I held out my cell phone. “Speed-dial five.” Which would’ve connected him to my dentist.
He didn’t take it. A Beverly Hills cop drove past us in a brand-new Suburban. One officer, all that curb weight. Gas economy doesn’t mean much in 90210.
I pocketed the phone.
Montez said, “What do you really want?” His voice wavered on the last two words.
“What you know about the movie and anything else you can tell me about Sydney and the Daneys.”
He backed away, positioned himself between the Corvette’s scoop-nose and the parking lot wall.
“The Daneys,” he said, smiling coldly. “Always figured them for your typical Jesus freak hypocrites, and I was right.”
“Right, how?”
“Daney was doing Sydney any way he wanted.”
“How’d you find out?”
“Saw her going down on him in her car. In the parking lot, after dark. Asked her about it the next day and she screamed at me to fuck off and get out of her life.”
“Which parking lot?”
“County jail.”
Same place she’d offered her baby blue BMW for the interview with Jane Hannabee. “High-risk behavior,” I said.
“That was the thrill for Sydney.”
“So Daney broke the eighth commandment,” I said. “What made his wife a hypocrite?”
“C’mon,” said Montez. “She had to know. Sydney and Daney were hooking up all the time, how couldn’t she know?” He worked his lips as if to spit, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “She rubbed me the wrong way. Psychobabble-spouting airhead. The only one she cared about was Troy, I couldn’t get her to even talk to Rand. You really care, you reach out to everyone.”
“Why’d you want her involved?”
“Character reference.”
“Why’d she favor Troy?”
“They both did. Because they knew Troy from before,” he said. “He was one of their do-gooder projects at 415 City. Which shows you how effective they were.”
“Rand wasn’t a project.”
“Rand never got into big-time trouble until he met up with Troy, so he never had the benefit of their wise counsel. Not that it would’ve made a difference, like I told you.”
“The script.”
“If you don’t believe there’s a script for everything, you don’t deserve that Ph.D.”
“What happened with the real script?”
“Sydney’s movie? What do you think? Nothing happened. This is L.A.”
“What was the story line?”
“How would I know?”
“Never read it?”
“No way, this was top secret. Don’t even know if there was a script.” He pulled out a remote and disarmed the Corvette’s alarm. Moving around me, he opened the door.
“What was there?”
He didn’t answer.
“Suit yourself,” I said and clicked open my phone.
He said, “All I saw was a summary, okay? A treatment Sydney called it. Only reason I knew about it was I found it in her desk when I was looking for matches.” Tiny smile. “I like to smoke afterward.”
“You and she got it on at the office?”
“Those cheap government desks are good for something.”
“What did the treatment say?”
“The names were changed but it was basically Kristal Malley. Except in her story, the boys had been manipulated by the kid’s father into killing her.”
“What was his motive?”
“It didn’t say, we’re talking two paragraphs. Sydney came back from the john, saw me reading, tore it out of my hand, and did the old scream bit. I said, ‘Interesting theory, maybe we can use it for real.’ She freaked out and kicked my ass. Literally, she kicked me.” He rubbed his rump. “She had on these pointy pumps, it hurt like hell.”
“So the treatment was written before the case closed.”
“Before the formal sentencing, but everyone knew how it was going to go down.”
I said, “Whose idea was the deal?”
“Sydney proposed it, Laskin accepted. She lied and told him I’d agreed. I ended up agreeing anyway, because I thought it was the best I could do for Rand.”
“Get the boys started on their sentence and party with co-counsel,” I said.
“It wasn’t like that,” he said. “That night- her desk- was after we’d done the bulk of our work. That’s when Sydney and I really started getting it on. Before that, it was only minor stuff. We kept it outside the office.”
“Motels?”
“None of your business.”
“In her car?”
“You want to be a judgmental prick, go ahead. It’s no crime to have fun.”
“Fun till she started kicking you.”
“She was insane,” he said, “but let me tell you. She had her talents.”
CHAPTER 31
Nymphomaniac,” said Milo. “To use a quaint old term.”
He blew cigar smoke into the air. The way the air felt today, he was cleansing it. “Not that I’m nostalgic for quaint old terms. Having borne the brunt of such.”
“ ‘Queer’ is common parlance now,” I said.
“So’s ‘niggah’ if you’re Snoop Dogg. Try it on some dude at Main and Sixty-ninth and see how many giggles you get.”
Smoke rings floated upward, wiggled and dissipated. We were two blocks from the station, walking slowly, thinking in silence, talking in bursts.
“So everyone’s screwing everyone,” he said. “Literally and otherwise. You think Weider’s story line pinning it on Malley was fiction? Or did she and Daney latch onto something eight years ago? Like Malley not being Kristal’s father. Like Troy telling Weider that Malley had put him up to it.”
“Montez jokingly suggested to Weider that they use it as a red herring and she freaked out. Maybe that was more than keeping her hot idea under wraps.”
“She’s got exculpatory evidence but conceals it. Because her main goal isn’t defending Troy, it’s cutting a film deal. Cold. As in what passes for morality in Hollywood.”
I said, “If Weider needed to rationalize, she could’ve. Malley pulled the strings but the boys did the actual murder and were going down for a long time, no matter what. She said as much to Marty Boestling. Her advice to Troy would’ve been keep quiet, I’ll get you out of jail quickly and you’ll be rich. That would explain his fantasy of wealth.”
“Troy was a streetwise little thug, Alex. Think he’d buy it?”
“He was also a thirteen-year-old with no future,” I said. “Kids flock to Hollywood every day believing in Rich and Famous. Still, because he was a kid, his patience couldn’t be relied on indefinitely. Maybe Troy’s death wasn’t Malley’s doing, after all.”
He bit down on the cigar. Choppy smoke created a jagged halo. Picking a scrap of tobacco from his tongue, he spat and frowned. “Weider was a P.D.; she’d have known how to connect to a guy like Nestor Almedeira.”
“Maybe so would Daney,” I said. “Working with disadvantaged youth. He and Cherish both visited Troy.”
“Daney was the white guy Nestor talked about, not Malley? Jesus.” Puff puff. “Yeah, it could go that way as easily as Cherish being Jacqueline the Ripper. Especially ’cause I’ve got no real evidence for either scenario.”
He dropped the cigar, ground it out on the sidewalk, waited until the butt cooled, and pocketed it.
“What a good citizen,” I said.
“Enough dirt in this city. So how would Rand’s murder fit with a Weider-Drew thing?”
“Same as with a Cherish-Barnett thing. Rand was never in the loop so he was allowed to live. Somehow, he figured out the truth behind Kristal’s death and made himself a target.”
“The truth being Malley’s revenge, because he wasn’t Kristal’s daddy.”
“That seems to be the constant,” I said. “Any progress on the DNA?”
“Filled out a requisition, waiting to hear from the muck-a-mucks. I’d still like to know how and when Cherish started sleeping with Barnett. But now maybe we know the why: payback for Drew screwing around.”