Zero to the Bone Read online

  The line connected to the sound of a sigh.

  “Tell me where I’m wrong,” I said. “You’re right, I don’t know anything, but I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s going on.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Where are you? I’ll come over, see if I can help you out.”

  “It’s too late,” he said, his voice no more than a whisper.

  “Too late for what? For Christine? Hell yeah, it’s too late for her.”

  “Are you going to publish that story, the one you showed me?”

  “It’s negotiable,” I said. “You need to give me something that points the story in the right direction if you want me to keep your name out of it.”

  He said nothing, the sound of his breath progressively slower and deeper with each inhalation, as though he was calming down or drugging out.

  “Did you ever check out Christine’s online diary?” I asked.

  A sigh rustled through the line.

  “She wrote in code about visiting your house, meeting some people there, maybe you and your brothers.”

  This time I didn’t even get a sigh.

  “She wrote you have a film production company. What kind of films are you interested in making?”

  The high-pitched strangling sound he made might have been a laugh but it just as easily could have been a cry. “It’s not my production company. It’s my brother’s, his friends’. I have nothing to do with it.”

  “Christine gave you her phone number, right? Said to call her when she broke up with her boyfriend. She didn’t mention your name online, but I think that was you she was writing about.”

  “She was playing with me.”

  “No, she wrote you were pretty hot; I mean, why else give you her phone number? Where are you now? We should talk. I can help you. The police may be slow but they’re not stupid. They’ll figure it out sooner or later, however you’re involved.”

  “See if you can find me…” he said, fading away, then snapping back, “I’m in the Marmont, third floor back.”

  “You’re there now?”

  “Mickey Mouse stamps,” he said. “Remember those?” He made the strangling sound again. “Just wanted you to know my intentions were good.”

  The line banged and crackled as though he’d dropped the phone. I jumped into my boots, shouldered my camera bag, and nudged aside the Rott, who guessed the moment I picked up the bag we were rolling and bolted for the door. Chateau Marmont lay at the foot of the Hollywood Hills, a thirty-five-minute drive from Venice Beach in light traffic. Over a dozen Mickey Mouse stamps had paid the postage on the DVD depicting Christine’s murder. Stewart may have lied to me about other things but he wasn’t lying to me about the stamps. He’d either seen the envelope the disk had been mailed in or had mailed it himself. I called Frank and told him about the conversation while I drove toward Hollywood.

  “Maybe he heard about Rakaan,” Frank said.

  “What about him?”

  “They just arraigned him on charges of murder two.”

  “How is it second-degree murder? Accidental death during sex-play strangulation, that sounds more like involuntary manslaughter to me.”

  “Maybe they’re hoping to start high and plead him down,” Frank said. “How savvy is this kid, you think?”

  “I’d say more clueless than savvy.”

  “Then he probably licked the stamps.”

  “And stuck them on with his thumb,” I added.

  “You want company at the Marmont?”

  “I think you’d spook him.”

  “I could hang out in the bar.”

  “A tabloid writer in a celebrity bar?”

  “I’d be as popular as spit in a sauna, wouldn’t I?”

  We agreed that he’d drive in from the Valley and wait in the lobby while I talked with Stewart. I couldn’t imagine why a Starbal would be willing to go on record, but the story was worth the possible waste of Frank’s time. The crime scene technicians would have dusted the envelope for prints and checked the stamps for traces of saliva that contained the licker’s DNA, but these techniques wouldn’t help the police track down a suspect unless his prints and DNA sample were in the database from a previous arrest. DNA alone wouldn’t lead the police to Stewart.

