Bungalow Heaven

JOHNNY-COME-LATELY

Tonight I died.

To be precise, I was made to be dead. That’s right. Killed.

Murdered. Gunned down in cold blood, as the TV newspeople are apt to put it.

That’s me lying there in a crimson puddle back of the Plexiglas case filled with Raisinets and Twizzlers and Sour Patch Kids. Death hath not dignity, isn’t that what they say? You’re telling me. The aftersmell of gunfire mingling with the stench of hot buttered popcorn; the pitiless glare of the fluorescents; the shouts and wails of the living, as if they’ve got anything to complain about. No, this is not what I would have hoped for at all, the obvious reasons aside.

But I’ll tell you, a curious thing happens when you die. You know how they say your whole life flashes before your eyes? Well how do they know? Because the people who say that didn’t actually die now did they? Those people almost died, or they thought they were going to die, or maybe they were clinically dead for a spell and then resuscitated, brought back to tell everyone about their lives flashing before their eyes. The point being: they all survived, pulled through, went on living.

So perhaps it would be more accurate to say that when you have a near-death experience, your life flashes before your eyes. And I’m here to tell you that when you have a whole-death experience, when you’re well and truly dead and gone and there’s no getting around it, something altogether different happens. Then, everyone else’s life flashes before your eyes. Not everyone in the world who ever was, of course. But everyone involved, directly or indirectly, in your demise.

At least that’s what happened to me. I can see it all now, from start to unfortunate finish. I know the motive and the method. I know who gave the order and who pulled the trigger. Who set the whole thing in motion, who stands to take the fall. I know all about the investigators charged with cracking the case and where they will go wrong and where they will get it right. What’s more, I know everything about every last one of them, every dashed dream and burning ambition and smoldering disappointment; the accumulation of their lives, the convergence of secret histories that brought us all to this sorry point.

And if I do say so myself, it’s quite a tale. Naturally, I might have hoped for a happier ending. But that’s life. And death. After all, this isn’t some goddamned Hollywood movie.

Ah, I hear sirens in the distance. The police will soon be here. I must go.

1

"See anything you like?"

You know, said Isabel, When you told me we were going to the movies, I got the idea we were going to the movies. Like, where you buy a ticket and everything.

What, and see some piece of crap? Donald said. And sit with a bunch of jerks who laugh at shit that isn’t funny and ooh and aah at a bunch of stupid explosions and pretend like they’re actually worried the hero is gonna get kil—

I believe it’s called the suspension of disbelief.

The suspension of disbelief doesn’t apply to things that thoroughly suck.

Isabel said nothing. It was a conversation they’d had more times than she could count and she wasn’t much interested in having it again now.

Anyway, Donald said, You told me you wanted to see this place.

It was a Friday morning in early September of 2006. Donald and Isabel were in the storage room of the Cornell Theater in Santa Dora, California, ten miles northeast of Downtown Los Angeles. THE ONLY SILENT MOVIE THEATER IN THE COUNTRY read the marquee out on Fair Oaks Avenue. Or rather, CO NTRY, the Cornell’s lone U having long gone missing and Dick Day, the owner and operator, not having bothered to replace it.

It’s a little underwhelming, Isabel said.

What did you expect?

"I don’t know. I guess I kind of pictured it like the warehouse in Citizen Kane."

The loot of the world! Donald mimicking the old-timey voice on the Movietone newsreels.

Isabel laughed. More like the loot of one man’s obsession.

She glanced around the dusty, windowless storage area, spotlit here and there by the bare bulbs that hung down from the ceiling at the ends of extension cords, casting halfhearted sprays of light across the gloom. The place was like an enormous garage that hadn’t been cleaned in years, only instead of power tools and lawn care products and boxes of clothes bound for the Goodwill, it was crammed full of old movie memorabilia—posters, lobby cards, props, costumes, bundles of glossy 8x10 publicity shots—and tarnished silver canisters holding reels of silent films.

