The Ticket Out (7 page)

But I still had questions. Why would she blackmail someone when she'd sold her script? Why didn't the goon in the Hawaiian shirt know what Stenholm looked like? What about the last thing he said? What was the second part that wasn't doable?

I fiddled with the S and reviewed my options.

The money put me in concrete danger—as opposed to my hypothetical danger as the hypothetical victim of an incompetent killer. It was impossible to give it back. How much time did I have before the goon realized he paid the wrong woman? How much time before he identified me and came after me? The police were going to get the envelope, but that wouldn't change anything: the goon would
still
come after me.

I patted a bundle. It seemed like a fortune. Twenty thousand dollars was half a year's salary after taxes. I thought of the Impala with the Kansas plates. What if the research for Stenholm cost money? What if I had to go to the Midwest? I'd lent my sister a lot since she'd moved to L.A.; it had exhausted my savings and I was living from paycheck to paycheck. But I didn't want to ask for expenses in advance. Barry might use it as an excuse to kill the piece.

I thumbed the bills of one bundle. One bundle—make it two, to be safe. That would be two thousand dollars for research. It was more than enough for comfort, but not so much that I couldn't pay it back. I'd think of a way to finesse it with the cops. Lockwood had exposed me as a bad liar, but I'd think of something.

I packed up the money, got dressed, and went out to the pool house.

The pool house felt fine in the daylight. In fact, the only spooky part about walking in there was how unspooky it felt. The place was sunny, the cops had cleaned the bathtub, and I'd straightened up after Lockwood had left. Her death had left no visible trace in my house.

That wasn't true:
I
was a trace. I started to laugh but had to stop. It hurt too much.

I took a long shower, then examined my face in the mirror. The punch had missed my nose and caught me on the left cheekbone. The skin there was greenish yellow and swollen. My left eye hurt, and there was a squishy lump on the back of my head.

I swabbed the lump, spread arnica cream on my cheek, swallowed four aspirin, and went to the kitchen to make coffee. While it was brewing, I stood on a chair and pulled the xeroxes out of the attic. I stuffed the envelope through the slats, poured some coffee, sat down with the telephone, and went to work.

First, I left a message for Lockwood to call me.

Second, I left a message on Vivian's voice mail. I told her about Stenholm's apartment and asked her to ask her cop sources about a burglary last winter.

Third, I called Mark to see what he'd heard from his Industry sources. Something had come up and he'd only made one call. I told him to get cracking. I also asked him to get the guest list for the party from Barry's assistant. He said I would owe him for this, and I said definitely.

I put the phone down and opened Barry's file on the Burger King siege.

I set Vivian's juicy note aside for the end. Underneath it was a shorter note from Barry. He listed the subjects that he wanted Lockwood to comment on. Most of them were common sense, as if Barry didn't trust my basic reporting skills. But one of his suggestions surprised me. He wanted me to ask Lockwood what
really
happened during the siege. I thought we already knew that.

The L.A.
Times
carried the initial story. It was dated Sunday, December 24, 2000.

I turned pages and kept reading. Lockwood was hailed as a hero; Marquez was treated like a lowlife. He was an 18th Street Gang member, and had weapons and drug arrests as a juvenile and adult. It came out that the siege was not gang related: Marquez's longtime girlfriend had left him for another man. She was an employee at the Burger King.

I realized as I read how much I'd forgotten about this particular scandal. Forgotten—or never knew. Christmas was a film critic's busiest season. We had last-minute Oscar contenders, the big family movies, and year-end wrap-ups to write. My Ten-Best list alone took days to decide. I never knew that, in the beginning, media opinion was on Lockwood's side. Given the circumstances and the rules of police procedure, he'd done the right thing.

I came to a brief biography.

He was an L.A. native, born and raised in Torrance. He'd gone to UCLA and law school, and had passed the California bar but never practiced law. He joined the LAPD instead and became a detective fifteen years ago. His wife was a senior deputy DA for Orange County. They had no children.

An old head shot of Lockwood in uniform accompanied the piece. He looked thirty years old, and scary in a buzz haircut.

Then the tide of opinion turned. The
Millennium
helped turn it.

A former hostage claimed that Lockwood shot Marquez as Marquez was preparing to surrender. The media went berserk. Marquez went from lowlife to misguided lover boy. Someone discovered that Lockwood once worked a homicide case in Rampart Division. Suddenly Marquez's criminal record was in doubt; maybe he was another victim of Rampart frame-ups. Calls came for Lockwood's firing. The pun machines cranked into overtime. Headlines read,
BURGER CON CARNAGE
and
PARKS TELLS A WHOPPER.
The
Millennium
had said nothing while Lockwood was a hero. Now Barry jumped in with a series of editorials.

Lockwood denied the hostage's allegations; a dozen witnesses backed him up. The
Times
discovered that the former hostage was a felony fugitive and reputed 18th Street Gang member. There were scattered attempts to clear Lockwood's name, but the scandal petered out into messy ambiguities.

Lockwood went on a three-month leave in May. The media read it as a tacit admission of guilt. The leave overlapped with Perez's release from jail; that was construed as an LAPD safety move. A short wire item from late July said that Lockwood spent his leave fishing in Mexico.

The file ended there. I picked up Vivian's note and laughed at her first line: she thanked me for hogging two great stories. The rest was gossip and advice.

“Rumor is rampant that DL came back from Mexico
a changed man
. My p.d. contacts won't discuss it, and the groupie girls, long on libido but short on insight, can't describe the change. DL is a
major
groupie heartthrob, especially now that we hear he and his wife are splitsville. By all accounts he was faithful while married (‘divine but unfuckable' in the words of one oversexed admirer), unlike your average cop. Now that he might be free, there's a scramble for his favors.
Your story is this change
. Imagine what DL must have gone through. What is he thinking and feeling since the siege?”

I reread the note, flipped the stack of pages, and started over from the beginning.

 

I
WAS NOT
happy with Barry's clip file.

I wasn't happy because it didn't answer the critical questions. What exactly
had
happened inside the Burger King? Was Lockwood guilty or not? If he was a changed man, what did he change from? I knew from Vivian that every cop had a personnel package; it contained citizen complaints, Internal Affairs findings, letters of commendation and support, and ratings reports. The contents were confidential, but the information could be had from friendly sources. What did Lockwood's package contain?

Vivian's note also threw me off. She spent a lot of time around cops and would call a pig a pig. She didn't take that line with Lockwood.

I left a message on her voice mail, then checked the file for recurring bylines and started phoning around.

I found two Lockwood reporters at their desks. They recognized my name and knew about the murder in Los Feliz; they'd even been trying to reach me. But neither of them was willing to talk for free. They would only trade information—if I told them what I knew, they'd tell me what they knew. I said I wasn't trading, and the conversations ended there. I did find out that the cops still hadn't released Greta Stenholm's name. That's the first question the reporters asked: could I confirm the name of the victim?

I got off the phone and played my messages. The light had been blinking since yesterday but I'd been ignoring it.

Most of the calls were from reporters; I erased them as I went. My sister had called twice to tell me about dinner with Father tonight. I checked the clock. I knew I'd have to see him sooner or later, so I decided to show up for dessert.

I went to work annotating the Lockwood file. I was still annotating when a long fax arrived from Mark. I put Lockwood down and skimmed the pages as they came in.

Reading made my head ache, and coffee and aspirin only helped some. It occurred to me to try ice. I made an ice pack, took Mark's fax over to the daybed, and stretched out flat.

It was a relief to switch to Greta Stenholm. I had no personal interest in cops or their lives. Stenholm, I understood immediately.

I held the ice against my cheek and read with one hand.

She was the daughter of rich Kansas ranchers. She discovered movies at college and decided to go to graduate school in film. Her father cut her off because he wanted her to study business; so she borrowed and worked her way through USC. Despite the financial pressures, she became the Class of '96 star. She won the award for best senior film and left school with an agent—Edward Abadi at CAA—and a writing partner, Neil John Phillips. She and Phillips had just graduated when they sold a screwball comedy for big money. Name actors chased the title role, but the script disappeared after a series of rewrites and executive purges.

Stenholm disappeared, too. She did uncredited polishes and rewrites, and worked odd nonmovie jobs. Phillips, on the other hand, was hot until last year. His screenwriting price had gone up and up until 1998, when he sold an action script for $1.1 million. MGM wanted to launch a retired football star as “the New Stallone.” They let the football star fine-tune Phillips's screenplay, and the finished movie was a disaster. It tanked at the box office; the critics trounced it; the studio looked stupid; and Phillips's overpriced script was blamed. But Phillips fought back. He filed lawsuits and took out ads in the trades to defend himself. He wouldn't take his screwing quietly—which upset all the people who did. The Industry blackballed him and he filed for bankruptcy late in 2000.

Unlike the Burger King siege, I remembered this scandal well. The
Millennium
film section had even weighed in on Neil John Phillips's side. It was wild that he and Greta Stenholm were connected. I shuffled through the xeroxed pages. Stenholm had numbers and addresses for Phillips and her agent, Edward Abadi.

I called Mark and told him I'd take it from there. Mark was full of news. The morning
Times
had given the murder a long paragraph in the Metro section; Stenholm wasn't identified and Lockwood got most of the space. Then two plainclothes cops stopped by the paper to interview him and Vivian about the party.

There were also things he hadn't put in the fax.

He said that USC hadn't been much help, but I should pursue a guy named Steve Lampley. Lampley was an Academy librarian and part-time film teacher. He'd followed Stenholm out from Kansas and was trying to make it as a screenwriter; he provided most of the personal facts. Lampley told him that Stenholm spent her spare time at the Academy library. She was there last Thursday: she was the one who defaced the
Hollywood Reporter
piece on the Class of '96.

I flipped through the fax pages to the
Reporter
piece. Stenholm had written “
CHANCE!!!
” in the margin of the article—right on library property.

Mark said that everyone called Greta Stenholm a “bright girl” or a “bright young woman.” It was uncanny how the word
bright
kept coming up, as if by consensus.