Hot Shot (12 page)

“Wow,” I said, for lack of anything better.

Lazarnick went over to the fridge and popped another Dew. “You're writing a book about Felina, huh?”

“I was writing it
with
Felina. Before she died.”

“Whereja get my name? Those assholes at
Headline Journal?
” He didn't wait for an answer. “More fuckwads. I gave them first rights of refusal. First rights and a damned fair price.”

“First rights to what?”

“The nude shots, dumbshit. What else?”

Nude shots?

“I didn't hear back from 'em for almost twenty-four hours. They dicked me around so long that I finally passed. I knew there'd be other offers. Like you.” He grinned. “And if you don't want 'em, I got plenty of sources. I'll sell 'em in England if I have to.”

“How long have you had these nude shots of Felina?”

“Fifteen, twenty years.”

“How'd you get them?” I tried to keep my voice casual.

He took a gulp of Dew. “I was freelancing, shooting concerts at the Whisky and the Troubadour. I met up with this guy who ran a couple of titty rags.”

“Like
Playhouse
and
Hustler?
”

“Nah. These were newsprint. Like
Screw.
He sold 'em in vending machines on Hollywood Boulevard. Anyway, he told me I could pick up some money doing girlie shots. There were a million of 'em just like Felina who hung around the clubs, hoping to score with a musician or whatever. And they all needed money.”

I pulled out my tape recorder. “Mind if I turn this on?”

“Put it away. I'm not giving you any interview.”

“Come on, Leo—”

“Hey, don't try to screw the pooch. I thought you were here to buy some pictures. You're not interested, there's the door.”

“Can I see the pictures?”

He grinned. “Maybe.”

“Why didn't you sell them during the Vernon Ash trial?”

“Couldn't get enough money.”

“Isn't some money better than none?”

“Hey, it was a gamble. But I'm a good gambler.” Green soda pop dribbled down his chins like antifreeze. “And now Jack Danziger's gonna be the payoff. You tell him that I'll give him a good deal, but that they ain't gonna be cheap. And tell him not to dick me around. Remember, I don't need the money, so if you're not serious,
adios.
”

I followed him back down the dingy hallway to the back of the house. Lazarnick led me past a darkroom with a red light-bulb over the doorjamb and stopped in front of a door locked with a double dead bolt. He took a key ring out of his pocket.

The room was so bright I blinked. White walls and overhead fluorescent fixtures made it feel like a laboratory, or an operating theater. All around the perimeter of the room were more file cabinets, each with laser-printed labels stuck neatly to the fronts of the drawers. Two light tables were covered with contact sheets and eyepieces. A paper shredder was balanced on a forty-gallon trash drum filled with confetti, next to a fax machine. There weren't any personal items anywhere. If Leo Lazarnick had an inner life, I still hadn't seen it. Leo Lazarnick was a picture-taking machine, the way a shark was an eating machine.

“Welcome to the Starship Enterprise,” he said.

I walked around, looking at the file cabinets. One of them—a big one—was labeled
NUDES
.

“You still do nude shots, Leo?”

“Hell, no. There's no money in that anymore, unless it's someone famous. Video and the Internet killed that market. But I've still got all my originals. I keep everything. Ev-ree-thing.”

“Why?”

“Jesus, you are stupid, aren't you?” He sighed. “One day some dumbass shot a picture of O.J. Simpson. Turned out that the Juice was wearing a certain pair of shoes, and bam! Welcome to a new tax bracket.”

He used the key ring on a file cabinet drawer labeled
NUDES
:
K
–
M
, selected a manila envelope—so old its edges were foxed and furred—and took out a stack of black-and-whites.

“Where'd you take these?”

“Christ, I dunno. Probably the backyard of my old place on Bronson.” Lazarnick's fat thumb riffled through the stack, making a quick count.

His cell phone went off again. He handed me the stack of photos. “Bet that's Brad changed his mind. Here, take a look. Braddy? Thought that was you.…”

I flipped through the stack of five-by-sevens.