The canisters were everywhere, hundreds of them, piled on folding tables, heaped on the metal racks that lined the walls, stacked on the floor like columns of giant quarters. Isabel picked through the canisters, reading the titles and reel numbers written in black magic marker on strips of masking tape affixed to the silver lids. She reached for The Crowd 5 and set The Crowd 3 on the floor beside a fire extinguisher.

What’s up with this? she said.

What’s up with what? Donald stood before one of the racks on the other side of the room making entries in a small notebook by the light of a dangling bulb.

All the fire extinguishers.

There were at least a dozen of them scattered about the floor, another half-dozen strapped to the walls.

Silver nitrate film stock, Donald said. Extremely flammable.

You’re joking.

I’m not. Where do you think the phrase ‘shouting fire in a crowded theater’ comes from? He jerked his thumb at the exposed pipes crisscrossing the ceiling. That’s why he’s got this sprinkler system. Not that it would help. Nitrate fires are incredibly hard to put out.

Isabel tugged at the collar of her blouse and said, Well, at least if there’s a fire it’ll warm things up. Why’s it so cold in here?

Fifty degrees Fahrenheit and fifty percent relative humidity. He pointed to the blocky air conditioner humming away in the far corner of the room. Keeps the film from decomposing.

You might have told me. I’m freezing.

I figured you’d know. Anyway, if you hurry up and pick something to watch we can get out of here and go in the auditorium where it’s warm.

She went back to rummaging through the stacks of films, thinking she’d rather be at the multiplex, watching a normal movie like normal people.

Isabel Zepeda was twenty-two years old, already in her second year in the graduate film program at UCLA, having finished her undergrad three semesters ahead of schedule. Dark-haired and dark-eyed, she was petite—five-three, a hundred and fifteen pounds—and struggling to stay that way. Isabel lived at home and her mama, who still cooked most of her meals, refused to trim the fat from the meats for their posoles and birrias. It was wasteful, she said, and anyway Isabel’s papa insisted that’s where the flavor came from.

Isabel and Donald worked together in the visual effects department of a post house in Hollywood called Studio Optiluxe. They’d been hired around the same time eight months earlier and gradually struck up a friendship. Isabel thought Donald resembled the actor Topher Grace, whom she liked, but Donald wasn’t Catholic and her mama would freak so she didn’t push it.

Isabel was working her way through a stack of canisters that appeared to be in no particular order. There was a Broken Blossoms 1, and a Foolish Wives 4 and something called The Dumb Girl of Portici 3 which sounded interesting, but reels one and two were nowhere to be seen. She said, I thought you were helping the guy, the owner, what’s his name?

Dick Day.

Isabel giggled. I’d probably go by Richard or Rick.

Donald said, Yeah, well, that’s Dick.

Anyway, I thought you were helping him organize all this.

I am. Even in the dim light of the storage room he could make out her skeptical expression. Hey, you should have seen it a month ago.

He moved on to the next rack and scribbled in his notebook. For the past few weeks he’d been trying to put the film collection into some sort of order, but he couldn’t settle on a system for organizing it all. One day he’d decide to arrange the films by genre, the next by studio, the day after that by year of release. That worked fine for the well-known titles, but there were dozens of others he had never heard of, films that had been long forgotten in the eighty or ninety years since their release, and tracking down even the most basic information about them proved to be too much trouble. In the end, he went with a simple alphabetical arrangement.

He was carrying three reels of Battleship Potemkin to the A-B pile, at least two more reels still buried away somewhere in the mess, when from across the room Isabel said, Why are there so many of this one?

What one?

"Greed, said Isabel. There’s like twenty of them. More. Here’s another."

Maybe he’s got more than one copy.

But they’ve all got different numbers. Isabel set down one canister and picked up another. You know, on the tape? On the lids?

Donald was rooting around for the missing reels of Potemkin, not really paying attention. Those are the different reel numbers.

