Below the Line: A Hollywood Crime Novel

1

THE JOB WAS IN LA—a city he considered highly overrated. Above all he loathed the traffic. Everyone in a goddamn competition. Cars blasting their horns, switching lanes with no signal, fighting for a lousy car length in yet another five-mile-an-hour freeway backup.

Warren Poole thought, the laid-back, Southern California lifestyle?

Shit, man, that ended at the asphalt.

He was lost.

And pissed. He’d sped across 250 miles of desert on the I-15 in three hours from Las Vegas, only to crawl for another three on the I-10 for the last sixty miles into Los Angeles. When he finally reached downtown, a web of interchanges and confusing signs spit him out into a neighborhood past the Los Angeles Convention Center. Now he was driving around in circles in the dark, looking at street signs and trying to get back on the I-10 to Santa Monica.

He was looking for Figueroa Street.

The theme for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was distant at first: the flute open, followed by the vocal wah wah wah part. Not the whole song. Only two bars of it. It became louder when he turned onto a street of run-down storefronts, Latinos on the sidewalk and a couple of soul brothers on the corner. He had no problem with the scenery. He worked with a Mexican and a black dude on his first crew back in the day. If you were going to operate in certain neighborhoods, you had to employ some diversity.

Warren Poole heard the theme again.

Poole buzzed down his window. Now he not only could hear the song but muddled words that followed. It was coming from a loudspeaker somewhere. He looked around, guessing it was from a storefront. But he was doing twenty-five and the tune was following. He checked his mirror, a Chevy truck behind him. The theme maybe coming from behind the truck. And then he clearly heard the words after the music:

Move it along, dog.

A red light ahead, Poole stopped. The truck rolled by him and took a right at the cross street. He turned on his dome light and looked at map he got from the Auto Club, trying to figure out where the hell he was. People told him he should get a smartphone with navigation. But he liked burners. He didn’t want a number tied to his name, let alone anything that could track him.

He looked up from the map and noticed lights in his mirror. A white Chrysler 300. Pimped out with a chrome aftermarket grill and blue undercarriage lights.

The theme sounded loudly as the Chrysler pulled up. Then, Move it along, dog.

Pool realized the music was the horn on the 300. He’d seen horns like that once in a car stereo shop, the kind of place where people bought novelty add-ons for their rides. He saw a horn that had the roar of Godzilla and another with cartoon sound effects.

The light still red, Poole looked at the map again, his eyes straining to find Figueroa in the maze of lines and street names.

The car sounded its novelty horn. Move it along, dog.

Poole looked up at the signal, the light green.

They moved forward together, Poole driving slowly, looking at street signs, the 300 so far up his ass he could no longer see the grill or the glow on the pavement from the undercarriage lights.

The horn: The flute and wha wha wha. Every couple of seconds now.

Move it along, dog.

Poole slammed on the brakes, the Chrysler screeching to a stop behind him. He took a deep breath and thought about the situation for a few moments, weighing the options. Finally, he decided. He reached down under his pant leg and removed a Beretta Tomcat from his ankle holster and slid the .32 into his windbreaker.

He walked slowly to the 300, his eyes scrutinizing the driver. He was going to rap on the tinted side window with his knuckles. But the driver beat him to it, buzzing it down, a cloud of pot smoke wafting out.

The soul brother’s dreadlocks hung off the back of his head down to his shoulders, the front part of his skull bald. He had a microphone in his hand. This asshole wasn’t satisfied with only the horn, Poole thought. He also had PA wired into the Chrysler. Poole glanced at a light-skinned sister in a tight black dress in the passenger seat, a blunt between her fingers. She seemed harmless.

Poole said, You in a fucking hurry? Or do you always jerk off with your horn when you smoke that shit?

The driver slowly turned toward him, then back to the girl, saying, The man a little out of his element, don’t ya think?

Poole watched the guy place the mike into its clip on the dash, doing it like he was in no hurry. Showing he wasn’t rattled, that now he was going to tell Poole how it was going to be. But when he saw the driver casually reach for the glove box, Poole didn’t wait for his fingers to touch the latch.

He grabbed a handful of the driver’s dreads.

And slammed his face into the steering wheel.

Hard.

The flute. Wha wha wha.

No Move it along, dog this time.

The girl dropped the blunt in her lap and recoiled against the passenger door. Her hands swept her lap as the embers burned a hole into her dress.

Poole slammed his face into the wheel again.

And again.

The movie theme playing each time.

I’m really fucking tired of that song, he said after one.

I’m really tired of the fucking traffic, he said after another.

And I’m really tired of this long fucking drive, he said as he slammed the driver’s face into the wheel one last time.

Blood streamed into the soul brother’s eyes, his arms limp at his sides, the soul sister shrunk into the corner of the door and her seat.

