City of War (7 page)

As we rode down the hill into the relative civilization of the 90210, the radio in the Rolls was on. Steve Hartman and Petros Papadakis—the Jimmy Neutron and Jack E. Leonard of Los Angeles sports talk—were, as usual, making intelligent, insightful points. Unfortunately, they were doing it at the same time. Hartman and Papadakis are the two heavyweights in town and have separate shows, mostly because you can’t shoehorn that much IQ, ego and certitude into one studio. But management apparently thinks it’s good radio to jam them together every once in a while, step back and watch the ignition. I wonder if they’ll feel the same way the day their two biggest stars go fists, teeth and key man policies over the desk at each other. In the meantime, though, while the bosses smile, the audience listens…and waits.

When I couldn’t decipher what they were shouting about, I turned it off. Kim was quiet, which elevated her another
notch in my book. People who have to fill every silence with conversation make my ass tired, so it was nice to just ride along with my own thoughts.

I kept turning her story over in my head, but it didn’t quite mesh. Like what was the real reason she hadn’t wanted to call the cops last night? Naked or not, most people’s reaction is to scream for a police officer if a dog is barking three blocks over, let alone if they’ve just escaped a kidnapping.

I was pretty sure that if her car was eventually found, the clothes she’d been wearing would be in it. But why take the car at all if you were just going to dump her in the drink? Why chance getting picked up in a vehicle that isn’t yours? Unless somebody wanted to go through it first, thoroughly.

Kim said she hadn’t been raped, and after her reaction in bed, I believed her. Women who’ve been sexually abused aren’t usually interested in making love a couple of hours later. But bad guys holding a woman they’re going to kill anyway generally aren’t paragons of restraint. Usually only pros have that kind of self-control. Or men who’ve been sent to do a job by someone they deeply fear.

And why did Tino get out of the van? You have to figure if you’ve botched an abduction, you’d want to get as far away as possible as fast as possible. Why let half of the drivers on the 405 get a look at you?

I concluded she was holding something back. Maybe without even knowing it—but that’s not what my gut said.

I turned off Santa Monica into Century City and honked my horn as we passed my law firm’s offices. Miguel, the parking valet, saw my Rolls, gave a big grin and waved. Where else but L.A. can you valet park to visit your lawyer.

“Somebody else you’ve helped?”

I smiled. “Miguel does just fine on his own. He and his cousin, Jorge, have the Century City valet parking and car washing concession. They probably make more than half the people working in the offices. My attorney did the negotiations for them. No charge, providing he got free valet service and clean cars for life. That’s his building.”

Jake Praxis has been my attorney and friend for a while now. He started life as a navy aviator, but that ended during a night carrier landing when a cable snapped and flipped his F-14 into the South China Sea. When they fished him out, he had a broken back, and his flying days were over. And in Jake’s words, “Once you’ve flown a shit-hot jet, you can’t bear watching somebody else doing it.”

So with that career plan gone, he tried law school and discovered it was a lot like being a pilot. You get to call the shots, and if your passengers don’t like it, they can get the fuck off your plane.

And if there are two things Jake’s good at, it’s calling the shots and firing clients who try to tell him how to do his job. You’ve got to respect that. He’s the best, and if you don’t want to listen, get yourself another lawyer. According to the
L.A. Times
, he represents eight of the top ten box office stars, five of the biggest earners in sports and all of the studio heads. Not bad for a ranch rat from East Jesus, New Mexico.

Jake represents so many Hollywood players that he sometimes finds himself on both sides of a negotiation. Anywhere else, that would be a conflict of interest, and one of the parties would have to get another lawyer. But if Jake represents you, you sure as hell don’t want some Number Two going up against him. So when it happens, everybody signs conflict waivers, and Jake goes into a room and makes the deal with himself. He says he likes representing both sides. It’s easier to sort out the overreaching.

He’s also the first call for reporters when something big breaks in show business or sports. But except for his pet environmental causes, you can’t drag a quote out of him. Talking to the press is not how you end up owning a Century City high-rise and homes from Sun Valley to Sorrento. Neither does having your face plastered across television screens.

“Why would I do that?” he asks. “To get more fuckin’ pain-in-the-ass clients?”