  Ahead of me, Chateau Marmont rose above Sunset Boulevard, a 1920s Hollywood imitation of the French Chateau style, it’s faux-stone walls and black-tile mansard roofs scaling the steep hillside in multiple tiers. Other hotels in town offered more luxurious digs at comparable prices but none approached the debauched gentility of the place, like a shabby aristocrat with a nasty vice up his frayed silk sleeves, and you’d have to check into one of the meth-and-hooker motels branching off Hollywood Boulevard to find a more partying clientele. The Marmont had the rarest quality of all in a city as devoted to amnesia as Los Angeles: a sense of its own history, the legends of those who frequented the place not so much the supernovas of the present but those whose fame shot across the sky decades ago, from Greta Garbo through James Dean to Johnny Depp. I cruised past the hotel entrance—garage parking was for guests only—and found a two-hour parking spot on the street up the hill. I told the Rott the hotel didn’t allow dogs, news he accepted with his usual resignation, settling down in the backseat with one of my old running shoes as companion and chew toy, to await my return.

  I’d stayed in the Chateau once before, a splurge that lasted one night because of the narrow difference between the room rate and my life savings at the time. I molded a pair of sunglasses to my face, swept past the registration desk, and climbed the stairs like I belonged there. On the second-floor landing a tall and broad-shouldered guy tried to avert his face behind a curtain of flowing black hair as he clipped past, heading downstairs in a hurry, and at first I thought he might be a nouveau rock star who didn’t yet realize nobody played incognito at the Chateau. I watched him round the staircase turn, and then climbed on toward the third floor.

  Stewart hadn’t specified the room number. Hotel management might not appreciate my visit if I knocked at every door, said, oops, wrong room. I slipped the cell phone from my jacket pocket, hit redial for Stewart’s number, and listened at the nearest door while the line connected. Nothing. I moved my ear from door to door until I heard the chirp of an answering phone from a distant room at the very end of the hall, a half-inch crack of light between the edge of the door and the frame. The door had been left ajar. Nobody leaves their door ajar in a hotel. The doors close automatically. I glanced behind me, suddenly cautious of witnesses, and crept forward, the fight-or-flight injection of adrenaline already coursing through my body. A face towel lay wedged beneath the corner of the door, near the frame, as though it had gotten tangled beneath the door as it shut. I gently pressed my elbow against the wood and nudged into the room.

  Stewart Starbal lay on the bed, propped up by a mountain of pillows at the headboard, the television across the room playing a syndicated episode of Cheers with the sound off. A bruise spread beneath his left eye like a storm cloud, and his upper lip swelled around the cut that split it. His cell phone lay chirping on the floor beside the nightstand. I severed the connection on mine and called out Stewart’s name. He didn’t move. The plunger of a syringe poked from beneath the corner of a hotel towel draped across the bed—his works. I hadn’t figured him for a junkie. A dull blot of blood on the skin at the crook of his elbow marked the spot of the fix. I called his name again and leaned across the bed to touch cool skin at his throat. While I felt for his pulse I thumbed 911 into my cell phone. The bruises on his face looked less than twenty-four hours old, the blood pooled beneath the skin purple and not dried black, but he’d certainly been beaten before he talked to me. His pulse eluded me. I didn’t think he was dead. The pulse on an overdose victim is often too faint to detect.

  I remembered the young man I’d passed in the hall as I was climbing the stairs. The overdose didn’t have to be accidental. Maybe Stewart had been dumb enough to mention that he’d b
een talking to someone who worked for the tabloids. I sprang out of the room and sprinted toward the stairs, telling the 911 operator a young man lay dying of an overdose in the Chateau Marmont. She could hear me running and told me to stay on the scene. They knew my identity the moment they picked up the call but I didn’t care. I hung up and shouted to the lobby desk receptionist that they had a medical emergency in Stewart Starbal’s room. His voice chased me down the stairs and out the door that led to valet parking. I dodged a couple waiting for their car and dashed toward the street in time to see a black Corvette speed from a distant curb, far too fast to catch sight of the plates.

  As I watched it go the phone rang in my hand. I checked the number. Frank’s. He was driving in from the Valley, probably approaching the hotel at that very moment. I connected and didn’t wait to hear his voice, shouting, “Quick, a black Corvette is leaving Chateau Marmont, can you see it?”

  He didn’t speak for a second, then cleared his throat.

  “I’m waiting in the lobby,” he said. “You ran right past me.”

