Jonathan Kellerman - True Detectives

Taught that school was just another bourgeois trap, young Lem obliged with chronic misbehavior and rotten grades that belied his IQ. A month after high school graduation he was riveting axle bolts on the Ford assembly line. Ten months of that lit up the Exit sign in his head and he gave community college a try. Decent grades enabled a transfer to Wayne State, studying sociology for three years, then transferring to U. Mich-Ann Arbor, where he talked his way into the film school. Once in, he chased women, smoked dope and dropped acid, did minimal work, barely passed.

Cursed with a sluggish metabolism that heaped on pounds, and a face reminiscent of a boiled potato, Dement was compensated with a sour yet strangely appealing charisma that made him moderately successful with women, a gift for dialogue and the ready quip, and, most important, an innate understanding of how to lie with a camera. Nearly thirty and broke, he slept with the right woman and lucked into a gig directing industrial safety training loops.

By day, he shot his close-ups of snarling machinery spliced with stock footage of mangled limbs. Nights were spent on his art: pseudo-documentaries starring friends and neighbors that highlighted the malevolence of Every Corporation.

In a New York Times interview, years later, Dement described those days: “I never spent a second in therapy but I sure understood my true motivation: My parents thought what I did was fascist-lackey garbage and I wanted to redeem myself in their eyes. Then they died in a house fire, I was a basketcase for a long time. But in the end, being orphaned freed me.”

Twenty-two months after learning his parents had left more debt than estate, Dement wrote, directed, filmed, and exhibited a docudrama about pollution in Lake Erie at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Maybe it was the deliberately grainy use of black and white, maybe he was just ahead of his time; no one paid much attention to Brown Water.

Next came an exposé of an alleged cabal among GM, the Catholic Church, and the Zionist Organization of America.

Half of Dement's crew quit over that one.

Several lean years followed, during which Dement, pushing forty, married to a former dancer and saddled with a slew of kids, worked as a truck driver and a drywall installer. Then a populist assembly candidate from Flint named Eddie Fixland needed someone to produce campaign commercials on a shoestring budge. Dement got the job by working for free, Fixland won his seat in the House, and though two years of scandal got in the way of reelection, his campaign's class-warfare ads featuring long shots of dying rust-belt towns and sunken-cheeked retirees living in trailers caught everyone's attention.

Dement became the go-to guy when you wanted hard-edged cinéma-politique. He grew prosperous, moved to a big house in Bir mingham, rewrote and reshot his Lake Erie film using a bigger budget: full color, megadoses of the innuendo and hyperbole he'd perfected working for Fixland.

Brown Water , version II, was nominated for an Oscar. Won a statuette. Lem made a brief, nasty speech, moved to L.A., took meetings, fielded offers. Using other people's money, he shot an exposé of emergency room practices spiced with gobbets of gore inspired by his factory-accident flicks.

Red Rooms was nominated for an Oscar and might've won if a heartrending portrayal of a nine-year-old, blind poet prodigy hadn't surfaced just before the submission deadline.

Upon hearing the verdict, Lem was reputed to have fidgeted in his seat at the Kodak Theatre and murmured, “How can you beat a fucking walleyed Helen Keller incarnation?”

He denied the quote.

The next two years saw Dement's fortunes dip as he tried his hand at “serious cinema.” A tale of Shakespearean lust garnered more plagiarism suits than profit. A historical action film depicting both sides in the Civil War as slavering, self-serving barbarians went straight to video, as did a “postmodern shake-up” of Othello that recast the tragedy as a metaphor for the Arab-Israeli impasse, with a villain named Iago Bernstein.

Lem Dement's name faded from the buzzosphere, as did tabloid shots of the now three-hundred-pound artiste at The Right Parties, bursting out of a custom tuxedo, his trademark limp-brimmed fishing hat studded with lures perched jauntily on a massive, grizzled head.

Dement went “into seclusion to center myself.” Emerged three years later with a four-hour, unspeakably violent depiction of the earliest days of Christianity, shot during a thirty-two-month stay in Turkey.

Given its creator's sensibilities, everyone expected Saul to Paul: The Moment to be an indictment of organized religion. What they got, instead, was a paean to the severest aspects of fundamentalist dogma that trumpeted the virtues of forced conversion and portrayed Arabs, Phoenicians, Mesopotamians, and Jews as hook-nosed heretics.

In a full-page Variety ad, Lem Dement announced, “I've been born again in the truest sense. My art and my heart are now focused upon sacraments of truth, purity and redemption.”

Quickly condemned as racist agitprop by the Hollywood establishment and the mainstream press, and protested serially by Muslim and Jewish civil rights groups, the film enjoyed a limited release in leased art houses and church auditoriums. Word of mouth grew. Theater chains signed on. Within three months, Saul to Paulhad taken in four hundred million dollars. Foreign revenues added another hundred fifty.

Lem Dement announced his “retirement to a life of contemplation” and moved to a “multiacre estate” in Malibu.

Same city where Rory Stoltz went to school. Honing his Industry ambitions.

Where Caitlin Frostig had gotten straight A's.

Aaron pushed back from the screen. Paced his office.

Malibu was more a concept than a locale, stretching thirty miles up the coast. But the Pepperdine-Caitlin-Rory link couldn't be ignored.

Aaron considered waking Henry again, to find out if Lem Dement's spread was anywhere near the sprawling campus. Decided against it. If Henry had managed to revisit his dream, busting his fantasy a second time would breed too much ill will.

Plus, at the early stages of the investigation, he needed to be careful about tunnel vision.

Caitlin goes to school in 90265, ditto Rory.

Rory has the gate clicker to a Hollywood Hills house owned by Dement, whose main crib is in 90265.

He flashed back to the house on Swallowsong. The winding driveway implied a big-view lot. High-priced real estate… maybe the place housed one of the stoners Rory had chauffeured.

In a Hyundai?

Had to be camouflage. So did leaving the club through the back- that was celeb behavior.

Was one-or both-of the stoners a VIP? That synced with Rory waltzing into ColdSnake.

Aaron returned to the keyboard, paired Rory Stoltz with Lem Dement , and Googled.

Did you mean demented roar?

No, I didn't, Meddling Cyber-Wienie.

He sat there for a long time, feeling his brain turn to sludge.

Three ten a.m. What he craved was sinking his teeth into the case, ripping and shredding like a rabid dog until the facts bled.

What he did was slog upstairs to Play Land, undress, fold his clothes neatly over the brass-and-teak valet, slip naked between Frette sheets.

Guessing Caitlin's face would appear in his dreams. He hoped she would.

Back when he'd been on the job, he'd embraced the classic Homicide D's self-congratulation.

We talk for the dead.

And sometimes, the dead talk to us.

Moe arrived at his desk at eight a.m., thinking about the Rory Stoltz-Mason Book connection.