Private L.A. Read online

  “The way he looked at life and his stories, they made you want to laugh, to cheer, and to cry, didn’t they? Thom could make you endure deep tragedy and know the far reaches of love and humanity.” He shook his head, now gazing at Justine in bewilderment. “How do you deal with someone who can do all that?”

  I reappraised him but said nothing, leaving Justine to ask, “What really happened to Thom and Jennifer Harlow?”

  “We don’t know,” Camilla Bronson said, tears forming in her eyes. “We honestly don’t. And all I can think is that it’s a tragedy that the world might never see Saigon Falls, never see their final incredible vision.”

  “Save that crap for a retrospective in Entertainment Weekly,” I said. “Tell us about Adelita Gomez.”

  “Adelita?” Sanders said.

  Terry Graves blinked. “What about her?”

  “She’s from Guadalajara,” Justine replied. “Which is where a blogger was murdered recently after posting that Jennifer and Thom had been seen in that city after their disappearance, highly intoxicated, or on drugs.”

  “I saw that,” the publicist said as if she’d chewed something bitter. “National Enquirer nonsense.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “Again, tell us about Adelita.”

  “She was the nanny,” the attorney said. “She went to Vietnam with them, which is where I met her briefly twice during my trips over there.”

  Terry Graves was studying his hands. “They loved her. Thom and Jennifer gave her a small role in the film.”

  “Why?” Camilla Bronson said. “Where is Adelita? What is she saying?”

  “We have no idea where she is or what she’s saying,” I replied. “Cynthia Maines told us Adelita left Saigon two days before the Harlows, bound for Mexico on a vacation.”

  “There you are, then,” Sanders said.

  “Don’t you think it’s strange she hasn’t contacted someone about the Harlows? It’s international news.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” he said, and I believed him.

  “Then tell us about the cameras in the panic room above the Harlows’ bedroom,” Justine said.

  All three of them squinted at her. “What?” Terry Graves asked.

  She told them what she’d found. They listened, openly confused.

  “You didn’t know they had a panic room?” I asked when she finished.

  “I had only a vague idea they did,” Sanders said.

  The producer said, “I’ve never seen it, but Thom said it was installed when Sandy Shine owned the place. Maybe Sandy put those brackets there. He was a professional degenerate, you know.”

  Sandy Shine was a hyper, mercurial actor who’d been nominated for an Oscar at sixteen, only to turn wild in his twenties: drugs, alcohol, and a long series of scandals, rehabs, and tawdry affairs that somehow transformed him into a comedic superstar with his own top-rated television show.

  “We’ll check it out,” I said, stood, and motioned to Justine that we were leaving.

  “What are you going to do with all this information?” Camilla Bronson asked.

  “We haven’t decided yet,” I replied.

  The attorney rubbed his hands together and said in a beseeching tone, “What can we do? How can we help you?”

  Terry Graves picked up on his angle, said, “That’s right. What can we change so this isn’t made public?”

  I thought about that. Justine beat me to it. “How about you start by firing the cook and maid you hired and bringing in the Harlows’ help in their place? The children love them. It will help stabilize them. It’s what I would tell a court.”

  “Of course,” Sanders babbled as if he were suddenly our fawning servant. The trio followed us out of the man cave back down the hall toward the screening room. “I should have thought of that before.”

  “We should have thought about that,” echoed Terry Graves.

  “But none of us ever had children, you know?” said Camilla Bronson.

  Why didn’t that surprise me?

  In any case, I tuned out their blather, turned the corner, glanced into the screening room, and saw the Harlow children and the Harlow help. Miguel sat in Anita’s lap. The others were on the floor, giving the bulldog a belly rub.

  Justine gasped beside me. I startled, looked at her. She was staring into the screening room, watching them, her lips parted in wonder.

  “What?” I asked.

  Justine tore her attention away, looked at me, deeply puzzled, but then shook her head and said, “Nothing. I just thought I saw something I hadn’t … but it’s nothing, I’m sure.”

