youth. I grew fond of him. Basically he was just a harmless old porch Negro.”

Nate was about to ask Snuffy if he’d heard from any of their classmates lately, when the burly Latino cop stopped chattering long enough to turn toward the herd of people emerging onto the red carpet, and said, “Holy shit! He’s already out!”

Hollywood Nate turned and saw the chief of police, his wife, and another elegantly dressed couple standing on the curb in front of the Kodak Theatre, and the chief wasn’t twinkling. All of the bonhomie that he’d shown to the paparazzi was gone.

Snuffy Salcedo scampered to the SUV, jumped in, and zoomed to the pickup area, where he leaped out and ran around to open the rear door for Mrs. Chief. Nate saw the chief jawing at Snuffy and neither looked very happy.

On the next transfer list, P2 Snuffy Salcedo did return to Hollywood Station, where he could no longer get as rich as the E Street Band.

LEONA BRUEGER HAD always referred to her home located high in the Hollywood Hills, almost to Woodrow Wilson Drive, as a mini-estate. Three residential lots had been bought and cleared of aging houses and tied together to make it the largest parcel in that part of the Hills, with a splendid view almost to the ocean. Her late husband, Sammy Brueger, had made most of his early money by buying into three wholesale meat distributors at a time when people said you couldn’t make real money in that business.

Sammy Brueger proved them wrong and did it with a slogan that his first wife dreamed up: “You can’t beat Sammy’s meat.” And then, early in the presidency of Richard Nixon, Sammy started following the New York Stock Exchange and became interested in a stock for no other reason than that its NASDAQ symbol, POND, was the maiden name of his wife. He was a born gambler, and when he learned that POND stood for Ponderosa Steak House in Dayton, Ohio, he thought that Lady Luck was calling him. The stock symbol bore his wife’s name, and the product was something that he bought and sold every day — meat! So Sammy plowed everything he had into that stock and it zoomed upward an astounding 10,000 percent and he became very rich. He divorced the wife named Pond and married a failed actress whose surname never helped him, and neither did she. Because of the prenuptial, the second one wasn’t so expensive to unload.

His third and final wife, Leona, thirty-two years younger than Sammy, told other trophy wives at her Pilates class that the meat slogan had certainly been true in the last ten years of the old man’s life, and she thanked God for it. She still shuddered when she thought of him in his old age crawling over her at night like a centipede.

Leona Brueger was still a size two, and was trainer-firm, with expressive brown eyes, delicate facial bones, and a Mediterranean skin tone that bore no evidence of the considerable work she had bought in order to stay looking so good at the age of sixty. Her last birthday had been devastating, no matter how much she had tried to prepare for it psychologically. Leona Brueger’s natural hair color had been milk chocolate brown at one time, and she hated to think what color it would be now if she ever stopped the monthly color and highlights.

On a summer afternoon while sitting by the pool skimming Elle and Vogue and reading Wine Spectator cover to cover, she happened to see a mention of a Beverly Hills art gallery where Sammy had bought three very expensive pieces of Impressionist art, two by French artists and one by a Swede. Leona couldn’t remember much about the artists and hardly noticed the paintings back when Sammy was alive, opining to girlfriends that trees and flowers should look as though they were living things distinct from the land that nourished them. And the nearly nude body of a peasant woman feeding a kitten in one of the paintings depressed her. She feared that she would look like that when, despite Pilates and a weekly game of tennis on the Brueger tennis court with her Pilates partners, her ass finally gave up and collapsed from boredom and fatigue.

But the article she was reading made her wonder why it had taken her so long to have the paintings appraised after Sammy died, trusting him that they were of “museum quality.” He’d always said that the very pricey pieces should hang exactly where he’d placed them: in their great room, the dining room, and along the main corridor of “Casa Brueger.”

She strolled inside from the pool, sipping an iced tea, wishing it were late enough for a nice glass of cool Fumé Blanc, and studied the three oldest pieces to try to see why anyone would think they were so valuable. She stood before the largest, the one of a woman squatting beside what looked to Leona like a pond or a lagoon. She decided to call the Wickland Gallery on Wilshire Boulevard to ask Nigel Wickland when he’d be coming back for the appraisal. The art dealer had stopped by a week earlier at her request and taken a preliminary look, but he’d said he needed to “research the provenance” before he could give her accurate information. It was hard for her to think about appraisals or any other business when she was about to embark on one of the great adventures of her life.

