The Best American Crime Writing (32 page)

Unlike Jesse, who flouted the taboos of the suburbs, his dad knew how to blend into West Hills. At one point he opened a baseball-card shop. At another he ran a car-wholesaling business, advertising in Jesse’s Little League yearbooks. His passion for the sport puts a new twist on the old Yogi Berra quip, a saying featured on the West Hills baseball website: “Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the street.” The case against Jack
Hollywood has yet to be proved, but prosecutors and detectives believe it will eventually explain everything about Jesse—why he was able to manipulate his cohorts so effectively and, more important, how he has managed to survive so long on the lam. They believe that his father knows where Jesse is hiding and is using his own underworld connections to keep him there. In the beginning Jesse did what most novice fugitives do, visiting familiar people and places, flashing cash, discussing the crime. Once he returned to West Hills, though, he vanished.

“That’s Jack Hollywood’s personality taking control,” Chief Deputy Correll says. “If he had not taken control, Jesse would be in jail right now.”

In the time that Jesse James Hollywood has been missing, Jeff and Susan Markowitz have transformed their home into a shrine. The relics of Nick’s life are everywhere: baby handprints, stuffed animals, the decoration from his first birthday cake—and his second and third and fourth and fifth—a karate robe, the cast from a broken right foot, an ornamental egg filled with soil from his grave. Susan has tried to console herself by writing poems, their titles blunt and raw: “Denial,” “Fading,” “Drifting,” “What Day Is This?” The screensaver on her computer is a picture of Nick’s marble headstone. Her e-mail address is aching4nick.

Evidence of Ben’s life is scarcer. Four months after the murder he was arrested on a pair of armed robbery warrants. The cases were weak—one victim was a druggie; the other, a reputed prostitute, accompanied him to a strip joint and a cheap motel—but Ben still drew a sixteen-month prison term. Susan could not forgive his lack of repentance. “He’s rubbing his brother’s name in the dirt,” she says.

When Susan talks, she seems to be floating. She wants to die.

Inside, she says, she already has. Twice she has been hospitalized, after overdosing on a combination of sleeping pills and champagne. Instead of finding peace she managed only to rack up $20,000 in medical bills. She made it through the first trial by taking Nick’s leather jacket to court, clutching it as his final hours were relived. She has vowed to stay alive long enough to see that all of his accused killers are brought to justice—and that includes Jesse James Hollywood, if and when he is captured. She does not know how long that will be. But she knows it will fulfill her last obligation as a mother.

That name. It was almost too good to be true. I would hesitate to call it a predictor of destiny. On the other hand, when you christen your son Jesse James Hollywood, the chances of him growing up to be a certified public accountant seem rather slim. In reporting this story, one of my first missions was to visit the Los Angeles county registrar-recorders office. I wanted to view his birth certificate. I had to know whether that whole trifurcated business—a name so much greater than the sum of its parts—was genuine, not a nickname, a gang name, a stage name, or some other self-mythologizing moniker. To be fair, the Hollywood part was unavoidable; it is the family appellation. The Jesse part (and here I must admit to some bias) is a perfectly fine Old Testament echo. But to deliberately sandwich them around James—to brand a newborn with such a theatrically infamous identity—now that made me wonder: What the hell were his parents thinking?

Although this article was ostensibly about a group of bored middle-class young people in the San Fernando Valley and their murderous exploits, it was at its heart about parents. Parents who offered too little guidance or the wrong kind of guidance, floating in and out of their children’s lives like ghosts. It would be foolish to say that Jesse
James Hollywood would have followed the straight and narrow if his folks had just called him Mortimer. But there is no question that bearing all three of those names made him an especially attractive subject for a
Los Angeles Magazine
crime story. We put him on the cover of our February 2002 issue.
“WANTED,”
the headline read,
“JESSE JAMES HOLLYWOOD
.” True to his name, he remains on the run
.

F
or a year I worked in an office where I spoke to dying people on the telephone every day. The office was that of a funeral-consumer watchdog, which meant that we kept an eye on the funeral industry and helped the imminently bereaved and imminently deceased to make affordable funeral plans. Above my desk I kept an index card with a Faulkner quotation, “Between grief and nothing I will take grief.” On a particularly bad day I scratched out the last word and changed it to “nothing.”

