Killer in the Hills (4 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

We reach the garage level and pick up our gear and get back in the Town Car. I turn on my phone for the first time since I spoke with Nicki and see I have thirty-eight new messages. I scroll through them as Melvin gets on his cell and starts passing Wen’s information along an endless chain of law enforcement agencies.

Most of my messages are from restricted or blocked numbers. The only ones that have ID are a few TV networks, Nicki, and one call from a movie studio. I start listening to the messages, deleting the ones from Fat Zach and others of his ilk, as well as the calls from the TV networks. Before I get to Nicki’s message, call-waiting interrupts. I look at the ID—the movie studio that called before, Panorama Pictures. Despite my better instincts, I take the call.

“Hello,” I say.

“Mr. Rhodes?” says a young woman.

“Yes.”

“I have Elli Erlacher for you,” she says. “Are you available?”

Elli Erlacher?
The name pings somewhere in my head, but it isn’t until I hear Elli’s voice that I finally place him.

“Jack,” Elli comes on the line after a few moments. “How the hell are ya, man?”

“Okay, Elli,” I say. “You?”

“Just been watching all of this crazy shit,” he says. “How ya holding up, dude?”

A casual listener would assume this was a conversation between two old friends, when in fact I have probably spent less than an hour of my life talking with this guy, on two or three occasions, over fifteen years ago.

“Okay,” I say. “What’s up, Elli?”

“Look,” he says, “I know the timing is messed up, but I’ve been meaning to call you for a long time so we could get together. I know you don’t get to L.A. very often.”

“Don’t much care for it.”

“Tell me about it,” he says. “I gotta get out of town at least once a month or I go apeshit. Listen, how’s your afternoon? Can you get together for lunch?”

“I’m a little busy right now, Elli,” I say. “What is it you need?”

“Well, I’d rather go into it when we have time to discuss it fully, but we want to be in business with you, Jack. Very much so. Are you in town long?”

Only long enough to find out who murdered my wife and whether or not I have a daughter, you arrogant jackass.

“Hard to say,” I tell him. “I’ll have to get back to you.”

“Understood,” he says. “Let’s check in with each other while you’re here. I definitely want to get together before you leave town.”

“Right,” I say. “I gotta go, Elli.”

“Okay, man,” he says. “Hang in there.”

I hang up.

Elli Erlacher. What a tool.

I had met him when we were both starting out—me as a struggling screenwriter, Elli as assistant to a talent manager with a big firm in town. I had just sold my first screenplay, right out of Cal State, and Elli’s boss represented a young actress who was cast in a supporting role. I had written the script after seeing Ingmar Bergman’s
Persona
in a film studies class and was inspired to write my own independent film. My script was a deeply heartfelt exploration about a college girl’s slow progression into madness and I titled it
The Descent of Anna K.
A low-budget production company bought the script and, ten months and twelve rewrites later, it had become
Slaughter on Sorority Row
. It was the first and last movie I ever had produced.

I spent one day on the set and, since there was nothing for me to do except stand around getting more and more pissed, I left. I ran into Elli in the parking lot and we traded stories and stole a couple of wrap beers from the grip truck, then promised to keep in touch before we parted ways. A year later, when Elli got a job as a baby executive at a real movie studio, my agent set up a meeting and Elli and I reminisced in his tiny office for fifteen minutes, then promised to keep in touch. We had drinks once after that, then I never heard from him again, but noted from the trades that he had climbed up the ladder quickly at Panorama Pictures. He became President of Production when his predecessor got wasted on roofies and absinthe at an after-Oscar party and was discovered by the party’s host, in his own bedroom,
in flagrante delicto
with an underage, overambitious actress. The dish around town was that Elli had arranged the liaison and then tipped off the party’s host, thus removing the final obstacle to his rightful position at the top. This was only rumor, of course, but nobody ever got rich in Hollywood by overestimating the integrity of a studio executive.

My agent in New York had deflected several movie offers for my books, as they became more popular. I had no interest in coming back to this hateful city, partly because of the death of my fiancée, and partly because writers in Hollywood are treated like house slaves—you don’t have to work the fields, but if you fall out of favor with your Master you’re horse food. I assumed the call from Elli was an attempt to reestablish our close personal friendship and make a book deal while I happened be in town. Of course, that deal would include the rights to my story about Penelope and Karen. A real class act.

The rain has diminished to drizzle by the time we exit the freeway and head into West LA, to the apartment where the webcam video was shot. I’m not looking forward to it, but Melvin wants me to take a quick look around to see if anything jogs my memory. I’ve been stretched across the backseat, staring out of the rear window of the car, lost in thought, and it suddenly occurs to me that I’ve seen the same black Hummer behind us for about ten minutes. When the Hummer follows us down the exit ramp I lean forward from the backseat to say something.

