Leona said, “We should behave like grown-ups and go to my bedroom for this first-timer, shouldn’t we? Yet somehow, being with a lovely lad like you I don’t want to behave like a grown-up. Do you?”
She unhooked her bra and let it fall to the floor with the linen dress, and he thought, Silicone for sure, but understated and very acceptable. Then it was his turn to give a command performance, so he put his glass on the table beside the sofa and stood. Just then another image flared, as hot and blinding as a red carpet spotlight. His mother still used those same words on him at least once a month: “Behave like a grown-up and find a nice woman, Nathan.” Goddamnit! If he couldn’t sweep away the terrifiying notion that he was about to shtup his own mother, he’d never even get it up!
Nate started feeling feverish and not in a good way. If ever he needed the tips he’d learned in that UCLA film class… Maybe if he were a method actor, he could go all Tom Jones sensuous and imagine something decadent, like a bathtub full of cherries jubilee or something. He had a sudden sensation of flop sweat, and he hadn’t even flopped yet. Then he heard the sound of a car clattering down the axle-cracking, fake-cobblestone driveway, and it didn’t sound like Rudy Ressler’s purring Aston Martin.
“Shit!” she said. “That’s Raleigh’s car. What the hell’s he doing back here after I gave him the fucking afternoon off? Jesus Christ!”
“I’d better get going,” Nate said with more than a small measure of relief. “Does he come in through the main door?”
“No, the kitchen door, damn him. But you don’t have to slink away, Nathan.” She picked up her clothes hastily and said, “Let me run to the bedroom and change. We can still sit and chat.”
“I’d better go,” Nate said, moving quickly to the front door, thinking that he definitely didn’t want the butler to gossip about him to Rudy Ressler. “You can tell him that I dropped you off and came in to use the bathroom for a minute so he doesn’t wonder about my Vette in the driveway, okay?”
She stood with her crumpled dress in her arms and said, “When we get back from Europe, I want you here for dinner parties, yes? And other things?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Nate said with a grin, handing her a business card bearing his private cell number.
“Yes, Leona,” she prompted.
“Yes, Leona,” he said.
“Don’t ever call me ma’am or Mrs. Brueger,” she said. “Never again.”
“Never again, Leona,” he said, with an even bigger grin that required more acting skill.
When Nate was in his Corvette and driving out through her gate, he thought once more of the assistant director who’d said, “Don’t pet the cougar.” It wasn’t until he was motoring down Mulholland Drive that he began to understand his conflicted feelings in that house. Sure, it was her money, and her age, that triggered those childish thoughts of his mother, but there was something else. It was the first time in his entire life that he’d been put in the position of actually living the ultimate Hollywood cliché. She had challenged him to man-up and sell his ass for a movie role, and he had waffled like a teenage ingenue on a casting couch. She had been every inch a man-eating cougar, and Hollywood Nate Weiss had been nothing but a twitchy fucking rabbit.
SIX
As that summer was winding down, most of the dozen working detectives at Hollywood Station had to wonder what else could happen. It wasn’t just the antics of the Bling Ring by any means. Another crime spree involved the “BMW Bandits,” who had attacked more than fifty BMWs, mostly on the west side and Wilshire district. They were discriminating thieves who often ignored personal articles such as laptops and other pricey items that owners left in their cars. What they were after were replaceable air bags and high-tech headlights, costing nearly $3,000 to replace in BMW 3 and 5 series cars. Other traditionally valuable and vulnerable car parts, like wheel rims, were being ignored, and the thieves were able to access and remove the air bags very quickly. Hollywood was expected to be next on their list of favorite areas of attack.
But the wave of home and auto burglaries was nothing compared with the strange and disturbing serial murders that occupied some of the detectives at Hollywood Station. One of the most bizarre involved the stabbing of homeless people. The first murder took place midday on a lovely Hollywood afternoon near Sunset Boulevard and Western Avenue. A homeless man managed to put in a call to police, saying, “I think I’ve been shot,” before falling over dead. He had not been shot but stabbed, and he died of a lethal puncture wound to the chest.
Another murder occurred on Hollywood Boulevard by the Music Box Theater. A homeless man was found dead on the ground, where he’d been lying for hours. The initial patrol officers to arrive saw no blood trail and at first did not think he’d been stabbed. After detectives arrived, they learned that one of the nearby commercial buildings had a security camera on which their suspect, another homeless man, was recorded watching his intended victim. The killer would approach the sleeping man, and whenever a pedestrian passed by, he would walk away. At one point he even seemed to spot the video camera watching him, but he was undeterred.
He’d taped a steak knife to his forearm inside two pieces of cardboard that acted as a sheath. When he felt it was safe, he simply walked over to the sleeping man and seemed to poke him. There was no slashing, no overkill. Just the chest puncture, and it was enough.
A third attack occurred at Yucca and Wilcox avenues. A homeless man awoke with pain in his chest. When he got up, blood gushed from a chest wound and he found that he could not walk. He was rushed to the hospital in time to save his life.
The killer turned out to be a former inmate of a state mental facility. Random beatings and even the senseless killing of vulnerable homeless people were certainly not rare, but this was Hollywood’s first serial attacker of homeless people who was himself a homeless person. The detectives referred to him as “the ultimate self-hating bum.”
Clearly, the most heinous case in the Hollywood detectives’ murder books in the first year of the Obama presidency involved Michael Thomas Gargiulo, who was awaiting trial for serial murder. Gargiulo, a thirty-two-year-old air conditioner and furnace repairman, originally from the Chicago suburb of Glenview, Illinois, was initially linked in a peripheral way to a Hollywood actor.
Long before coming to Los Angeles from Illinois, Michael Gargiulo had been questioned as a teenager in the murder of his high school classmate Tricia Pacaccio. She was stabbed to death in what detectives called a “blitz attack” on her doorstep in August 1993, a week before the eighteen-year-old was to report to Purdue University as a freshman with an interest in environmental issues. In her high school yearbook, the bright and popular girl said she “wanted to save the world,” but as it turned out, she couldn’t save herself. Her murder went unsolved, although DNA material was found under the fingernails of the victim. Years later, Hollywood detectives became intimately acquainted with that case, following a terrible murder in the Hollywood Hills.
On February 22, 2001, actor Ashton Kutcher had driven to the Hollywood Hills bungalow of his girlfriend, Ashley Ellerin, to take her to a Grammy Awards party. She was a stunning twenty-two-year-old fashion student, a model, and an occasional Las Vegas dancer. The young actor knocked and rang the bell but got no answer. He looked through a rear window and saw what he thought were wine stains on the carpet. He left the bungalow, and Ashley Ellerin’s body was found the next day by her housemate. The first detective to arrive called the crime scene “a massacre.”
Every window in the bungalow had bars on it, and there was even a steel door. The doors were in good repair, all freshly painted with no sign of forced entry. Inside, from the front entry down a long passage, were spatter and drops of blood. Beyond that, there was a lot more blood all the way to the body lying on the top landing, described by detectives as “a bloody pulp.” Her hair looked as though she’d just washed it and was fresh from a shower at the time of attack. She wore a terry-cloth robe and pajamas. Her throat had been sawed and ripped open and her head was knocked off the brain stem. Only mangled ribbons of tissue connected her head to her body. The medical examiner stopped counting stab wounds at forty-eight.