“So find him for me. Will you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then I can start to live again.”
SIX
It had taken Todd a few minutes to get used to sitting behind the wheel of the old Lincoln sedan which Marco had chosen, many years before, as the vehicle in which he preferred to anonymously chauffeur Todd around. Sitting in the seat adjusted for Marco’s huge frame made him realize — for the first time in the chaotic sequence of dramas that had unraveled since Marco’s sudden death — how much he would miss the man.
Marco had been a stabilizing influence in a world that was showing signs of becoming more unstable by the hour. But more than that: he’d been Todd’s friend. He’d had a good nose for bullshit, and he’d never been afraid of speaking his mind, especially when it came to protecting his boss.
There would come a time, Todd had promised himself, when he would sit down and think of something to do that would honour Caputo’s name. He’d been no intellectual, so the founding of a library, or the funding of the Caputo Prize for Scholastic Achievement, wouldn’t really be pertinent: it would need some serious thought to create a project that reflected and honored the complexity of the man.
“You’re thinking about Marco Caputo.” Tammy said as she watched Todd adjust to the spatial arrangements of the driver’s seat.
“The way you said that, it didn’t sound as though you liked him very much.”
“He was rude to me on a couple of occasions,” Tammy said, making light of it now. “It was no big deal.”
“The fact is he was more of a brother to me than my own brother,” he replied. “And I’m only now realizing how much I took him for granted. Christ. First I lose my dog, then my best buddy — ”
“Dempsey?”
“Yeah. He died of cancer in February.”
“I’m sorry.”
Todd turned on the ignition. His thoughts were still with Marco. “You know what I think?” he said.
“What?”
“I think that the night he got killed he wasn’t just drunk. He was panicked and drunk.”
“You mean he’d seen something?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. He’d seen something up at the house and was running away.” He drew a loud breath through his nose. “Okay. Enough of the detective work. We can do some more of that when all this is over. Right now, we’re heading for Malibu.”
On the way down to the ocean, Todd provided Tammy with a little portrait of where they were going. She knew about the Colony, of course — the guarded community of superstars who lived in houses filled with Picassos and Miros and Monets, with the ever-unpredictable Pacific a few yards from their back door, and — just a jump across the Pacific Coast Highway — the Malibu Hills, which had been the scene of countless wildfires in the hot season, and mud-slides in the wet. What she didn’t know was just how exclusive it was, even for those who were powerful enough to write their own rules in any other circumstances.
“I was planning to buy this house next door to Maxine’s place, way back,” Todd told her, “but my lawyer — who was this wily old fart called Lester Mayfield said: ‘You’re going to want to rip out that concrete deck and take off the old shingle roof, aren’t you?’ And I said: ‘You betcha.’ And he said: ‘Well, dream on buster, ’cause they won’t let you. You’ll spend the next ten years fighting with the Colony Committee to change the color of your toilet seat.”
“So I didn’t buy the place. They’ve lightened up on the rules a lot since then. I guess somebody must have pointed out that they were preserving some pieces of utter shit.”
“Who ended up buying the house next door to Maxine?”
“Oh … he was a producer, had a deal with Paramount. Made some very successful movies for them. Then the IRS taps him on the shoulder and asks why he hasn’t paid his taxes for six years. He ended up going to jail, and the house stood empty.”
“Nobody else bought it?”