  21

  FRANK WAS SAVVY enough to distance himself the moment the staff descended. Luxury hotels may not appreciate guests inconsiderate enough to die in their beds but they’ve become accustomed enough to the ritual that most have protocols for handling it, and because part of the historical richness that made the Chateau Marmont a destination hotel involved the overdose of one celebrity or another, the staff had more experience than most. Suicide is one of the dirty realities of the hotel trade. Given that price is no object to those who plan to check out permanently, few with a valid credit card will choose Motel 6 over the Ritz. Once the staff ascertained that I was not a close relative of the victim, they shuttled me off to a spare room next to the office. The room served as a catch-all storage space, containing a bed, stacks of spare linens, extra file cabinets, and one reluctant eyewitness to an overdose. They were good enough to bring me a room-service carafe of coffee but refused my request to let me get my dog to keep me company.

  Frank called a half hour into my vigil to report that the emergency medical technicians had packed up and left without a stretcher. When a homicide investigator named Mike Dougan from the LAPD’s Hollywood station poked his head through the door, nobody had to tell me Stewart was dead.

  “I was afraid it might be you.” He flashed a name written on his notepad—mine. “Not too many people out there named Nina Zero.”

  “Nice to see you again, too,” I said.

  “Still got that toothless Rottweiler?” he asked, in a not unkind voice. I’d met Dougan the year before, during the investigation of my sister’s death. The circumstances of that meeting hadn’t been conducive to building any kind of friendship, but he treated me as fairly as his job allowed. With his push-broom mustache and a chest and belly so massive it made him look like he was always falling forward, he reminded me of a human walrus. I was even remotely happy to see him. I’d been dreading a conversation with RHD Detective Logan. Logan didn’t yet know how Stewart connected to Christine. The Chateau was Hollywood’s turf, so it made sense that Dougan answered the call.

  “The kid, is he dead?” I asked.

  Dougan mimed giving himself a shot in his forearm.

  “Overdose. Nothing the EMTs could do for him.”

  “How long?”

  “How long what?”

  “Has he been dead.”

  Dougan stared at me, trying to read why I wanted to know.

  “He called me an hour before I found him.” I clicked open my cell phone and navigated to the number Stewart had called from—his cell phone—and the time he’d called.

  Dougan crooked his neck to read the display, flipped back in his notebook to a number he’d scrawled on the page, and asked if it was mine. It was. He’d found my number on the call list of Stewart’s phone. I wondered if Stewart called anyone after me but didn’t have the courage—or audacity—to ask.

  “I didn’t see more than the one track mark on his arm,” I said. “I figured him for a pothead, not a junkie. Maybe it was his first time.”

  “Shooting junk is like Russian roulette,” he replied. “Sometimes once is all you need. And if the dose is hot enough, you’re pulling the trigger on a fully loaded gun.”

  That implied suicide—or murder.

  “Did he leave a note?”

  “Junkies don’t write notes, not even when they intend to overdose. Most of them, they start to commit suicide with the first fix, and it just takes them a long time to die.”

  “I didn’t see other track marks,” I repeated. “Just the one.”

  “If you know what a track mark looks like, then you should also know junkies can inject into the legs or hands.”

  “Did you check?”

  His stare turned aggressive. None of my business.

  I decided to impress him with my domestic virtues and poured him a cup of coffee. “I’m only asking because I was thinking he didn’t administer the hot shot,” I said. “Or if he did, somebody prepared it for him.”

  Dougan’s mustache twitched and he pulled down on his face with the palm of his hand, exasperated. “I’d forgotten how much trouble you were. Maybe you should tell me how you met…” He glanced down at his notes for the name and his mouth drooped open. “Oh shit, it’s not that Starbal, is it? The movie guy?”

  “His son,” I said. “I first saw him at the funeral of Christine Myers, a girl who modeled for me. After the funeral I tracked him down. I wanted to know why he’d gone, because nobody else there seemed to know him.”

  He absently accepted the cup when I pressed it forward.

  “You recognized him?”

  “We tracked him by his license plate.”

  “Why go to so much trouble to find a stranger at a funeral?”