"I know that, Isabel said. But there’s a five, and an eight, and a twenty-three. She held up one of the canisters, This one says thirty-nine."

She had his attention now. When she said twenty-three his stomach jumped a little, and when she said thirty-nine he felt a tingling sensation, as if his body knew what was happening before his brain had processed it.

"I’ve been going through this pile over here for like five minutes and they’re all Greed."

What do you mean, priceless? said Burt.

I mean what people usually mean when they say priceless. It’s worth a shitload of money.

Donald stood in the Cornell office, just up the hall from the concession stand and lobby. With its dreary air of disarray, the office was like a smaller, marginally brighter version of the storage room, with a window onto the alley next door that let in a sliver of natural light. There were three banged-up wooden desks on which sat clunky, oversized PCs, relics from the late 80s, and piles of junk mail and papers and books. A pair of old movie posters—The Thief of Baghdad, La passion et la mort de Jeanne D’Arc—hung unframed and faded on the walls. On the floor sat boxes of supplies for the concession stand: condiments, plastic cups and lids, sacks of saturated yellow crud used to make the butter flavoring.

Donald was still wearing the white cotton gloves he’d put on to thread a half-dozen reels of Greed into the projector minutes before, the whole time Isabel asking, What’s the matter? Donald muttering Hold on, hold on, until finally Isabel got fed up with being ignored and got out her cell to do a Google search of Greed. She’d read in silence as Donald put on another reel and the scratchy, black and white images flickered across the Cornell’s screen. Donald, she said, This isn’t— and Donald at last said, Yeah. I think maybe it is.

He left her in the projection room and hurried downstairs to tell Dick.

Only Dick didn’t care.

In fact, it seemed that Dick couldn’t have cared less.

When Donald tried to convey the significance of his discovery, Dick informed him that he was perfectly well aware of its significance, and when Donald protested that Dick couldn’t let it just sit up there in the storage room gathering dust, Dick cut him short with a flick of his hand and got up and walked out of the office.

But it’s priceless, Donald pleaded to Dick’s departing back. It was at that point Burt Toolner walked in.

Burt was Dick’s partner, in business and in pleasure, though in all their years together there had been precious little of either in the arrangement as far as Burt was concerned.

He stood staring at the canister in Donald’s gloved hand and said, Like, how much money?

I don’t know, said Donald, A shitload.

What did you say it’s called?

Donald held out the canister, pointing to the Greed 34 written in black marker. "Greed. Erich von Stroheim. 1924."

What did Dick say about it?

Shuhh. Donald swiped at the air with his free hand and affected Dick’s snide tone. He said, ‘Perhaps you’re familiar with the phrase, let sleeping dogs lie?’

Burt wasn’t too sure what that meant but he recognized the tone, having been on the wrong end of it daily for close to a decade now. He squinted at the canister that looked just like all the others up in the storage room. Why’s this one worth so much?

Donald set the reel on the edge of the desk and studied Burt’s jowly, hangdog face, trying to think of a way to explain it so Burt would understand.

Okay, he said, You know who Shakespeare is?

Burt gave him an offended look. Donald considered asking Burt to tell him who Shakespeare was, but decided to let it go.

So let’s say Shakespeare wrote a play, Donald said, And a lot of people think it might be the greatest play ever written, not just by Shakespeare, but by anybody. Except there’s no way to tell for sure because there are only twenty pages of it. The other eighty pages were lost a long time ago.

Burt’s eyes darted from Donald to the canister and back again. I thought this was a movie.

"It is a movie, Burt. I’m making an analogy."

Burt’s eyes dimmed and fell still.

Never mind, forget about that, Donald said. He pointed at the canister. "It’s a movie, yes. It’s one of the greatest movies ever made. Some people think maybe the greatest. But no one knows for sure because no one’s ever seen it."

How do they know it’s so great then?