  Chapter 95

  JUSTINE WOULD NOT elaborate on what she’d been thinking back in Sanders’s mansion as she looked at the Harlow children and their beloved servants. Indeed, she didn’t seem to want to talk about anything at all on the ride back to her bungalow. She just stared out at L.A. blipping by as if it were some foreign country she was reluctantly visiting for the first time.

  The crime scene investigators were gone when we reached her street, though the chalk mark that had surrounded the assassin’s body was still there, along with the blood that darkened the pavement.

  “Talk in the morning?” I asked when Justine reached for the door handle.

  She nodded, hesitated, looked at me. “Last night, when you brought me home and I was drunk …”

  “I was completely honorable.”

  “No, of course, nothing like … Did I say anything … strange? Not me?”

  My eyes never left hers as I shook my head. “Justine, I don’t remember anything strange or not you at all. You were tired. You drank a little too much. In our business it happens.”

  She softened. “You are a good person, Jack.”

  “I try to be,” I said. “Need me to walk you to the door?”

  “No,” she said. “The dogs are there. I’ll be fine.”

  I watched her until she’d opened her door, the Jack Russells jumping around her. She looked back at me and waved. Putting the Suburban in reverse, I was suddenly exhausted. I’d survived a murder attempt and helped uncover fraud on a massive scale. I deserved a good night’s sleep.

  As I drove home, I put in a call to Mo-bot, asked her how the coding party was coming along.

  “The money’s going to be transferred from the California general fund account,” she said. “We just got word of that a few minutes ago, and we’re making some last-minute changes so the tick hides deep in the file’s metadata.”

  “If you say so,” I replied. “They’re the best, right?”

  “The fine ladies of Cal Poly?” Maureen said as if it were heresy to even question their qualifications. “They’ve thought of a ridiculous number of things Sci and I missed.”

  “Enough said. We’ll talk in the morning. I’ll explain what ESH Ltd is.”

  “Look forward to it,” she said, hung up.

  I reached my house. It was cool outside. The sea breeze was building. I went inside, turned on the gas fireplace. I sprawled on the couch, watching the flames. I thought of the last time I’d watched the fire. I thought of Guin Scott-Evans and wondered when the actress was returning from London.

  Then Justine elbowed her way back into my thoughts.

  Justine had always been the level head in the room. Or at least it had always seemed that way to me. And she’d always been the one to try to get me to open up. Now she seemed to be retreating into herself. Why?

  I got a Sam Adams from the fridge, drank it while munching on a bag of microwave popcorn, trying unsuccessfully to figure out what was beating her up so badly. I finally decided she’d tell me in her own time—if that was what she decided. If not, I’d give her the space to try and work it through.

  After getting a second Sam, I turned on the television, tried to watch the Lakers-Bulls game. But it was preseason stuff and none of the plays looked crisp, and I quickly got bored. Passing on a perfect chance to catch up on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, I instead turned the TV off, listen
ed to the silence of my house, and went back to watching the fake fire in my hearth.

  Someone had tried to kill me. Someone had sent an assassin to take me out. Who? Why? Earlier in the day, I’d come up with several likely suspects, and lying there on the couch, I tried to go through them one by one.

  Front and center: Carmine Noccia. He’d outright accused me of tipping the DEA to the hijacked shipment of painkillers. I’d outbluffed him when he and Tommy had tried to extort me out of Private. No doubt about it, Carmine had cause.

  Two: Tommy? I wanted desperately to say impossible, but he was ruthless, and mean, and more than a little fucked up in too many ways to count. He might try to leverage me in ways I hadn’t considered. He’d pretend that he’d implicate me in murder. But would he? He’d certainly screw me over if he could, and had succeeded at that more than once. But in the end I was his brother, right? There was a line somewhere that he wouldn’t cross, right? He wouldn’t personally hire a Russian assassin, would he? Or was I just a hopeless romantic when it came to what my brother might have been?

  Three: No Prisoners? Possibly. But why would they key on me? I hadn’t exactly been front and center on that case. LAPD and L.A. Sheriff’s had helped me in that respect, putting their own people in front of the cameras.

