Gregg Hurwitz - The Crime Writer

L.A. is a city of memorable faces. Even the unattractive character actors have that certain something, that exemplification of type. The others, too, lodge in the mind. The near misses. All lacking that extra it that would catapult them, that would mean they're not here at this place with these people, with you and me. Perky girl in a White Sox cap, nose-job-enhanced but not quite there. The wrestler who won best smile at Wichita High. The cheerleading captain who gave great backseat head in Short Hills. They come like pioneers, bringing abdominal six-packs and twenty-two waists and little else, seekers of prepackaged glory without the talent for Broadway or the balls for the service. L.A. is the edge of the American dream, the farthest your hopes can carry you before you topple into the Pacific, Icarus without water wings. And yet still they come. They come out and crowd the cliff edges, penguins above dangerous waters.

L.A. will devour them. It will crush them into inconsequentiality, grind them into a paste and smear them through the city's forgotten alleys. They will clip coupons and pre-party to save money on bar tabs. They will inhabit dojos and Coffee Beans during working hours sunny L.A.'s businesses thrive with patronage from the idle keeping their empty audition hours open and they'll scour online job sites for graveyard shifts that don't exist. They will get gigs as trainers and waiters and Cuervo girls, and their friends will mumble, That's cool, that's cool. They'll turn into third-rate entrepreneurs, making bamboo purses, designing jewelry in Reseda, marketing a blue-colored vodka in college bars. Their days must be open for auditions that come less and less frequently, but just when they're about to lose hope, they'll land Laura in a small-theater production of The Glass Menagerie and the rush and promise will fuel ungainful employment for another few years. And then, if they haven't wised up and beat a retreat to Billings or Sioux City, someone will offer them a pinch of escapism or a skin flick not porn but tasteful erotica and so the next downward spiral will begin. And new meat arrives by the busload. It pours out of LAX and off the freeways, chattel for the abattoir, oxen groomed for the altar.

I reached Flux, fighting through a mosh pit of wannabes mobbing the unmarked double doors. No one has a name here. They are all "dawg" and "baby doll." They gain position in the scrum by working in concert, like raptors, with the friends they'll be only too eager to drop once they book their first pilot. They call out to the bouncer using his first name, which they've researched. Their boss's brother knows the bartender, or their brother's boss knows the owner. They swell and shove politely, and a chirpy girl with a clipboard feigns exasperation through her ecstasy of purpose and rank, chiding them and distributing wristbands as if feeding chimps at a zoo. A few older women, indistinguishable from prostitutes by garb and makeup, have ceded bitchiness with their age; they can no longer compete directly. Instead they switch strategies, cooing support at the czarina working the door. That poor girl. Look, she's all alone managing the line. You go, honey. You tell them. Still, they do not curry enough goodwill to pass Go. The girl with the clipboard knows their type, knows that in a different life they've blown smoke in her face at a cattle call or discarded her head shot while working nights filing in a casting office.

Consigned to club-line purgatory, the crowdlings bicker and pop pills and talk loudly of embellished career developments and pretend not to be where they are, waiting outside in the bitter Hollywood night. That is where they will wait, night after night. And then one day Fame will pluck one of these poor unfortunate souls and elevate her like a priestess to the top of the ziggurat, and thenceforth, she will never know cordon ropes and lines and bouncers named Ricky, and it will make it worth it for everyone else who still does.

Chic's voice, like warning bells in my head: Always easier to take somebody else's inventory.

What made me any different? About how I got here? Where I'd wound up?

A shorter bus ride and a longer stain.

Then what? Envy? I thought I'd sworn off that with the single-barrel bourbon. Envy for what? The exuberance? The hopefulness? The youth? As Chic had said, life leaves you behind. By Hollywood standards I was long in the tooth, like Morton Frankel. I had a few successes under my belt and access to rooms behind some of the city's locked doors as a writer, as an alleged murderer in a way that others might envy, but I'd have traded it in a stockbroker's minute to be back on the other side, out in the unforgiving night, with all my solutions lying inside. I'd have traded it all to believe in the myth once again.

But instead I am here to deliver a hair.

I cut through the crowd, and it yielded to my apathy. Inside, over an ungodly remix beat, some kid covered Bob Seger without the grit or gravitas.

"Drew Danner," I told the girl at the door. "I'm with Johnny Ordean."

At both names the frontmost constituents of the throng stilled and the girl dropped the clipboard against her thigh, revealing it for the prop that it was, and wordlessly unhooked the maroon rope.

Sliced-and-diced Seger had given way to pump-and-hump rhythm. Threesomes were freaking under seizure-inducing lights. I find me bitches left and right. I find me bitches every night. Production-development girls in Chanel grooved in a circle, their oblivious movement an inadvertently droll endorsement of the lyrics. The club had a kind of magnetic energy that pointed to the rear corner, where indeed I found Johnny Ordean and his franchise face. Fulfilling the no-neck contingency of the entourage, his cousin sat deep in the booth, hammering cigarettes into his face one after another.

He slid out and I slid in. Johnny wrapped an arm around my shoulders, raised his brows at my vibrant eye, and gave my neck a squeeze like an old-school mobster. Playing the part, I reached inside my jacket pocket, removed the envelope, and dropped it on the table like a payoff. The envelope held a Ziploc containing a single specimen of Morton Frankel's hair. The others I was saving for a rainy day.

Johnny wound his finger in the air, a let's-get-moving gesture, and his cousin shifted the cig from one end of his mouth to the other and pressed a cell phone to his sweaty cheek.

"Fast and quiet," I said.

Johnny squeezed my neck again.

"And thank you."

"Of course, bro. What good is celebrity if you can't put it to work?"

It was, I thought, an excellent question.

Far from the madding crowd, I sat like a tailgater on my little rented rectangle of Hollywood asphalt and dialed my cell phone.

"I'd like to see you," I said. "I'm in your neck of the woods."

"Ah, yes," she said, "I can hear the excess in the background."

The parking-lot attendant gave me a peculiar look as I pulled out. For twenty bucks I should've set up camp for the night.

Caroline proved to live in a corner unit on the sixth floor of a recently renovated building on Crescent Heights. I tripped over some vestigial scaffolding on my way in, the doorman kindly pretending not to notice. I waited in the freshly carpeted hall while she undid a profusion of dead bolts. She double-checked me through a veil of security chains, and then the door closed on me again. More metallic unhooking and we were face-to-face.

She reached out, gingerly touched my right temple just beyond the stitches. "Have you iced that?"

Minutes later I was sitting on her plush sofa, she on the adjoining coffee table, the better to press a bag of frozen corn kernels to my eye. I described to her the nature of my disagreement with Mort. To my surprise she didn't reprimand me for Junior's role, but then, she knew him better than I and, given her profession, likely applied a stringent doctrine of accountability regardless of age.