L.A. Mental (11 page)

When the gray light of morning brought me around, I got to my feet with the kind of grogginess you feel after a sleep like that, and the kind of loneliness you feel when the musk of a woman's perfume lingers on the pillows, but she is gone.

Twenty-Three

A
shower and some strong coffee helped to clear my head, and I figured that the best way to stave off my moping was to get busy. First stop of the day was another trip to Nick's place. This time I had a few specific notions of what to look for that I could easily have missed yesterday—anything that might relate to the VoIP phone calls, or to Hap, or to the video of Erica.

Before I could get out the door, my own phone rang. It was the detective I'd talked to yesterday, Drabyak. I answered nervously, afraid that the lid had popped off that dreaded can of worms after all.

“I don't have any news about your brother, Dr. Crandall, and it looks like the case isn't going any further,” he said.

“I appreciate knowing that, Detective,” I said, relieved.

He didn't speak again for several seconds. I could picture him slouched in his car, one wrist hooked over the steering wheel, staring out the window at nothing while his mind worked busily at whatever was on it.

Then he said, “I've got another reason for calling. I could maybe use your help down the line.”

“How so?”

“I've done some nosing around since we talked. Sort of on the cop grapevine, putting some pieces together. There've been other incidents in the past few months that all have this kind of feel. They seem random because they're spread out over different times and areas, but it's the same stuff. People just coming unhinged. Assaults, tearing up their own homes and themselves. Some suicides, some comas, survivors who say that out of nowhere, they'd get a killer pain in their head and they'd go bat shit. Didn't know what they were doing or care.” He didn't have to add, “Like your brother.”

My first thought was, Nick's cocaine—the nanoparticle additive that Ivy Shin had found in it
was
somehow causing this, and the stuff was getting into drugs on a widespread basis. But I wasn't about to say so. I'd try to help Drabyak if I could, but not at the price of admitting that Nick had possessed the coke and I had hidden it.

Drabyak's next words undercut that, anyway.

“The strangest thing is, we're not talking druggies or people on the edge,” he said. “These are very high-
powered
people. A glitzy lawyer—you'd recognize his name. A big-shot movie exec. Somebody who's top level in county government. Like that.”

“Is there anything that seems to tie in with Nick?”

“Not yet—but that's what I'm getting at. I have a hard time believing this is just happening by itself. My gut feeling is, there's something starting up that we're going to see more of, and we might be looking at a real problem. So if you do turn up something, Dr. Crandall—you know, that your brother tells you, or whatever—keep my phone number handy, will you?”

I assured him that I would.

Twenty-Four

W
hen I got to Nick's house, it looked the same as when I'd left. I spent a couple of minutes clearing the refrigerator of perishables, to get that over with—there wasn't much, Nick lived mainly on fast food—and took the garbage out to the bin. I decided to leave the cleanup at that for now; there was no hurry on the rest, and no point in disturbing things more than I had to.

Then I started prowling again, with my eyes open for anything, including more dope, but with DVDs at the top of my list. It had occurred to me that Nick might have a copy of the Erica video that wasn't stashed in the secretary desk simply because it was too big for the cubbyhole; and it would hide in plain sight—just an apparent blank, probably the same kind of Sony disk she'd given me, that an intruder looking for drugs or money wouldn't even notice.

Nick liked movies, and there were plenty of them lying around, probably a hundred or more, but no blanks that I could see—no signs that he'd ever done any camcorder filming or even copied anything. They were all commercially produced, mostly action flicks and comedies, with a fair sampling of porn. I figured I'd better look inside the cases, so I started picking my way through the wreckage and checking them out.

I worked my way over to a pile of the triple X's, a jumble of flesh tones and alluring female shapes. A few were old standbys like
Deep Throat
with stars who'd practically become household names, but most were more recent and I'd never heard of either the films or the actors.

The fifth or sixth one of those I opened, titled
Pink Pantherettes
, stood out—not because the disk inside was the blank I was looking for, but because there was a bright red, life-size imprint of a woman's lips on it. Below that was a handwritten inscription:

To Nick—can you feel these, baby? Love, D
.

I touched the imprint carefully. The lip gloss was dried and faded but real, not part of the packaging—the result of a sultry wet kiss.

The video appeared to be a collection of vignettes, with several female stars posed on the cover. They all had obvious porn names, but none of them began with
D
. The film was also five years old. No immediate help there, but it did point to Nick having a direct connection with that world—and it was a good bet that “D” was one of these actresses, using the initial of her real name. I set the disk aside and went through the rest of them, now thinking that if she and Nick had been an item, he might have more samples of her work; maybe that would help me identify her.

