“I guess you and him are pretty tight.”
I saw his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed hard, without a reply.
“What’s your name?”
“Jimmy.”
“So how long have you known Mandeville, Jimmy?”
I felt the driver’s hand on my arm.
“Time’s up, pal.”
I glanced at Jimmy one more time, but he wasn’t looking at me. Then I was out of the car and the driver was closing the door behind me.
“Thanks for the look.”
“Yeah, sure.”
*
Templeton was chatting up the generic soap opera hunk when I found her again, and it seemed they’d already exchanged phone numbers. He made a polite exit after she introduced me, and she wanted to know what I’d been up to in the interim. Before I could tell her, the lights dimmed and came back up several times, and the partygoers began to stir, grabbing jackets and handbags and heading for the corridor that led into the cavernous concert hall.
As we followed other VIPs to a roped-off section near the stage, I saw Edward T. Felton, Jr., nodding with an economical smile in the direction of Dr. Miller, who took a seat at the far end of the row beside Freddie Fuentes. Five or ten minutes later, the lights went down, and Mandeville Slayton was announced with great fanfare. Then he was descending a staircase from stage heaven as the spotlight came up and found him, crooning a song that immediately had women all over the arena shrieking. He was in my range heightwise, right around six feet, but he had a good hundred pounds or more on me, packed into a baby-blue jumpsuit of satin or silk, with gold neck chains and bracelets for accent, and a natural Afro cropped close to his massive head. I wouldn’t have called him a particularly good-looking man, but he had a wide smile and beautiful, moony eyes, and he carried his bulk with a certain style and grace that had just a touch of effeminacy in it. He also had quite a way with a song, from the dramatic higher registers that drove the audience wild to the intimate, breathy moments that had the ladies swooning—including, to my astonishment, Templeton. Just as Elvis had tossed scarves from the stage, Slayton had his own gimmick: One by one, he threw dozens of long-stemmed white roses into the crowd, and when the Tower of Love had finished his performance and returned for two encores, Templeton had two of the roses pressed against her chest, and cheeks that were wet with tears.
I asked her if she was OK to drive and she nodded numbly, staring at the empty stage as if she’d just seen the second coming.
*
We sat for nearly an hour parked in a red zone on Lankershim Boulevard across from the main entrance to Universal City. It was the only exit that seemed feasible for Slayton and his entourage, given the position in which the limousines had been parked. I sipped water from a bottle I’d brought along, while Templeton went on and on about what an incredible performance she’d just seen, ranking it only behind live shows she’d attended to hear Michael Jackson and Diana Ross.
“What about the King?”
“Justice, Elvis died when I was six years old. You must have seen him, though.”
“Not a chance. I was strictly a Van Morrison man.”
“Must have been all that Irish melancholy you found so appealing.”
“If you’d like, I’ll do something from
Astral Weeks.
”
“Maybe another time.” Templeton nodded in the direction of Universal City, where Mandeville Slayton’s white limo was winding its way down the roadway from the hotels, pulling the string of black limos like the head of a snake. She switched on her ignition, and we watched the limos turn left one by one. When they were all in front of us, we followed them a block or two along Lankershim until they turned onto the Ventura Freeway, heading north. They crossed the 405 into the west Valley, and when they reached Topanga Canyon Boulevard, they turned off and made their way slowly along a darker, winding road through the Santa Monica Mountains to Pacific Coast Highway.
The lead driver turned right onto PCH, moving from Topanga Canyon toward Malibu. That put us roughly twenty-five miles west of downtown Los Angeles, along a stretch of coast that encompassed sandy beaches, palisades, canyons, and mountains, and the scene of some of the most horrific fires and mudslides known to the disaster-plagued region. Like most of Southern California, Malibu had once been a Mexican rancho, where cattle were raised, crops grown, and wildlife roamed. A developer named Frederick Rindge had purchased this particular stretch in 1892, and after he died, his widow, May, had waged a long and costly battle to preserve the privacy of her land. She had gone so far as to build her own private railway in 1906 to prevent a state coastal highway or Southern Pacific Railroad line from coming through, thus enhancing Malibu’s reputation as one of the country’s most scenic and valuable privately owned areas. Mrs. Rindge eventually lost her legal battles with the state, which began construction on the coastline road that we were riding along now. She began selling lots to movie people in the thirties, creating an exclusive neighborhood that became known as the Malibu Movie Colony, aka the Colony, a prestigious stretch of beachfront where the small parcels now sold for millions.
We passed through the heart of the Malibu business district, then past the Colony itself, and continued north another few miles, as the traffic thinned and the lights along the shore became fewer and fewer. Finally, along a dark stretch where the highway ran between steep cliffs and the rocky beach, the procession of limousines slowed. One by one, they turned off the highway and down an access road that ran almost parallel to PCR. The narrow road led with a hairpin turn to a single estate that stood on a blunt bump of coastline, isolated and protected by rocks and water. The lead driver stopped briefly at a security kiosk near the north end of the property while the guard raised a crossing arm and passed them through.
Templeton pulled to the northbound shoulder of the highway beneath a rock-strewn palisade and shut off her lights. We watched the line of cars move down the access road in a southerly direction, then make a sharp turn back the other way, following the road to the house, which sat at the north end close to the water. It was a sprawling, two-story structure in the Mission Revival style that I recognized immediately as a famous landmark built in 1905 by Mrs. Rindge and later purchased and renovated by a silent film star whose name I’d long forgotten. We were looking at perhaps twenty million dollars’ worth of real estate, although if the house were ever sold, it would probably be torn down and the acreage subdivided for a dozen beachfront homes, codes permitting.
“The Felton place.”
Templeton switched off the ignition.
“How do you know?”
