A Pacific Breeze Hotel (2 page)

DeWarner’s mouth twisted into an ugly imitation of a smile. “Well, Miss Felicia, if you want to give me a private audition, you might be able to change my mind.”

Felicia decided the audition was over. “I think it’s best if I leave now.”

Suddenly, DeWarner began kissing her and tearing at her dress. He ripped at the delicate material until the buttons holding the dress together gave way and fell to the carpet. DeWarner’s initial appearance had been that of a kindly grandfather, but now he had changed into an angry bear of a man. He held her in a tight grip, one plump, meaty hand covering her mouth and nose. Felicia couldn’t breathe or scream. She kicked out and landed a blow to his kneecap. He roared with pain and loosened his grip on her. She broke free of his embrace and then ran to the door leading to the reception area, her only means of escape.

Felicia had her hand on the doorknob when she heard the gunshot behind her. She turned to see DeWarner sprawl face-first on the carpet.

Blood gushed from a wound in the back of his head and spread across the expensive Persian carpet. Felicia had run for her life.

ÇÇÇ

“Miss Avery?” Nolan prompted her.

“I’m sorry. What was the question?”

“You were saying he was shot while you were still in his office?”

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“That’s correct.”

“Where did the shot come from?”

Felicia looked past Nolan as if she was remembering the layout of DeWarner’s office. “I think it came from the French doors. There’s a little garden out there. Actually, it’s more like a miniature jungle. Behind the garden is a swimming pool. I think the person who shot Mr. DeWarner was hiding somewhere out there.”

Nolan wrote quickly as she spoke. “Did you catch a glimpse of anyone?”

Felicia shifted in her chair. “I didn’t see anything. Just all that blood.”

“So why did you run?” Nolan looked up from his notebook and pinned her with his gaze.

Felicia lowered her eyes. “I don’t know. I mean, I was scared. I didn’t know if he would shoot me, too. I saw the blood on the carpet…and my dress was torn and I didn’t want anyone to see me like that.”

O’Rourke was certain he could have shot DeWarner himself without batting an eye after the way he had mistreated Felicia. The thought of that sleazy producer touching her…

Of course, if Felicia stayed in this town for any length of time, there was the danger she would become hardened like the women O’Rourke had dealt with while working vice. Many of them had arrived with dreams of stardom, only to end up in the flesh trade after a few years. But Felicia had an intelligence about her. There was a mind working behind those green eyes. O’Rourke hoped she wouldn’t follow the inevitable path to destruction.

Satisfied they’d got all the information she had to offer, O’Rourke and Nolan left Felicia’s apartment. They walked down the stairs, through the lobby, and out into the last rays of afternoon sunshine.

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O’Rourke turned the car onto LaBrea Avenue, then hung a right on Santa Monica, heading for the police station. He inhaled deeply and then wished he hadn’t. The air was stale and had an acrid taste to it. “I’ll drop you off at the station. I’m gonna tail her.”

“What for?” Nolan cast a puzzled glance in O’Rourke’s direction.

“The shooter may think she can ID him. Best to keep her safe.”

“Whatever you say.”

O’Rourke knew Nolan didn’t believe him for a second but he didn’t care. Now he had an excuse to see Felicia again, and that was all that mattered.

ÇÇÇ

The next morning, O’Rourke found himself two cars behind Felicia’s rusted blue Coupe. She turned her car onto Sunset Boulevard and he caught a glimpse of red hair kissed golden under the brilliant California sun. After a few moments, her car pulled to the curb ahead of him.

O’Rourke slowed his own vehicle and then pulled over a block behind her. Felicia grabbed her purse and hurried down the sidewalk before entering an elegantly ornate building. A sign on the front door indicated this was the famous Lloyd Acting Studio.
Prestigious place,
he thought.

Not easy to get accepted into the hallowed sanctum of acting excellence, established years ago by the honorable Sir Chester Lloyd.

O’Rourke closed his eyes for a moment. He indulged in a daydream wherein he escorted Felicia to the Policemen’s Ball, the highlight of the LAPD social calendar. In the daydream, Felicia was decked out in white satin, her lovely shoulders bare. O’Rourke wore a tuxedo and a proud smile on his face. They danced and laughed and when he brought her home, he kissed her. But then, the dream evaporated into insubstantial

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gossamer. O’Rourke opened his eyes and focused his fierce concentration on the back of Felicia’s car.