Because I am a person who has obsessively meditated on his own death since the age of 5, my friends and family thought it uncanny, if not alarming, that I had taken the job. When I was 6 my parents were worried enough that my father, a minister, took me to funerals, thinking (reasonably) that my trouble was all in my mind and that a swift dose of reality might cure me. What my father did not understand was that no matter how assuringly he winked at me over the bowed heads, death is ultimately a problem of the imagination. The funerals only gave mine dark fodder.

As did, inevitably, the job that put me on the phone with death every day. When I found myself flirting with a terminally ill 22-year-old girl, I knew it was time to “move on.” On my last day, my coworkers gave me a cardboard coffin, which they had all signed, like a giant crematable birthday card. I absconded with two numbers: the girl’s (I wanted to meet her in person—to sleep with a dying girl, I think—and from our conversations it seemed mutual, but it never
happened, I never called, and then she died) and that of an Oregon undertaker who, after some controversy with his mortuary board, had fled the state and opened a brothel. The man’s name is Mack Moore, and the brothel, in Beatty, Nevada, is called Angel’s Ladies. Because this man had made what I saw as the happy leap from Thanatos to Eros, I knew that I had to seek him out. He was older than I expected—71—but when he shook my hand, in the driveway of his Las Vegas mansion, what struck me were the lustrous strawberry-blond curls that fell like a halo around his ears.

The eponymous Angel, Mack’s wife, helped Mack and me pack my trunk with whorehouse provisions—laundry detergent, toilet paper, tubs of mayonnaise, hot cocoa—before we set out on the 120-mile drive to Beatty. Angel stayed behind to tidy up, since the police had returned their confiscated belongings just a week earlier and the house was still a disaster. I was soon to hear much about the night that Angel had been held hostage in her living room while the cops looked for evidence of illegal “outcalls.”

The elderly pimp shuttles back and forth between his Vegas mansion and the desert brothel a few times a week. The lonesome-ness of the drive is total and exhilarating: a haunting landscape of gray-green sagebrush broken here and there by a streak of martian red, a rumpled mountain range, a demonic cactus. In almost two hours the only blips of civilization are the town of Amargosa Valley (Mack points out and curses the Cherry Patch 2 bordello, a rival), a New Age temple, and the south entrance to the Nevada Test Site.

Beatty, in Nye County, is the last town to survive from among the many that popped up during the 1904 Rhyolite gold rush. Now Rhyolite, once the fourth largest city in Nevada, is a ghost town, and Beatty is the place where you had better stop to buy gas. The Bullfrog Mine, the major employer until central banks across Europe released large parts of their gold reserves into the market, shut down in 1998 and is now down to a skeleton crew doing mop-up; Beatty’s population has dwindled severely as a result. The economy is sporadic,
and stability is as fleeting as it was for the nomadic Shoshone, who summered on the oasis. Other jobs are scarce to nonexistent. Even the Nevada Test Site, despite being literally just over the hill, provides only a handful of jobs to the few willing to commute—the nearest gates are 103 miles north and 54 miles south. The Yucca Mountain Project, a planned federal graveyard for 77,000 tons of high-level radioactive decay, offers possible hope for the future, but it’s less than certain, and even if it flies, it won’t guarantee jobs for Beatty. For now, the town survives on tourism: Death Valley hikers, truckers, gamblers, and men visiting Angel’s Ladies.

The prostitutes settled this area with the miners. Only the former remain in business. The only other trace of the miners are the wild burros that roam the town like dust-shrouded ghosts. Mack says that if some people get their way and Angel’s is closed, the town will suffer badly, and it’s probably true. The Beatty Chamber of Commerce is one of the brothel’s greatest boosters.

Mack wears thick-soled Adidas tennis shoes with ankle socks and a powder-blue cardigan, and as he rambles on in his puttering unpunctuated way, every so often his eyes get flirty, like he’s going to share something extremely funny or something deep and meaningful, but each time he tries to address the sex-death continuum, or answer my timid, oblique questions to that end, he veers into the sententious whey of condolence cards.