  Four: members of the Harlow-Quinn team? Had one of them threatened to blow the story on the orphans’ fund? Or had the actors been ignorant of the way the money was being funneled to the Saigon Falls project, then discovered it, and had they been preparing to go to the authorities?

  Five: whoever took the Harlows, excluding the Harlow-Quinn team.

  I supposed that was possible. Maybe we were close and someone had decided to take me out?

  Then again, for the most part, Justine had taken the lead in that investigation. Had she been the assassin’s real target, with me a lucky opportunity?

  It was suddenly all too much to think about. My head ached and I closed my eyes. I honestly don’t remember falling asleep.

  Chapter 96

  MY CELL PHONE rang and I jerked alert on my couch, head groggy. What time was it? Three thirty a.m.? I’d been sleeping five hours?

  Yawning, I picked up the cell, saw a number I didn’t recognize, answered, “This better be good.”

  “Didn’t want to come tell me in person that someone tried to kill you, huh?”

  I hung my head, feeling guilty for having forgotten to visit Del Rio, or at least call him. “It was a crazy day, Rick,” I began.

  “I’m sure it was,” he said. “Make up for it. Get over here ASAP.”

  “It’s three thirty in the morning.”

  “There’s someone here wants to see you, misses you deeply.”

  I flashed on Angela, the Filipina nurse. “It’s three thirty in the morning.”

  “Which is why you better get your ass over here, Jack,” Del Rio said firmly. “Ghosts like the one standing in front of me need to be gone and well hidden in spooky spook land long before sunrise.”

  Chapter 97

  I HADN’T SEEN him in more than a decade, but he had not aged a bit and still looked like an overgrown choirboy, with pale pinkish skin, a pleasant pie-shaped face, and a riot of curly orange hair. But the eyes gave the lie to everything else, hard and dark as sapphires even if his lips were smiling.

  “Guy Carpenter,” I said when I saw him in the chair usually reserved for me in Del Rio’s hospital room.

  Carpenter was dressed in boat shoes, khakis, a white polo shirt, and a blue Windbreaker sporting the logo of a country club in Chevy Chase, Maryland. With the Titleist ball cap on his head, he looked ready for thirty-six holes. I knew better. He’d never been in a country club in his life, unless it was one constructed especially for bad-asses, which he most definitely was.

  “Jack Morgan,” Carpenter said, getting to his feet, shooting me a winning smile, and shaking my hand while those hard sapphire eyes danced over me, making me feel oddly expendable. “Been following your career since the ’Stan.”

  “Can’t say the same about you.”

  “Yeah, well, I was always better suited to the shadows than you were. How long did you last at the company?”

  “Two years,” I said. “Difference of philosophy.”

  “I figured that,” he replied, then laughed and shook his head. “Isn’t it strange the way life unfolds? The unexpected turns and twists?”

  Del Rio spoke up from the bed. “You come here to tell us something, Guy, or get all touchy-feely about life unfolding in its grand arc?”

  “He hasn’t changed,” Carpenter said to me, throwing a thumb Del Rio’s way. “Even with a broken back he hasn’t changed.”

  “Not a bit,” I replied.

  Carpenter’s smiling face fell then, and I saw the darkness I’d glimpsed several times in Afghanistan when Del Rio and I were charged with moving him about the country on missions we never fully understood.

  He went to the door and shut it, then jammed a chair under the doorknob. “That nurse is a real pain,” he said. “I figured she might try to interrupt our business just to get her jollies.”

  “You were always a quick study,” I said.

  “Dartmouth will do that for you,” Carpenter replied before looking at Del Rio. “Those fingerprints you sent me?”

  “Yes?”

  “They don’t exist.”

  “And that’s why you flew three thousand miles to see me?” Del Rio asked.

  “I heard your back was broken.”

  “Bullshit,” Del Rio said.