Even though he was new to the detective division, O’Rourke had rapidly distinguished himself by having the highest solve rate. O’Rourke lived and breathed the job, and he had no life outside of his work.

When he had shipped out to the war, O’Rourke had hopes of starting a family with one of the girls who had come to Hollywood to be a star, but had given up at the starting gate. Lenore had accepted his proposal, but the war had changed everything for both of them. The long absence when he had been fighting in the Pacific had revealed a flaw in her character. She was incapable of loyalty to one man, and had admitted as much in a tearful letter, which had found its way to him in a stinking, Asian jungle where he hunkered down with his platoon waiting for the next onslaught from the enemy. Her letter traveled from the other side of the world but it had still smelled of lilac. He had held it to his nose and dreamed of home.

O’Rourke hadn’t kept the letter. When he’d been captured and sent to a Japanese POW camp, the enemy soldiers had taken it, along with everything else he possessed. They’d slapped him across the face with the letter and then tore it to pieces. He’d imagined he could still smell lilac as the pieces floated through the sticky, humid air. Then they’d confined him in a cage for two years as if he was an animal. The things he’d suffered in the camp had tempered him and molded him into a different man than the one who had stood smiling on the gangplank of the troop ship, waving good-bye to Lenore on the dock. Los Angeles was also a different town when he’d returned from the war. Or maybe he saw it that way because of his own experiences.

O’Rourke checked his watch, surprised to find two hours had passed since Felicia had entered the building. Then suddenly, she was outside

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again, smiling and waving at the other acting students who walked towards their cars or the bus stop down the street. Felicia pulled her car back onto Sunset Boulevard, joining the swell of bumper-to-bumper traffic navigating the road. O’Rourke managed to stay three car lengths behind the blue Coupe, and when the car hung a left on La Cienega and eventually swung onto Melrose Avenue, O’Rourke guessed her destination. This was confirmed when she arrived at 5555 Melrose Avenue. Felicia drove through the gates and past the dazzling white façade―the entrance to Paramount Studios.

Another audition. How many auditions had she attended since arriving in California? How many did it take before a starry-eyed, would-be movie star gave up and headed home to the Midwest, eventually marrying and raising a new generation of would-be movie stars?

But Felicia had talent or she wouldn’t have made it into the Lloyd Acting Studio. What she needed was a break. Unfortunately, Hollywood was downright miserly when it came to handing those out.

The last stop on her agenda came as a surprise to O’Rourke. After the audition at Paramount, Felicia drove downtown and pulled up in front of a weathered, washed-out building on Figueroa. In better days, before the Great Depression, the building had been a grand theater built in the Art Deco style that had been all the rage at the time. Now, it housed the Figueroa Street Soup Kitchen.

Fifteen minutes after Felicia had entered the building, O’Rourke decided it was time for a little reconnaissance work. He entered the foyer of the once-magnificent theatre. The place reeked of mold and neglect and was dimly lit and depressing after the vivid sunshine outside.

Audience seating was now replaced by rows of tables where hungry men leaned over steaming bowls of soup. Across the cavernous area, in front

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of the now-empty stage, Felicia wore a food-encrusted apron and ladled out soup from a copper tureen.

An auburn curl escaped the chignon which rested on the nape of her neck. Her cheeks were flushed from steam, kissed to a deeper shade of rose. O’Rourke had never heard of a starlet wasting her precious time performing charitable acts for her fellow man―not unless there were plenty of cameras around to document the fact. His gut feeling about her had been correct. This girl was different. What had brought her to this plastic world of tinsel and neon? It was no place for a person to flourish and grow, a city that mowed people down and spit out their bodies in pieces.

O’Rourke felt he knew Los Angeles the way a civilian could never experience it. It was part and parcel of who he was. And like the tough, old City of Angels, he possessed no soft edges or vulnerable spots anywhere on his body.

