Loser's Town (11 page)

Spandau drained his whiskey and stood up. ‘I think you are all fucking deranged,’ he said, ‘and I’m going home.’

‘You sure you don’t want to work for me?’

‘I think my being an employee would jeopardize our friendship.’

‘Fucking smart-ass. Stay out of my way. Opposition should be destroyed in its infancy.’

‘Sun-Tzu?’

‘Nah, my old boss, Vinnie the Gag. Best garrotte artist in the business. I still got his number.’

Stella gave him a wolf-like smile. Spandau put down his empty glass and went home.

The following afternoon, a thankfully quiet Saturday, Spandau was working in the garden. The raccoons appeared to have forgotten about the goldfish for a while. It was nice and quiet and he was relaxed for the first time since his vacation had ended. The phone rang inside the house. He didn’t answer it, let it go through the machine. He tried not to listen to it. He cleaned the pump in the bottom of the pond and fed the fish. They were like dogs now, they gathered in a clump whenever they saw him. He dropped in the pellets and they ate and wriggled around happily. He tried again to think of some way to protect the goldfish from the raccoons. Short of putting a top over the pond there was nothing he could do. He thought about killing the raccoons again. But there was the problem of what to do with a dead raccoon and, anyway, there were always more raccoons. His golden moment was spoiled and he went into the house and listened to his message.

‘Hi, this is Gail. You’ve got a message from Bobby Dye. He wants you to call him. His number is . . .’

Spandau scribbled down the number. He thought about not calling. It was a mistake to get involved any deeper in this, a clear lose–lose situation, as Coren would have been the first to point out. The job was hard enough without working for a client who didn’t know what the hell he wanted. Spandau crumpled the bit of paper and tossed it into the trash. He went into the kitchen and opened a beer, then went back into his office, dug the paper out of the trash and made the call. A machine picked it up. Bird noises and gorilla sounds, then the beep.

‘This is David Spandau . . .’

Bobby picked up quickly. He sounded sober and crisp. ‘Hey, man, thanks for calling me back. Can you come over here, to my place? I need to talk to you. I live up at the top of Wonderland . . .’

Head east on Sunset Boulevard, starting at the Beverly Hills sign, the most famous residential locator in the world.

You’re well in from the sea now, and the funkiness of Santa Monica is but a memory. You’ve endured the twisty, disappointing paved section past UCLA (with all this dough you’d think they’d fix the potholes) and by now you’re coming to terms with the fact that the houses in Beverly Hills don’t look a thing like Jed Clampett’s, since the yards are diminutive and there’s nary a Southern Revival mansion to be found. Did we fly all the way out
here for this? you ask. You’ve passed Bel Air, too, the exquisitely gaudy, privately maintained and closed to the public neighborhood where O.J. Simpson did (or did not) off his wife and her lover, and where Ray Bradbury was once arrested for just walking. (You just kept driving, since they would not let you in. Standards have to be maintained. The snotty bastards.)

Finally you reach the sign, which, for some reason, doesn’t look quite the way it does in the pictures. (This is because the sign you’re thinking of, the big one, the really famous one, is actually a few blocks away on Wilshire. This is a second-string sign, and it’s just as well you don’t know this, because then you’d really feel like a putz, wouldn’t you?) Your teenage daughter in the back seat wants to stop, to get her photo taken beneath the sign. But half a dozen people are doing that already, and there’s no place to park without getting run over or another ticket like the one you got for trying to park in Westwood. And your old lady is tired and her sinuses are killing her. Maybe it’s the flowers. You tell your daughter no and keep on driving and now she hates you, just the way she’s hated you ever since you left home. She hates you. Your wife hates you. You suspect you may be about to get lost. You have a map but nobody except you is willing to read it, and you can’t read it without getting everybody killed or pulling over, and there is nowhere to pull over. There are too many cars driving too fast, and the people in these cars apparently hate you too.

Keep driving.