So, unless you’re an insider, you wouldn’t recognize him—even in his courtside seats at Lakers games.

“That was Jake Praxis’s building, wasn’t it?” said Kim a block and a half later. “Is he your attorney?”

I nodded.

“No shit.”

“You know him?”

“Hardly. But he’s on the board of the Getty, and I shook his hand once at a cocktail party. He had an Italian actress on his arm who could have stood next to a Ferrari and nobody would have noticed the car.”

“Only one?”

Kim grinned. “I’ve heard he’s quite the man. How’d you meet him?”

“Did a favor for one of his clients.”

“Back to the favors. You must be quite the fucking guy to know. What was it? Another ‘watcher’ operation?”

I smiled. “I wish it’d been that easy. The client is a big action star who coincidentally happens to live up the street from me. The guy had a bad case of couldn’t-keep-it-in-his-pants and liked living on the edge. Jake warned him more than once about fooling around with women he didn’t know, but like a lot of people—especially actors—when his boxers bowed, his brain went out for a smoke.

“Then he got himself paparazzied in a Brentwood bar licking the face of a Colombian drug lord’s seventeen-year-old daughter who was in town visiting colleges. The photographer was a whole lot smarter than the actor. He followed the happy couple to a poolside suite at the Four Seasons and got more shots of them playing lap trampoline in a hot Jacuzzi.”

Kim whistled. “Colombians don’t send warnings. They just kill everything that breathes, including your goldfish.”

“Actually, when it comes to their daughters, they like to torture the goldfish first.”

“Seventeen-year-old
chocho
. At least it was a piece of ass the guy was going to remember.”

“Yep, but not in old age. The actor got my name from a friend, and by the time he called, he was nearly hysterical,
holed up and surrounded by more security than an Israeli ambassador. He swore up and down the girl told him she was twenty-three and an illegal from Guatemala. I believed him, but so what? Guys who use the phrase ‘Swiss bank’ in the same sentence as ‘remote landing strip’ don’t much care about the pure of heart. I wanted to tell the schmuck he didn’t need me, he needed a priest.

“But the guy was crying so hard I felt sorry for him. He was supposed to start a picture in a month, but he was too terrified to leave the house. Eventually, I said I’d make a couple of calls—mostly so I could just get the hell out of there.”

“You’re not going to tell me the actor’s name, are you?”

“Nope.”

“That’s okay. There’s a big star who’s got such an attitude that I’m just going to pretend it’s him. Go ahead.”

“I got in touch with a friend in the DEA who told me this particular bad guy, Wilson Garza, liked to straighten out personal problems by strapping offenders to a drum of gasoline and shooting it with a grenade. Probably fitting for an actor who couldn’t keep his dick under control, but tough on the studio that was paying him thirty mil. But my DEA guy also told me that Garza was in the middle of a power struggle he was probably going to lose. It might take six months or so, but sooner or later, he was going to be taking a MAC-10 nap.”

“So the actor just had to wait him out.”

“Yeah, but the studio wouldn’t. If he didn’t show up for work, they’d recast and sue for damages. So I got myself invited down to Medellín to meet with Garza.”

“How?”

“The DEA guy called him.”

“They can do that?” She sounded incredulous.

“It isn’t like TV. These guys all live in the same world. They know each other. They have each other’s private numbers. It’s business, even with the Colombians.

“I’d already determined Garza was a big movie fan, so
while he was showing me around his hacienda, I told him that the wayward and now-penitent actor had always wanted to shoot a picture in Colombia but didn’t have the right contacts. And just like the old saying—everybody’s got two businesses, their own and show business—Garza got a Hollywood erection. He even had a story he ‘just knew’ would be a worldwide sensation.”

“Let me guess. The Wilson Garza Story.”

I nodded. “And who better to play Garza than the real deal. So the actor hired a Spanish-speaking screenwriter, Carlos Goldstein, who, in return for twice his usual fee, agreed to log a lot of overseas phone hours with Señor Garza, talking character arc, motivation and act breaks.

