At two in the morning, she called him crying. She was incoherent, but he managed to get her to tell him where she was.
The abandoned house was near Crenshaw Boulevard in L.A.’s dangerous Hyde Park area. Ralston kicked in the door. There were empty liquor bottles, beer cans, and cigarette butts, but no Ava.
In the back portion of the house, he found a filthy mattress lying in the middle of the floor. A couple of portable lamps were positioned on each side. They had been switched off, but were still warm to the touch. Nearby was the plastic packaging for a particularly vile sex toy. Ralston’s heart sank. He’d been on enough movie sets to know what he was looking at. He needed to find her.
As he stepped into the kitchen, he heard a noise from outside. It sounded like the lid of a dumpster had been dropped. When he made it to the alley, he saw two men in the distance, running away. He also found a dumpster. Without opening its lid, he knew what he was going to find inside.
Praying to God, Ralston eventually found the strength to lift the lid. What he saw broke his heart wide open. By the time he dialed 9-1-1, the men he’d seen running from the alley were long gone.
In the days that followed, the cops asked him a lot about Ava’s drug use. They wanted to know who she bought from. Ralston couldn’t help them. He had no idea. Alisa provided the police with a ton of information. Ava had met her dealer through one of the soap opera’s crew members. Alisa even knew the identity of the next person up who supplied her dealer.
The detectives found her depth of knowledge interesting, to say the least, and wanted to know how she knew as much as she did. Alisa was no fool. She was an attorney, after all, and never answered the officer’s questions, at least not truthfully. That didn’t come out until the trial.
Alisa and her father had paid off both the dealer and the supplier to not provide Ava with any more drugs. Both of the subhumans had agreed at first and then tried to extort more money out of the family, threatening to hook Ava on even worse substances. When they refused, the drug pushers had made good on their threat.
Both Alisa and her father were convinced it was the same two men who had been responsible for Ava’s death. Putting them at the scene of the crime would have been all that was necessary to secure a conviction. But as much as Ralston wanted to see the people responsible for Ava’s death pay, he hadn’t seen the faces of the men in the alley. He couldn’t ID the two drug dealers as the figures he’d seen running away from the dumpster.
Even the district attorney tried privately to convince Ralston to testify against the two men. They were career criminals with horrific records. It didn’t matter if they were really the ones who were responsible. They had been responsible for untold suffering, and if they didn’t kill Ava, they were going to wind up killing someone else’s son or daughter.
The arguments were not lost on Ralston. At the very least, these were the men who had gotten Ava hooked on drugs and continued to feed her addiction. But Ralston had only one thing that truly belonged to him in life: his honor. As much as he wanted to kill both the pushers with his bare hands, he couldn’t lie. He could not positively identify them as the two men from the scene.
Without his testimony, the case had fallen apart and so had his relationship with Ava’s family. They had needed him, and in their minds, he had let them down.
Now, several years later, he needed them. “I understand why you’re still angry,” he said.
“Are you patronizing me? Boy, do you have balls. You know, I should have had you drummed out of the business.”
“Alisa, I need your help.”
The woman laughed. “You want my help with something? Let me rephrase my prior statement. You have colossal balls.”
Ralston considered telling her that not a day went by that he didn’t think about Ava; that he didn’t wish for some sort of penance he could perform for letting Ava down. Though he knew Ava’s addiction was just that-Ava’s addiction-he still felt incredibly guilty for her death. He tortured himself wondering whether, if he had quit the movie he’d been working on, he could have gotten Ava up to that cabin and gotten her sober. He wondered what would have happened if he’d chased those men down the alley. Would he have been able to ID them in court? Would he have even survived the altercation? All he had was the tire iron from his car. What if they’d been carrying firearms?
“I never wanted Ava to die,” he said. “Please.”
There was silence, several moments of it.
“Please,” he repeated. “I need your help.”
Alisa knew that Ralston was a good man. She also knew that the men accused of Ava’s death were the ones who were responsible. She was one hundred percent sure about that. Ralston had allowed Ava’s killers to go free. It made it very difficult to hear from him now, much less be asked to help him.
“If this is about cozying you up to one of my firm’s clients to help you get some movie deal, I swear to God I’ll make good on my promise to kill you. Do you understand that?”
“It’s not about business. I’m in trouble.”
“If you need a lawyer, you’ve come to the wrong place,” replied Alisa. “You’ll have to find somebody else.”
“No,” said Ralston. “I don’t need a lawyer. At least not yet.”
She had no idea what was going on, but he definitely had her attention. “What have you done?”
“I’ll explain it when I see you.”
“Oh? Just like that we’re having a meeting?” she replied. “Sorry, I’m booked.”
“Damn it, Ali. This is serious.”
“What this is, Luke, is my time, which gets billed at eight hundred and seventy-five dollars an hour. At least, that’s what I get paid when I am working, which is what I was doing before you called pretending to be from my children’s school and pulled me away from my client and a very important negotiation I’m trying to hammer out for her.”
Ralston decided he was going to have to give her something to get her to meet with him. And as strained as their relationship had been, she was the closest thing to family he had. “Did you hear what happened at Larry Salomon’s house?”
“Did I hear about it? Everyone’s heard about it. It’s all people in this town are talking about this morning. Why would you ask me,” she said, her voice suddenly trailing off. “Tell me you had nothing to do with what took place at Salomon’s house.”
“I need to see you. I need a favor.”
“Oh, my God.”
“Ali, please,” he said. “I need to see you.”
“Did you kill those people?”
“No comment.”
“No comment?” she replied. “Oh, my God.”
“Ali, come on.”
“What happened to Salomon?”
“He’s fine,” said Ralston. “He’s with me. He can vouch for everything.”
“Then I suggest you two turn yourselves in to the police. Pronto.”
“We can’t. At least not yet. That’s what I need to talk to you about.”
Alisa was quiet as she thought about how to handle it.
“Are you still there?” Ralston asked.
“Quiet,” she replied. “I’m thinking.”
Ralston remained quiet.
“Where are you?” she finally asked. “Are you somewhere in L.A.?”
Ralston was hesitant about answering, but realized he was going to have to trust her. “We’re south.”
“How far south? San Diego? Mexico City?”
He decided that for the time being it was better for all involved if he didn’t give her too much information. Until he knew for sure that she was on his side, he was going to be very careful. After all, she had promised to kill him. And though he doubted that she really meant it, there was still part of him that knew better than to cross her, or her father. “Can you get down to Manhattan Beach?” he asked, picking a quiet beach community just north of where he was.
