When Shane left the Snake Charmers Bar, a cold breeze had just started blowing out of the north. The stiff winter wind took the new spring leaves off the trees, then swept them along until they collected against the curbs and the sides of houses, where they fluttered in the cracks and crevices like tiny green-winged butterflies.
Shane was making the drive from Adams to Hollywood ' General Studios, where Nicky Marcella's office was located. The afternoon sky was cloud-blown and cobalt blue. The air sparkled with a heart-quickening freshness.
Despite all these natural splendors, Shane's mind was still back inside the grimy Snake Charmers Bar. He couldn't get the picture of Carol White out of his mind-a picture of desolate remorse. Shane's friend and ex-partner Jack Wirta used to say that God gave with one hand but took away with the other. And it was often true. God had given Carol a beautiful body and the face to go with it, but had taken away the toughness she needed to survive in the glitzy world that would ultimately beckon, creating a circle of pre-ordained failure.
Franco Zeffirelli hadn't let her move during the audition, made her sit in a chair, and, according to Carol, that one moment had changed her entire life. Her dreams of stardom were now reduced to that one pathetic memory. "I came this close."
Shane shook his head as he drove north on Highland Avenue. She probably hadn't been close at all. From the day she arrived in Hollywood, she had been low-end fuel for the system. Hollywood needed its losers, its fallen dreamers. Without the Carol Whites, what does it count to be Julia Roberts? There had to be profound tragedy to define overwhelming success.
So Carol was in the Snake Charmers Bar with her pincushion arms still oozing from the morning's jab-job, telling Shane about her brush with stardom. It almost made him want to cry.
Why were the losers affecting him so much lately? A few years ago he could have looked at Carol White, put the cuffs on her, and never looked back. But now it was almost as if he felt responsible for her plight, as if she existed in her current wretched state because Shane Scully had not done his job correctly, had somehow failed her personally. He knew that cops usually couldn't change the way things were, but since the Viking case, he had started to see the remnants of humanity inside all of these human flameouts.
He had looked past the surface of Carol White. Behind her red-rimmed eyes he could see the beautiful girl from Teaneck, New Jersey, still alive inside looking out at him, bewildered at how she'd ended up this way.
And that's what haunted him. That's what was ruining this beautiful windswept day.
Hollywood General Studios was on Seward, just five blocks east of Highland. The studio was one of the oldest in Hollywood and had always been a rental lot. Shane thought he remembered hearing that Ozzie and Harriet had been shot there.
He pulled up to the main gate and stopped as a uniformed guard with a clipboard came over. "Shane Scully to see Nicky Marcella."
"He's casting today. Is Mr. Marcella expecting you?" "No, sir, you'll have to call."
The guard went into his wooden shack and picked up the phone. Shane could see past the gate into the studio lot. Hollywood General occupied one large city block and had five or six soundstages. There was also a construction mill and some postproduction facilities. The guard came back and nodded, leaning toward Shane. "You know where Building Six is?"
"No, sir."
"Go through the gate, turn left, and find a visitor space along the front of the administration building. Then walk north toward the low one-story building at the end of the lot. Mr. Marcella's office is number six forty-five, end of the hall."
"Thank you."
Shane did as instructed and found a parking place in front of the ranch-style administration building. He got out and locked his car, then looked around. The studio buildings were mostly one-story stucco, with slanted slate roofs. The warehouse-size soundstages loomed above them. Everything was painted a strange reddish-brown color, and the little patches of grass that were part of the meager landscape plan were now engaged in a desperate struggle for dirt with some kind of wiry, weedlike growth.
As he walked toward Building Six, he passed a new maroon Bentley convertible parked across two stalls. One of the blocked stalls read: Nicholas Marcella.
As soon as Shane entered the corridor, he could see perhaps twenty beautiful young girls sitting in metal chairs that had been placed along the walls. They were all dressed in short-shorts, heels, and halter tops despite the cold wind whipping around outside.
As he moved down the hall, he could see that most of them were studying their audition scenes from miniaturized Xeroxed script pages, which he remembered a casting director once had told him were referred to as "sides."
Shane walked past the line of actresses who were sitting outside Nicky's production company, identified by a gold relief of a coliseum bolted to the door-and under that a gold sign: