And pride was what Phoenix was expressing, as his words spilled out about his friend.
“Tiger was good. He could do anyone. Jimmy, Kurt, Jim, Heath, Johnny. He was goin’ places.”
Phoenix meant that Tiger could change his appearance to look like the dead stars Phoenix named. Barrie realized with a shiver that they were all stars who’d died tragically young, either from addiction or their own reckless behavior, shooting stars who burned out too fast on their talent and lifestyles: James Dean in a car wreck at twenty-four, Kurt Cobain a suicide at twenty-seven, Jim Morrison of a heroin overdose (hotly disputed) at twenty-seven, and the youngest of all of them, Johnny Love, a sixteen-year-old movie idol who in the 1990s had burned up the screen in cult classics like Race the Night and Youngbloods and then died shooting up a lethal speedball at sixteen, just after the huge success of his last movie, Otherworld.
Barrie thought uncomfortably, and not for the first time, how chillingly easy it was to become what you pretended to be. Now Tiger had joined the list of his dead idols.
She shook her head and tried to focus on the boy beside her. “Was he working for someone?” She avoided the word “pimp.”
Phoenix straightened his shoulders, clearly proud of his dead friend. “He was doin’ it himself. He hooked up with someone big. Real big. He had a regular date with someone in the movies, really connected, who was into shifters big-time. And he was paying big money for Tiger to shift.”
Barrie’s heart started beating faster. “Someone in the movies? Do you know who?”
Phoenix shook his head. “Someone who was going to do things for him. Get him parts. Tiger was really high about it.”
Could it be? A connection between Tiger and Saul Mayo? Barrie had the strongest feeling, an almost psychic hit, that she was on to something. Maybe something huge.
“A producer? Director? Actor?” she asked, trying to be casual.
“Tiger didn’t say much.”
“Did you ever actually see this guy?”
Phoenix shook his head. “I saw his car once. A limo.”
Not helpful. Every third car in this town was a limo.
“If that person—or anyone—comes around looking for Tiger, can you let me know?” She gave Phoenix a card; he looked down at it listlessly and shrugged. Her heart tore. “Phoenix, I can drop you at Out of the Shadows. You know Lara would be glad to have you.”
His eyes grew hooded. “Maybe I’ll cruise over later.”
She sighed. It was so hard to get the kids out of the life. It was abuse, but for them it was abuse on their own terms. She touched his arm.
“You call me if you need anything, Phoenix. I’m so very sorry about Tiger.”
Mayo’s body had been discovered at the Chateau Marmont. The hotel was a Hollywood institution, built in the 1920s and modeled after a French castle, with one elegant old main building towering over a spread of luxury bungalows that fairly dripped old film studio elegance. It was known for its beautiful views, ornate turrets and tiny wooden elevators, the junglelike pool area, and the young celebrity clientele populating the hopping cocktail bar.
Barrie pulled into the side alley where the front entrance was tucked away and looked up at the Gothic palace on the hill. Its aura had been paid for in blood, the hotel being the site of several legendary tragedies: John Belushi’s death from a drug overdose, and the near death of Jim Morrison, who used to joke that he used up the eighth of his nine lives when he fell headfirst onto a garden shed while trying to swing from a drainpipe to his window at the Chateau.
And tragically, sixteen-year-old Johnny Love.
Barrie recalled uneasily that Phoenix had said Johnny was one of Tiger’s favorite shifts.
And Johnny Love had died of an apparent overdose in his teens.
Just like Tiger, Barrie thought. So much like Tiger.
It was not much more than the cruel chance of Hollywood that one had ascended to iconic superstardom and the other had died anonymously in an alley.
She frowned as something prickled at the edges of her consciousness, some fact that she knew was important but that she couldn’t quite get to.
As she was grasping for the thought, she was distracted by the sight of a hearse pulling up, a Hollywood Ghost Bus loaded with tourists out to see “the darker side of Tinseltown.” Barrie grimaced; it was all oh-so-edgy and cool from the outside, but tonight she couldn’t see anything even resembling humor.
And now, she realized, the movie mogul Saul Mayo would be part of the tour, maybe even more of a celebrity in death than he had been in life. It was outrageous, enraging. And so very, very Hollywood.
Barrie breathed in to calm herself. Then she gave up her Peugeot to a valet and walked into the hotel through the side alley entrance.
As she entered the dim, elegant, edgy lobby, her mind was going a mile a minute. She knew she was going to have to play this carefully. She was bound to run into other journalists digging up dirt on Mayo’s death, and she didn’t want anyone else, not anyone, picking up on a possible connection between Mayo and Tiger.
Least of all Mick Townsend. But here he was, larger than life, strolling around the sunken, tiled lobby, looking irritatingly suave and baronial in the lush surroundings that came complete with grand piano, heavy velvet drapes and candelabra. He seemed not just at home but as if he owned the place.
“Gryffald,” he said, apparently unsurprised to see her. “Selling out and going for the Mayo story after all?”
“Just like you, I guess,” she retorted, but she was secretly glad he’d jumped to that conclusion. It would save her the trouble of making up a story to keep him from guessing the real trail she was on.
“So, how’d he die?” she asked. If Townsend was going to be so damned chummy she could at least get some information out of him.
“OD,” Townsend said shortly. “Some exotic drug cocktail. Coke, heroin and belladonna.”
Belladonna? Barrie thought, startled. Coke and heroin was a common combination, called a speedball, among hard-core drug users. Adding a hallucinogen, particularly one with such an occult history as belladonna, was more Other territory than human, although in Hollywood Others often started edgy trends that humans then adopted without knowing the Otherworldly source.
Mick continued, “Of course, we’re not allowed to report that. Total blackout until it’s confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt—or lawsuit.”
He circled the piano, stopped to run his fingers lightly and expertly over the keys. She recognized the opening of an old jazz standard, one of her dance favorites.
Damn, he could play the piano, too. Perfection was so annoying. Barrie felt a warmth spreading through her and was alarmed to find herself wondering what it would feel like to have him run those skilled fingers over her body.
All right, that has to stop now.
Townsend pushed back abruptly from the piano, grimacing. “The story’s already jumped the shark. It’s not enough that Mayo died of an OD at the Chateau Marmont. There’s some genius of a bellhop insisting that he checked into a bungalow with a young guy who was the spitting image of Johnny Love. Ghosts, for God’s sake,” he said, disgusted.
Now it was adrenaline Barrie felt racing through her, accelerating her thoughts.
A bellhop saw Johnny Love?
Phoenix said Johnny Love was one of Tiger’s favorite shifts.
Tiger had a powerful Hollywood client who paid big money for shifting.
Tiger’s body was moved from somewhere else into that alley.
She’d