“Black Hummer, dealer plates,” Melvin says, before I can open my mouth. He doesn’t look back. He hasn’t even turned his head for the entire ride, as far as I could tell.

“I see him,” the driver says.

Melvin types something on the small keyboard installed on the Town Car’s console, and we take a circuitous route to the apartment on Sawtelle Boulevard. A few blocks before we reach our destination the Hummer slows down until it disappears in the heavy lunchtime traffic behind us and is gone.

“You call that a car chase?” I say.

No one says anything.

“Would it kill you guys to at least crack a smile or something?” I say.

“It might, if you ever said anything funny,” Melvin says.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

There wasn’t much to see at the apartment on Sawtelle, which was on the second floor of a ratty two-story building. A detective from West LA Division met us there, along with the building’s manager, a nervous middle-aged Asian woman who said nothing. The apartment was a cramped studio with a cheap desk, a daybed, and a teddy bear. Nothing jogged any memories, and I didn’t like being there any longer than I had to, so we left after about fifteen minutes. The manager led us out the back way, through the underground garage and out into a small courtyard. Melvin and I walked across the drizzly concrete courtyard, then through a gate and into an alley, where a different car—a gray Chevrolet sedan—picked us up, with a different driver at the wheel.

Melvin rides shotgun and I sprawl in the backseat as we crawl through traffic in the gray car, in the gray drizzle on Wilshire Boulevard. We stop at a drive-thru and order lunch at Jack in the Box, which we eat in the car while parked at a strip mall. I polish off two cheeseburgers and watch Melvin type on a laptop and talk on his cell. From what I can gather, he is already getting reports from FBI field agents, LAPD detectives, Cyber Crimes investigators, and somebody from the Treasury department. I can tell from his tone that none of it sounds promising.

I look at my watch for the tenth time in an hour. I am bored out of my skull and seriously considering taking the next plane to New York when Melvin gets off a call and turns to me.

“You bring anything decent to wear?” he says.

“Why?” I say. “Did somebody from Jack in the Box complain?”

“We’re going out tonight,” he says.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Hollywood is business disguised as a party, and the party is in full swing at the Hotel Molique when Melvin and I arrive. The sleek, circular, brushed aluminum bar is packed three bodies deep with fabulous people. The hostess greets us—a stunning young woman in a tiny black designer dress. She glances at my off-the-rack navy sport coat, then makes Melvin and me wait until our party is complete before we will be seated. We are waiting for a retired guy from Vice, who is going to give us the down-low on this infamous place. Melvin is wearing a black Dolce & Gabbana suit that fits him like horsehide on a hardball. A few people at the bar glance at him, looking right past me.

The dining room is huge, with a domed ceiling covered with a
trompe l’oeil
sky painted over it. As the minutes tick by, the lighting changes subtly, causing the painted sky scenic to transform from late afternoon to magic hour, as cinematographers call it. Everyone else calls it twilight, but this is not a place where everyone else is welcome.

“I feel like a pound mutt at the Westminster Dog Show,” I say to Melvin as we stand there, waiting. Melvin glances at my clothes.

“They probably think you’re my harried, underpaid assistant,” he says.

“I’m not being paid at all,” I say.

“Rightly so,” he says.

The retired vice cop arrives. His name is Mike, he’s in his sixties, beefy and thick, with a pock-marked, go-to-hell Irish face and a cop mustache. The hostess greets him effusively, calls him by his first name, gives him a kiss on the cheek, and leads us immediately to the best table in the room, near the bar.

“I feel like I’m having dinner with Brad Pitt,” I say as we sit down. Mike grins.

“There’s a reason for that,” he says.

Our waiter breezes over and takes our drink orders and then Mike talks.

“This was my beat for a long time,” he says. “I know everybody here, and I know all the dirt. They tried to pay me off when the news of what actually goes on here hit the press. I wouldn’t take their money, but I still get the best table when I come in.”

“So what goes on here?” I say, after the waiter brings our drinks.

“It’s a whorehouse,” Mike says. His eyes do a quick scan of the bar as he sips his Scotch. “From here I can count at least six or eight women at the bar who are pros, and there are probably some new faces I don’t know.”

I do my own scan of the bar. All of the women are young, beautiful, extremely well-dressed and bejeweled, and exuding refinement as they chat with the men around them.