It was Felina, all right. Black and white and topless to boot. The face looked about sixteen; the body, twenty-five. There were no dates on the back, but from the hairstyles and the few clothes she had on, I guessed they were fifteen to twenty years old. Some were indoors, some were taken under a tree, but Felina wasn't wearing a blouse in any of them. The focus wasn't sharp and the lighting was downright terrible, but the guys who thumbed quarters into the nudie racks on Hollywood Boulevard weren't looking for beaver shots of Ansel Adams quality.

The “money shot” was the last one. Felina, reclining in a chaise longue. She was totally nude, legs spread. Her hair was a-tousle and her tongue poked out of her mouth awkwardly.

I tried to figure out what was so profoundly disturbing about it. It wasn't the breasts or the spread legs. It was the very amateureness: the sight of a teenage girl forced into a ridiculous parody of a centerfold. Not yet twenty, and already a commodity. She hadn't mastered the cheesecake tease yet.

It felt like a mug shot.

This was interesting stuff, but ultimately meaningless. If Lazarnick wouldn't give me an interview, there was virtually nothing I could use for the book, except for a paragraph or two about her days at the Sunset Strip rock clubs.

I shoved the glossies back in their envelope. They went halfway in and then caught on something: a piece of paper.

“Well, if you don't want it after all, why the fuck are you bothering me, Brad? Tell that boss of yours this little dick-around is gonna cost him next time I get something he really wants.…”

Lazarnick's fax beeped, and a piece of paper began sliding out. He walked over to the fax, mumbling into the phone the whole way.

I pulled out what was in the envelope.

It was an old photocopy that had faded to a dingy gray. At the top was typed the words
MODEL RELEASE
. Below was some boilerplate releasing all rights, present and future, to Leonard H. Lazarnick.

At the bottom was a signature: Eduardo Lopez.

Eduardo?

Lazarnick was scanning his fax, yelling into the phone. “That's it! I'm telling you for the last time. Take it or leave it.”

I took it.

8

O
N THE WAY BACK
to the hotel, I stopped at Kiri-Dog for lunch. I could have ordered Chateaubriand from room service and charged it to Jack Danziger, but a burrito sounded better. My palate was no more sophisticated than the rest of me. Besides, I needed to think, and I wanted comfort food.

Kiri-Dog was a weatherbeaten lunch stand on a nasty stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard. The clientele was mostly teenage hustlers and runaways, but I was addicted to their Kosher Burrito: hot dogs, scrambled eggs, and pastrami thrown together in a tortilla and glued together with neon-orange grease. God only knew where the name Kosher Burrito came from—it was about as rabbinically approved as bacon with ranch dressing—but I'd been addicted to it for years.

I got a Kosher Deluxe and an order of O-rings, sat down at a picnic table overlooking a car wash and a film-developing lab, and pulled the piece of paper out of my pocket.

There it was, in clear, unmistakable cursive: Eduardo Lopez.

Felina's father?

It was possible. After all, the Felina in Lazarnick's photos could have been only sixteen or seventeen. The body was centerfold material, but the face was Pedophile City.

Queasiness set in, and it had nothing to do with the burrito. What kind of father would let his teenage daughter be photographed topless?

At the next table a gaggle of underage throwaways and prostitutes was splitting a single order of fries. One girl squirted plastic packets of ketchup into a cup of water, making tomato soup. She wore a pair of Daisy Dukes and a halter top pulled down to expose bee-bite boobs. I put her at fourteen.

Who was I kidding? This was
Hollywood.
Hell, if a movie role was at stake, some parents would send their daughters over to the casting director's house, wearing a red ribbon and a smile.

Maybe Eduardo Lopez was the worst kind of scum—maybe even a child molester himself. That would explain the nights at the Troubadour, the drugs, the prostitution. Weren't most hookers abused as kids, or was that just an urban myth?

I took another bite of burrito and licked up the grease that ran down my hand. It still didn't fit. Somewhere I had gotten the idea that the Lopezes were Old Country Catholics. I didn't even know if Lopez spoke English.

Perhaps he had signed it without being able to read it. Perhaps Felina hadn't told him the nature of the pictures.

Perhaps she hadn't known what they were going to be herself.

