The Ticket Out (3 page)

I
WOKE UP
the next day feeling better than I'd felt in ages. Movies had been getting to me; I didn't realize how badly until I was given a break. No reviews for a while felt like a giant relief.

I threw off the covers and bounced out of bed. The bed was a foldaway couch—the only piece of furniture on the mansion's second floor. I'd stayed there overnight because part of my caretaking duty was to sleep upstairs for parties and check for damage after. I did a fast tour of the main floor. Everything looked good; no one had stolen the vintage fixtures or gouged the woodwork.

I headed to the pool house to fix coffee, clean up, and plan the day. Mark would have to reassign all my screenings. I'd call him first.

I walked out the kitchen door and looked across the backyard. The screen door to the pool house was standing wide open.

The pool house was a miniature copy of the mansion—a stucco box with striped awnings and a tile roof, shaded by old avocado trees. I didn't always lock my door because I didn't think I needed to. The mansion sat on two acres on a quiet street that dead-ended at a steep hill. There were no neighbors to the north or west, and the backyard was enclosed by a ten-foot wall. The pool house sat at the back of the property. It was only accessible from the mansion or the driveway gates, and I kept both locked and alarmed unless the mansion was being used.

I walked around to the pool house. The inside door was open, too. I walked into the front room.

Someone had turned all the lights on, and the radio was playing soft rock. A canvas duffel bag drooped off the daybed. Jeans, a T-shirt, and cotton underpants lay in a pile on the floor. A pair of platform sandals stood next to the pile.

My throat went dry. I crossed to the bathroom, took a deep breath, and looked inside.

It was the blond.

She was naked and stretched faceup in the bathtub. Her head was resting on the back ledge. Her hair was dark where the water had soaked up to her ears. Her eyes were almost shut; a green half-moon showed under one lid, white showed under the other. Her skin had a healthy flush, an effect produced by condensation and the sun on pink porcelain. The bathwater was pink, too, from the porcelain, and diffused blood. Her hands floated palms down on the surface.

I stood in the doorway, shocked to the absolute core. I knew I was seeing what I was seeing but no action or thought would come to me.

I might have stood there forever if my legs hadn't given out. I started to fall. I grabbed the door frame to keep myself up and felt suddenly sick. I staggered forward and threw up in the sink.

I ran cold water and splashed it over my face and neck. When I felt ready, I turned around and looked again.

There were neat vertical lines carved up both her wrists. A knife was sitting at the bottom of the tub. I recognized the handle; it had come from my kitchen drawer.

I saw a blood smear on the tiles beside her ear.

I bent to see closer.

She had a big lump high on her head. Red drops oozed from an abrasion on the lump. The moisture had stopped the blood from drying.

My mind was beginning to work again. She did not do the lump herself. I walked out of the bathroom and out to the backyard. I was moving like a zombie.

I looked around.

The back of the mansion, the swimming pool, the patio, the lounge furniture, the gardens, the garage: everything looked normal. Except the ivy. The wall around the yard was covered with thick old ivy. The ivy by the pool house had been torn away in a strip all the way to the top. The vines were sagging loose.

I took hold of an attached vine, climbed the wall, and looked over. A vacant lot adjoined the backyard. It was packed dirt and covered with scrubby bushes. I looked hard but I couldn't see footprints or anything.

I wedged my hand under a vine and hung there to think.

I was having the stupidest, most dangerous idea. It's the shock, I thought. But the idea wouldn't go away. It was a bad idea—the worst possible idea—but it grew in my imagination until it became very, very important.

I stared down at the pool house. I stared for an age, fighting the idea. But it won in the end.

Los Feliz was LAPD territory. The cops hated the
Millennium
at least as much as we hated them. They would never let me in on this story.

Any way I looked at it, I only had one choice: to let myself in without them knowing it.

Could it be done? Could
I
do it?

I had no experience with that kind of journalism. And I'd have to lie to the cops. Did I have the nerve for it? I'd always been a lousy liar, and this would mean lying on an unknown scale for who knew how long. What happened if I got caught? “Obstruction of justice” and “tampering with evidence” were clichés from a thousand crime movies; they had no reality for me. Did they mean jail? Was I prepared for jail?

