The prostitutes ball ss-10 Page 4

"This is not a good time. We Ye just starting holiday follies," Stender protested. "The Truth or Dare is about to begin. It's a tradition."

  "I'll make it as quick and painless as possible."

  Sumner hadn't come back from the men's room so I did a quick scan of the party and to my dismay saw he hadn't gone in there at all, but was over by the floor-to-ceiling windows, already talking to a pretty girl in a green sequined miniskirt. As I watched he handed her his business card.

  "Okay, Detective, if you'll make it quick, let me see what I can do," Stender said, as if it was his choice, not mine.

  He escorted me into the massive hotel-sized living room. The center had been cleared of furniture with the big, snow white sofas pushed up against the far walls to make room for the festivities. There were at least forty people in here, all of them very hip and trendy. Nobody over the age of thirty-five.

  "Okay, okay," somebody shouted shrilly above the noise as I entered. "But if I do it, Sandra, then you gotta do me." I turned and saw a slightly pudgy guy wearing baggy jeans and a T-shirt that had FUCK ME screen-printed across the front. He was shouting at a young, shapely girl with a rich tan set off by a strapless white mini.

  "You ain't got the stones, mate," the girl yelled back with a New Zealand or Aussie accent. The crowd was hooting and shouting insults at the pudgy young guy.

  The chub squealed. "That's the bet, right? If I do it, I get to put my schmandra in Sandra." He laughed. It was actually more of a high-pitched giggle.

  "You gotta catch me first," the girl yelled. She was drunk or stoned, so that probably wasn't going to be much of an issue. She took a step forward and stumbled, almost going down.

  Without warning, the pudgy brat grabbed a taser up off a nearby table and shouted, "Don't taze me, bro!" Then he slammed the gun up on his chest and fired.

  The tazer zapped the T-shirt. Flesh and fabric burned. His body leaped backward, hit by fifty thousand volts of electricity. He bounced off a sofa by the wall, then rolled onto the white plush pile carpet and started vibrating violently under a table like a hype with the dries. "Ooow-Ooow-Ooow! That smarts!" he yelled while the room hooted and cheered.

  "I'm hoping that's not him," I said to Stender.

  "That's him," he replied.

  "Who are these other people?"

  "Agents, studio development people, celebutantes."

  I didn't ask what a celebutante was but guessed it was a famous heiress who did nothing but party.

  "Somebody cut me a line. I need medication!" Brooks shrieked, as everyone laughed.

  A fresh line of cocaine was cut on a table as the Heir Abhorrent crawled over to it on his hands and knees. Somebody handed him a straw and, while his friends shouted encouragement, Brooks hoovered up the blow.

  I'm not in Vice, and I didn't want to waste three valuable hours at the top of a murder investigation booking this jerk at Men's Central, but I have to admit I was tempted. I turned to Stender instead.

  "We've got two ways of doing this. You can bring him to me in another room or I can badge this whole bunch of loadies and end this party right now with a trip to jail. Your call."

  "There's a den back there," he said, pointing. Til show you, then bring him."

  "Good choice."

  I caught a glimpse of Sumner Hitchens, caucusing with four Hollywood film types whose hair was moussed and styled in interesting shapes. Hitch had his hand on one guy's shoulder, chatting him up relentlessly. I left him there because bottom line, I preferred to do this alone.

  Stender led me to the den and left. As I waited I decided to have round two with Jeb over my new partner first thing in the morning.

  The den had beautiful whitewashed ash walls. It was large and square, with a high carved-wood ceiling. Bookshelves dominated three walls and framed historic documents with some familiar signatures John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson-hung in lighted alcoves. There were certificates of authentication mounted beneath each priceless artifact.

  In one corner of the den, inside a magnificent glass box, was an antique six-shooter. The plaque read: COLT SINGLE-ACTION. 44 PEACEMAKER: JESSE JAMES 1881.

  As I was admiring it, the door opened and a very stoned Brooks Dunbar stumbled in followed by Stender Sheedy, who closed the door immediately and moved up to take a guardian's position between us.

  "You have a card?" Stender demanded.

  I pulled out my creds and showed them to him as he wrote down my name and badge number.

