L.A. Times Read online

  L.A. Times

  Stuart Woods

  This book is for Steven and Barbara Bochco.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Vincente Michaele Callabrese blinked in the midafternoon sunlight as he…

  Chapter 1

  Vinnie Callabrese stood on the southeast corner of Second Avenue…

  Chapter 2

  Vinnie’s beeper went off as he left the movie house.

  Chapter 3

  Vinnie paid the cabbie, tipped him five, then ran up…

  Chapter 4

  Vinnie had met Barbara Mannering at a benefit for the…

  Chapter 5

  Vinnie worked on the production budget for two days, between…

  Chapter 6

  Vinnie loved the work. He tried to get his collection…

  Chapter 7

  Vinnie sat in the rehearsal hall at Central Plaza on…

  Chapter 8

  Vinnie sat straight up in bed. Something had awakened him,…

  Chapter 9

  Vinnie lay on his dead mother’s bed and tried to…

  Chapter 10

  Vinnie sat in a taxicab and sweated. He had less…

  Chapter 11

  Vinnie had three meetings on the morning of the showing…

  Chapter 12

  Michael opened his eyes and listened hard. There was a…

  Chapter 13

  Michael approached the gates of Centurion Pictures slowly. He had…

  Chapter 14

  Michael entered the Executive Building again and found Helen Gordon…

  Chapter 15

  Michael had a prearranged appointment downtown at 2:30, and there…

  Chapter 16

  Michael arrived at his offices the following morning and was…

  Chapter 17

  Michael and Vanessa found the Bel-Air house of Leo and…

  Chapter 18

  Robert Hart was indeed shorter than Michael had thought. Even…

  Chapter 19

  Michael arrived in his office to find his secretary standing…

  Chapter 20

  Michael sat in the lawyer’s office and stared at the…

  Chapter 21

  Michael drove back to the studio in a fury, whipping…

  Chapter 22

  Michael drove the Porsche slowly up Sunset Boulevard toward the…

  Chapter 23

  Michael jerked awake to the sound of the telephone. He…

  Chapter 24

  Driving didn’t do it. When he got to the studio…

  Chapter 25

  Michael sat and looked at the two police officers. This…

  Chapter 26

  Michael sat at a table at a McDonald’s on Santa…

  Chapter 27

  Monday night at Morton’s. The crème de la crème of…

  Chapter 28

  Michael put down Mark Adair’s first-draft screenplay of Pacific Afternoons…

  Chapter 29

  Michael looked across his desk at his director. Eliot Rosen…

  Chapter 30

  Michael stood in the center of Leo Goldman’s enormous office…

  Chapter 31

  Michael got to the office early the next day and…

  Chapter 32

  Special Agent Thomas Carson of the Los Angeles office of…

  Chapter 33

  The ringing telephone woke Detective Ricardo Rivera. He rolled over…

  Chapter 34

  Michael got to the beach half an hour early. He’d…

  Chapter 35

  Michael shifted the Porsche down into second gear and turned…

  Chapter 36

  Michael eased the Porsche into the turnaround of the Goldmans’…

  Chapter 37

  Michael was already dressed when Vanessa woke up. “It’s Saturday,”…

  Chapter 38

  Michael stood on the beach at Carmel and watched Robert…

  Chapter 39

  Michael slept in his office again on Thursday night, and…

  Chapter 40

  Michael watched as Bob Hart leaned over his wife and…

  Chapter 41

  Michael went to the studio on Saturday, leaving Margot lying…

  Chapter 42

  From an article in Vanity Fair:

  Chapter 43

  Michael put down the magazine and stared out at the…

  Chapter 44

  Rick Rivera sat by the pool behind the house in…

  Chapter 45

  Michael stood at the front door and watched the stretch…

  Chapter 46

  Michael was picked up by a studio limousine in the…

  Chapter 47

  Michael was home before midnight. He said good night to…

  Chapter 48

  Michael had already finished breakfast on the terrace overlooking the…

  Chapter 49

  It was after lunch before the two FBI agents showed…

  Chapter 50

  Michael and Amanda Goldman lay naked on the upstairs back…

  Chapter 51

  Michael sat in Leo’s private screening room, adjacent to his…

  Chapter 52

  Michael walked into the Beverly Hills Hotel, through the main…

  Chapter 53

  Michael looked up into the glazed eyes of Margot Gladstone…

  Chapter 54

  Michael waited impatiently for the call from Leo’s secretary, and…

  Chapter 55

  Michael looked around the hospital room. The entire Centurion board…

  Chapter 56

  Michael stood at the podium and addressed the memorial service…

  Chapter 57

  Near the end of his first week as head of…

  Chapter 58

  Michael sat in the chauffeur-driven stretch Mercedes that he had…

  Chapter 59

  Michael and Amanda Goldman both reeked of cocoa butter as…

  Chapter 60

  Michael stood at the mirror and expertly tied his black…

  Chapter 61

  Michael sat at his desk, going over the budget for…

  Chapter 62

  Michael straightened his desk, squared away the legal pads, scooped…

  Epilogue

  Michael slowly opened his eyes. He had been aware, over…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by Stuart Woods

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  1975

  Vincente Michaele Callabrese blinked in the midafternoon sunlight as he emerged from the darkness of the York Theater on the Upper West Side after the noon performance of The Strange One, a revival starring Ben Gazzara and George Peppard. He sprinted for the subway, and as he rode downtown toward his next movie he was still gripped by the performances of the two young actors who had been among the most promising of their generation.