Nothing definite turned up, no more personal seals like the lipstick—but one of the ladies did appear in three more videos. She was billed as Kandi Kane, a somewhat hard-edged blonde who seemed to be a backup player rather than a lead.

And damned if she didn't start looking vaguely familiar, although I was reasonably sure I'd never seen her in action. I set the four DVD cases on a table and studied her photos, trolling for the memory. After a minute, I started to hook into it.

One night last year, Nick had stopped by my place to hit me up for some cash, and she'd been with him. Her name was Denise. Her hair, longish in the DVD cover pix, was cut short in a shag, and there was no sign of that taunting fuck-me smile; she'd seemed wary, worn down, and she was in her midthirties, past her prime in an industry that was endlessly flooded with fresh young talent.

She and Nick had stayed only a few minutes. She hadn't talked much; she'd mentioned that she worked in a shop at Venice Beach, but not surprisingly, said nothing about her porn career, which was probably over.

But she would still know people in that world. And if I were Nick, looking for somebody to set up that video of Erica—who had the know-how or connections to do it and who wouldn't be overly scrupulous about the legality—a girlfriend like Denise, aka Kandi Kane, would be a logical place to start.

It would sure be worth having a talk with her. But how to find her? I didn't know her last name; there were a lot of shops on Venice Beach, and I had no idea which one she worked at, if she even still did; and I could be sure that Nick would dodge any questions that angled in that direction.

I chewed it over in my mind as I went through the rest of his stuff, including all the old mail, receipts, and other papers I could find, drawing a blank all around. But at some point, for no conscious reason, I started thinking about how I'd stumbled into Hap Rasmussen and Nick being in contact. It was via phone records—and I wondered if those might help here, too. It stood to reason that Nick would have been talking to whoever else was involved with the Erica video, around the time that it was made.

I hustled back home and went straight to my computer, calling up Nick's phone records and concentrating on the period when Erica's video would have been made.

Right away, I spotted a number with several calls both ways. The incoming ones listed its city of origin as Venice, California. I didn't have any trouble tracing this one; it was neither a cell phone nor VoIP, but commercial.

Blossom's Beachwear and Specialties, on Ocean Front Walk in Venice Beach.

Twenty-Five

F
or sheer energy, along with a liberal dose of insanity, Venice Beach was tough to beat, and on this warm Sunday it was packed. Making my way through the whizzing roller skaters and bicyclists, I felt like a duck in a shooting gallery, and in long pants and a shirt, I was way overdressed; a lot of the outfits on parade could have been measured in square inches, and the tattoos would have covered the beachfront. The boardwalk bristled with every kind of carnival hustle, with a predatory world below the surface. There were a lot of cops around, for good reason. Tourists, in particular, tended not to realize that a walk up an innocent-looking side street could part them from their money, and if they were uncooperative or unlucky, their lives.

Blossom's Beachwear was a narrow storefront shoehorned into a row of shops toward the south end of the boardwalk; the window displayed items like T-shirts reading
IF YOU WANT SAFE SEX, GO FUCK YOURSELF
, microscopic thong bikinis, and a rack of off-color joke postcards.

And inside behind the counter stood Denise, dressed to match the merchandise in a tube top and cutoffs. She was attractive enough to make the outfit work, but age-wise, she was pushing the envelope.

She was busy ringing up a customer and barely gave me a glance at first. But then she looked again quickly, and I could tell that she recognized me—and that she was already not happy about my being there.

I pretended to poke around through the merchandise as if I was interested. When the customer left, she came over to me—smiling, but with her tense body language screaming
nervous
.

“Hi, Denise,” I said. “You remember who I am?”

“Nick's brother, right?”

“Tom, yeah. You heard what happened to him?”

She nodded, her smile fading a little. “How's he doing?”

“Pretty fair. You can visit him if you want. He's at UCLA.”

“Sure, I'll do that,” she said. Her gaze flicked past me toward the steady stream of passersby on the boardwalk; people were pausing to check out the merchandise and starting to drift into the store. “Look, thanks for the heads-up, but I'm getting busy. So if you don't mind—”

“I didn't come here to give you a heads-up,” I said. “We need to talk.”

“Maybe
you
need to talk. I don't see why I do.”

“I think we have a common interest—a lot to lose.”

The smile was all gone now, with her eyes both hostile and a little scared. This kind of acting was not in her repertoire.

“I'll have to get someone to take over the counter for me,” she said. “Give me a couple of minutes.”

I waited on the boardwalk, trying to stay out of the way of the gawking crowd and blitz of speeding wheels, until she came out.