Would you just listen for a second Burt? We know it’s so great because we’ve seen, like, twenty percent of it. But the rest, the other eighty percent hasn’t been seen for decades. Everyone assumes it was either lost or destroyed. But it wasn’t. Donald tapped the canister. "It’s right here. Dick’s got it. Dick’s got this lost masterpiece. The whole thing. Right up there in the storage room."

They stared at each other for a moment. Burt still wasn’t too clear on any of this. When Donald first mentioned Shakespeare, Burt thought he meant the guy who painted that ceiling in that church or whatever, and all the talk of plays and missing pages had him a little confused. But that word, priceless, he understood very well. And he figured there was one person who would know what to do about it. As soon as Donald took the canister and headed back to the storage room, Burt got out his phone and called Cam.

2

Cam Healy sat poolside in a shiny black Speedo, greasing himself up with suntan oil, SPF 0. He was in the backyard of his home, a 14,000 square-foot Mediterranean. A Beverly Hills mansion.

Only it wasn’t Beverly Hills.

It was goddamned Glendale.

Cam leaned forward in his sling chaise and set the oil on a glass-topped patio table. Also on the table: prescription bottle of Endocet, laptop, cell phone, remote control.

Cam dry-popped two Endocets, picked up the remote and hit play.

The twelve-string intro to Hotel California jangled out of the backyard speakers. Cam raised the volume until it was almost too loud to bear and then as the drums kicked in and Henley’s vocal started up, he flopped back on the chaise and gave himself over to the pills and the sound and the sun.

The music took him back to 1976, back before everything went to hell. Back to when Cam was a hotshot young producer, riding in on the last wave of the Easy Rider generation, the New Hollywood of longhaired barbarians at the gates of the crumbling Studios, come to change the pictures forever and make them great again.

By ’76, Cam had packaged the elements—script, director, principal actors—and patched together the financing for his debut feature, Rincon Point, a dark coming of age tale about a SoCal surf bum who falls in with a murderous cult. It became a modest hit on the art house circuit, but Cam had his sights set higher.

Jaws had come out in ’75, and Star Wars was just around the corner. The dawn of the opening weekend blockbuster was at hand, and Cam, who was in any case more naturally simpatico with the old Studio mogul-tyrants than he was with the New Hollywood artistes, ditched the Rincon Point formula—small budget, character-and-story, niche appeal—and focused his energies on marketability and maximum demographics.

He had a good ten-year run: six hits, two misses, and one legendary bomb, a pop-drenched skinfest entitled Killing Floor which, in Cam’s telling, had been Flashdance two years ahead of its time. That fat fuck Don Simpson should have been sent up for grand larceny the way he ripped me off on that one, Cam would rant for years after at parties and premieres.

In more reflective moments, he would concede to having perhaps erred in one regard: setting the movie in a Chicago slaughterhouse. Put a hot babe in a steel mill, he’d say, And people think it’s sexy. Have her seduced in an abattoir, and they call you a sick son of a bitch.

The debacle of Killing Floor aside, by the mid 80s Cam had it made: house in Beverly Hills, primo table at the Ivy, A-listers on the speed dial. But as the money got bigger, and the kicks harder to come by, Cam—who had always lived on the thin margins of what was morally and legally acceptable—began to take more and more risks, inch a little farther out on the tightrope until, exactly ten years after the release of Rincon Point, it all came crashing down.

Lying there poolside, zoning on the music and the Endocet, memories of The Fall would inevitably drift back. Most of the particulars were lost to him by now, the result of twenty years gone and the coke-blasted state he’d been in when it all went down.

They came to him, these memories, in dim, out of focus flashbacks. The violence, the seriously heavy violence, followed by the howling hysterical scandal in the papers and on the TV news. The heat from the LAPD and the even more intense heat when the Feds jumped in. The grand jury indictment narrowly averted.

All that, Cam could handle, and did. What he couldn’t cope with was the shunning. By ’86 he could no longer go to Morton’s, or the Coconut Teaszer—hell, he couldn’t even go to Nate and Al’s deli—without hearing the whispers, seeing the eyes averted, feeling the backs turned against him. Overnight, Cam had gone from player to pariah.