The first time I called he answered from his shower and let me know, over vigorous lathering, that his brothel had been suspended because of a sting coming out of a conspiracy involving the sheriff, a rival brothel owner, a former madam, and maybe even the assistant DA; that he was going to sue the shit out of Nye County for violating his civil rights; that he took Viagra; that he and his wife were swingers; and that when I came to visit he would put me up in the Fantasy Bungalow. Most of the drive he talked about which swinging
magazines are best for meeting other swingers and how since Angel was so much younger and prettier than he, she got more dates than he did, but by the way he told me this, I was led to believe that it was probably the other way around, that he was the Lothario, something later confirmed unenthusiastically by the girls who make up Angel’s staff. Despite his candor about his sex life, the circumstances surrounding his abrupt exit from the funeral trade remain hazy. There is ample stuff for nightmares, if you believe all the accusations: The matter of a missing corpse. Bodies buried in the wrong graves. Bodies exhumed on the sly. Bodies cremated in parties of two. Between 1992 and 1994 alone, eighteen complaints were filed against Moore with the Oregon Cemetery and Mortuary Board. But, thanks to the state’s confidentiality laws, the board’s investigative records are sealed, and I’m left without a full grasp of the mystery behind the man with whom I’m now zooming into the heart of nowhere.

Mack started out selling headstones to put himself through Bible college, but when Oregon cemeteries colluded to require that markers be purchased directly from them, driving out the independent monument dealers, he was nearly put out of business. Fighting mad, Mack became a spectacle, getting dragged out of more than one cemetery in handcuffs for barging in with wheelbarrow and spade to plant a rebel headstone. Fourteen years, three trials, and three appeals after he filed a lawsuit against the cemeteries in 1969, the exclusive installation requirement was ruled a violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act; Mack took over four of the defendants’ cemeteries—financially weakened by the judgment—built more funeral homes, and began his necropolitan reign over Lane County. He promptly made new enemies of rival funeral directors, who bristled at his aggressive salesmanship—full-page color ads of caskets, coupons, raffles, cut-rate burials—ploys, they felt, more suitable for
selling box springs. One Christmas he advertised a special “Holiday Memorial Service,” promising a special appearance by Santa Claus, who, “in person, will tell how he remembers his wife who died of cancer.”

Soon after Angel was hired as a janitor (she quickly worked her way up to hairdresser, and, according to Mack, did a lovely job with the women’s hair), her youngest son was killed in a motorbike accident. Mack embalmed the boy. Not a year later, Angel’s husband died. Mack did that funeral, too. Mack’s wife and business partner, Eva, grew suspicious of his relationship with his widowed employee, but he denied any hanky-panky: “I never got involved with any woman that I’d served as a funeral director. But it was not because I didn’t have the chance.” After Eva divorced Mack and they divided the properties—making them, in essence, competitors—he tacked an addition onto one of his parlors, rechristened it Celestial Funeral Home and Wedding Chapel, and invited the entire town to his and Angel’s wedding. Because of her tragic losses, Mack says, Angel made an excellent funeral professional. It is the same compassion for human frailty, Mack says, that’s made her such a damn good prostitute—but that’s rushing ahead.

The odd rivalry with Eva came to a head, gruesomely, in late August 1993, when a man died who had prearranged for his funeral at Chapel of Memories (owned by Eva) but who had bought a cemetery plot at Springfield Memorial Gardens (owned by Mack). His body was taken to Eva’s. The man’s stepson went to Mack’s, understandably confused. Mack, with mattress-salesman finesse, persuaded the stepson that since his father was going to be buried at Mack’s cemetery
anyway
, it might be easier, less
grief
, not to mention cheaper, because, well, Mack was prepared to give him a great deal, if he just let Mack do the burial
and
the funeral. All he’d have to do is sign the transfer and Mack would go over to Eva’s and get his stepdaddy. The stepson was persuaded. Unfortunately for Mack, Eva had dumped the body in the casket, wearing nothing but diapers,
covered in its own postmortem foulness. “We worked on that damn casket for hours trying to get the damn stink out,” Mack says. Some time during the mayhem, no doubt perturbed, probably thinking that his wife had done this to him on purpose—“she did dirty”—Mack took color photos of the soiled dead man and showed them to the stepson, suggesting he file a complaint against Eva. The stepson was not pleased, and the family took both Moores to court for $7 million. Eva was eventually dropped from the suit, and Mack settled for $21,000. By this point, however, the mortuary board was fed up and proposed suspending Mack’s license for illegally soliciting bodies from a rival funeral home. This was, after all, not the first time.