She’d leased a villa in Tuscany for three months and was going there with Rudy Ressler, the movie director/producer she’d been dating off and on for more than a year. Rudy was amusing and had lots of show-business anecdotes that he could relate by mimicking the voices of the players involved. He wasn’t as young as she would like if she decided to marry again, but he was controllable and an amazingly unselfish lover, even though that didn’t matter as much as it used to. And he still knew enough people very active in show business to ensure that they’d always have interesting dining partners. His one Oscar-nominated film had kept him on the A-list for the past twenty years. If they ever married, she figured she’d end up supporting him, but what the hell, she was bucks-up rich. Sammy had left her more than she could ever spend in her lifetime. And that reminded her again that she was now sixty years old. How much of a life did she have left?

For a moment Leona couldn’t remember what she was about to do, but then she remembered: call the Wickland Gallery. She got Nigel Wickland on the phone and made an appointment for the following afternoon, when he would have a closer look at the thirteen pieces of art. She’d have to make a note to ask the gallery owner if he thought her security system was adequate to protect the artwork while she was in Tuscany. But then she thought, screw it. Sammy had the art so heavily insured that she almost hoped someone would steal all of it. Then she could buy some paintings that were vibrant and alive. It was time for Leona Brueger to get out and really live, away from her palatial cocoon in the Hollywood Hills. She might finally take the risk and buy a vineyard and winery up in Napa Valley.

Raleigh L. Dibble was in his third-floor apartment in east Hollywood, getting ready for the part-time job he was doing that evening on the only day off from his regular work. It paid chump change, but it helped with the rent and the car payment on his nine-year-old Toyota Corolla, which needed tires and a tune-up. He stood before the mirror and adjusted his black bow tie, a real one, not one of those crappy clip-ons that everyone wore nowadays. He fastened the black cummerbund over his starched dress shirt and slipped into his tuxedo jacket for a big dinner party in the Hollywood Hills celebrating the release of a third-rate movie by some hack he had never heard of.

All Raleigh knew about the homeowner tonight was that the guy was a junior partner in a Century City law firm who needed an experienced man like Raleigh to augment his hired caterers and make sure that things ran smoothly. Raleigh’s past life as the owner of a West Los Angeles catering business had qualified him for these quasi-butler jobs where nouveaus could pretend they knew their ass from corned beef. Raleigh had met a lot of wealthy people and earned a good reputation, which brought him a small but steady income and had kept him from drinking the Kool-Aid after his business had gone belly-up.

He thought he didn’t look too bad in the tux. Mother Nature, the pitiless cunt, had put macaroni-and-cheese handles around his middle, and it was getting scary. At only five foot seven he wasn’t tall enough to carry the blubber overload. Though he didn’t have much hair left, what he had was nutmeg brown with the help of Grecian Formula. And his jawline was holding up, but only because the extra fat had puffed his cheeks like a goddamn woodchuck. Now he had a double chin — no, make it a triple. If he could ever earn enough money, he hoped to get a quarter of his body siphoned into the garbage can by one of the zillion cosmetic surgeons plying their trade on the west side of Los Angeles. Then maybe a hair transplant and even an eye lift to complete the overhaul, because his eyes, the color of faded denim, were shrinking from the encroachment of the upper lids. Enough money could rectify all of that.

Before he left the apartment for that night’s gig, he figured he’d better call Julius Hampton, his full-time boss for the past six months. The old man had just turned eighty-nine years of age when he’d hired Raleigh, who was thirty-one years younger almost to the day. Raleigh had been hired the month after Barack Obama took office, and it was an okay job being a live-in butler/chef and all-around caretaker six days a week for the old coot. He was being paid by a downtown lawyer who administered the Hampton trust fund, but the lawyer was a tight ass who acted like it was his money, and Raleigh had had to practically beg for a wage increase in early summer.

Julius Hampton had been an indefatigable and flamboyant cruiser of Santa Monica Boulevard in his day, but he’d never made any kind of pass at Raleigh even before learning that his new employee was straight. Raleigh figured that gay or straight, it wouldn’t matter to the old man anyway, since Raleigh was no George Clooney, and the geezer was through with sex. Julius Hampton was left only with fantasies stoked by their weekly visits to west Hollywood gay bars, more out of nostalgia than anything else.