And so in the fall of 1986 he exiled himself.

To goddamn Glendale.

From Beverly Hills, it was but a short drive over Coldwater Canyon and a few miles east on the 134, no more than twenty, twenty-five minutes if the traffic was moving. But it might as well have been another galaxy.

Gone was the home on Loma Vista with the view stretching from Downtown to the Palos Verdes Peninsula and the blue Pacific beyond. In its place, the house on Wonderview Drive—and how he’d like to meet the smartass son of a bitch who named it that—Wonderview Drive, from which one could gaze out on the smoggy flats of Glendale and Burbank. Beautiful downtown Burbank, as Carson used to crack.

Gone were the lush Santa Monica Mountains, the fan palms and eucalypti and banyans, the morning mists drawn inland by the onshore flow. In their place, the baking hot Verdugos, sludge-brown and snot-green, as ugly a mountain range as there was, pocked with scrub and chaparral, a feast for wildfire when the Santa Anas began to blow.

And beyond the Verdugos the bone dry San Gabriels, and beyond the San Gabriels a godforsaken desert stretching east to Arizona and north to fucking Idaho.

And to make it all worse he could still see, from his backyard on Wonderview, those same Santa Monica Mountains he had left behind, only it was the scrubby backside—and this was just how Cam thought of it—the backside, as if the mountain range itself had turned its back on him, showing him its ass.

Exiled from Hollywood, Cam had come to Glendale and remade himself as the Porn King. Producer, not star. Not with that big belly hanging down over his Speedo, and those spindly, middle-aged-guy arms and legs. Cam had always been built along the lines of Mr. Potato Head and was, if anything, an even deeper russet brown, the result of four decades of devoted, relentless tanning. At least he could say that much for Glendale: out here beyond the reach of the marine layer, it was nothing but sun, day after day after day.

Cam was basting under just such a sun that Friday morning in early September, little drops of Hawaiian Tropic-scented sweat beading up across his body, lost in the blare of Hotel California and the stupor of the day’s first Endocet, when his cell phone began to buzz and the spell broke.

He sat up and lowered the volume and took the call.

Yeah, what?

Cam? It’s Burt.

Cam leaned back in the chaise, relieved at least that it wasn’t a problem on a shoot—some ‘actress’ refusing to perform whatever depravity the day’s script called for, a failed HIV test for one of his stars, a shakedown on a location permit, any of the myriad annoyances that made up his miserable days as the man in charge of Money Shot Pictures.

Listen, Burt, I’m a little busy.

Okay, but I got something I think you’d be interested in.

Not likely, Cam thought.

Something I found here at the theater.

Cam reached for another Endocet as Burt launched into his spiel. Something about priceless and masterpiece and Shakespeare, of all things.

Hotel California faded out in a squall of guitars, giving way to New Kid in Town.

Burt rambled on, Cam hardly listening. But he’d caught the word Greed and something about the missing reels to some old movie, and when Burt mentioned the name von Strohmeyer, Cam put it together.

He knew the story already. In the long years of his exile he’d made a thorough study of Hollywood’s crash and burn cases, everyone from Fatty Arbuckle to River Phoenix, searching, maybe, for a path to redemption—which, in any case, he didn’t find—or maybe just because misery loves company.

He knew all about von Stroheim, a minor flameout as these things went, and he knew about Greed, the missing reels and all, an old Hollywood legend, so old it was now forgotten. No, Cam wasn’t much interested in what Burt had to say. Not least of all because his idea of priceless and Burt’s idea of priceless were two very different things.

And yet, and yet… There was a little voice in his head telling him to pay attention, the little voice that had been so good to him so many times before, the same voice he’d ignored that one time and look what it cost him. Cam listened closer, not to the stumbling voice on the other end but to the one in his head until he heard it telling him: C.C.