  "I don't want to talk to this fucker, Sten," said the pudgy little twenty-four-year-old monster in the pornographic tazer-burned T-shirt.

  "Shut up!" I snapped at him, spittle flying.

  He jumped back and looked at me with an expression of disbelief as if I'd just dropped down from the chandelier wearing a cape and spandex tights.

  "You can't shout at me!" he said. "This is my house!"

  It was actually his father's house, but I was beyond quibbling. Brooks seemed badly offended by my behavior. It seemed that nobody ever spoke harshly to him.

  "Wait 'til my dad finds out about this," he said petulantly. "He'll get you fired."

  "I'll risk it. You've got some questions to answer, Mr. Dunbar. They're not difficult, but they will require accurate, sober responses. I understand you own an estate at 3151 Skyline Drive in Hollywood. Is that correct?"

  "Huh?"

  I turned to Stender and shot him a frustrated look.

  "Brooks, tell the detective what he wants to know," the young attorney directed. "Then I'm sure he'll leave."

  Brooks Dunbar wiped some runny powder off the edge of his nostrils with the back of his hand. "Shit… I gotta…" More silence. "This fuckin' sucks. My party's totally going to shit out there," he complained before finally heaving a big, frustrated sigh. "That property, if you have to fucking know, is like an investment, which is in my dumb trust, which I can't fucking use. Why I gotta talk to this guy, Sten?"

  "Three people died by the pool up on Skyline tonight," I told him.

  "You mean like they overdosed or something?"

  "Yeah… On 9 mm bullets."

  He held my gaze, a shrewd crafty look finally coming into his bloodshot eyes. "Is that supposed to be like my fault or something?"

  "Do you own a machine gun, Mr. Dunbar?"

  "A machine gun? I got… I got… like a I got… I really don't wanta do this now, Sten. This is so fucking unfair."

  "Just please answer his question, Brooks," Stender Sheedy prodded gently.

  "I can run a firearms check," I said. Tm gonna find out so you might as well tell me. You own one or not?"

  "I got like an old antique something or other. Its got a model number but I can't remember. It's a fucking All I know is I had to register it when I bought the damn thing." He glowered, then mumbled, "You're not supposed to let shit like this happen, Sten. I'm not approving of this at all."

  I waited for more, but that seemed to cover his thoughts on the machine gun.

  "Is it here?"

  "What?"

  "The machine gun."

  "In my room."

  "Let's go."

  He looked at his young lawyer. "The Truth or Dare is getting trashed while we mess with this shit."

  "Let's just get it over with, Brooks," the wise, still sober, Century City mouthpiece advised. He set clown his drink and led the way.

  We walked down a hall and out into the beautiful six-acre backyard that featured a commanding view of the sparkling lights of Bel Air. We headed along a hedge-trimmed path to a carriage house, which was bigger than my place in Venice. Brooks opened the front door.

  The main room was a mess. Beer cans, empty scotch bottles, and old fast-food boxes littered every surface. Girls' undergarments bloomed like lacy, pastel mushrooms on the furniture and floor. There was a dusting of white powder on most of the tabletops.

  " 'Scuse the mess," Dunbar mumbled as he led me upstairs to the large master suite.

  The bedroom looked like a bomb had gone off
in a men's store.

  I followed him over to a table littered with a ton of debris. He swept it off onto the floor with his hand and there, serving as an elaborate base for a glass-topped coffee table, was a. 50 caliber, water-cooled, antique Browning Model 1809 machine gun from World War I. It was sitting on a low tripod stand.

  "Does it even work?" I asked.

  It looked like an art piece, a decorative table base for gun freaks or Rambo fans. It was undoubtedly welded in place and missing the firing pin. I was starting to fantasize about smacking this little chump.

  "I don't know," he whined. "How should I know? Can I go now?"

  "Do you know Scott Berman?" I asked.

  "The producer?"

  "No, the butterfly collector."

  I was losing it.

  "I think my dad knows him. He's been here at parties and stuff. I don't pay much attention to shit like that. I got my own life."

  "What do you pay attention to?"