You’re approaching the Sunset Strip. The Lamborghini dealership hints that there might be some glamour ahead. But no, this too is disappointing. It could be anywhere, and looks a little white-trashy, if anybody were to ask you. You wouldn’t be caught dead in a neighborhood like this back home. Just look at those giant billboards, covering the entire sides of respectable buildings with bulging tits and crotches! Good lord! Restaurants, hotels and nightclubs whose names you vaguely recall sail past, but they don’t look anything like the way you’d imagined. Look! There’s the Whiskey A Go Go, where Jim Morrison and The Doors used to play, though nobody in the car but you knows or gives a shit who The Doors were. Your wife tells you she thinks you’ve passed Rodeo Drive, but you’re damned if you’ll turn back, not in this traffic, and anyway that’s what she gets if she won’t read the goddamned map. Your daughter thinks she’s spotted that club where the famous young actor overdosed and died in the street. She wants to stop again and get her picture taken on the very spot. Screw her too, and keep driving.

Drive past the clubs and the bistros. Past the Chateau Marmont, that Gothic elephants’ graveyard where stars go to kill themselves. Keep driving until it seems as if the dubious history and the chintzy glamour of the Strip have all been exhausted, and the world starts to give way again to strip malls and taco stands, the domain of us regular people. This would be Laurel Canyon Drive. Do not give
up hope. You have not yet left history and glamour after all. Turn left into Laurel Canyon and you are entering the Hollywood Hills, where life in LA
really
begins to get interesting.

On the other hand, none of this has any meaning for you at all.

Because you, being one of us regular people, one of the unprivileged, one of the hoi polloi, will never get to see it.

Because the whole point of this world, in case you haven’t noticed yet, is to keep you out.

Wonderland Avenue crawls up the eastern side of the Santa Monica Mountains, pushing itself off from Laurel Canyon like a tired and indecisive burro. You do not drive up Wonderland so much as slog up it, since it is steep and twisty and even the few street signs appear to have abandoned hope. There are so many abrupt changes that it’s useless to give directions, and most popular guidebooks don’t even bother, instead recommending that tourists arm themselves with a Thomas Guide and hope for the best. Of course it is precisely this sort of confusion that makes the place so desirable for the people who live there. It’s like living at the end of a gigantic garden maze and only a few people know the key. Who needs to live in a gated community when nobody can find you anyway? The result is a closed community, a community of secrets, while giving the appearance of being just another laid-back neighborhood. Musicians and actors have always liked the place because of
the unspoken rule of keeping your mouth shut and minding your own business. This code of
omerta
has interesting consequences. Its seclusion made it attractive to the creative rock revolutionaries of the sixties, a place where they could hide away, drop acid, fall in love with each other’s mates, and change the course of popular music. On the other hand, in 1981 porn star John Holmes was involved in a dope-infused, deal-gone-wrong bloodbath at 8763 Wonderland, in which police found an entire house redecorated in blood and guts. Privacy can have its drawbacks.

Spandau was thinking of the Wonderland murders as he drove upward through the exclusive neighborhood. He thought about growing up in Arizona, a place where the dream was to work hard and make enough money to buy into a neighborhood where everything was guaranteed to be clean and safe. It was a world where income alone weeded out the riff-raff. A world where your neighbor in the big shiny house was going to be a doctor or a lawyer, not a successful drug dealer or porn star or a bunch of strung-out and psychotic thieves. In LA, you couldn’t be sure. That little house with the white picket fence might belong to the next Charlie Manson, just waiting to write your name in blood. You never knew where you were in this place. Spandau thought of five people getting hacked to death – a noisy enough enterprise, one would think – while ten yards away someone went on eating their cornflakes. In what sort of world does a blood-curdling scream seem commonplace?

Spandau had often driven up Wonderland. The trick was to always hang to the right. Soon he came to the top where it leveled a bit, and there was a small selection of large but tightly closed gates to choose from. Spandau drove up to the security post outside Bobby’s gate. He pressed a button and let the camera have a good look at him. Waited, while they decided that a guy in an Armani suit and driving a new BMW probably wasn’t the new John Wayne Gacy. You couldn’t be sure though. The gate buzzed and opened. Spandau drove up and parked on the landing outside the garage. He glanced at the Porsche and the Harley, neither of which looked used. You had to feel a little sad for a guy who had those kind of toys and never got a chance to play with them. He walked up the hill to the house.