*   *   *

Pulling my old Buick into the porte cochere of the Beverly Hillshire, I could feel my stomach clench. Once I could have put away a Kosher Burrito and an order of rings and be ready for an ice-cream sandwich. Now all I wanted for dessert was Maalox.

I bought a small bottle of the stuff at extortionist hotel prices and was leaving the gift shop when someone slugged me with a purse.

“You
schmuck!
”

I whirled. This time Sloan's purse caught me in the breadbasket and pitched me into a display of duty-free Fantabulous Fakes Fragrances, knocking vials of “Gorgio” and “Channel No. 5” to the carpet.

“I've been waiting for you for two hours in that goddamn lobby!”

“Sloan,” I hissed, “can we discuss this somewhere private? Like my room?”

She stalked out of the gift shop and headed for the elevators. I picked up my Maalox and trotted after her. If she'd had a tail, it would have been switching. She wasn't wearing any makeup, and her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. Without the makeup, her resemblance to Felina was almost nil.

The elevator was empty, thank God. I jabbed a button and a voice announced “Thirty-four” in English, French, and Japanese.

“You mind telling me what this is about?”

Sloan sagged against the back wall of the elevator. “I got a call. On my unlisted home phone.”

The elevator went cold for a second.

“What kind of call?” I said slowly.

“Someone who knew I had talked to you.”

“Someone threatened you?”

“Yes. No. Not threatened. But he knew about us meeting at the gym. He even knew what I had to drink.”

“… Okay. This is not good. But it's not necessarily something to worry—”

“Easy for you to say! You're not the one getting mysterious phone calls!”

I clammed up until we got to my room.

*   *   *

Sloan helped herself to a five-dollar fruit drink from the minibar and plopped down on the sofa.

“Make yourself at home,” I said.

“Thanks.”

So much for irony. “Tell me about this call.”

“I was at home a couple of hours ago, about to take a shower. The phone rings, and this voice goes, ‘How was your lunch?' I go, ‘What lunch?' and he goes, ‘Your lunch at Smooth Moo. You didn't even finish your shake.'

“Well, I go, ‘Who is this?' Right then, I reach down and pick up my cat, 'cause I'm scared. And he laughs again and goes, ‘Just a friend. By the way, that's a mighty pretty cat you've got there. Pretty little pussycat.' And he hangs up.”

“Wait. He could see you?”

“The front drapes were open, just a little bit. But I'm on the third floor. He would've had to have binoculars, or a telescope.”

Sloan swigged more guava juice and hugged herself, rocking back and forth gently. The story was far-fetched. A little too elaborate. If it wasn't for the call I had gotten, I wouldn't have believed it. But I had. And I did.

“Sloan … I got one of those calls, too. He didn't say anything openly threatening, but it felt pretty menacing anyway. And I couldn't make out the voice either.”

“Oh, I
know
who it was,” Sloan said. “That's why I'm scared.”

“Who?”

“Brooks Levin.”

“I— Are you sure?”

She nodded.

“Holy…”

“You got that right,” she said, and popped another bottle of juice.

Hollywood is a forgiving place. You can cheat on your wife, neglect your children, shoot heroin for twenty years, have an orgy with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and still make a comeback—as long as you're willing to share the details in front of God and Oprah. Even by today's standards, though, there are still some forms of trouble—child molestation, multiple murder—that might just kill a career dead-bang.

That's why Brooks Levin was on the auto-dialer of every publicist and agent in town, right next to Police, Fire, and Spago.

Levin referred to himself as a security consultant, but soldier of fortune was more accurate. Drop a dime to Levin and your troubles would go away. Levin assembled teams of publicists, defense lawyers, potential witnesses, whatever it took. He worked for celebrities, defending them against the tabloids, and then turned around and defended the tabloids against celebrity suits. On top of everything, he refused all interviews, which only added to his myth as a shadow kingpin of Hollywood.

Brooks Levin was always on the same side: the side of whoever got there first with the money.

Sloan stared at me with a look somewhere between wonder and dread. “What the fuck are you working on here?”

I looked out the window, down at the shoppers jaywalking across Rodeo Drive. Somebody didn't want her talking to me. Somebody didn't want this book written. Somebody who was wealthy or powerful enough to hire Brooks Levin.