  Woody Allen’s movie Bananas was next, at the Bleecker Street Cinema, and he would make a seven o’clock double feature of Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons and Othello. He was short of his record of seven movies in sixteen hours, but that had been made possible by two three-screen houses next door to each other on Third Avenue, so he’d only had to take one subway.

  It was after midnight when Vinnie left the Eighth Street Playhouse and started home; each step he took toward Little Italy was taken with more foreboding. He had cut school again, and he was already a grade behind; his mother would be waiting up for him, and his father, if he were home…well, he didn’t want to think about that.

  Vinnie was fourteen and big for his age. He was already shaving every day, and girls t
hree and four years older were taking him seriously. He didn’t have a lot of time for girls, though—when he wasn’t in school or at the movies, he was running errands for a loan shark in the neighborhood, which paid for his movie tickets. Since the age of six, when he had belatedly seen his first film, Vinnie Callabrese had been to the movies nearly two thousand times. His friend and benefactor, an older boy named Tommy Provensano, who was very smart, was always telling Vinnie that he should keep his moviegoing a secret, because nobody would take him seriously.

  He had seen some favorite films four or five times, but Othello had been a new experience for Vinnie. He hadn’t understood much of the dialogue, but he had been able to follow the story, and the dark drama had riveted him to his seat. He knew guys like Iago on his own block. He admired them; he learned from them.

  Vinnie walked up the five flights, his heart pounding from more than the exertion. What if the old man were home? He inserted his key into the lock and turned it as silently as possible, then slipped into the four-room railroad flat. All was quiet; he sagged with relief as he stood still in the kitchen, letting his breathing return to normal. It would be easier if his mother didn’t see him until morning, when her anger would have abated a little.

  “Bastard!” a voice behind him said.

  Vinnie spun around to find his father, Onofrio, sitting in a kitchen chair, leaning against the wall, a pint bottle of cheap whiskey in his hand. Onofrio didn’t bother using a glass anymore.

  “Bastard from hell!” his father said. “You were never mine; your mother laid down with the mailman, the butcher—somebody.”

  “Don’t you talk about my mother that way,” Vinnie said, his voice trembling.

  Onofrio stood up and took a long swig from the bottle, then set it on the sink beside him. “You talk back to me?” He unbuckled his wide belt and slipped it from his trousers. “You want this, huh?”

  “Don’t you talk about my mother that way,” Vinnie repeated.

  “Your mother is a whore,” Onofrio said, almost conversationally. “That’s why you are the bastard.” He flicked the belt out to its full length.

  This time the buckle was not in his hand, but at the swinging end of the belt. This time would be bad, Vinnie thought.

  Onofrio swung the buckle at his son. It made a whirring sound as it moved through the air.

  Instinctively, Vinnie ducked, and the heavy buckle passed over his head.

  “Stand still and take your beating, bastard!” Onofrio shouted.

  There was a hammering on a door down the hall, and Vinnie heard his mother’s voice faintly pleading with his father. “You beat her again, didn’t you?” Vinnie asked.

  “She gave me a bastard, didn’t she? I beat her good this time.”

  Without thinking, Vinnie swung a fist at his father’s head. The blow caught Onofrio solidly on the jaw, and he staggered back against the wall, dropping the belt.

  Vinnie’s father stared at him, his eyes wide with anger. “You would raise a hand to your father?”

  Vinnie swallowed hard. “I would beat the shit out of my father,” he said. Onofrio reached down for the belt, but Vinnie kicked it out of his reach, then straightened him up with an uppercut that would have laid out most men. His father was tough, though; he had been the neighborhood bully in his youth—Vinnie had heard this from his mother, when she had warned him never to resist a beating from his father.

  “Now I kill you with my hands,” Onofrio said, pushing off the wall and rushing at his son.

  Vinnie was as tall as his father, but fifty pounds lighter. On his side he had quickness and, tonight, the fact that his father was drunk. He stepped aside and let Onofrio hit the opposite wall of the tiny kitchen, then stepped in and threw a hard left to the bigger man’s right kidney. Onofrio sagged to his knees, groaning, and then Vinnie went to work, choosing his punches and his targets, feeling cartilage and bone break under his fists, hammering his father until the man could only lie on the floor defenseless while his son kicked him into unconsciousness.