Then Angel’s eldest son, Jesse, died from drug abuse. The boy and his father had allegedly argued about who had the worse kidneys; it’s not clear that the father won by dying first, since Jesse died just a week short of his thirtieth birthday. For Angel, it was a world-ending blow.

Given their troubles, leaving was an easy decision. In October 1995, Mack sold to a corporate funeral home, and by March 1996 he and Angel had moved to Vegas. Then they bought the brothel, and Angel, vanquished by grief, registered as a legal prostitute.

Mack has since found new loopholes to finger, and the Nevada Brothel Owners Association has castigated him for jeopardizing an industry that likes to keep as low a profile as the funeral trade. The director of the association, George Flint, says that Mack has “turned what is a fairly halfway respected industry into a kind of farce.” Angel’s Ladies was busted in the spring of 1999 after sending their blondest girl, Cindi, to a motel when a cop, posing as a trick, called for room service. (Prostitution is only legal in Nevada
inside
a licensed brothel.) It took three calls for the cop to persuade the madam, Wanda Towns, but Wanda and her husband, Clint, who works as a security guard at Angel’s Ladies and who drove Cindi to the motel, were arrested and convicted with Cindi for attempting to
solicit an illegal outcall. Mack argues that Cindi was just going to “dance” for the man, that it was just an “escort” date, a distinction not made by the Nye County brothel ordinance. A month later the county sheriff’s office simultaneously raided the brothel and the Moores’ Vegas home. Evidence showed a history of outcalls, and the county commissioners shut down the brothel for two weeks, but an appeals judge later ruled entrapment, reversed the convictions, and ordered the Moores’ belongings returned. Still, a gross misdemeanor charge of conspiracy to engage in illegal prostitution looms over the Townses and Cindi, pending a possible settlement with the county. But with Mack blaming everyone for being part of a conspiracy and threatening to sue the county for violating his civil rights (holding Angel hostage, depriving Clint, who has asbestosis, of his oxygen, refusing to return important personal documents), and the county dredging up new pandering charges (trafficking girls to Vegas), the fight will likely drag on until both sides run out of steam. On the other hand, if Mack makes good on his threat to sue the county and wins, he may expand his business. There’s a vacant building across from the Burro Inn and Casino that he’s thinking about buying and turning into a funeral parlor.

Mack walks the line of the law as deftly as he walks the line between grief and lust. How very blurry that line is in a free-market culture that survives on the myopic propaganda of manufactured need, in which need is predicated on fear of loss, fear of not having; in which images of grief are routinely brought into focus as images of desire. Between grief and nothing, nothing sells better than grief. Except maybe pussy.

We pull around the side of the brothel, a compound of linked trailers painted antacid pink. Electric angels dance over the front porch of the double-wide. “That’s Shanda,” Mack says before we get out of the car. “She is a bubbling-over girl. So is Cindi. Those two girls
will kill you off.” Shanda, in a bowler and a pajama top unbuttoned to the navel, is ankle deep in cats; she ministers to one with an eye-dropper. Thirty or forty surround her like pigeons. She drops the kitten and greets me with a chipper Texan drawl. Two litters of the feral cats were born this week; their eyes are weepy and shuttered. Shanda helps Mack and me unload my car. We can’t help but toe mewling cats out of our path to the brothel.

Dinner is already on the table, waiting (Mack called from twenty miles back to let them know to set an extra plate for me). Wanda takes off an oven mitt to greet me and then runs to the kitchen for a last-minute dish. Mack sits at the head of the table; at the other end sits Clint Towns, who watches the news, an oxygen tube strapped under his nose. Cindi is a jittery blond in a red leather jacket. Diane tells me that if I want a good story then I should ask her about the time she and her daughter got lost in the Sahara and her daughter ran out of Kool-Aid and they were saved by a mysterious being.