“Motion picture development makes cancer research look fast, and if you’ve got a slow writer, it’s like waiting for the Academy to honor Reagan. And just about the time Garza started wondering if he’d been had, somebody put an RPG up the ass of his Escalade. Problem solved.”

Kim was laughing out loud. “I know you don’t take money, but this guy owes you big time.”

“Well, sometimes, if the situation warrants, I come up with something that reinforces a lesson or has a positive impact somewhere. In the Garza matter, I told the actor I would appreciate his taking a hundred thousand of his tax-deductible dollars and giving them to Sister Vonetta, the head of St. Regis Catholic School in South Central L.A.

“A product of hood herself, Sister V. is one of my all-time favorite people. Imposing in every way—physically, spiritually and vocally. And over the objections of the archdiocese—and maybe even the Vatican—through sheer force of will, intimidation and a lot of shouting, she has single-handedly created the most rigorous learning institution in the city.

“South Central is as rough a place as there is, but once you enter the gates of St. Regis, you wear a uniform, you don’t speak street, you have to buy all of your own materials and the discipline is unforgiving. Parents sleep in line for a week to apply.”

“Sounds like she should be on Oprah.”

“Wouldn’t work. Oprah wouldn’t get a chance to talk.”

“And Jake Praxis was grateful.”

“Loved the whole thing—especially the hundred grand to Sister V., which he told the star, was about ten times too light considering his stupidity. So Jake and I became friends, and every now and then, he calls me when he has a delicate situation. Most of the time I give him some advice and move on, but sometimes something comes along that’s intriguing, and I get involved.”

“So he’s not really your lawyer, he’s more like a colleague.”

“We do things for each other. He’s on the board of my foundation too.”

“That would be the Black Foundation?”

“Catchy name, don’t you think?”

Kim was looking at me strangely. Finally, she said, “Just who in the fuck are you?”

6

A Torn ACL and Russian Women

I eased the Rolls off Olympic and into Ralphs underground parking garage. We’d driven by the outside lot upstairs, and it had been packed, but down here, there were only three cars, all grouped near the elevator. Kim directed me to where she’d parked the night of the kidnapping. I pulled in a few spaces beyond, and we both got out.

“What are you expecting to find?” she asked.

I stood in Kim’s parking space. “You were here, and the van was behind you, facing the building.”

“Yes.”

I pointed to the ground, and Kim saw the four broken fingernails lying on the pavement. She took an involuntary step backward, then came forward and bent over them. “My God, it really did happen.”

With Kim trailing me, I wandered off in the direction the van would probably have come from. In the farthest corner of the garage, I found three unfiltered cigarette butts that had burned themselves out rather than being stepped on. I bent down and picked one up. The blue lettering was intact—Gauloises.

“What’s that?” asked Kim.

“Confirmation of Tino’s bad taste.” I threw the butt back down and walked a few steps further. I found what I expected. The distinctive ash from a cigar. I pointed to the parking space between the two ash piles and gestured with my hands. “Tino backed the van in here, then he and Dante waited until the woman sent you down. I thought you said you were only gone ten or fifteen minutes. Tino got through three cigarettes.”

“Maybe he was nervous,” she shot back. Then she reconsidered. “It could have been a little longer. I did browse the deli section for a while. So they were following me.”

“All the way from work, I expect.”

“And I made it easy by going into a deserted garage. Some price to pay for a little shade.”

“They were probably going to take you from home, but when you pulled in here, they improvised.” I made a full circuit of the garage. In the corner near the elevator was a surveillance camera mounted in the ceiling. If it had the right lens, it could see the entire garage, but someone had spray-painted its eye with black enamel.

“Let’s go upstairs,” I said.

When we entered the store, Kim took hold of my arm. I looked down at her, and she shivered. “It gives me the creeps being back in here.”

We walked over to the manager’s desk at the front of the store. It sat up on a platform and was being manned by a handsome young guy wearing a name tag that read Arkadios. As we approached, I saw him look up and try to figure out if I was a Laker. It’s a look I’m familiar with.

“Excuse me, sir,” I said. “Yesterday my wife parked her car downstairs while she was shopping, and it got scratched. I noticed you have a surveillance camera down there, and I was wondering if maybe there’s a tape I could look at.”