  Vinnie stopped only because he was tired. He wet a dishcloth and wiped the sweat from his face and neck, and when his breathing had slowed, he went down the hall to his parents’ bedroom and unlocked the door. His mother fell into his arms, weeping.

  Much later, after he had helped his mother get his bleeding father onto the living room couch, after she had bathed Onofrio’s battered face, after sleep had finally come to his parents, Vinnie lay awake and relived the pleasure of what he had done to his father. It was fuller and more complete than any pleasure he would know until he was much more experienced sexually. He felt not the slightest guilt, because Vinnie never felt guilt about anything. He had learned in his short life that other people felt guilt; he understood the emotion, but he did not know it. Now he devoted himself to thinking about the worst possible thing he could do to his father, worse than the beating he had just given him. It did not take long for Vinnie’s bright mind to alight on the brown bag.

  Onofrio collected numbers money each evening from two dozen locations in Little Italy, then remitted it to Benedetto, a rising soldier in the Carlucci family, the following morning. Onofrio’s life was his bond. If he did not take the money to Benedetto, he would die for his greed. Benedetto had a foul temper and a reputation for swift vengeance at any hint of disrespect.

  Vinnie got slowly out of bed and tiptoed next door to his parents’ bedroom. Silently, he opened the door and crossed the room to the bed, then dropped to his knees beside his sleeping mother. He felt under the bed for the bag, and its handle met his hand. As quietly as he could, he extracted the little satchel, then returned to his own room and switched on the light.

  There was nearly three thousand dollars in the bag. Vinnie moved his bed out from the wall and removed the floorboard that covered his secret hiding place. He moved aside the Playboy magazines and the condoms and the hundred dollars he had saved and placed the money in the hole; then he replaced the floorboard and the nail that made it look permanently fixed.

  He took the brown bag into the kitchen and dropped it out the window into the air shaft, where he knew it would be found; then he returned to his room and stretched out on the bed.

  By this time tomorrow, he thought as he drifted off, Onofrio Callabrese would be at the bottom of Sheepshead Bay. Vinnie’s sleep was not disturbed by the prospect.

  CHAPTER

  1

  1989

  Vinnie Callabrese stood on the southeast corner of Second Avenue and St. Mark’s Place in New York City and watched the candy store across the street. The fat man was due any minute.

  Vinnie felt neither guilt nor anxiety about what he was going to do. In fact, the only emotion he felt at that moment was impatience, because he could see the marquee of the St. Mark’s Theater 80 in the next block, and he knew that Touch of Evil started in eight minutes. Vinnie didn’t like to be late for a movie.

  Vinnie’s nose was Roman, his hair and beard thick and black, his eyes dark. He knew how to concentrate those eyes on another man and induce fear. Vinnie wasn’t the heaviest muscle who worked for Benedetto, but he stood six-two and weighed a tightly packed one hundred and ninety pounds.

  The fat man weighed more than three hundred pounds, but he was soft to the bone. Vinnie wasn’t worried, except about the time.

  With six minutes left before the movie, the fat man double-parked his Cadillac Sedan De Ville at the opposite corner, struggled out of the big car, and waddled into the candy store. Vinnie gave him long enough to reach his office, then crossed the street. The place was empty, except for the old man who made the egg creams and sold the cigarettes. Vinnie closed the door, worked the latch, and flipped the OPEN sign around. He looked at the old man and gave him a little smile. “You’re closed,” he said, “for five minutes.”

  The old man nodded resignedly and picked up the Daily News.

  Vinnie strode past the magazine racks, his leather heels echoing off the cracked marble floor, and put his hand on t
he doorknob of the back room. He opened it very gently and peeked into the little office. The fat man sat, his gut resting on the battered desk. With one hand he was flipping quickly through a stack of small bills, and the fingers of his other hand flew over a calculator in a blur. Vinnie was momentarily transfixed. He had never seen anything quite like it; the fat man was a virtuoso on the calculator.

  The man looked up and stopped calculating. “Who the fuck are you?” he asked.

  Vinnie stepped into the office and closed the door behind him. “I’m a friend of the guy who loaned you five thousand dollars nine weeks ago,” he said. His accent was heavy—New York and Little Italy.

  The fat man managed a sour grin. “And you’ve just come to make a polite call, huh?”

  Vinnie shook his head slowly. “No. The polite guy was here last week, and the week before that, and the month before that.”

  “So you’re the muscle, huh?” the fat man said, grinning more widely and leaning back in his chair. His right hand remained on the edge of the desk. It was a long reach over his gut, and it didn’t look natural. “You ever heard of the law, guinea? You ever heard that what your friend does is against the law? That he has no legal claim on me, not even a piece of paper?”