When they got outside, Rudy Ressler’s Aston Martin was waiting and he was standing beside it with a cell phone to his ear. He said to Leona Bruger, “Damn! Leona, I’m terribly sorry. I just got a call from our editor, who’s practically in a fistfight with the director over the final cut. Can you possibly catch a cab?”
Nate said, “I can take Mrs. Brueger home.”
“Could you, Nate? That’s great,” Ressler said. “Okay with you, Leona?”
“Go referee the fight,” she said. “See you this evening.”
Before he got in his car, Rudy Ressler said, “I just had a thought, Leona. While we’re in Europe, maybe Nate here could drive by in his patrol car once in a while and check in on the house and the new man. What’s his name?”
“Raleigh Dibble,” she said.
Ressler said, “Yeah, Raleigh. Would you mind, Nate? There’s some valuable art in that house and that’s a lotta responsibility for a new guy.”
“Be glad to,” Nate said, realizing that he did not get to do lunch.
When Rudy Ressler had pulled away and Nate was waiting for the parking attendant to retrieve his car, he smiled apologetically and said to Leona Brueger, “When was the last time you rode in a seven-year-old Corvette?”
“At one time in my life I drove an eighteen-year-old bathtub Nash,” she said. “I was only slightly older than my mode of transportation but I loved that beast. I was driving it when I met my first husband, who I came to love a lot less than my old car, but through him I eventually came to meet Sammy Brueger. Now how about the story of your life, Nathan? Do they call you Nathan?”
“My mother and father do,” he said. “But everybody else calls me Nate.”
“Nathan Weiss.” When she said his name, she gave his biceps another squeeze and hung on to him unsteadily. “How is it that a nice Irish-Italian girl like me ends up being attracted to gorgeous Jewish men?”
He smiled self-consciously and said, “Must be the circles you travel in. I haven’t run into all that many gorgeous Jewish men. But I’m not much of a Jew anyway. Haven’t even gone to temple since I was a kid.” Then he paused and said, “Except a couple of times when somebody died.”
“Relatives?”
“Cops.”
“Jewish cops?”
“No, but I still felt compelled to go and pray for them, even though I know it’s all mumbo jumbo.”
She looked up at him and said, “Revealing that personal information to me just made you even more attractive. But I’ll bet you’re used to compliments from women, aren’t you, Nathan?”
Nate was relieved when the parking kid arrived, and he drew the Vette up beside a Ferrari 599 that he’d read in Motor Trend was selling for more than $300,000. Another kid delivered an Audi R8 that Nate had read sold for a paltry $150,000.
The kid held the door open for Leona Brueger, and Nate tipped him $10, the most he had ever tipped for car service.
After he got behind the wheel, Nate said, “I do apologize for my car.”
She smiled and said, “You really are too cute for words, Nathan.” Then she took off her right shoe and said, “These goddamn things’re killing me.”
She removed the left shoe and held it in her hand while Nate drove north in heavy traffic. He looked over and touched the shoe, saying, “Is it really snakeskin?”
“Damned if I know,” she said. “I’m not a shoe whore. I’m one of those broads that just buys the brand and hopes for the best.” She yawned and leaned back, slurring her words slightly and said, “Go ahead and ask me.”
“Ask you what?”
“How much I paid for them.”
“I wasn’t thinking that,” Nate said, but he was.
“Come on, Nathan,” she said. “I’ve had lots of cops in my extended family. The price of things was always on their minds. I understand you. I grew up poorer than you can imagine. I was a regular little Scarlett O’Hara when I came to this town, vowing never to be poor again. It didn’t take me long to learn that everything in Hollywood is for sale if you know how to shop.”
“Okay, how much do those shoes cost?” Nate asked.
Leona yawned again and said, “I think they were thirteen hundred and change.”
That impressed him for sure. He looked down at the shoes again but didn’t touch them this time.
Trying to make conversation to keep her awake, he said, “It sounds like you and Mr. Ressler have a wonderful vacation coming up. Two months in Tuscany sounds great.”
Her eyes were closed when she spoke. “Tuscany again. A different villa this time. Rudy’s never been there. Rudy’s never been many places outside of Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Malibu, and the San Fernando Valley, where he can run his production company on the cheap.”
“And you’re getting married when you get back? Congratulations.”
She opened her eyes and said, “My, my. Rudy shared a lot when I went to the ladies’ room. It must be the badge you carry. He’s very impressed with authority figures. When he has dinner with the chief of police he almost wets his pants.” Then she told him her address in the Hollywood Hills and closed her eyes.
Nate wondered if a bottle of wine always made her so chatty. And he wondered if an innocent flirtation with Leona Brueger might give him more juice with Rudy Ressler. Then he remembered what an assistant director had said to him on one of the last jobs he’d worked. The AD had observed the producer’s wife, a woman twenty years older than Nate, flirting with him. It made him say to Nate, “Officer, if you want to get work in this business, don’t pet the cougars. Not when they belong to the boss.”
She actually began dozing by the time they reached the foot of the Hollywood Hills and the Corvette began climbing up Outpost Drive to Mulholland. Nate had always enjoyed driving in the Hills in a black-and-white, admiring the view homes, fantasizing about that one break that could make it all possible for him, too.
When he got to the address she’d given him, he pulled up to the gate and stopped. It was easily the largest residential property in this part of the Hollywood Hills and Nate had to admit he’d love to be shown around.
He said gently, “Uh, Mrs. Brueger, we’re here.”
She opened her eyes and rummaged in her purse until she found a key ring that had a small remote device on it. She pressed it and the gate swung open. He drove in on a long, curving, faux-cobblestone driveway. He made the circle around a bubbling fountain so that the front of his car was facing the gate and she was on the side in front of the huge tiled arch over the main door.
He jumped out and ran around to open the door for her but she was already out, holding her $1,300 shoes in one hand and her purse in the other.
“Come in for a minute, Nathan,” she said.
“Okay, Mrs. Brueger,” he said.
This was a first. He’d been inside many homes in the Hollywood Hills over the years but as a cop, almost never as a guest.
She unlocked the door and pushed it open, walking to a nearby computer panel on the wall to punch in her code and deactivate the high-pitched alarm warning.
“Follow me,” she said.
He did that, crossing a foyer of Mexican tile until he was looking down two steps into the great room. It was very large and it seemed that almost every square foot of the white plaster walls contained paintings: oils, watercolors, and numbered lithographs.
Leona Brueger tossed her shoes on a massive glass coffee table, knocking over some pricey-looking knickknacks.
She said, “Have a seat. I’ll be right back. What’re you drinking?”
The entire interior was done in cream and custard colors: the walls, the drapes, the carpet, the side tables, and even the twin sofas, with accent pillows in subtle pastels. It all spelled comfort to Hollywood Nate. There was none of that minimalist crap he was constantly seeing in magazines and in the L.A. Times home section. This all looked stuffed and overstuffed. He had the impression of being enveloped by a giant voluptuous marshmallow.