Sweetie's Diamonds (12 page)

Billy hesitated and then came out with it.
 
“Well, she's in it.”

“What do you mean?”

“She's
in
it.
 
The tape.
 
She's an actress in it.”

Peter Davis looked at his son in disbelief.
 
“I don't think so, Billy.”

“She is.
 
I think she made a bunch of those movies when she was younger.”

Davis examined the box and cassette again, turning it over as if he were hoping that some kind of identifying information would magically appear on it.
 

Finally, he just said, “Get to bed.
 
Now.”
 

Billy ran past him, down the hall, and into his room.

Peter Davis held the tape in his hand.
 
What did he have here?
 
Diane Boston?
 
In a porno movie?
 
What kind of a hand grenade was he holding?

This warranted closer inspection.

Davis shut off the television and carried the tape back to his bedroom, where he had his own set, VCR, and DVD player.
 
He shut the door, turned on the TV, and inserted the cassette.
 
The movie resumed where it had left off.

The “babysitter,” about to reach her moment of ecstasy, is interrupted when the child's parents arrive back home.
 
The woman instructs the man to pay the babysitter and take her home.
 
The man is all too happy to do so.
 

After a moment, Davis indeed recognized the video as one he had watched a few times during his bachelor days.
 
His son had lied to him.
 
Billy had been snooping around in the crawl space.
 

The movie continued.
 
The man escorts the babysitter outside, gives her some money, and then slips her a hundred-dollar bill.
 
He asks her if she'd like to earn a “little extra.”
 
The babysitter bats her eyes and tells him that she'd love to.
 
They drive a ways and turn down a deserted road.
 
The man parks the car and then… they go to it.

Peter Davis had looked at his fair share of pornography in his time.
 
When he was in college in the seventies he had made it something of a hobby.
 
He gave it up when he got married but unfortunately his taste for younger women and desire for sex on the side railroaded that venture.
 
After the divorce he had continued to look at and watch porn when he could get away with it, although he hadn't dug out his old collection in years.
 
In many ways, Peter Davis considered himself something of a connoisseur when it came to the pornography industry.
 
He knew who the performers were and he followed the various genres.
 
He could name the classic films and the stars.
 

And he recognized the actress playing the babysitter as Lucy Luv.
 

He remembered that Lucy Luv appeared on the porno scene in the late seventies and was around for two or three years and then disappeared.
 
All of her films had been transferred to videotape later in the eighties, once the video boom hit big.
 
He wasn't very familiar with her “work” but he had seen her before and was aware that she had been a promising newcomer, a star of a handful of films, and then she quit the business.
 
If he recalled correctly, there had even been a rumor that she had died.
 

Peter Davis smiled.
 
Now he understood why he found Diane Boston so attractive.
 
He saw something in her that no one else did.
 
Ever since he had met her, Davis had a sense of
déjà vu
when he was around her.
 
The one time they went on a date he had asked her if they had met before they began working together at the high school.
 
Diane had smirked and said, “Not likely.”
 
He had never been able to shake the feeling that she looked familiar.
 

Now he knew why.
 

Sure, Diane Boston looked a lot different now.
 
She was older, she wore her hair differently, and she wore contacts to change the color of her eyes.
 

Nevertheless, it was her.
 
Diane Boston was Lucy Luv.

D
arren Marshall slammed his fist on the desk and screamed at the monitor.

“You piece of shit!”

He looked at his watch and winced.
 
8:35.
 
He had better get to the office or Mertz would have his hide.
 

“What's wrong, honey?” Ellie called from the bedroom.

“The damn Internet is clogged up,” he yelled back.
 
“Go back to sleep.”
 
He closed Explorer and tried opening it again.
 
The blank screen remained frozen, not completely loading his home page.
 

Wasn't Internet cable supposed to be a lot faster than dial-up? he asked himself.
 
His experience was that this was true only ninety-six per cent of the time.
 
There seemed to be periods during the day when everyone and his dog were using the Internet and it slowed to a crawl.
 

To hell with it, he thought.
 
He closed the window, shut down the machine, and turned off the monitor.
 

“I'm leaving, Ellie,” he called.
 
He grabbed his Starbucks coffee thermos, picked up his briefcase, and ran to the door.
 
The sun was already warming things up in southern California and he was thankful that every day was Casual Day at the
Weekly
.
 
He could go in wearing a T-shirt and shorts if he wanted.
 
That would probably have to change if he ever made it to the
Times
.

He got inside his red Saturn, turned on the ignition, and backed out of the drive.
 
He and Ellie lived in a fifty-five-year-old bungalow not far from Echo Park.
 
It was a comfortable two-bedroom abode that he had bought inexpensively because the previous owners had raised cats.
 