I shut my eyes.

Of course I wasn't prepared for jail. I didn't know if I could do this at all. But I knew that I had to try. I had to find the guts to lie, playact, stonewall, obstruct, tamper—to do whatever had to be done.

Because
she
was the Hollywood story I was going to write.

***

O
NCE
I'
D
made up my mind, the next part was easy. I gave myself an hour to accomplish everything. One hour would make no difference to her or the cops.

I put on kitchen gloves, dumped out her bag, and hunted around for a wallet. It was in a zippered pocket inside the bag.

I pulled her driver's license out first. Her name was Greta Maria Stenholm. Five feet nine inches, 140 pounds. Green eyes. No corrective lenses needed. Date of birth: August 10, 1970.

I paused over that coincidence: August 10, 1970. Greta Stenholm and I were born on the same date, two years apart. I'd just turned thirty-three; she'd just turned thirty-one.

The address on her license was 7095 Hawthorn Avenue, number 1. Hawthorn was in the center of Hollywood.

I put the license back and went through the rest of her identification. She was carrying expired credit cards from Visa and two department stores. The Visa had a maroon plastic card stuck to the back. I pried the two cards apart. The maroon was a student ID from the academic year 1995—96. Stenholm had been enrolled at the School of Cinema-Television at USC.

SC: one of the best film schools in the country.
The
best, if you wanted to work in the Industry—and she'd gone there.

I turned the wallet upside down and shook it. Loose change and movie stubs fell out. She didn't have any paper money, and the change added up to $1.68. I shuffled through the various stubs. They were dated August 24—Friday, four days ago. She'd spent all day and night seeing movies on Hollywood Boulevard. She'd seen
The Princess Diaries
at the El Capitan,
Rat Race
at the Chinese,
Forever Hollywood
at the American Cinematheque, and a double feature of
A.I. : Artificial Intelligence
and
Jurassic Park III.
Her first show was at 9:30
A.M.;
her last at 9:05
P.M.

I put everything back in the wallet and stuck the wallet back in the zippered pocket. It was time to take notes.

I switched on the computer and opened a new file. I detailed my actions since I'd seen the open screen door. I described the crime scene, indoors and out, and listed the contents of the dead woman's wallet. All that was done in my own shorthand, the kind I used to take notes in the dark: “lites, radio—party clos. on floor—her + knife/tub full—ivy down.” I typed fast and kept making mistakes because of the gloves. I'd fill in details later. Details like the bathroom smelled of lavender oil, not dead body. Someone had poured half my bottle into the bathwater.

I got up and sorted through the rest of her stuff.

A cosmetic kit. A man's wristwatch. A key ring. A checkbook. A stuffed rabbit. A small envelope. A bulging, scuffed-up Filofax held together by an elastic band.

I went back to the keyboard and typed the list. I starred the items that weren't normal for an overnight bag. I noted that the bag itself was Air Force surplus or an imitation. It had faded black wings stenciled on the side.

Her cosmetic kit contained the bare essentials: toothbrush, toothpaste, comb. She'd worn no makeup at the party, I remembered, and no jewelry except the wristwatch.

The key ring was a cheesy souvenir of the Hollywood sign; it held four door keys and two GM car keys. Her checkbook showed an account at the California National Bank. The last balance entered was thirteen dollars, and she'd written five checks since then. I could only assume that they bounced.

The rabbit was a threadbare child's toy. It had ripped seams, a missing ear, and a very strange dress: a crimson velvet gown, trimmed with gold fur that resembled a lion's mane. The dress looked homemade and newer than the rabbit.

I picked up the envelope and tried the flap. It wasn't sealed. Inside I found a three-by-five color Kodak.