This boss had been a longtime friend of a lot of other rich old men on the west side, not all of them gay by any means. Raleigh had driven Julius Hampton to many dinner parties where Raleigh would hang around the kitchen with the other help until the party was over or his boss got tired. On nights when the old man’s phlebitis was bothering him, Raleigh would bring the collapsible wheelchair from the car and wheel him out to the old Cadillac sedan that his boss loved and Raleigh hated. Raleigh figured that in his day, Julius Hampton probably had a lot of boy sex in that Cadillac, back when his plumbing still worked. Maybe sitting on those beat-up leather seats brought him delicious memories. In any case, his boss had dismissed the suggestion every time Raleigh urged him to junk the Cadillac and buy a new car.

Raleigh L. Dibble had been in the catering business almost continually since his high school days in San Pedro, the third child and only son of a longshoreman and a hairdresser. As a young man he’d begun concentrating on using good diction while he was on a job, any job. He’d read a self-improvement book stressing that good diction could trump a poor education, and Raleigh had never gone to college. All he’d ever known was working for inadequate wages in food service until he went into business as a working partner with Nellie Foster of Culver City, who made the best hors d’oeuvres and gave the best blow jobs he’d ever known. They’d done pretty well in the catering business when times were good, working out of a storefront on Pico Boulevard. But they’d gotten into some “diffi-culties,” as he always described his fall from grace.

Raleigh had been forced by circumstance to write several NSF checks, and after that was straightened out, the IRS got on them like a swarm of leeches, sucking their blood and tormenting them for over a year until a criminal case for fraud and tax evasion was filed in federal court. Raleigh had done the manly thing at that time and taken the bullet for both himself and Nellie, claiming to authorities that she knew nothing about the “edgy paperwork” that had helped to keep them afloat temporarily.

He’d been sentenced to one year in prison to be served at the Federal Correctional Complex in Lompoc, California, and the night before he had to report to federal marshals, Nellie gave him a tearful good-bye and thanked him for saving her ass. She promised to write and to visit him often. But she’d seldom written and never visited, and she married a house painter two months after Raleigh was behind bars. And he didn’t even get a farewell blow job.

Raleigh had served eight months of his sentence, gotten paroled, rented a cheap apartment in a risky gang neighborhood in east Hollywood, and lived by hiring out as a waiter to various caterers he’d known when he was in the business. Then he’d stumbled into the position with Julius Hampton as what the old man called his “gentleman’s gentleman.” Julius had seen too many English movies, Raleigh figured, but he made sure his diction was always up to par when he was in his boss’s presence.

The dinner party in the Hollywood Hills that night turned out to be disastrous because the lawyer homeowner had hired a Mexican caterer to serve what was supposed to be Asian fusion. As far as Raleigh was concerned, there was nothing more dangerous than a Mexican with a saltshaker, and everything tasted of sea salt. Raleigh played his role to the hilt, but Stephen Fry as Jeeves the butler couldn’t have saved this one. His feet and knees were killing him when the night finally ended and he could get home to bed.

The next morning Raleigh was up early and on his way to pick up Julius Hampton to take him to Cedars-Sinai for a checkup with his cardiologist. After that, they went back to the Hampton house, where the old man had his afternoon nap, and he was raring to go again when he woke up and remembered that it was the night for his weekly lobster dinner at the Palm. Raleigh had never been crazy about lobster but he could have a rib eye and a couple of Jack Daniel’s to get him through the rest of the evening at one of the west Hollywood gay bars that the old man still liked to frequent at least one night a week.

By the time they’d finished dining and arrived at the gay bar, it was filling up with other customers also arriving after dinner, and they were lucky to get a small table. The sweating waiters couldn’t deliver drinks to the customers fast enough. Raleigh and his elderly boss were sipping martinis close enough to the three-deep bar patrons for the old letch to gawk at all the muscular buns in tight pants, some of which Raleigh figured were butt-pad inserts. Many of the younger hustlers wore tight Ralph Lauren jerseys with jeans or shorts, and the old boy gazed at them with melancholy. Raleigh was certain that their crotch mounds were from stuffing socks in their Calvins. He figured the youthful hustlers must buy socks by the gross at Costco.

Julius Hampton recognized Nigel Wickland before the Beverly Hills art dealer recognized him. “Nigel!” he said as the art dealer was passing their table on his way back from the restroom.