Bobby Dye’s house – which, on the advice of his accountant, he did not yet own but merely rented for an exorbitant sum – sat on an outcropping that stuck out over a precipice like the hood mascot of a 1950s Pontiac, jutting its chin at the dried plains of Los Angeles. The house was all natural wood, glass, and high ceilings, built by a rock star in the sixties who liked the idea of living in a cabin somewhere but knew better than to let his manager or his record label out of his sight. The result was what one guest had called a ‘hippie Valhalla’ and Spandau thought it lived up to the name. A patio hugged the perimeter of the house, not the most burglar-proof arrangement but it led to some spectacular views. Spandau wondered how many
drunks had toppled down into the hillside bushes. It wasn’t high enough to kill you unless you landed badly or kept rolling. He walked over to the edge and looked toward the back. A long flight of wooden steps led down to a pool and a cabana. Another shorter flight led to what was probably a guest house. Spandau turned and through the plate glass saw Bobby watching him. Bobby came over and slid open the patio door.

‘I really appreciate your coming over here,’ said Bobby, extending his hand. Spandau shook it. It was a different Bobby from last night. He was cool and confident. The eyes were bright and alert, and his grip was firm. His skin had regained its color. It was as if the previous night had never happened.

‘You ever think I wouldn’t?’ Spandau asked.

‘Nah,’ said Bobby. ‘Not really.’

Bobby led him into the living room. A tall cathedral ceiling and acres of glass that looked down on most of Los Angeles. So this is what it’s like on Mt Olympus, thought Spandau. At first glance the furniture was a collection of odds and ends, but the dining table was genuine Spanish mission and the childlike scrawl above the couch was a Basquiat. The couch itself was art deco, rescued from a 1920s ocean liner, and the lamp beside it was Lalique. The room had a southern exposure so the sun never managed to penetrate the window directly. The house was light and cool inside though all the wood still gave it the feeling of being in a forest somewhere. A good architect can do
wonders. There was no consistency but the kid had taste and a good eye, Spandau had to admit. He’d been working class, Spandau had read. Maybe not poor but enough that the money would have been a shock. There were a few auction house catalogs around, and Spandau imagined him feverishly picking through them, researching the names, desperately trying to make up for all that time without. The trailer had been a blank screen, but this was different. Spandau felt he was beginning to get a handle now. Again there were no personal photos about, nothing to display his past, but that itself was telling. It was the place of a young man trying to recreate himself.

‘Thanks for last night,’ said Bobby. ‘I might’ve shot him.’

‘No, you wouldn’t have.’

‘What makes you so goddamn sure?’

‘You may be dumb, but you’re not a complete idiot.’

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

‘It means you aren’t dumb enough to throw away a billion-dollar acting career in order to kill a shit like Richie Stella, no matter how pissed off you think you are.’

Bobby flopped down in an art deco leather chair. ‘You really think you got me pegged, don’t you?’

‘Well enough to know you faked that note. And well enough to know that Richie Stella is blackmailing you.’

Bobby didn’t bother to look surprised. He took out a packet of French cigarettes and made a show of lighting one.

‘You could just pay him,’ Spandau said. ‘Or better yet, just go to the cops. They have units that specialize in this crap. I know this is Hollywood, but blackmail is still supposed to be illegal.’

‘He wants me to do that fucking movie. He wants to be a fucking movie producer, the asshole.’

‘Well, he’s a vicious and immoral little shit. He sounds qualified to me. How bad is the movie?’

‘The script is shit. Annie would never let me do it. I mean, it would be fucking embarrassing. That’s what
Wildfire
is all about. It’s my breakthrough, man. Annie says I could make the A-List with this one. I do his shit movie, I throw the whole thing away. What I’m doing on
Wildfire
is good, man. The best work I’ve ever done. Real fucking acting. I turn around and do this piece of shit and
Wildfire
looks like a fluke, you know? I can’t do it.’

‘Talk to the studio. Let them deal with it.’

‘I can’t.’

‘How bad can it be?’ Spandau said to him. ‘You’re a gold mine for them, they’ll do whatever they can to protect that.’

‘Oh yeah, that’s exactly what I need. Get rid of Richie and then give these motherfuckers the leash. They’re worse than he is.’