“You meet at the bar, make some conversation, do a little discreet negotiation, then it’s upstairs to a suite,” Mike says. “Most johns go for a full night—most of the girls won’t do anything less. Between the suite, the bar, room service, and the girl, you can party all night like Charlie Sheen for about ten grand. Depending on your tastes.”

“That kind of thing goes on in swag hotels in every big city,” I say. “What was the big scandal?”

“Dope,” Mike says. “About fifteen years ago, when everybody was a high-roller, johns started asking for drugs as part of the party package. Coke, rock, meth, pharmaceuticals—uppers, mostly. If you’re paying ten thousand bucks to party all night with a gorgeous gal you don’t want to fall asleep.”

“Still not uncommon,” Melvin says.

“Yeah,” Mike says. “The trouble came when a doctor named Veltzin started moving his celebrity clients in here to dry out. Only Veltzin’s method of treating addiction was to give his patients more drugs—different drugs, more potent drugs. Not to mention the fact that his patients could come and go as they pleased, and there was a bar one floor down, which was full of beautiful women available at a price that a celebrity could easily afford. By the time we busted the whole thing up, pretty much the entire hotel was full of rich, famous junkies. There were some fights, some broken furniture, then a john—a Wall Street big shot—OD’d in a penthouse upstairs and we had to clean it all up. Sent the owners to prison. The good doctor put himself down with a cocktail of morphine and Dilaudid the night before he was supposed to start a twenty-year stretch.”

“Shame,” Melvin says.

“Yeah,” Mike says. “So the girls still work—like you say, it happens all over the place—but the dope had to go. The new owners laid down the law and the pimps enforce it: no dope, no fights, no scenes at the bar. Nothing flaky. Any girls get out of line and they suddenly find themselves out of work—at best. A couple of girls tried to sneak in some rock and they were beat up pretty bad. Long story short, it took us a while to clean the place up, and in one of the last sweeps we did I arrested Penelope Fletcher, or whatever her name is, in a sting upstairs. We traced her bond money back to a guy named Leukatov. We don’t know much about him, but he’s big in the finance end of most of the porn shot here, in the Valley—which is most of the porn in the world. He was low on our radar until the porn business got hit hard by the recession, like everything else. So Leukatov came up with a clever business model to keep bringing in the cash. He produces about two or three hundred movies a year, and employs about twenty, thirty girls at any given time, give or take. He gets ‘em hooked on dope, turns ‘em into pornstars, then turns ‘em out, usually here. They make very high dollar hooking because the johns know their work from the movies. Feel like a big man, banging a pornstar, y’know?” Mike has drained his Scotch, and raises a thick forefinger to signal for another.

“So this guy Leukatov makes coin on the movies, the drugs, and the hooking,” Melvin says.

“Right,” Mike says. “We also think he’s making a fortune in sex trafficking. Bringing in Russian girls, Baltic girls, South Americans, Southeast Asians…girls from all over the world. We figured the guy’s worth around ten, fifteen million. Probably a lot more by now. Nobody knows much about him except he’s a Russian national and he’s a vicious son of a bitch. He and his crew nailed a rival pimp to the floor of his house in the hills. I mean, literally. With a nail gun. None of this we can prove, of course, but we know. Everybody is scared shitless of this guy, so nobody talks.”

That’s Hollywood in a nutshell: a rat’s nest of creepy behavior, smoothed over by a veneer of willful ignorance. There is no vice, no crime, no type of misbehavior that is reprehensible except one—making trouble for the fabulous people who run it all. You could marry a goat and no one would blink, unless the goat wanted producer credit on a movie. And even then, no one would ever say there was anything
wrong
with marrying a goat. Just not
that
goat.

“You think the Russian killed Penelope?” I say.

“Hard to say,” Mike says. “Doesn’t seem to be his style. Penelope was a good earner. And so far as we know, Leukatov only kills when he wants to make a point. And there doesn’t seem to be any percentage in it for him.”

A question has been nagging at me for the last twenty-four hours, so I raise it.

“The way she was dressed and made up, at the Chateau Marmont,” I say. “She was posed, like for a photo shoot.”

“Yeah,” Mike says. “That means something. Don’t know what, though. My background is vice, not homicide. Thing is, I wanted to also tell you that this guy Leukatov is moving into younger girls. More and more of them are minors.”

Mike looks at me, letting me connect the dots.

“You’re talking about Penelope’s daughter,” I say.

Mike gives a brief nod.

The waiter comes to take our dinner orders, but I have suddenly lost my appetite. I resist the urge to order a Jack Daniel’s and get a salad and some sashimi. When it arrives I can’t finish it.