Joseph Wambaugh - Hollywood Hills

He said gently, “Uh, Mrs. Brueger, we’re here.”

She opened her eyes and rummaged in her purse until she found a key ring that had a small remote device on it. She pressed it and the gate swung open. He drove in on a long, curving, faux-cobblestone driveway. He made the circle around a bubbling fountain so that the front of his car was facing the gate and she was on the side in front of the huge tiled arch over the main door.

He jumped out and ran around to open the door for her but she was already out, holding her $1,300 shoes in one hand and her purse in the other.

“Come in for a minute, Nathan,” she said.

“Okay, Mrs. Brueger,” he said.

This was a first. He’d been inside many homes in the Hollywood Hills over the years but as a cop, almost never as a guest.

She unlocked the door and pushed it open, walking to a nearby computer panel on the wall to punch in her code and deactivate the high-pitched alarm warning.

“Follow me,” she said.

He did that, crossing a foyer of Mexican tile until he was looking down two steps into the great room. It was very large and it seemed that almost every square foot of the white plaster walls contained paintings: oils, watercolors, and numbered lithographs.

Leona Brueger tossed her shoes on a massive glass coffee table, knocking over some pricey-looking knickknacks.

She said, “Have a seat. I’ll be right back. What’re you drinking?”

The entire interior was done in cream and custard colors: the walls, the drapes, the carpet, the side tables, and even the twin sofas, with accent pillows in subtle pastels. It all spelled comfort to Hollywood Nate. There was none of that minimalist crap he was constantly seeing in magazines and in the L.A. Times home section. This all looked stuffed and overstuffed. He had the impression of being enveloped by a giant voluptuous marshmallow.

And then there was the view. It was Hollywood, but not his Hollywood down there at asphalt level. This was Hollywood as seen by God, if there was one. The smog from this elevation was not ugly, not a dingy gray blanket of dangerous gases settling over the L.A. basin in late summer. No, this was a blaze of vivid primary colors propelled by offshore breezes and later would be lit by a last solar gasp before the sun fell into the Pacific. It was astonishing how beautiful and even delicious the L.A. smog could look from a $15 million home in the Hollywood Hills.

She paused on the top step and said, “Do you like the view?”

Nate said, “Up here the smog is the color of a cabernet and overripe plums and purple grapes with a spray of peach juice flowing through it. But somehow I don’t think this is what they mean when they say that Hollywood is just a big fruit bowl.”

Leona Brueger said, “Why, Officer Weiss, you do surprise me. Not only do you carry a SAG card but you have a touch of the poet in you. I wonder what other surprises you might be keeping hidden.”

Nate looked at his watch and said, “I have to be at work and in uniform by seventeen fifteen-I mean, five fifteen. I better not have a drink.”

She turned and said, “How about diet soda? You look like the healthy diet soda type.”

“Fine,” he said. “Thanks.”

The coffee table between the two sofas was piled with art books that looked as though they’d never been opened, and women’s magazines that looked well perused. When she returned with his diet soda in a crystal goblet, she had a goblet of white wine for herself. She held her glass up to his and said, “Chin-chin,” which a makeup artist that Nate used to date said was “the cry of the Hills birds,” meaning the women of the Hollywood Hills.

She sat down two feet away from him on the sofa and said, “I gave the butler the afternoon off. He won’t be back until seventeen hundred-I mean, five o’clock.”

That made Nate chuckle, and then he said, “Would he be Raleigh, the guy I’m supposed to see when I check on your property after you’re gone?”

“That’s him,” Leona Brueger said. “Some of my friends say I shouldn’t leave all this”-she waved in the general direction of the paintings-“with a man who’s only worked here such a short time, but he’s also worked for a friend of ours and comes highly recommended. Besides, I don’t give a rat’s eyeball for all this. It was my late husband’s passion, not mine. It’s well insured anyway, so que será, será.”

“I don’t know very much about art,” Nate said, sipping his soda and thinking, Yes, this lady really does like to get her drink on.

“Neither do I,” she said. “And I’m too old to learn. And speaking of old, how old did you say you are?”

“I’m thirty-eight,” he said. “I know I’m getting a bit long in the tooth to make it in the movie business. I’ve been a cop since I was a baby of twenty-one.”

“Hah!” she said. “Old. Thirty-eight is old, is it?”

She took a long pull from the wineglass and put it down on the coffee table. She scooted close to him and said, “I’ll bet I could help your career a little bit. As far as the part in whatever the thing is that Rudy’s doing, you’ve got it. I’ll see to that. But it’s only a couple of days’ work. I know other people in the business. People with real topspin. I could introduce you around. Some evening when you’re off duty, would you like to come here to a dinner party and meet a few of my friends?”

“You bet I would,” Nate said, wondering if a chemical peel gave her that buttery skin.

“I have to warn you, though,” she said, “all they talk about is diets, drugs that facilitate diets, and box-office grosses.”

“Fine with me,” he said.

“Can you really act?”

“Well, I’m not one of those who go through life imagining how everything would look through the lens of a Steadicam, but I’ve taken some classes,” he said. “And I’ve had a couple of speaking parts, but not in a feature film yet. And I can’t count the number of times I’ve been an extra.” He stopped when he saw her lips curve up in a little smile, and he felt like a kid bragging to a wealthy aunt. Then he said, “So, yes, I think I can act. But so can thousands-no, make it tens of thousands-of other people trying for the same breaks. I know what I’m up against.”

“Rudy Ressler is no Martin Scorcese,” she said, “but I’m sure you’re aware of that. Is that how you see yourself? In a crime movie directed by Scorcese or maybe by Clint Eastwood?”

“In my fantasies?”

“Yeah, let’s hear your fantasies.”

“To be honest, in my fantasies I’m not playing a cop. I see myself in a Woody Allen movie.”

He watched her burst into laughter, and he wasn’t sure how to interpret it until she stopped and said, “You are adorable, Nathan Weiss. I think I could like you a lot.”

“I like you, too,” he said, not knowing what else to say. And then it occurred to him that what was making him feel so uncomfortable and awkward was not just the fact that she was Rudy Ressler’s fiancée and he wanted the job. And it wasn’t just her age. She was a fit, hot-looking woman, even if she was as old as his mother. It was that she was rich. This was the first time in his life that Nate Weiss was playing a flirtation scene with a seriously wealthy woman.

“Meanwhile, you do have a job that you like, yes?” Leona said.

Nate said, “At Hollywood Station we used to have a sergeant we called the Oracle. He said that doing good police work was the most fun we’d ever have in our entire lives. And I’ve found that to be true.” Then he thought of his former partner, Dana Vaughn, of her lying dead in his arms, and he said, “For the most part it’s been fun.”

“Where does acting come into it, then?” she asked.