City of War (2 page)

Cigar-guy’s voice tremored with rage. “Goddamn it, Tino, get back in here, or I swear to God, I’ll take that fuckin’ knife and cut you a new asshole myself.”

Without taking his eyes off me or lowering the knife, Tino climbed back in the van and roared away while the white Caddie leaned on his horn and tailgated him at breakneck speed.

The northbound lanes weren’t going to open anytime soon, and my feet were already wet, so I locked up the Rolls and went after the girl. I’m not really a runner, but I move pretty well, and my long stride was an advantage in the rushing water.

When I got to the Budweiser truck, smoke was coming out of the cab. I could see the driver slumped over the wheel, unconscious. Three men were taking turns standing on the truck’s top step trying to wrench him out without success. Suddenly, flames leaped up out of the dash and set the truck’s ceiling on fire. The acrid black smoke of burning plastic surged out the door and drove the rescuers back. The driver opened his eyes and moaned.

Suddenly, I was three thousand miles away. Treading water in a wreckage-strewn, gasoline-slick sea. Then the fire came, searing my face and blistering my hands. I heard her scream, and I dove and swam in the direction I thought it was coming from. But when I surfaced, gasping for air, there was only more fire. I called her name. Then came the second explosion…and then nothing.

“Hey, buddy, you okay?”

I turned. A well-dressed man in horn-rimmed glasses had hold of my arm. I looked at my hands, but there were no burns. I saw the smoke-engulfed Budweiser truck.

I ran to the cab, held my breath and with my height and reach, felt around the driver’s waist. He was still belted in. Just as I found the seat-belt release, he screamed that his legs were on fire. I grabbed his shirt and pulled—hard. He came tumbling out into my arms as flames erupted through the cab.

I threw the driver over my shoulder and, with the searing heat pushing me along like a blast of wind, I ran clear of the flames, then sat him down in the rushing water, where his legs stopped smoldering. As other motorists came over to help, I heard sirens in the distance. I left the driver with a couple of guys who seemed to know what they were doing and continued after the girl.

I’d gone about thirty yards past the wreck when I saw her. She’d crossed the empty northbound lanes and was picking her way through a patch of freeway forest trying to find a path past the geysers. But the water was so deep here, and pounding down so hard that, all of a sudden, she lost her footing and went down.

When I got to her, she was spitting mud and leaves and swearing like an angry rapper. I reached down and pulled her up, but instead of being grateful, she took a swing at me. I caught her fist in my palm and held it. So she kicked me. Even though she was barefoot, it stung, so I squeezed her fist until she got control of herself.

I was still wearing my hanging-around-the-boat clothes—
a beat-up pair of khaki bush shorts and a blue denim work shirt over a navy Tee. I took the denim shirt off and put it on her. She was pretty tall herself, but even so, my 17 x 40 extra-long was like a dress on her. She buttoned a couple of buttons to keep it from flying open, then started back into the underbrush.

Rather than fight with her again, I opted for fear. Shouting to be heard above the pounding water, I said, “Tino and his friend are circling around on the side streets. They figure you’ll be easy to spot.”

At the sound of the name Tino, her head shot up like she’d been slapped. I could see she was teetering on the edge of hysteria. She started to sob. I went over and put my arm around her and felt her go limp. Doing most of the walking for us both, I waded her back across the freeway and headed toward the Rolls. To try to ease her anxiety, I said, “You’re safe now,” and she seemed to relax a little.

When we got to my car, she looked at it, started to say something, then didn’t. I saw her working to compose herself as she dried off with one of the towels I handed her, then she got herself situated in the passenger seat with a blanket over her legs. I took off my wet shoes, threw another towel on the floor and got behind the wheel barefoot.

I saw her fingering the lettering on the blanket.

“What’s
Sanrevelle
?” she asked.

“The name of my boat.”

“And it’s big boat, right?”

“Pretty big.”

She looked at me, and I caught a little bit of a glint in her eye—a good sign. “So you’re either married or gay or live with your mother.”

“Mind telling me where you’re going with this?”

“I’m in a Rolls with a terrific-looking guy who owns a boat with monogrammed blankets. Things like that just don’t happen to me, so I’m looking for the punch line.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” I said. “No wife, no boyfriend, and the only person at home is my valet.”