Cam sat up and wedged the phone between his shoulder and ear and took the laptop from the patio table. Off in the distance, he saw the traffic bunching up on the 134 just before the interchange at the 5, a car overheating on the shoulder, all the goons slowing down to have a look. As Cam tapped at the keyboard he said to Burt, What’s your friend—what’s his name? Dickie? What’s he say about all this?

Burt said, Well, you know Dick—but Cam had already stopped listening. He felt a rising excitement as he typed in Greed and von Stroheim, opening and closing links, scanning pages, looking, looking. There it was. Carter C. Carter. The moment Cam saw the name, it all came back to him, a chance conversation years ago.

Cam said, Yeah, Burt, let me look into this, I’ll get back to you.

He set the cell phone back on the patio table and picked up the remote. He put New Kid in Town on repeat and raised the volume all the way. He walked to the edge of the yard and studied the view. For the first time in twenty years it did not offend him. Because what he now saw from his perch on Wonderview Drive was not Glendale or Burbank or the ugly rump of the Santa Monicas or the backup on the 134. What he saw was the future. A way back in. After all these years. Johnny come lately my ass! he said aloud. He raised his arms high above his head and snapped his fingers and began to sway side to side in time with the music.

* * * * *

Sonia Ovasapian stood at her kitchen counter, putting on coffee. Mrs. Ovasapian was still half asleep, and maybe a little hung over from the Kachikyans’ party the night before. She had left her glasses back on the nightstand, and when she spotted the distant figure moving in the backyard across the ravine, she thought of the news reports she’d seen all week and assumed the worst. She picked up the phone and dialed 911.

There’s a bear in my neighborhood, she said.

The dispatcher notified Glendale PD who sent out a patrol unit and put in a call to Fish and Game. One of the local TV stations picked up the scanner traffic and launched its chopper. For the next forty-five minutes, the newscopter circled overhead while two Glendale patrolmen and a game warden searched the neighborhood. All week, brown bears had been coming down from the San Gabriels to forage for water and food. Two of the bears had been darted and driven back to the mountains. A third scampered off into the hills and the warden thought that might be the one they were looking for now. But so far, there was no sign of the animal. No paw prints, no scat, no overturned garbage cans. And no reports of sightings other than Mrs. Ovasapian’s.

At one point, the newscopter pilot thought he spotted the bear up on its hind legs in a backyard and went in for a closer look.

But there was no bear.

Just some guy, sun-brown and hairy, wearing a black Speedo and doing a strange sort of dance at the edge of a swimming pool.

Just Cam Healy, the New Kid in Town.

* * * * *

A few minutes before eight o’clock that same Friday morning, Carter C. Carter backed out the driveway of his home in Hancock Park and headed north on June Street, skirting the golf course of the Wilshire Country Club.

He made a right on Melrose and three minutes later turned left at Windsor into the four-lane drive leading to the main gate of Panorama Pictures International.

The other executives all came in through the restricted entrance over off Gower. It was quicker that way: no tour groups, no day jobbers with their big growling trucks and Live Better/Work Union bumper stickers, no anxious young women answering temp calls while secretly hoping to be discovered. Just a gleaming procession of Benzs and Beemers and a respectful Good morning, sir, from the security guard.

Carter preferred the main gate with its double archway and dazzling wrought iron, and above the arches the words Panorama Pictures in an elegant, cursive script evocative of a golden age gone by. He was a fifteen year-old kid the first time he set eyes on it and fifty-seven years later it still gave him a charge, right out there on Melrose for all the world to see. That gate was Panorama Pictures, just like MGM’s lion, or the water tower at Warners.

That afternoon, Carter was in his corner office on the fourth floor of the Panorama Admin building. He’d just gotten off a video call with his distribution chief in Singapore and was about to head out to look at some dailies when his secretary Myrna came through over the intercom.

Mr. Carter, I have a Cam Healy on the line.

There was a pause, one of the signals they’d developed over the years telling him it was a call he probably did not want to take. He won’t say what it’s in regard to. Shall I tell him you’re not available?