At first Raleigh thought that Nigel Wickland was about sixty years old, but up close, he looked more like sixty-five. He was tall and fashionably thin, with a prominent chin, heavy dark eyebrows, and a full head of hair so white that it looked mauve under the mood lighting. He wore a tailor-made, double-breasted navy blazer, a pale blue Oxford cotton shirt, and an honest-to-god blue ascot impeccably folded against his throat. Raleigh wondered if the blazer was Hugo Boss or maybe Valentino, or was it a Men’s Wear-house copy? And how about the shoes? Were they O.J. Simpson Bruno Maglis or knockoffs? Nigel Wickland wore his clothes so well that you couldn’t tell if they were the real things.

Then Raleigh’s attention was drawn to the man’s exquisite hands. The fingers were long and tapered, the nails beautifully manicured, and there were no prominent veins to be seen, which there should have been on a man his age. Raleigh wondered if guys even had cosmetic surgeons do their hands around here, and if so, whether they called it a hand job.

The art dealer stroked his chin and seemed nonplussed for a moment, probably thinking that Julius was just another dotty old queen who frequented the west Hollywood clubs, until the octogenarian said, “It’s me, Julius Hampton. Remember? We played bridge at the Bruegers’ a couple of times before Sammy passed away.”

“Julius!” Nigel Wickland said. “Of course I remember. How are you?”

As they shook hands, Julius Hampton said, “Still upright, more or less, with the help of my man here. I’d like you to meet Raleigh Dibble. I don’t know what I’d do without him. Sit down and join us.”

The art dealer extended his graceful hand to Raleigh and said, “Nigel Wickland. Pleased to meet you.”

“Same here, Mr. Wickland,” Raleigh said.

“Nigel, please,” the art dealer said to him. “And may I call you Raleigh?”

“Of course,” Raleigh said.

Raleigh wondered if the toffee-nosed accent was legit or something the art dealer affected for L.A.’s west-side nouveau. Raleigh had spent nearly six months bumming around Europe as a young man and had lived in London for a summer, waiting tables at a bistro. He’d even considered affecting an Oxbridge accent like Nigel Wickland’s when he’d been in the catering business but decided that it could backfire if his customers found him out. They liked their phonies to be less obvious phonies around these parts.

“What’ll you have?” Julius Hampton said to the art dealer, and Raleigh noticed that the old man’s bony hands were trembling most of the time. It was hard for him to hold a martini glass anymore without spilling it.

Nigel Wickland ordered a banana daiquiri and chatted with Julius Hampton about the bargains now available at the Wickland Gallery. Raleigh Dibble figured he knew the Nigel Wickland type well enough. The west side of L.A. was full of them. Given the art dealer’s obvious ego, the gallery would of course bear his name. And even though a man as old as Julius Hampton would be an unlikely prospect for a sale, Nigel Wickland seemed compelled to chat him up about the treasures to be had just a few blocks away on Wilshire Boulevard. Raleigh figured that the art dealer was constantly chumming the waters in case any of Julius Hampton’s less grizzled friends or neighbors was ever tempted to take the bait.

“The bloody recession is forcing people to sell for indecently low prices,” Nigel told them, and signaled to the waiter for another round when his glass was still half full.

Boozer, Raleigh thought, but then reminded himself that in the gay bars everyone seemed to drink more to bolster their courage for encounters that were often risky.

It was then that Nigel Wickland said, “Have you been to the Brueger house since Sammy passed? I sometimes wonder how Leona is really holding up.”

Old Julius Hampton cackled and said, “The merriest of widows is dear Leona. I understand she sometimes dates a filmaker named Rudy Ressler when he’s not molesting children at UCLA, where he lectures at the film school. He’s one of those people who make cheap indie films that probably go straight to DVD.”

Raleigh had been impressed many times by his employer’s knowledge of the movie business as well as any other business that was peculiarly relevant to Angelenos. Like his father before him, Julius Hampton had made his fortune as a real-estate developer, and the Hampton brokers bought and sold to real Hollywood names on a regular basis, not to second-raters like Rudy Ressler. As Julius Hampton and Nigel Wickland chatted about people they knew in common, Raleigh excused himself and went the restroom.

While Raleigh was gone, Nigel Wickland said, “Nice chap. Seems competent.”

“Very,” Julius Hampton said, with just enough drink in him to gossip. “His catering business failed some time ago and he’s eking out a living now. He’s basically very honest but he got in some tax trouble with Uncle Sam back then. Had to spend some time locked up in federal prison. I have a PI do a background on everyone I hire. I’ve never questioned Raleigh about his past even though I know a lot about it. I can tell you that he cooks like Julia Child.”