“Oh, this is just great,” she said with mock sarcasm. “Now there’s a fucking valet! And here I sit. Drowned Rat Cinderella. Well, my luck’s holding.”

We both laughed, and I felt the mood in the car change.

“You wouldn’t happen to have a Big Mac lying around this crate, would you?” she asked. “I’m fucking starving. The least those assholes could have done was feed me.”

If you can swear with that kind of conviction, you’re probably going to live. “There’s a picnic basket in the backseat. See what you can come up with. I’m a little hungry myself.”

She managed to stretch far enough to reach the basket with only a slight loss of modesty, and when she got the cover off, she smiled in genuine delight. And it was a good smile. Lots of teeth and a faint wrinkling around the temples that gave her eyes a Christie Brinkley look.

Pawing through the goodies like a hungry cat, she took inventory. “Sandwiches, cheese, crackers, caviar, a pair of wineglasses…and this…” She held up a bottle of cabernet sauvignon and scrunched her eyes at the label. “What’s PlumpJack Reserve?”

“Something Shakespeare could have only dreamed of.”

“Really? And is ’95 a good year?”

“Well, it’s before the company started putting screw caps on a great wine, but you be the judge. There should be a corkscrew in the glove compartment.”

“You always travel like a Ruth’s Chris?”

“Only during earthquake season.”

“Is
that
where all this fucking water came from?”

“That and Flintstones-era plumbing.”

“Well, thank God for good timing.”

“Ruined Tino’s plan for a big night?”

“Kept me from being fish food.” She shuddered involuntarily.

I looked at her, but she wasn’t acting. I reached for my cell phone.

“What are you doing?” she asked with an edge in her voice.

“Calling the cops.”

Her sarcasm was palpable. “What, so I can spend the next several hours being asked questions I don’t know the answers to? Thanks just the same, but I think enough of L.A. has already seen my ass.”

I put the phone down. “You want to talk?”

“Maybe later,” she said. “You have a name?”

“Rail.”

“First or last?”

“First. The last is Black.”

“Rail Black. You do anything like…ordinary?”

“Actually, it’s Rail Sheridan Black—after my grandfather, but without the ‘Lord’ in front of it.”

“You some kind of royalty or something?”

“Mostly the ‘or something.’”

“And you are?”

“Kimberly York.”

“Okay to call you Kim?”

“Ordinarily, no, but I make an exception when I’m wearing the guy’s clothes. So who’s Rhonda?”

I saw that she was looking at the gift card she found in the wine basket. “A friend. Rhonda Champion. Tomorrow’s my birthday. We were planning to go bonito fishing. That was lunch.”

“From the tone of this, I think Rhonda was expecting to be dessert.”

“Could be.”

“You and Rhonda serious?”

“Well, I couldn’t just sit around waiting for you.”

That got a laugh, and it was as nice as I’d expected it would be. So we sipped our PlumpJack, and she ravaged the rest of the basket while tow trucks and ambulances came and went up ahead of us. There’s something I’ve always liked about watching a very pretty, extremely ravenous, young lady eat. And this was a tall, healthy girl who went at it with both fists and talked with her mouth full.

After a while, the emergency workers had a couple of
lanes clear, and the geysers shut down, so the highway patrol started waving people through.

“Where can I drop you?” I asked.

“Where do you live?”

“Beverly Hills.”

“Then your place will be fine.”

2

Sexy Elevators and Killer Pastrami

Beverly Hills is a city of 35,000 halfway between downtown L.A. and the Santa Monica pier. But it’s not your ordinary town. It’s not even your ordinary rich people’s town. From its beginnings as a Native American spiritual site called “The Gathering of the Waters” through its cattle ranching days and finally as home to some of the wealthiest people on the planet, it’s a place of boom, bust and mythmaking.

It’s also as Balkanized as any city in America, but not by race, ethnicity or bloodlines. All that matters here is money and celebrity. Pick the first, and regardless of how many banks your family robbed back in Dubuque, presto, you’re a leading citizen. Pick the second, and your white-trash in-laws can hang their tattooed asses out the window of your twenty-million-dollar mansion and get applause from appreciative tourists.