Yes, please.

Carter sat back in his chair and wondered why on earth Cam Healy would be calling him.

Mr. Carter, Myrna popped back on the intercom, I’m very sorry, but he says it’s a matter of some urgency regarding your Uncle Eric.

Carter experienced a momentary loss of bearings, like a traveler who has fallen asleep at the end of a long journey and awakened in a strange room. And then he glanced up at a framed black and white photograph on the wall and said in a quiet voice, Alright, put him through.

Five minutes later, Carter set down the phone. He stared out the window at the rounded hulks of sound stages stretching into the distance, and beyond the stages to the Hollywood Hills, brown and parched in this dry, end-of-summer season. He leaned into the intercom and said, See if you can get Carol in here.

Yes Mr. Carter.

He got up from the desk and went to the photograph on the wall. It was a five by seven, black and white, of a man in dapper, Gatsby-like clothes. The man’s hair was parted in the middle and slicked back clean, and he had a look on his face of the haughtiest arrogance and disdain. He sat in a wicker chair, a cane hooked over one of the arms, a movie camera in his lap, and next to the chair was a small wicker basket from which sprouted curling strands of film, like a celluloid Medusa.

Carter’s Uncle Erich.

An uncle he never met. An uncle by marriage, and briefly at that. His Aunt Vida’s husband for something less than two years in the early teens—long before Carter was born—who left her for some Jezebel of a showgirl as Carter had once heard his mother whisper into the phone.

This uncle Erich, this family disgrace, was forever after a forbidden subject. Until Thanksgiving, 1944, at the Carter family estate in San Marino when the men retired to the wood-paneled smoking room for whiskey and cigars, and ten year-old Carter, eavesdropping from the catwalk above, heard them muttering—and soon, thundering—about that scamp, that scallywag, that flim-flam man. From what Carter could gather, his phantom uncle’s crime—above and beyond having seduced and betrayed Aunt Vida—was that he happened to be one of those damn picture fellows.

Mr. Carter—it was Myrna on the intercom, jolting him back to the present. Carol’s over on stage 29, she says she’ll be here in a few minutes.

Thank you, said Carter. He stared at the man in the photo, this man he’d never met, and thought: You’re the reason I’m here.

He recalled how those overheard snippets had fired his imagination and how, at the age of twelve, he began to ditch his afterschool piano lessons and sneak off to D. Haven Blake’s Book Emporium in South Pasadena where he spent hours among the stacks, poring over the cheap illustrated histories of a still-young Hollywood. It was not the stars, or even the movies themselves that drew him in. It was the process, the mechanics, the apparatus of it all, from the big, sprawling Studios with their economies of scale, to the fly-by-night production houses cranking out cheap Westerns and Romances on Poverty Row.

He found little about his uncle in those books, for by then his uncle was already all but forgotten. But he felt something like a kinship with his uncle’s spirit as he stared in wonder at the black and white photos of the bustling studio lots and buzzing commissaries, of the giant sound stages with their latticework of lighting suspended from the ceiling like some mechanical hanging gardens, of the sunbaked crewmen in shirtsleeves and trilbys on location in Griffith Park and the Santa Susana Pass.

Early one morning in the summer of his fifteenth year, Carter left the San Marino estate and walked the mile and a half to the South Pass depot where he caught a trolley to Downtown Los Angeles. At Pershing Square he transferred to another trolley that took him west along 6th Street. At the corner of Van Ness he exited and walked ten blocks up to Melrose and three blocks over to Windsor where, for the first time and with a hard-beating heart, he stood before the Panorama gate. Buoyed by the brashness of youth, he talked himself onto the lot and into a gofer’s job in the Panorama prop shop. That was in ’49 and Carter had been there ever since. And now here he was, seventy-two years old, the oldest Chief of Production in town by far, twice as old as some he could think of, and with little reason to—

What’s going on?

Carter turned from the photo to see his daughter Carol coming in the office door.