“I’ve read profiles of Felton, and his houses are invariably mentioned. This one’s his little place at the beach. He’s also got a hilltop monstrosity overlooking Hollywood, filled with priceless artwork and antiques, supposedly as ostentatious as an ornate French palace.”
“Fit for a queen?”
Below the highway, inside Felton’s big gates, the limos were being parked in a large motor court and the chauffeurs were shutting off their lights. Doors were opening and figures emerging, too indistinct to make out from where we sat.
Templeton’s beeper sounded, and she took a call on her cell phone. She did more nodding than talking, but I got the gist of the conversation—some kind of newsworthy crisis had taken place and she was being summoned for duty.
She closed down the phone and looked at me apologetically.
“There’s a plane down out of LAX, about five miles out in deep water. They’re calling me back to cover one of the hospitals where some of the casualties are coming in.”
“I guess you gotta go.”
“Sorry, Benjamin.”
“Hey, I’ve been there myself.”
I leaned over, kissed her on the cheek, then started to climb out of the car.
“Where are you going?”
“You’ve got your story to cover, I’ve got mine.”
“Felton’s party?”
“A little snooping, nothing too serious.”
“How will you get home?”
“I’ve got money. Malibu has cabs.”
“You sure, Justice? We’re pretty far out.”
“Then I’ll put out my thumb.”
“I don’t know about this, Ben.”
“Get to the hospital, Templeton, before the best interviews start dying.”
“Be careful, OK?”
“Aren’t I always?”
She gave me the raised-eyebrow look, watched the headlights in her rearview mirror, checked the highway in front of her, then swung a U-turn into the southbound lane, heading back toward Santa Monica with a double toot of her horn.
I dashed across PCH, moving in the other direction, where the highway was swallowed up by the darkness, without a pair of headlights in sight.
*
I trotted for perhaps a quarter mile, along the shoulder beside a security fence, which was topped with concertina wire that extended from the north wall of Felton’s property, until the fence ended at a pile of slate gray boulders the size of small cars. Beyond the big rocks was a narrow strip of beach and, beyond that, pounding surf. The sand was dark, strewn with seaweed from the last tide, and the illumination along the highway behind me was negligible. As I made my way over the boulders to the beach, moving cautiously on the slick leather soles of my new shoes, my principal source of light was a quarter moon that created a silver reflection on the water, which erupted in a roar and burst of white froth each time a wave broke. Now and then, headlights came down the sloping highway to the north, briefly finding me before they passed. Otherwise, I was alone.
When I reached the drab-looking sand, I started hiking back in the direction of Felton’s mansion, where I could see the distant glow of windows and softer lights bathing the walls of the main house. In less than a minute, the beach had ended and I faced a steeper pile of boulders that looked as if it had been erected artificially, intended to keep intruders out. The tide was low enough that I was able to work my way up and across, though I had to crawl over the damp rocks at times on my hands and knees, not trusting the treacherous bottoms of my shoes. I continued that way for fifteen or twenty minutes until I reached the pinnacle of the boulders, with the beginning of Felton’s nasty-looking chain-link fence to my left while I faced a channel below. The salt-corroded fence extended across the top of a concrete seawall that was piled with boulders on either side. The wall veered off at this point away from the ocean, following the highway and creating the triangle of land ahead of me on which Felton’s estate had been built. On this side of the fence and wall, the rocks descended into the modest channel that now looked passable, with the tide still out. I made my way carefully down, staying close to the concrete wall to keep my feet dry when the highest breakers came rolling in to make their spray. The wall, like the rocks beneath my feet, was slick with algae and wet from the last high tide, and for every sure step I managed, I took another that cost me my footing and sent me to my knees, or grasping for the barnacled edge of a boulder to stay upright. Halfway across the chasm at its bottom, out of breath and muscle weary, I stopped to rest for a minute or two.
My knees were banged and bruised, my hands scraped and bleeding, the funeral suit and shoes a mess. I put my back against the cold wall and felt my sweat going chill in a brisk wind that had come up since I started my trek. It was a dark and lonely pocket of the universe down there, with the ocean out in front of me and the big seawall behind, and nothing but the fractional moonlight and the sound of crashing surf for company. I shivered, thinking about it, though something about being down there appealed to me at the same time. I felt so infinitesimal and forgotten for a moment, anonymous as a crab and considerably more vulnerable, with the huge force of the sea so close, pressing in so powerfully. Out on the horizon, I could see the lights of a freighter passing in the night, moving cautiously across the surface of the massive, surging sea.
*
After I’d rested, I started across the channel again. When I reached the other side, I heard the tinkly, distant sound of music coming from Felton’s estate. From time to time, faint beams from southbound headlights found the rocks piled up before me, alighting briefly on the cold, damp stone before angling off to follow the road away from Felton’s isolated piece of land. I climbed the rocks like a ladder now, hand over hand, until I was up and over the top, where they were almost even with the ledge of the seawall again. The chain-link fence ended here, and a few yards after that the rocks gave way to an extremely narrow strip of dark sand strewn with more seaweed and small stones. The sandy shoreline, not wide enough to be called a beach, looked more like the remnants of one that the sea had long ago reclaimed, something that had been happening along the Southern California coast in recent decades as the changing currents eroded the earth, inching slowly toward the highway and the cliffs beyond it, sometimes even swallowing up entire beachfront homes in the worst of storms.
Felton’s property was reached by a short set of concrete steps built up against a wall and leading over it. Beyond the wall was a gated security fence, perhaps eight feet tall, painted black and comprised of steel bars spaced widely enough to allow a view of the ocean from the other side but not human entry. I saw figures moving about the grounds and inside the lighted house, and above the music I could hear the high-pitched voices of boys at play, and the occasional spring of a diving board and a splash into deep water.