Most of Robin’s guitars and mandolins are commissioned by professional musicians and collectors who play seriously. A few end up stashed in the vaults of rich men seeking trophies-lucky-sperm recipients, real estate tycoons, Aspergian algorithmers, movie stars.
Plus the lampreys who get rich off movie stars. I rarely think of my girl as a Hollywood type but she’s the one who gets invited to all the parties we seldom attend.
Six minutes later, that paid off. “Got what you need.”
“That was quick.”
“I looped in Brent Dorf.”
Dorf was a luminary at a major talent agency. I’d met him last year when he picked up a replica of an eighteenth-century parlor guitar that would end up hanging on a wall. When he found out what I did for a living, he reminisced about being a psych major at Yale, regretted that he hadn’t pursued it because his “primary passion” was helping people. My experience is people who talk about being passionate seldom are.
Brent had impressed me as the perfect political type-a mile wide and an inch deep, programmed to banter on cue. His jokes were clever, his attention span brief. Whatever charm he managed to project was diluted by the flat eyes and sanguinary grin of a monitor lizard. At least he paid his bills on time.
I said, “Dorf knew about CAPD?”
“Boy did he, honey. Unfortunately, Big Guy’s life is going to get really complicated.”
She explained why.
I told Milo.
He said, “Oh.”
Then he swore.
CHAPTER 33
Prema-Rani Moon was Hollywood royalty. As is the case with real royalty, that meant a mixed bag of privilege and decadence.
Grandpa Ricardo (ne Luna) had been nominated for an Oscar but didn’t win the statuette. Grandma Greta’s success rate was one for three. Uncle Maximilian’s average over a forty-year career was the best: a perfect two out of two.
Daddy Richard Jr.’s star had glittered, then sputtered, with seven forgettable pictures followed by a descent into the gummy haze of heroin addiction. Rick Moon’s final attempt at rehab was a stint at a Calcutta ashram run by a guru later proved to be a rapist. Flirtation with fringe Eastern philosophy led Moon to endow his only child with a hybrid Indian name: Prema, a Sanskrit word for “love,” and Rani, “queen” in Hindi.
By the time the little girl was five, all traces of religion in her father’s muddled consciousness had been banished and he was living in Montmartre with the little girl’s mother, a second-tier Chanel model turned semi- famous by her marriage to the handsome, tormented American film scion.
A coke-induced heart attack claimed Rick’s life at age thirty-eight. Lulu Moon claimed she’d tried to revive her husband. If so, the powder she’d crammed up her nose hampered the process. Fourteen months later, she was buried next to Rick at Pere Lachaise cemetery after slashing her wrists while her daughter slept in an adjoining bedroom.
Prema, as she was now known, discovered the body. Never schooled, she couldn’t read the barely literate suicide note that belied Lulu’s claims of attending the Sorbonne.
Shipped back to Bel Air, the child was raised by her grandparents, which translated to a stream of boarding schools where she failed to fit in. The child-rearing ethos on Bellagio Road was less-than-benign neglect. Ricardo and Greta, still working occasionally in character roles, were gorgeous alcoholics and compulsive plastic surgery patients who had no interest in children-in anyone other than themselves. By the time Prema was fourteen her grandparents were pickled in Polish vodka and resembled wax figures molded by addled sculptors. Two years later, Ricardo and Greta were dead and Prema was an adolescent heiress whose considerable assets were managed by a private bank in Geneva.
With no other option, Maximilian Moon, now knighted and living in London, took on the task of serving as his niece’s guardian. That translated to a two-room suite on the third floor of Sir Max’s Belgravia mansion, Prema enduring her uncle’s abysmal piano playing and getting to know the coterie of young lithe men he labeled his “paramours.”
When Prema was sixteen, a poobah at a major modeling agency noticed the tall, slender blond girl with the scalpel-hewn cheekbones, the ripe-peach lips, and the huge indigo eyes standing in a corner at one of Max’s parties with an unlit joint in her hand. The offer of a contract was immediate.
Prema yawned her way down the runway as a Gaultier clothes-hanger, rented herself a garret off Rue Saint- Germain, never bothered to visit her parents’ graves. The combination of passive income and modeling fees allowed her to regularly score chunks of hashish the size of soap bars from Tunisian dealers near the flea market, a treat she shared with her fellow ectomorph beauties.
Her apathy during Fashion Week made her all the more attractive.
One day, Uncle Max paused long enough in his butchery of Rachmaninoff to suggest his now gorgeous niece attend university. When Prema laughed that off, he offered her a stint as a fairy in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of
Prema agreed.
She loved being someone else.
The rest is fan-mag history.
Donald Lee Rumples was born in Oklahoma City where his father worked as a pipe fitter and his mother stayed home raising five kids. Preternaturally handsome but lacking the coordination for athletics enjoyed by his brothers and the attention span for scholarship displayed by his sisters, he dropped out of high school at seventeen, worked as a janitor, then a gutter at a meatpacking plant, gave that all up and hitchhiked to L.A. where he swept up a 7-Eleven on Western Avenue in Hollywood.
That career lasted four months, at which time he wangled a day job as a golf caddie supplemented by a nighttime gig sweeping up a pizza joint in Brentwood. It was there that the wife of a TV producer took a shine to the black-haired, black-eyed kid tidying up the pepperoni and offered him a position as a houseboy at her manse in Holmby Hills.
A year of not-so-clandestine bedding of the somewhat large lady of the very large house led to Donald’s being spotted while serving hors d’oeuvres at his host’s Christmas party. The spotter was a casting agent and the offer was a walk-on part in a low-budget horror flick.
Once on the set, Rumples caught the eye of a female assistant director. The following day he’d moved into her Venice apartment. Weeks after that, he traded up to the Encino compound of her boss, the male director. Months later he was the toy of a studio executive with a spread in Bel Air who got him an agent. That led to a speaking part in a dog food commercial. The spot sold a lot of kibble and Donald scored a speaking part in an action film and a legal name change. His face and physique were adored by the camera and if he had enough time he could memorize a few lines.
The action flick was marketed to teenage boys but women loved it and marketing surveys revealed the reason: “strong but sensitive” black-haired, black-eyed Ranger Hemos, played by Donny Rader. A curious slurred delivery that would have been judged clumsy in a homely man was labeled sexy by legions of female admirers.
One of those admirers was Prema Moon, now thirty-four and an established star. She summoned the younger man with the strangely appealing mumble to her compound off Coldwater Canyon. Donny had just begun living with his last costar, a sweet-tempered B-list actress with the IQ of adobe. Prema couldn’t have cared less about prior commitments. In what
