I landed at LAX fifteen minutes early and spent another twenty waiting for my suitcase at the baggage claim. After that I traipsed over to where all the drivers stood around holding signs for specific pickups among which, according to Leslie Wheeler, I was supposed to be one. I glanced at each sign in succession from right to left, but none of them had my name on it. My next glance was through the glass doors leading to the sidewalk outside and the myriad of taxis and vans and limos crowded next to it. A couple of guys were out there smoking, so I rolled my suitcase out to them and asked to bum a smoke. The taller and wider of the two knocked a Camel out of his pack and lit it for me, and I stood there smoking with them until I was done. It tasted like heaven.
When I returned inside, the group of drivers had thinned some, but there still wasn’t one designated for me. I loitered another half hour, bought a coffee at a stand and wished there was someone else to bum a cigarette from, which there wasn’t. No soap. I grumbled and found a quiet corner to dig out my state-of-the-art-in-2002 mobile phone to call the number Leslie gave me. Straight to voice mail. Naturally.
Outside I hailed a taxi. The driver didn’t pop the trunk so I dragged my suitcase into the backseat with me. When he asked me where to, I told him the hotel Leslie set me up with, the Wilson Arms. It ended up being a forty-five-minute ride that made me as poorer in dollars as it had in minutes.
The hotel was right in the heart of old Hollywood, a once glamorous town gone to seed and now on its way back up thanks to regentrification. My old apartment building was only four blocks south, though I wasn’t feeling sentimental. I rolled my case into the narrow lobby, took in what looked like a recently refurbished atmosphere, and then told the clerk my name. He said my room was ready and paid for, and he handed me a key. Not a keycard, an actual key. Some old things still stuck around. I rode the elevator up to the third floor, found 325 around the first corner in the hallway, and went inside.
It was a smallish room, but big enough. A few framed glossies of dead movie stars on the walls. Maybe they’d stayed here, and maybe even in this very room. Maybe the place was haunted. I sat down on the edge of the double bed and had a staring contest with David Niven. He won.
On the credenza there was a white envelope with my name on it. Gratified that at least something did for once, I picked it up and ripped it open. Inside was a check for two thousand dollars, signed by Leslie Wheeler. A sticky note on the back of the check read: For the third reel. More if we find them. Start tomorrow? LW.
I folded the check in half and slid it into my wallet. Then I opened the mini-fridge next to the credenza, found a $10 bottle of beer, and drank it. I wanted a cigarette and thought about roaming down to street level to find one or twenty, but instead I lay down on top of the comforter and dropped into a deep sleep, still in my clothes. When I woke up, the clock beside the bed told me it was three in the morning. I washed my face in the bathroom with cold water, dug my book out of my travel bag, and read the paragraphs on Grace Baron again. The hazy photo next to the text still failed to compete with the footage I’d seen from Angel of the Abyss. After I set the book down on the bed, I closed my eyes and replayed the reel in my head. Then I waited for dawn.
The unimaginatively named Silent Film Appreciation Society was housed in a narrow postwar building on a side street of Hollywood Boulevard, several blocks east of all the action. There wasn’t anything resembling a guide to the offices in the dusty entryway, so I wandered up the stairs and examined the doors on the second floor until I found what I was looking for. Masticating savagely on a flavorless piece of nicotine gum, I knocked on the door. When a few minutes crawled by and no one answered, I knocked again.
“Ms. Wheeler? It’s Graham Woodard.”
Still nothing. I tried the doorknob. Locked.
I muttered something I wouldn’t say in front of anybody’s mother and wandered back downstairs and out to the sidewalk. I’d passed a cluttered little souvenir shop on the way here that was just up at the corner, and I remembered a sign in the window advertising their ridiculous prices for cigarettes. Six minutes later I dropped eight bucks on a soft pack of Pall Malls and had one in my mouth before I left the shop.
So the elusive Ms. Wheeler failed to have me picked up at the airport and she wasn’t in the office when I expected her to be. She’d paid me — if she hadn’t, I’d likely be en route back to LAX by then — but I had no idea if or when I’d start earning my keep. I was starting to get a little grouchier than usual and entirely unsure how to proceed. For want of a better idea, I returned to the door on the second floor of her building and knocked again, louder and longer. Nothing, as I expected, so for a last-ditch effort I called her number again.
On the other side of the locked door, a mobile phone chirped with its preset ringtone. I jumped a little.
I took the phone down from my ear, but I let it ring and listened to the sound coming from inside. It kept going until I pressed END. I supposed people left their phones behind all the time — I knew I’d done so on many an occasion — but it didn’t gibe well with me. Not with everything else amounting to her total absence since I’d landed in Los Angeles. I felt a small tremble in my knees and knocked again, softer.
“Ms. Wheeler? Leslie?”
Footsteps sounded on the wooden stairs behind me. I turned to see a small woman coming up on the landing. When she saw me standing there, she gasped, “Oh!”
I said, “Ms. Wheeler?”
The woman laughed. She was short and bony, her iron gray hair pulled back into a girlish ponytail. She stretched her thin mouth into a smile and said, “No, I’m Barbara Tilitson. You must be Mr. Woodard.”
Another member of the sewing circle, I decided. She walked slowly toward me, digging a jangling key ring from her knitted purse.
“That’s me,” I told her.
“Is she not in? I’m surprised. Probably stuck in traffic. I can’t imagine the traffic in your neck of the woods can best ours.”
“I tried her cell phone and heard it ringing inside,” I said. “That is, I assume it was hers. Could be a coincidence, I guess…”
“Well, let’s just see,” Barbara said with a pleasant lilt. She jabbed a bronze key into the doorknob and pushed the door open. I followed her into the dark room and waited for her to switch on a light. When she did, I squinted and looked at what was once probably a pleasant room, furnished with antiques and decorated with framed reproductions of classic one-sheets for silent pictures — but the place had been smashed up by someone who knew about smashing. There were turned-over chairs, broken glass, and the rug on the floor had been pulled up and tossed into a pile in the corner. All of the posters had been ripped out of their frames, like somebody was looking to see if there was anything behind them. In one, America’s Sweetheart Mary Pickord knelt reproachfully in a nightgown beneath the title A Good Little Devil. Beside the poster, a plump woman with short salt-and-pepper hair slumped in a faux leather club chair.
Barbara Tilitson screamed.
I knew then why Leslie Wheeler had been giving me the slip since my arrival. She was dead.
4
The abduction took twice as long to film as Jack anticipated, putting the production a few hours behind schedule. The heavy, a character actor by the name of Billy Terence, kept fumbling awkwardly over Grace when he was supposed to be exerting villainous force, afraid to offend the lady. Jack alternately whined and bellowed, commanding Billy to grab her, dominate her, own her. At first Billy blanched, beside himself in spite of his rough looks. Only when Grace touched him gently on his rocky, weathered face and told him it was all right, that they were only performing, could he get the scene right.