  "The color of Lindsay's or Paris's undies or the lack thereof." He giggled. Then he touched the bum marks on his T-shirt. "Man, that taze was brutal. My nipples are still stinging."

  "Detective Scully, is it really necessary to do this tonight?" Stender Sheedy Jr. interjected.

  "Yes it is." I turned to Dunbar. "When was the last time you went to your house on Skyline Drive?"

  "I don't go up there. I told you, it's a fucking investment. It's in my trust."

  "The Dorothy White Foundation?"

  "Yes."

  "Who is Dorothy White?"

  "My mother. It's her maiden name. They named my dumbass trust after her for some fucked-up reason nobody can ever quite explain." "And you never go up to 3151 Skyline?"

  "It's an investment," he almost shrieked. "I don't fuck with that shit. I have people who do that for me." He was becoming very agitated.

  Then, apropos of absolutely nothing, he said, "It's fucking Christmas, dude. You know, Christmas?"

  "How much cocaine do you do?"

  "I'm taking the fifth on that one, buddy," he sneered angrily.

  Now Stender Sheedy, sensing my displeasure and his client's jeopardy, stepped forward. "Brooks wants to cooperate, Detective, it's just hard when he has fifty guests."

  I turned to Brooks. "Where were you between ten and ten fifteen tonight?"

  "He was here," Stender said.

  "Yeah," Brooks agreed. "I was right here, asshole."

  "The party started at nine thirty," Stender said. "He's got fifty witnesses. He doesn't know anything."

  Which had to be the understatement of this entire holiday season.

  "Okay. Here's the deal, Mr. Sheedy. You have your client in my office tomorrow morning at nine A. M. Have him cleaned up and sober. Otherwise, I'm going to issue a warrant for his arrest as a material witness."

  I already knew that this stoned pudgeball wasn't involved in my triple murder, but I had some more questions that I needed to ask him on background. As it was, he was so loaded I'd have to do all of this again anyway, because a statement taken while a witness is under the influence of a powerful drug wouldn't hold up in court. I took out two business cards and handed one to Brooks, the other to Sheedy.

  "Where do they make these up, Kinko's?" Brooks said, frowning at the department-issued card.

  "I'll find my partner and get out of here," I told Sheedy. "Have him there on time tomorrow."

  "He'll be there," Stender promised.

  I walked back to the main house and was just heading into the living room when I saw the girl in the green sequined mini come out of the powder room.

  "Excuse me, miss. Did my friend just give you his business card?"

  "Huh?"

  It was a sharp crowd.

  "My friend, the handsome African-American in the rust-colored suit. I think he gave you the wrong card. We just got new ones."

  She pawed into her purse, her expressive brow furrowed in concentration. She dug through bags of powder, pills, and beauty aids before finding the card and pulling it out.

  I looked at it. An expensive gold-embossed number, definitely not from Kinko's. Nifty little picture of a golf flag in the top right corner. Underneath it said:

  HOLE IN ONE PRODUCTIONS

  SUMNER HITCHENS

  PRODUCER AND CEO

  Chapter 9

  I told Sumner what I'd learned from Brooks and Stender Sheedy in the carriage house as we headed across town to meet with Alexa. Once I was finished, I also gave him a good sanding down over his professional demeanor and investigative methods.

  "You were down there passing out your little production company cards to a room full of coked-up agents and D-girls while you were supposed to be working this case with me. I'm trying to be patient, but this shit's gotta stop or I'm gonna make a serious move on you."

  "I was on the job, Scully. There's more than one way to prepare Courgettes Provencale."

  "Please stop with the cooking metaphors."

  "I was in the zone, brother. While you're up in the carriage house with Lord Fauntleroy, I had those freaks in my crosshairs working ground zero, collecting facts."

  "If you got something, lets hear it," I said, wondering if maybe I'd jumped too fast.

  "I always get something, my man," he shot back.

  "Make it great, my man!"

  "Brooks Dunbar is broke," Hitchens began. "What our moonlighting sergeant from Ameritech told us is true. His trust is all locked up. As a result he's a thief. He waits 'til his friends are stoned or passed out then steals credit cards out of their wallets and runs up huge tabs. I learned from one guy that some Russian oligarch's kid got hit for almost two hundred grand on his black AmEx a month ago.

