Bugger backed the Volvo diagonally across the alley and aimed it west. I gave him a two-minute lead before starting my own engine.
25
DUGGER DROVE ALL the way to Ocean Avenue. Bringing a hit man home? That surprised me.
But instead of turning left toward the high-rise, he made a right and swung into the left-turn lane. Only a truck between us now, but the height of the cab kept me safely out of view as we sped down toward PCH.
I switched to the right lane, got close enough to see Bugger behind the wheel, sitting straight, head not moving. Black Suit turned from side to side. Catching an eyeful of the mansions lining Santa Monica’s Gold Coast, the white-clapboard palace William Randolph Hearst had built for Marion Bavies, now a crumbling mass of planks, generous expanses of beach parking lot that afforded a clear view of the Pacific, churning and silver under a charcoal cloud bank. Gulls flecked the clouds with avian static. A few wet-suited surfers had paddled out yards from the tide line, despite breakers that degraded to a dribble.
The ocean is never anything but beautiful.
Black Suit taking it all in.
Sightseeing.
Bugger stared straight ahead and put on speed.
He sped through the Palisades and into Malibu, past the latest slide zone and Caltrans’s feeble attempt to battle nature with concrete barriers and sandbags and pink, gritty fiberglass slopes as genuine as Caltranspromises. A few more wet winters and the coastline would look like Disneyland. Black Suit’s head had stopped swiveling—fixed on the ocean. Easy choice: The land side was shopping centers and pizza joints and schlock shops not much different from what he’d encounter in Brooklyn.
I followed the Volvo through Carbon Beach, La Costa, past the private road that led to the Colony, the emerald hills of Pepperdine University, where the commercial clutter gives way to brown mountains, black gorges, orange poppies, and more than a hint of what Malibu must have been like when the Chumash Indians roamed.
Latigo Beach, the Cove Colony, Escondido. No suspense: I knew exactly where Dugger was headed and was ready well before his left-turn signal flashed and he pulled into the center turn lane.
He stopped a quarter mile before the Paradise Cove intersection and Ramirez Canyon. A towering plastic sign advertised the Sand Dollar Restaurant and the trailer park that bordered the restaurant’s private beach.
Malibu’s estate zone. A half mile broken by a handful of gates, each handcrafted and unique and flanked by old trees and hedges, too-perfect beds of flowers, closed-circuit TV cameras, No Trespassing warnings.
Prime of the prime: the few multiacre Malibu properties blessed with sheltered coves and sandy beach and views of the shipping channels that lead to Asia.
The gate that held Dugger’s interest was a tangle of burnished copper tentacles shadowed by the palms and pines I remembered, as well as gigantic rubber trees and schefflera and sagos and birds-of-paradise blazing flamelike in the afternoon sun. He must have had a remote-control unit, because before he completed the turn across PCH the octopus arms swung open and he sailed through. I had my cheapie camera ready and hustled for shots of the Volvo’s rear end as it vanished into green.
Click click click.
The gates closed. I was going no farther.
But Dugger had a busy day lined up.
Chauffering Black Suit to Daddy’s place. The pleasure dome conceptual light-years from the little cell in Newport that Dugger had oncecalled home. For all his rumpled guy pretense—attempts to distance himself from his father and what his father represented—when things got rough Junior returned with the volition of a homing pigeon.
Walking in step with a cold-faced man in a black suit.
Business. Tying up loose ends.
Who was next?
I returned to Santa Monica, found a MotoPhoto with a FREE DUPLICATES! banner, had a cup of coffee while my film developed, then inspected my handiwork. Most of the roll was taken up by rear shots too distant to be useful, but I had managed to snag Dugger and Black Suit together in full-frontal midrange and in two individual close-ups. Nice clear view of the Volvo passing through the coiling copper gates but, once again, too far to catch the license plate. Tony Duke’s address was partially obscured by greenery, but no matter: Those tentacle gates were unique.