What do you want? she said, screaming it.

He wanted to drop in on an old girlfriend. Then he wanted to get settled. He wanted to get a decent night’s sleep before the job ahead. But he didn’t tell her that.

Warren Poole leaned close to the driver and spoke in a soft voice.

Say, dog, you wouldn’t happen to know where Figueroa Street is, would you?

2

EDWIN BLAKE’S BIG BREAK INTO show business came in Detroit five years ago because somebody chopped up two drug dealers and a crack whore.

He was working homicide, the second shift on Squad Seven, called to investigate a multiple murder involving a Roto-Rooter van abandoned on Detroit’s east side. A reporter named Rick Quigley from the Detroit Free Press showed up just ahead of three TV crews minutes after Blake’s partner, Al Henderson, strung tape between two maple trees to establish the curbside crime scene. Blake detested the stories Quigley wrote about his unsolved cases. He decided Quigley’s reporting had nothing to do with his skills as a detective. He concluded it was because Blake was six feet tall and Quigley was hardly five-two. So, Blake decided he’d give the reporter an exclusive. He told him to duck under the tape and follow him to the Roto-Rooter van. A couple of TV crews bitched that Quigley was getting special access.

Blake ignored them. He wanted Quigley to have his moment.

When they reached the back of the van Blake said, Ricky, I’m going to let you see what we got. He swung open the doors, telling Quigley to step inside, Blake following. Al Henderson, who everyone called Hendo, stood outside the door, watching. He knew what was coming.

Blake shined his flashlight around the interior of the van, saying, I know it doesn’t look like much. But we’ve got a triple here.

All I see are garbage bags, Quigley said.

Look closer, Blake said.

Quigley bent over one of the bags.

That’s when Blake reached into a Hefty sack and handed Quigley the severed arm of a thirty-two-year-old African American male.

Here, Blake said. Let’s give a hand for the little guy.

Quigley jumped, slamming his head into the roof, only to trip over a router as he scrambled out the back door. Hendo later told everyone on the fourth floor of police headquarters that Quigley tossed his dinner in front of the TV crews. Blake didn’t see that. But he didn’t contradict him.

It was a good story, no matter how you told it.

The next morning, the inspector in charge of the homicide section woke Blake up, telling him to get his ass downtown. Quigley had complained to the deputy chief. Blake figured his boss was going to dress him down and note the incident in his personnel file. Instead, when he arrived at headquarters, the inspector said he wanted to personally congratulate him, saying, It’s about time someone did a number on that short stack sonovabitch.

While Blake was downtown, he decided he might as well say hello to the Squad Seven day crew. But he found the squad office filled with a half dozen people he’d never seen before. Somebody said they were from Los Angeles and were rehearsing for a cop movie they were shooting in Detroit. The location scout liked the police headquarters building at 1300 Beaubien because it was built in 1923, was gritty, and some scenes in Beverly Hills Cop were filmed there.

Blake poked his head into the doorway. Two actors were sitting at a desk, reading from a script. Blake could see the scene was an interrogation, a detective threatening a murder suspect with the death penalty unless he confessed to a homicide.

When they finished, Blake said to no one in particular, Excuse me. We don’t have that here.

Don’t have what? said a guy in a baseball cap and T-shirt. He was sitting at another desk in the far corner of the room.

Blake told him that Michigan was the first English-speaking government in the world to abolish the death penalty in 1846. First-degree murder carried a sentence of mandatory life.

The guy in the ball cap said, And who are you?

Detective Sergeant Edwin Blake.

You work here?

Blake said, You’re sitting at my desk.

Blake later learned the guy in the cap was the director. But he looked more like a fresh-faced counselor at a kid’s summer camp. He asked Blake if he had any more suggestions, sarcasm in his voice.

Since you asked, a homicide detective would never interrogate a suspect that way. In fact, he wouldn’t use this office. He’d put him in the box, the little room down the hall. Let him sit there for a good hour and wonder what the score was. Then he’d drop by to say he’d be right back and let him sit another hour.

Blake figured at that point the director would tell him to fuck off. Instead, that night he took Blake to dinner at the Pegasus Taverna in Greektown, showing up with a satchel and still wearing the ball cap. After three glasses of retsina, that Greek wine fermented with wine sap, he started confessing. This was his first feature film, he said. He’d only directed TV episodes before. The script had a decent story, he said. But the dialogue was lousy. The producers wouldn’t pay the writer for another pass. And he didn’t think the writer could fix it anyway. He said he could polish it himself but was up to his ass in other problems. That’s when he reached into his satchel, slid the script across the table and said, You’re just the voice of authenticity I’ve been looking for. Can you give me notes?

For the next three weeks they met a couple times a week. Blake suggested realistic dialogue, flagged factual errors, and even came up with a couple better locations. Blake figured the screenwriter had never met a real detective and had gotten all his ideas from watching movies. He told the director, This thing reads like it was written in a coffee shop.