  “Whatever,” Carpenter replied, his face hardening. “Those fingerprints belong to no one, and because the three of us go way back, I thought you’d want to hear me say that in person. Take it as a warning if you want, but don’t try to find someone who doesn’t exist.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Warning from who?”

  “People with far more reach than I’ve got,” Carpenter said. “Spooky, spooky spook people.”

  “Did Rick tell you where the fingerprints came from?” I asked.

  “As a matter of fact, no,” he replied. “But it doesn’t matter.”

  “Oh, but it does,” I said.

  I told him everything, described seeing the four dead bodies on Malibu Beach, the killings in the CVS, and the explosion on the Huntington Beach Pier. Then I described how a drag-queen shooter playing Marilyn Monroe on skates killed six at Mel’s Drive-In before a granny who would have been the seventh shot him dead.

  “This is our first serious clue as to who is behind No Prisoners,” I said. “We need your help or eight will die tomorrow.”

  Through all of it, Carpenter had listened impassively, as if he were hearing the plot of a new action movie and not the gruesome details of an actual mass-murder spree.

  When I was done, he blinked several times, rubbed his fair cheeks, and pursed his lips. “I read about some of this,” he said. “No Prisoners?”

  “That’s the handle,” Del Rio said. “You recognize it?”

  Carpenter shook his head.

  “But you know those fingerprints,” I said. “Otherwise, I don’t see you coming here at all, as compassionate a man as you are. And I don’t think that warning was coming from any triple-spooky people. I think it’s coming from you.”

  Carpenter thought that was funny but said, “No one ever said you were a dummy, Jack. But from me or whoever, take it as fair warning.”

  Del Rio said, “There are twenty-one people dead. Innocent people. Eight more may die. Women. Children. Doesn’t that kind of thing get through to you? Or are you so jaded by your life in the shadows that nothing gets through anymore?”

  To my surprise, Carpenter’s face cracked and the hard bravado fled, and he honestly seemed to age right in front of me, his eyes hollowing and his cheeks sagging. He said in a weary voice, “These kinds of things get to me more than you could ever imagine, Rick. The things I’ve seen? The stuff I know? I haven’t slept right in years.”

  “High time to get some of
it off your chest,” I replied. “Either that or the twenty-one people dead here in L.A. are going to become a permanent part of your nightmares and obsessions.”

  Carpenter’s shoulders hunched and he gazed at me as if I were Jacob Marley’s ghost, showing him the length and weight of an invisible chain that threatened to hang from him for all eternity.

  “I don’t want that,” he said quietly.

  “Then tell us what you know,” Del Rio said. “Help us stop these killings.”

  Chapter 98

  CARPENTER LOOKED AT the floor for a long time, as if seeing something on the antiseptic film that coated the hospital tiles.

  “Okay,” he said at last. “But none of this can become public. And none of this can ever be traced to me. If you attribute the information to me, well …”

  “We get it,” I replied. “Far as I’m concerned, you were some mirage I once hallucinated in Afghanistan.”

  Del Rio nodded. “You’ve got our word.”

  Carpenter sighed, slouched in the recliner, and for the next hour and a half, and on past sunrise, told us a story that we never would have believed if Del Rio and I hadn’t been in Afghanistan ourselves during the crazy times after the invasion, after Bin Laden’s escape from the Tora Bora cave system, during the beginnings of the neo-Taliban counterinsurgency, long before the surge.

  Carpenter said the fingerprints belonged to Clive Johnson, Master Sergeant Clive Johnson, who’d served in the Rangers and then with several Joint Special Operations Command teams, which drew elite warriors from all four branches of the military.

  “It was early 2003, and the forces we’d committed to Afghanistan were being drawn down, sent to stage up in Kuwait before the invasion of Iraq,” Carpenter said. “There was a lot of dissension in the ranks, especially among spec ops who’d been in country since November 2001, right from the beginning.”

  I remembered. “They felt they were being undercut, forgotten.”

  Carpenter nodded. “They were being given all sorts of conflicting signals regarding the rules of engagement, when you could shoot, who you could shoot, that kind of thing.”