  "When his victims start hiring bent noses and talking about his kneecaps, young Brooks takes them to expensive Melrose stores like Louis Vuitton, Fred Segal, and especially this place called Cruel Hearts which is right down from the Ivy. It specializes in expensive S and M leather and jewelry. He got his mother to set him up accounts at these places. To keep his friends from killing him, he buys time by letting them charge expensive stuff on his mother's accounts there. His mother, by the way, is Dorothy White. They named Brooks's trust in her maiden name." I had that last part, but little else.

  "Among other things, this kid also owns Eagle's Nest Productions," Hitch continued.

  "You shitting me? Wasn't that a huge privately owned TV studio back in the eighties? They used to have half a dozen shows on the air. I haven't heard anything about them for almost twenty years. It explains, I guess, why Stender Sheedy is his lawyer."

  "Under Brooks Dunbar's astute guidance, Eagle's Nest now only makes the occasional Paris Hilton Look, Pa, No Bra video. The last one didn't make back its production costs so Stender probably doesn't have to work too hard on that account.

  "His art-dealing business consists mostly of stealing a few of his dad s paintings out of the guesthouse so his old man wont notice-then fencing them in Melrose Boulevard antique shops." He looked over and smiled. "There's more if you're interested."

  "Yeah, I'm interested." I had to admit, he'd done better than I had.

  "So his art and movie businesses are both a joke, like Sergeant Cruz says. Nobody likes this kid. He's been cut off by both his mom and dad, which is why he's such a thief. Dorothy Dunbar still thinks little Brooks will pull out of his drug-induced tailspin, but nobody else believes it. They're using him. He's using them. All of this useful intel was obtained by Sumner Hitchens, Esquire, while you were in the carriage house examining a fucking table base."

  I didn't respond. When you're right, you're right.

  "An apology would be nice," he prompted.

  "I'm not gonna apologize to you just because you did your job, Hitchens."

  "Why not?"

  "Because I don't want to."

  "Courtesies of a small and trivial character strike deepest in the grateful heart," he said.

  "Who said that? Sure doesn't sound much like Einstein."

  "Henry Clay.
You should start reading more than department wanted fliers." He snap-shifted the Porsche and we sped on.

  Sumner pulled in at a pancake house restaurant located in a strip mall off Mission Road near the medical examiner's building. It was after one A. M. I'd called on my cell and knew Alexa would be waiting.

  Hitch chirped the car lock and we walked past a space where my Acura was parked.

  Inside, as we approached a back booth where Alexa was sitting, I could see a worried look on her face. Before we even sat down I knew she had more bad news for us.

  Chapter 10

  "Both of the dead girls were high-dollar Internet prostitutes," Alexa said as soon as we slid into the booth with her. "The blonde was named Chrissy Sweet. Her working name was Slade Seven. The brunette was Paula Morgan, working name Steel Cavanaugh. These were five-thousand-dollar dates. They worked for Yolanda Dublin, the Mulholland Madame. This hooker angle is gonna be media catnip so the case just got more sensitive, if that's even possible."

  "Doesn't Yolanda Dublin run an Internet site called the Double Click Club?" Hitch asked.

  "Right," Alexa said. "And from their pictures on that site, the girls were both gorgeous."

  The waitress came and Hitch and I ordered coffee, along with ham and eggs and orange juice because we were probably going to be up all night, working through breakfast.

  After the waitress left, Alexa continued. "The way her Internet site works, a client gets thoroughly screened by Yolanda first. Then, if you pass muster, you're issued a password which allows you access to the exclusive services section of the site. There, you can scroll the girls' pictures and streaming videos. The rates are listed on each girl's page as a modeling or therapist's fee. If you're a preferred client, once you double-click on a girl, the date is made."

  Hitch was writing this down in his journal.

  "Detective," Alexa said, and Hitchens looked up. "Hopefully this won't be talked about to third parties operating outside the scope of the investigation."

  "What exactly does that mean, Captain?"

  "UTA," I said. "Jamie Foxx. Studio development execs."

  He smiled at her and nodded. "Me and Shane already been through this," he said, collegially.