The director said, If you want to get specific, it was a Coffee Bean on Wilshire.

Blake came to like the director and decided to show him around. He introduced him to assistant prosecutors over drinks at a downtown bar and let him tag along on a homicide scene. He toured him through the crumbling Packard plant and cruised down West Jefferson to see the blast furnaces on Zug Island at the mouth of the Detroit River. The director got fired up seeing a world they didn’t tell him about in film school.

The day the film crew left town the director told him he’d be in touch. Blake didn’t hear anything for six months. Then one night the director called to tell him ABC had picked up a series from a pilot he’d directed, a cop show. The executive producers were looking for a technical consultant and he wanted to recommend Blake for the job. It would require that Blake move to Los Angeles.

I’ll have to think about it, Blake said.

It’s pays $3,500 a week, the director said.

Blake told him he’d get back to him in twenty-four.

He’d worked in homicide for ten years. He’d seen other dicks cite the weekly array of bodies and leave with mental disability claims. But the carnage never rattled Blake. He liked homicide because he was his own man. He liked being on crime scenes without a supervisor looking over his shoulder. When he was at 1300, he liked working suspects in the box. His partner claimed he was a master at working the religion angle.

I’m not a churchgoer, Blake said.

You know what I mean, Eddie, Hendo said. You get these scumbags to believe in redemption. That they could become the solid citizen they were always meant to be by copping to first-degree murder.

On the other hand, homicide wasn’t the same outfit as when Blake signed on. The old-school dicks, the detectives who showed up in suits, starched shirts, and expensive leather shoulder holsters had all retired. With them went their tactics. Those cops didn’t spend much time on forensic evidence. They just rounded up people, most of whom already had sheets or warrants, and locked them up until somebody gave somebody up. But a US Department of Justice probe put an end to the practice. Without those moves, everyone had to rely more on an understaffed evidence collection unit as the city skidded towards bankruptcy.

Family wasn’t tying Blake to Detroit, either. His mother had retired to Tampa. His first wife lived in South Carolina. They hadn’t talked in years. His second wife worked in the domestic violence unit. She left him after five years for a female chief who ran a firehouse on the northwest side. Blake wrote it off to her working with battered women, which had brought her to the conclusion that most men were just no goddamn good.

Blake decided to take two days off and fly to LA to meet the showrunner and a couple of ABC executives for the new series. He liked the way they sent a Town Car to the airport to pick him up, the driver waiting in the LAX baggage claim with Blake’s name on a sign. He liked that he’d left streets packed with dirty snow and in five hours was seeing palm trees as smooth jazz played on the Town Car’s radio. He liked walking around the Warner Brothers lot where he spotted the names of films like Dirty Harry and Blazing Saddles on plaques outside the sound stages, informing people what movies had been shot there.

Do you like their offer? the director asked afterwards.

No, he said. I loved it.

Blake was forty-seven years old. He returned to Detroit, filed for his pension, and drove back to LA with a couple of suitcases, his record collection, and all the possessions he could jam into a Jeep Grand Cherokee.

He never expected the adjustments he had to make to his new work environment. His first day on the job he wore his best suit. The receptionist thought he was an attorney. He told Hendo, Only agents and attorneys wear suits. I feel like I’m back in narcotics. He switched to jeans, Frye engineer boots, and a collared shirt, untucked.

From the go, Blake began laying out stories and investigative tactics to the room of eight writers. But he quickly noticed that his sarcasm, cop shop humor, and general attitude wasn’t landing well. Once, he joked that he had to let a handicapped suspect go because he couldn’t figure out how to cuff a one-armed man. The writers thought he was serious. My brother is handicapped, a female writer said. I find that offensive.

Blake began wondering if his days were numbered.

That’s when Carla stepped into the picture. They met on the Warner Brothers lot. She’d shown up to counsel a newly sober actress who panicked when the network sent a congratulatory bottle of Cristal to her trailer. Blake happened to be walking by when Carla emerged from the Star Waggons trailer. She handed him the $300 bottle of champagne, saying, Hey, big guy, do something with this. He told her they could share it at his place that night, half expecting her to blow him off. Instead, she said, I don’t drink. But you can buy me dinner sometime. He found out on the first date she was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous and sponsored a lot of women she called her pigeons. On their third date he invited her over to his apartment for some pasta he put together. He told her that things weren’t going well in the writers’ room.

I’d really like to succeed at this, he said.

Carla said, There’s two kinds of people in this world, Eddie. Those chasing cash and prizes. And those simply trying to do the next right thing. Both have their own definition of success. She knew quite a bit about the industry. She explained her late dad was a top Hollywood entertainment attorney.