I’ve got a friend, Richie Catcavage, who’s a brilliant screenwriter and a brilliant drunk—and not necessarily in that order, which is why he keeps turning up on my doorstep. In one of his many unproduced scripts, he wrote a piece of dialog.

A drunk or not, he’s probably right.

I turned north off Sunset and wound my way up the hill to Dove Way. A fire engine sat at the corner, but its emergency lights were off, and the crew was busy rolling up hoses. About a dozen people were standing outside my neighbor’s house, which had its gate open and lights on. I recognized one of the men as the owner, and when he saw me, he smiled and waved. A television truck sat nearby, its crew taking shots of mostly nothing. But that’s Beverly Hills. A movie star burns his toast, stop the presses.

My place sits on two landscaped acres hugging a hillside, but the ten-foot ivied walls, thick privacy foliage and screened gate keep it from being seen from the street. It’s a 17,000-square-foot Spanish hacienda with a little Hollywood eccentricity thrown in.

Elevators in private homes were pretty rare in 1922, especially ones between the master suite and an underground sixteen-car garage—with both entrances hidden. But whoever had needed this kind of egress had also been particular about lift aesthetics. On the ceiling, there’s a painting of a bare-chested, gold-helmeted conquistador astride a rearing, fire-snorting stallion. And clutching him from behind is a Vargas-inspired, exceptionally buxom, mostly unclad young lady, head thrown back in ecstasy, a rose clenched between her teeth. Add in the extra-thick tapestries on the walls, and the effect is apparently to render the conveyance both erotic
and
soundproof—a design nuance I have yet to see fully explored on HGTV.

1001 Dove Way is one of the original “North of Sunset” properties, and over the years, it’s had a litany of owners, including some fairly famous ones. But to me, none of the prior inhabitants is as intriguing as J. C. Stinson, Howard Hughes’s personal attorney.

Legend has it that during Howard’s early paranoid stage, to avoid subpoenas, he lived in Stinson’s pool house. And since it doubled as a screening room, he spent months lying naked on one of the couches, watching
Citizen Kane
over and over.

Personally, I think if he was watching anything, it was a picture of his own, like
The Outlaw
, instead of one done by a guy he hated—but
Kane
makes a better metaphor. That’s what I mean about Beverly Hills mythmaking. When was the last time anybody cared what John D. Rockefeller watched and what he wasn’t wearing while he watched it? And even if they did care, where else would it be bold-printed in the real estate listing?

I bought the house—furnishings and all—six years ago. The previous owner had had a little problem with the tax man and was going to be spending the next decade as a federal guest if he didn’t get out of town—fast. He’d kept the house in his secretary’s name, and I was a cash buyer, so there wasn’t much haggling. The last I heard, he was living in Belize with a Norwegian underwear model.

Little by little I’ve brought the place back to its past glory. I say little by little, because it’s nearly impossible to find craftsmen who can duplicate the original work. If I were counseling young people, I’d tell the ones who weren’t headed for college to forget everything they’ve been told about technology and learn the old trades. The supply of talent that can work with hardwoods, stained glass, hand-made fabric and countless other one-of-a-kinds you can’t buy at Home Depot is practically nonexistent.

Anyone with any skill at all has a backlog of projects that runs into years. And because clients almost always have heavy money, you can charge whatever you like, and people will line up to pay it. Not a bad way to earn a living and get some creative satisfaction in the process. And woe be it unto the billionaire who gives his craftsmen a hard time. They simply walk out and leave him with a half-restored
terra-cotta fresco or a marble staircase to nowhere. The rich generally aren’t very careful about the way they treat people, but believe me, they kiss artisan ass.

As I passed through my gate and wheeled up the tree-lined drive, I saw Mallory coming out the front door. He’s my houseman, valet, confidant and friend. He’s been with me almost from the day I was born, and his power to anticipate my needs is uncanny. I have no idea how I’d get along without him, and I try never to think about it.

As soon as I stopped, he was already unloading my weekend gear from the Rolls, and in typical British fashion, he didn’t register so much as an arched eyebrow at the young lady who climbed out of the car wearing my shirt and nothing else.