The smell of urine could never be eliminated, no matter what kinds of cleaning solutions were tried.
 
This didn't bother Ellie because she was a cat person anyway.
 
She had two of them.
 
Darren was wary at first, but after living in the house for a week he didn't notice the smell.
 
Ellie's cats more than made up for the phantom odors of long-gone felines.
 
The only problem was what to do when they had guests, which thankfully wasn't very often.
 
Ellie usually cooked something with a ton of garlic in it so that he wouldn't have to explain why the house stank.

As he got on the crowded 101, Darren once again considered the project he had decided to undertake.
 
Ever since Aaron Valentine's trial had ended, Darren had become obsessed with the man.
 
He had spent time at the library digging up past news articles on Valentine and utilized his home computer to surf the Internet in search of any dirt he could find about the porn king.
 
It was a terrific idea.
 
An exposé on Aaron Valentine could elevate his status at the
Weekly
and perhaps even lead to a book deal
.
 
The King of Porn
—great title.
 
He had broached the subject with Mertz, who shrugged and said, “It might work.
 
But research it on your own time until you have something concrete to pitch.”
 

Darren wondered if he could really score an interview with Valentine.
 
It was worth a try.
 
Darren had heard, however, that Valentine was not an easy man to see.
 
The man didn't like journalists unless he was in control of what was being said.
 
If Valentine knew that Darren wanted to write an exposé about him, and psychoanalyze him in the process, he probably wouldn't be very happy about it.
 

Still, Darren was fascinated by what he had learned so far about Aaron Valentine.
 
The man had served a short stint in prison during the sixties for pandering and peddling drugs.
 
He got into the pornography business in the early seventies and apparently found his niche.
 
By the end of that decade he had established himself as one of the kings of the trade.
 
Unlike his competitors, who were based mostly in the San Francisco area, Valentine risked arrest by making his films in southern California.
 
A few of his productions had been busted but many slipped by with the help of the West Coast branches of a couple of Italian families with law enforcement personnel in their pockets.
 
Darren had come across a few articles dated from 1978 inferring that mafia activity in the Los Angeles area was experiencing a renaissance due to the rise in pornography and drug use.
 
Darren was positive that Valentine was mob-connected.

Some of the more intriguing news items Darren had found centered on the mysterious disappearances of a few porn stars who had worked for Valentine's company, Erotica Selecta Films.
 
The first went by the name of Julie Titman.
 
Her body was found in Death Valley months after her disappearance.
 
One older actress, Brenda De Blaze, whose real name was Karen Andrews, had disappeared in the spring of 1979.
 
This would have gone unnoticed if her father hadn't made a big deal out of it and appeared on local television in a plea for help.
 
Valentine's organization claimed that the actress had simply left town.
 
This conflicted with the father's testimony that his daughter had told him she was trying to quit the business but that Valentine wouldn't let her.
 
Seven months later, Karen Andrews' body was also found in the desert.
 
She had been shot in the head.
 
The perpetrator was never caught.
 

Two more starlets who went by the names of Angel Babe and Lucy Luv went missing at the same time in early 1980.
 
Their real names were Angela Gilliam and Dana Barnett, relative newcomers to the business who roomed together in Santa Monica.
 
Darren got the impression that they were lovers, or at least bisexual.
 
Angela was a pretty young blonde who made less than five feature films before disappearing.
 
Dana, also blonde, was more of a star, having been working in the biz since 1977.
 
No one knew what happened to the girls, as their apartment was left with their things still in it.
 
Bodies were never found, if indeed they were deceased.
 
Darren was interested in this case because Angela's brother Eric was also in the porn business, acting under the name of Pete Rod.
 
Eric Gilliam had given a statement to the police implying that his sister wouldn't just leave town without telling him.
 
He suspected foul play and went so far as to insinuate Valentine's involvement.
 
Eric Gilliam left Erotica Selecta Films three years later and began to work for other production companies.
 
Today he was one of the leaders in the business and produced and directed a line of videos featuring amateurs.

Traffic on the 101 stalled and Darren was forced to use his cell phone to call the office.
 

“You need to start leaving your house earlier,” Mertz told him.
 
It was the sixth or seventh time Darren had called in late in less than a month.
 

“You won't care when I tell you what I've dug up on Valentine,” Darren said.
 
“I think the guy is involved with the mafia and is possibly a murderer.”

“So tell me something we don't know,” his editor said.
 
“Just be careful you're not setting us up for libel.
 
And get your butt in here.”

Darren hung up and the traffic started moving again.
 
What an asshole, he thought.

He figured that a juicy story was just waiting to be uncovered.
 
Missing porn stars?
 
Dead
porn stars?
 
Mafia connections?
 
Pornography and drugs?
 
It certainly had all the right elements for a bestseller and possibly even a movie deal.