They ended up in bed. Afterward, she used the bathroom and left, saying she had to meet one of her pigeons at a midnight AA meeting. When Blake hit the head later, he found she’d written something in lipstick on the mirror:

Eddie, Tap the Brakes.

He called her. Carla, sex was your idea.

Not that, she said. Your job. Just tap the brakes. Or you’re going to scare these industry people to death.

He came up with a plan. He decided to apply what an old homicide dick used to say: You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. But you can make him goddamn thirsty. He kept his mouth shut. Became aloof, mysterious. The writers had to pull the stories and tactics out of him. When they used an idea, he told them how original they were. Soon the showrunner was making full use of him. He often sent Blake to the set to help directors block scenes or advise the stunt coordinator on action sequences.

In his first year in LA, Blake traded in the Jeep for a new Dodge Challenger SRT and spent hours driving the muscle car around and discovering the spots he’d seen in his favorite films. He passed a Saturday afternoon up at the Griffith Observatory where they shot Rebel Without a Cause. He spotted the office building they used in Die Hard in Century City. At night he watched dozens of shows and films on TV, spotting scenes with streets and commercial strips he’d driven through only days before. He found it all exciting.

One night over dinner, Blake told Carla, I feel like I’m living in a film.

You are, Eddie, Carla said. It’s called Narcissism Ground Zero. Everyone here is the star of their own movie.

The last thing he expected was his to flop.

3

HE ARRIVED AT DAGNEY’S IN Santa Monica just before 11 p.m. She greeted him from behind a locked screen door, one hand on her hip, dressed in a pair of tight black yoga shorts and a white smock top cut just above her navel. Warren Poole expected she’d give him shit for showing up with no warning.

She did. You can’t call first, Warren? Or did you run out of minutes on one of those lousy pre-pays. You can’t stay here.

I’ve booked a room, he said.

She swept a lock of hair away from her eye. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m working.

You shooting fuck films in your crib now?

I told you I was hanging it up the last time you were here. When was that? Two years ago? Maybe three?

Poole shrugged. Just open the door, Dagney.

She hesitated but then clicked the latch. He walked right past her and stopped in her living room, looking around. He knew she’d bought the Craftsman bungalow when prices tanked after the Northridge quake, back when she was a big adult star rolling in the porn bucks. The place had changed since he was there last. Gone was the clutter. Gone was a salt-and-pepper shag carpet, replaced by hardwood floors. Gone, too, were any film posters, replaced by a large print of a hot air balloon rising over a foggy city in India. It hung over an overstuffed couch. She’d also added a flat screen TV and a book cabinet with glass doors. There was an odd-shaped glass coffee table, covered with two stacks of hardcovers and paperbacks.

Poole picked one up and read the title: Women Who Run With The Wolves.

He tossed it back on the table and said, What’s that smell?

She was standing at the threshold of the living room with her arms crossed. She uncrossed one arm and pointed to a cone-shaped device on a credenza, a stream of vapor coming out of a hole on the top. It’s jasmine. Aromatherapy. It elevates your mood and reduces stress.

He plopped down in an IKEA easy chair. I’ll stick with bourbon.

I don’t keep hard liquor around, she said.

Make it a Heineken.

That, too.

Christ, Dagney. It’s been a long drive. Whataya got?

Kombucha.

Kom what?

It’s fermented, made from a Manchurian mushroom. I drink it before my Tai Chi and Kung Fu classes.

You’re doing that now?

I got sick of having my ass grabbed. Some guy recognizes me in an elevator and tries that? He’ll want off on the next floor. Not to mention stalkers. One of them shows up here I’ve a got a surprise for those sick sonsabitches, too. She paused. The Kombucha will give you a lift. And it aids in digestion.

There’s nothing wrong with my gut.

Looks bigger than last time.

And what happened to you?

She uncrossed her arms, walked across the living room to the doorway of the kitchen and turned around. My back was killing me. The implants. My accountant said I could write off the reduction as a business expense. He put it under repairs. She pushed a strand of her blond hair behind her right ear. You want what I got or don’t ya?

I’m always good for a tumble, Poole said, his back straightening.

She rolled her eyes. "The Kombucha, asshole. It does have some alcohol."

Bring it, he said.

When she returned from the kitchen, she handed him a bottle that looked like a long neck beer. He took a sip. It didn’t taste like tea. It was tart, like weak vinegar. Dagney sat down on the overstuffed couch and crossed her legs, swinging the top leg up and down. He liked her long, slim legs, and the way they rose to her peach-shaped behind. He was thinking her smaller tits were just fine, losing her old Jessica Rabbit rack. Almost fifty now, she still looked good. And, he decided, any physical flaws she may have developed with age would be more than compensated by her cinematic skill set. He’d never slept with her after she started doing adult films. It was the reason he’d