  “Because Christine Myers was murdered.”

  Dougan looked like a man standing upright in a landslide, nothing he could do about the earth sliding beneath his feet except try to ride it out and hope it didn’t get worse. “This is the girl they found near Malibu, isn’t it?”

  I said it was.

  “I should have known.”

  “A lot of murders in L.A.,” I said. “You can’t keep track of them all.”

  “I don’t expect to. But seeing you is like seeing a buzzard circling overhead; you figure something’s dead close by.” Beneath his mustache his lips twitched in a failed smile, as though he half regretted the remark, then he dropped his head to sip at the coffee. He knew the comment wounded me and was decent enough to feel guilty about it. “He called you before you called him, right? Did he say why?”

  “He wanted to know what happens to the people who slip through the hole in the center of everything,” I said.

  “What did he mean by that, you think?”

  “That he was lost. At least that’s what he said.”

  “How did he sound? His emotional state.”

  “Depressed and very stoned.”

  “Did he say anything or indicate in any way he wished to take his life?”

  “He kept saying it was too late for things,” I said, remembering the conversation. “But I’m not sure I buy this as suicide.”

  “Why not?”

  “As I was coming up the stairs, I saw someone maybe come out of his room.”

  “You saw…somebody…maybe…” He drew out the words to emphasize the uncertainty of my statement. “Did you see someone come out of the room or not?”

  “I can’t be sure, but you saw Starbal’s face, the bruises. Looks pretty obvious to me somebody beat him up last night.”

  “And decided that wasn’t enough punishment?” His voice spiked with disbelief. “So he comes a second time to kill him?”

  “I’m not saying that’s what happened, just that it could have.”

  “Can you give me a description?”

  “About six feet, broad shoulders, long and wavy black hair, mid-twenties. He turned his head away from me when he was coming down the stairs,
so I didn’t get a good look at his face.”

  “You know what I can do with this?” Dougan flashed his notepad to show he’d doodled a fat 0. “Zero, like your name.”

  I decided not to tell him about the black Corvette. He’d ridiculed me enough. A guy leaves the hotel and drives away. So what? Even if he’d been in Stewart’s room, that didn’t mean he’d murdered him. Dougan was right, it looked more like a suicide than a murder, but the probability that Stewart had killed himself unsettled me far more than the idea that he’d been murdered.

  “Here’s what I don’t get.” Dougan flipped back in his notebook. “A guy you barely know, he’s getting ready to give himself a hot shot, and out of all the people he can call to share his final moments with, it’s you. I’m not hearing why.”

  The true answer to that was more complicated than I wanted to admit, at least to a homicide detective, no matter how much he was willing to tolerate me. “He knew I worked for a newspaper. I’m pretty sure he knew something about Christine’s murder and wanted to tell me about it.”

  “Why you?”

  “Because I knew Christine.”

  “But inconveniently someone murders him just before he can talk to you, doggone it.” He wagged his head again, his smile tight and unbelieving. “I believe you’re sincere. It’s not your fault you have a hyperactive imagination. But from what I see so far, I also think you’re wrong. Of course, if a strange thumbprint shows on the plunger of the syringe, I’ll call you a genius.” He flapped his notebook closed and tapped me on the shoulder with his fist, just lightly enough to be friendly. “Stick around while I check a few things out, will you? Shouldn’t be too long.”

  Dougan lumbered out the door, slapping his notebook against his thigh. I watched him go with some reluctance. He’d left me alone with my thoughts, and my thoughts weren’t good company just then. Whatever Stewart had wanted from me, I’d failed him. I’d been so emotionally focused on Christine that it never occurred to me to care what happened to him. Did someone set him up with a hot shot or had he shot up intending suicide? Judging by the timing of his call, a lethal dose flooded through his veins while we spoke. Maybe he’d expected to be found in time to be revived, the dose a way of tempting death rather than an irrevocable leap into it. Why else mention that he was staying at the Chateau Marmont? Then again, he might have figured he’d be dead by the time I arrived, the call less a cry for help than a final, damning comment on my lack of humanity.