"Ask you what?"
"How much I paid for them."
"I wasn't thinking that," Nate said, but he was.
"Come on, Nathan," she said. "I've had lots of cops in my extended family. The price of things was always on their minds. I understand you. I grew up poorer than you can imagine. I was a regular little Scarlett O'Hara when I came to this town, vowing never to be poor again. It didn't take me long to learn that everything in Hollywood is for sale if you know how to shop."
"Okay, how much do those shoes cost?" Nate asked.
Leona yawned again and said, "I think they were thirteen hundred and change."
That impressed him for sure. He looked down at the shoes again but didn't touch them this time.
Trying to make conversation to keep her awake, he said, "It sounds like you and Mr. Ressler have a wonderful vacation coming up. Two months in Tuscany sounds great."
Her eyes were closed when she spoke. "Tuscany again. A different villa this time. Rudy's never been there. Rudy's never been many places outside of Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Malibu, and the San Fernando Valley, where he can run his production company on the cheap."
"And you're getting married when you get back? Congratulations."
She opened her eyes and said, "My, my. Rudy shared a lot when I went to the ladies' room. It must be the badge you carry. He's very impressed with authority figures. When he has dinner with the chief of police he almost wets his pants." Then she told him her address in the Hollywood Hills and closed her eyes.
Nate wondered if a bottle of wine always made her so chatty. And he wondered if an innocent flirtation with Leona Brueger might give him more juice with Rudy Ressler. Then he remembered what an assistant director had said to him on one of the last jobs he'd worked. The AD had observed the producer's wife, a woman twenty years older than Nate, flirting with him. It made him say to Nate, "Officer, if you want to get work in this business, don't pet the cougars. Not when they belong to the boss."
She actually began dozing by the time they reached the foot of the Hollywood Hills and the Corvette began climbing up Outpost Drive to Mulholland. Nate had always enjoyed driving in the Hills in a black-and-white, admiring the view homes, fantasizing about that one break that could make it all possible for him, too.
When he got to the address she'd given him, he pulled up to the gate and stopped. It was easily the largest residential property in this part of the Hollywood Hills and Nate had to admit he'd love to be shown around.
He said gently, "Uh, Mrs. Brueger, we're here."
She opened her eyes and rummaged in her purse until she found a key ring that had a small remote device on it. She pressed it and the gate swung open. He drove in on a long, curving, faux-cobblestone driveway. He made the circle around a bubbling fountain so that the front of his car was facing the gate and she was on the side in front of the huge tiled arch over the main door.
He jumped out and ran around to open the door for her but she was already out, holding her $1,300 shoes in one hand and her purse in the other.
"Come in for a minute, Nathan," she said.
"Okay, Mrs. Brueger," he said.
This was a first. He'd been inside many homes in the Hollywood Hills over the years but as a cop, almost never as a guest.
She unlocked the door and pushed it open, walking to a nearby computer panel on the wall to punch in her code and deactivate the high-pitched alarm warning.
"Follow me," she said.
He did that, crossing a foyer of Mexican tile until he was looking down two steps into the great room. It was very large and it seemed that almost every square foot of the white plaster walls contained paintings: oils, watercolors, and numbered lithographs.
Leona Brueger tossed her shoes on a massive glass coffee table, knocking over some pricey-looking knickknacks.
She said, "Have a seat. I'll be right back. What're you drinking?"
The entire interior was done in cream and custard colors: the walls, the drapes, the carpet, the side tables, and even the twin sofas, with accent pillows in subtle pastels. It all spelled comfort to Hollywood Nate. There was none of that minimalist crap he was constantly seeing in magazines and in the L. A. Times home section.
This all looked stuffed and overstuffed. He had the impression of being enveloped by a giant voluptuous marshmallow.
And then there was the view. It was Hollywood, but not his Hollywood down there at asphalt level. This was Hollywood as seen by God, if there was one. The smog from this elevation was not ugly, not a dingy gray blanket of dangerous gases settling over the L. A. basin in late summer. No, this was a blaze of vivid primary colors propelled by offshore breezes and later would be lit by a last solar gasp before the sun fell into the Pacific. It was astonishing how beautiful and even delicious the L. A. smog could look from a $15 million home in the Hollywood Hills.