Lately though, a restlessness, a loneliness, a longing, had begun to gnaw at his heart. A desire to belong, to care about someone, to pour out his fears, his hopes, his dreams to a sympathetic, human ear. The only one he could talk to was Nolan. But soft emotions didn’t figure into their conversations. They talked about cases they worked, baseball, and the latest left-handed rookie slugger.

Felicia smiled at a ragged, unkempt man who held out a bowl to receive his soup. The man smiled back at her with a snaggle-toothed grin, which made O’Rourke want to turn away in disgust. But Felicia didn’t. Instead, she looked the man in the eye and gave him a warm smile. O’Rourke saw the flush of pleasure spread up the man’s neck as Felicia bestowed this small attention on him.

As if sensing his scrutiny, Felicia glanced up and swept her gaze around the dining room before returning it to the soup tureen. Confident

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he hadn’t been spotted in the dimly lit foyer, O’Rourke walked back toward the building’s entrance.

He picked up the
Los Angeles Times
from a vendor down the street from the soup kitchen. DeWarner’s murder had made the front page. No surprise there. He glanced up now and then to reassure himself Felicia’s car was still parked a few spaces in front of his own. Turning back to the paper, he read the speculation about a possible organized crime involvement in the murder. As far as O’Rourke knew, DeWarner Studios had no involvement with the mob.

The crime lord, Mickey Cohen, had taken over the Los Angeles rackets after Bugsy Siegel’s untimely demise. Bugsy had been a handsome, charismatic racketeer, a “celebrity gangster,” chummy with the Hollywood set and accepted in their social circles. Nevertheless, O’Rourke could find no connection between DeWarner and Siegel. His investigation revealed no connection between DeWarner and the new crime king, Mickey Cohen, either.

If not organized crime, whose wrath had the powerful producer incurred?

“Good afternoon, Detective. Would you care for a bowl of soup?”

O’Rourke’s heart spiked upwards as if attempting to escape his body.

Felicia had crept up so quietly, he hadn’t been aware of her until she stood beside his open window and peered down at him. Some detective he was.

ÇÇÇ

Detective O’Rourke stared up at her, caught off guard and obviously not happy about it. He removed his hat and his face grew red under her scrutiny. Was he embarrassed?
Serves him right!
she thought. All

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morning, she had sensed someone following her as she had driven around the city on her various errands. Now she had caught the culprit.

But had she? The sense of being followed had dogged Felicia since C.B. DeWarner’s murder, even before she had met O’Rourke. Who had followed her yesterday? From the moment she’d bolted from the dead man’s office, Felicia looked over her shoulder, trying to discover the person who shadowed her footsteps. Today, her feeling had been justified when she glanced up from her tureen and spotted O’Rourke’s craggy but attractive face shadowed in the foyer of the soup kitchen.

Felicia leaned closer to O’Rourke. “Are you following me, Detective?”

“I must be losing my touch.” O’Rourke’s voice was rueful. “Usually when I tail someone, they don’t know it unless I want them to.”

“I just happened to see you across the dining room.”

Felicia decided not to tell him about the feeling that someone had shadowed her since DeWarner’s murder. Most likely, it was her imagination working overtime.

“How often do you work at this place?” O’Rourke’s mouth tightened as he took in the old building, the run-down neighborhood.

“Twice a week. It’s actually a nice place to work.”

Felicia caught his skeptical expression and wondered if she could explain why she spent her spare time at the soup kitchen. Sitting around waiting to hear whether she had gotten another bit part in a movie or play would drive her insane if she let it. Helping others, especially men who were homeless and hungry, kept her grounded in reality―which was a rare gem in Hollywood, a rationed commodity. She knew many aspiring actresses who seemed to live in a dream world where the pot of gold was just over the next rainbow. Felicia was part of this dream world and yet apart from it. Helping others made her realize how fortunate she was to have a place to live and food on the table. Seeing the homeless men in

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their torn and dirty clothes weeded out any stray seeds of self-pity that sprang up in her heart.

“If you say it’s a nice place, I guess I’ll have to believe you.”

O’Rourke’s expression was still skeptical.

“Believe me.” Felicia walked around and got into his car. She turned to face him. “Now, why are you following me?”