How’s everything on 29? Carter said.

Disastrous, said Carol. But yesterday was catastrophic, so we’re making progress.

Carter smiled to himself: she sounds like me.

Sit down, he said.

Carol settled into one of the high-backed rosewood chairs facing his desk. She was in her mid-forties, Carter’s only child. Officially, her title was Vice President in charge of Studio Operations but what she was, really, was Carter’s wingman, his eyes and ears and closest advisor.

Other than 29, how’s things? Carter said.

You called me over here to ask how’s things?

No. Carter looked out the window over her shoulder. I called you in here because I just got off the phone with Cam Healy.

It took Carol a moment. She muttered the name a couple times, trying to place it, and when she did she opened her eyes wide and said, Cam Healy?

You know, I’d forgotten, he has the most extraordinary voice. You’ve never heard him speak, have you?

No, said Carol, I’ve never had the pleasure.

Carter ignored the sarcasm. It’s almost like two voices at once. One is very rough and one is very smooth, but they come out simultaneously. I’ve never heard anything quite like it. It’s like… honey, mixed with gravel.

Carol stared at her father thinking it was unlike him to meander like this. Get to the point and get to it quick, he’d drilled into her for as long as she could remember. She wondered: is this how it begins? The ramblings of an old man, the mind going feeble?

I always thought it was the voice of the devil himself, Carter said, smiling a little. Irresistible, really.

Alarmed by her father’s dreamy air, and wishing to snap him out of it, Carol said, Was he calling from prison?

Carter frowned and turned from the window to look at her. He was never convicted. In fact, I don’t believe Cam was ever charged.

Carol shrugged, Well what was he calling you about?

Your great-uncle, Carter said. He waited for her to make the connection and then watched as her eyes left his and settled on the black and white photograph on the wall.

You’re kidding. Carol got up from her chair and went to the photo. Carter came around from his desk and stood beside her.

"Healy says he’s found a copy of Greed."

Carol turned to face him. "A complete copy?"

I said it had to be. Otherwise, no deal.

Oh my God, said Carol. After all this time. She glanced at the photo again and then quickly back at her father. Wait a minute, what deal?

Carter went and sat behind his desk. He leaned back in his chair and looked out the window once more and said, Cam Healy wants to make a picture with us.

3

The following Thursday Detective Lita Ritenour found herself sprinting across the roof of a four-story parking garage in Downtown Los Angeles, chasing a teenager in baggy-ass jeans and a backwards ballcap and a triple-X New Orleans Saints jacket.

Lita tried to remember the last time she had run anywhere, and came up blank. Her legs were heavy and stiff and her breath was coming hard. The kid was halfway across the roof, twenty feet ahead and opening it up with every stride. He looked big and bulky in the oversized jacket and jeans but Lita knew better. She figured him for about six-foot, one-fifty. Loping, he was, the little shit.

Lita felt a twinge in the back of her thigh, some forgotten muscle, scolding her for neglect. The kid was almost to the edge of the roof now, forty feet ahead. He reached the stairwell and gripped the railing and vaulted onto the steps. The gold fleur-de-lis on the back of his jacket vanished into the stairwell and the bill of his turned-around ballcap flashed out of sight like a hand waving bye bye.

Lita scuttled down the stairs after him. On the second floor turn she missed a step and had to lunge for the handrail to keep from falling. By the time she reached the bottom and looked up Seventh, the kid was already rounding the corner at San Julian.

Across the street a half-dozen homeless people stood watching the show.

He went thataway, called out one, drawing a laugh.

That boy is gone, girl, said another.

Lita ran to San Julian, made the turn, and spotted the kid a half-block ahead. She reached under her jacket and pulled the .40 Glock compact from its holster. She planted her feet and took dead aim at the fleur-de-lis. Freeze! she shouted, but it came out wheezy and thin. The kid slowed but didn’t stop. Lita sucked in a breath and shouted again: "Santa Dora PD. You’re