“Let's go around back,” she said. “You can't smoke on the beach anymore. Fucking rules about everything.” I followed her into the small cul-de-sac beside the shop. She took a cigarette from her purse and lit up. She had her own share of body art, but it was fairly restrained—a heart on her left breast, a slave bracelet around an ankle, and something just visible at the base of her spine, maybe a rose.

“So what's this about?” she said, and added defensively, “I haven't really been seeing Nick for a while.”

She'd damned sure been talking to him on the phone, but I let it go for the moment. I didn't have any proof of what I suspected, and she obviously wasn't just going to come out and admit anything. Best bet was to make it clear that she'd damned well
better
be scared.

“It's about how Nick was into something that could seriously damage people's lives,” I said. “I'm trying to keep that from happening. I need some information.”

“What's it got to do with me?”

“Let's say a video was made that shouldn't have been.”

By now she'd had time to prepare herself, and she answered with a shrug. But it was too casual and came too late.

“I don't even know where you're coming from,” she said. “I don't make videos.”

“I'm glad to hear that. Because if this one ever turns up in public, if there's ever even a whisper about it, the people who did make it are going to prison. Slam dunk.”

I could tell that one hit harder, but she kept it up, shaking her head, dragging on the cigarette and exhaling a thin curl of smoke.

“Sorry. Can't help,” she said. “Is that it?”

“Not quite.” I was carrying a plastic shopping bag, like I'd bought something on my way here. But what was in it was the lipstick-imprinted Kandi Kane video that I'd taken from Nick's house.

I pulled out the DVD and held it up for a couple of seconds, just long enough for her to register what it was.

Her pissed-off look vaporized, swept away by alarm. Then her eyes narrowed and she tried another bluff, but it was feeble.

“Did you get off on watching it?” she said.

“Haven't had the pleasure yet.”

“So what does it have to do with anything?”

“I know about the phone calls between you and Nick, too,” I said. “That's how I found you here. Come on, Denise. If the cops get into this, you'll be the first bug to hit the windshield.”

She turned away, tapping her cigarette ash and grinding it under her sandaled, crimson-nailed foot.

“Look, I wasn't really in on it, okay?” she said. “Nick told me he wanted a sneak video and asked if I knew somebody who could do it. I gave him a name. That's all. I don't know
why
he wanted it, or who he was going to film.”

“No idea why, huh?”

She shook her head again, this time emphatically. “Not a clue. Nick usually ran his mouth a lot, but not about this. He acted like it was a nuclear secret.”

I was inclined to believe her about that much, given how out-of-character careful Nick seemed to have been overall.

“Who made the video?” I said.

“Just a guy.”

“I need to have a talk with him, too.”

“All he did was set it up and burn the disk,” she said, now looking worried and with a hint of pleading in her voice. “Nick didn't tell him what was going on with it, either. We didn't
want
to know more. You understand about that?”

I spent a few seconds deciding whether to keep pushing, but then opted to back off. She obviously did not want to give up “just a guy's” name; he was probably not a very
nice
guy, who might decide to take out his rage on her. And a good cop–bad cop routine right now might disarm her into talking more. I could come at her again if I needed to.

“All right, let's cut a deal,” I said. “You tell him what I told you, and make sure the word gets to anybody else who knows about it. Not one fucking ripple about this better surface, ever. I'll put it on hold and hope it stays there. But if something goes wrong—they're up against the power structure that owns the bones of this city.” I didn't like saying things like that, but it was true.

“I'll tell him, and he'll hear it, believe me.”

“There's still no guarantee I can keep this under wraps, Denise,” I said. Her eyes got wary again. “There's a lot more involved, I'm just starting to find out how much. I don't expect you to like me, but if you've got anything else that might help me out—it might help you, too.”

She leaned back against a wall, cupping one elbow with her other hand and finishing off the smoke with a final fierce drag.

“Me and Nick got together once in a while, usually when he felt like it,” she said. “I could tell he was into something—like he was expecting some kind of big payoff. I don't know what it was about—that's the honest to God truth. But there was one weird thing I've been thinking about.

“I was over at his place one night last week, and he got a phone call and I could hear enough to know somebody was coming by. Then he told me I had to leave—wouldn't say why, got kind of nasty about it. Pissed me off, man—I've done a lot for Nick, and all of a sudden he's tossing me away. I wanted to see what this was, you know? So I went along with it, took off in my car, but I parked down the road and snuck back. Pretty soon, this motorcycle comes rolling in.”

That got my attention. “What did it look like?”

“Medium-size, black, kind of fancy. Not a
biker
bike like a Harley. Anyway, I didn't know who this was, but I just assume it's a guy, right? But then she takes off her helmet.”