It showed a sinewy old man draped facedown over the lap of a brown-haired woman. His left side was to the camera, and he was naked and tan except for white swimsuit lines on his flank. A dark wig and wraparound sunglasses hid his identity. The brunet was facing the camera with one arm raised to spank him. She looked incredibly bored. She sat at the foot of a bed covered with a dinosaur spread. Large posters lined the wall behind her:
Jurassic Park I
and
II, Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, Jurassic Park III.

I said out loud, “Steven Spielberg.”

I slid the picture back in the envelope and picked up the Filofax. Flipping to the address book, I started with the As. I read a few names and stopped, surprised.

I skipped forward to the
Bs
and Cs, the Ls, the Ts—and couldn't believe it. Her book was crammed with big names. It was a
Who's Who
of current Hollywood.

That was too much to type out. I gathered up the Filofax and key ring and ran to the mansion. The downstairs office had an industrial-size copy machine. I only glanced at the chair where I'd last seen her alive. I popped open the Filofax, pulled out a fistful of pages, threw them in the automatic-feed bin, and hit
PRINT.

I checked the clock. I'd promised myself one hour: twenty-six minutes were gone.

I ran to the front door and looked outside. Everyone on the block parked in their garage or their driveway. I saw my car at the end of the street. And I saw a powder-blue Impala at the curb two houses down.

The Impala had expired Kansas plates. The passenger window had been smashed, and the glove compartment hung open and empty. Glass pellets were scattered all over the floor. The trunk lock looked like someone tried to force it: the chrome was nicked and dented. I inserted both GM keys, one, two—fast. The second key worked; the trunk clicked open.

It was full of boxes and loose junk. I found movie reference books and a ton of videocassettes. One box was labelled
MISC
.; another,
WORK IN PROGRESS
; a third,
SCREENPLAYS
.

I dug through the screenplays. I wanted the
Thelma & Louise
sequel she'd talked about at the party. The scripts were all bound, but they weren't dated, and the titles told me nothing. I needed the whole box. I started to lift it out and realized it wasn't practical. There was no place to hide the box from the cops.

I said, “Damn,” slammed the trunk down, and ran back to the house.

The copier had finished the first batch of pages. I grabbed a second batch, tossed it in the bin, and punched the button. While I waited I skimmed through her 2001 appointment calendar. I got a blast of famous names, studio meetings, and Industry hangouts. She never said which studio or with who, she just wrote, “Studio meeting.” Barry's party was her last notation. The pages for the week preceding it were blank.

I checked the time and decided to copy the calendar. I pulled the pages out and fed them to the machine. The job took fifteen more minutes, but by the end I had a complete duplicate set of her address and appointment books.

I ran to the pool house, climbed on a chair, and stuffed the xeroxes through the slats of the attic fan. I arranged everything the way I'd found it, tossed my gloves in a drawer, copied the crime-scene notes into a second file, closed both files, grabbed the telephone, and dialed the cops.

An operator answered. “Nine-one-one. State your emergency.”

“Yes, I found a woman.” I could hear my voice waver.

“What is her condition?”

“She's dead.”

“What is your location, ma'am?”

“8918 Nottingham in Los Feliz.”

“Is there an apartment number?”

“It's a house.”

“What is your name, please?”

“Ann Whitehead.”

“We'll have a car there in a few minutes, Mrs. Whitehead.”

I hung up and walked to the bathroom door. Greta Stenholm lay in the bathtub—silent, perfect profile, serene.

She had better be worth the risk.

A
NYBODY HOME?
Police!
Anybody home?!”

Two uniformed cops stood at the driveway gates. The woman cop did the shouting. The male cop had wedged his foot between the bars and was starting to climb over.

I ran to the gates, hit the release latch, and dragged one side open. The cops pushed from their side and crowded through the gap. They were both clean-cut Latins.

The woman cop said, “Are you Ann Whitehead?”

I said, “Yes.”

“We rang the front doorbell. Nobody answered.”

“The body's back there.” I pointed at the pool house.

The cops took off at a jog. I followed after them. They stopped me at the bathroom door, then they went inside. The male cop squatted beside the tub and I braced myself for questions.

The woman cop said, “Did you touch anything?”