Nate was about to ask Snuffy if he'd heard from any of their classmates lately, when the burly Latino cop stopped chattering long enough to turn toward the herd of people emerging onto the red carpet, and said, "Holy shit! He's already out!"
Hollywood Nate turned and saw the chief of police, his wife, and another elegantly dressed couple standing on the curb in front of the Kodak Theatre, and the chief wasn't twinkling. All of the bonhomie that he'd shown to the paparazzi was gone.
Snuffy Salcedo scampered to the SUV, jumped in, and zoomed to the pickup area, where he leaped out and ran around to open the rear door for Mrs. Chief. Nate saw the chief jawing at Snuffy and neither looked very happy.
On the next transfer list, P2 Snuffy Salcedo did return to Hollywood Station, where he could no longer get as rich as the E Street Band.
Chapter Three.
LEONA BRUEGER HAD always referred to her home located high in the Hollywood Hills, almost to Woodrow Wilson Drive, as a mini-estate. Three residential lots had been bought and cleared of aging houses and tied together to make it the largest parcel in that part of the Hills, with a splendid view almost to the ocean. Her late husband, Sammy Brueger, had made most of his early money by buying into three wholesale meat distributors at a time when people said you couldn't make real money in that business.
Sammy Brueger proved them wrong and did it with a slogan that his first wife dreamed up: "You can't beat Sammy's meat." And then, early in the presidency of Richard Nixon, Sammy started following the New York Stock Exchange and became interested in a stock for no other reason than that its NASDAQ symbol, POND, was the maiden name of his wife. He was a born gambler, and when he learned that POND stood for Ponderosa Steak House in Dayton, Ohio, he thought that Lady Luck was calling him. The stock symbol bore his wife's name, and the product was something that he bought and sold every day--meat! So Sammy plowed everything he had into that stock and it zoomed upward an astounding 10,000 percent and he became very rich. He divorced the wife named Pond and married a failed actress whose surname never helped him, and neither did she. Because of the prenuptial, the second one wasn't so expensive to unload.
His third and final wife, Leona, thirty-two years younger than Sammy, told other trophy wives at her Pilates class that the meat slogan had certainly been true in the last ten years of the old man's life, and she thanked God for it. She still shuddered when she thought of him in his old age crawling over her at night like a centipede.
Leona Brueger was still a size two, and was trainer-firm, with expressive brown eyes, delicate facial bones, and a Mediterranean skin tone that bore no evidence of the considerable work she had bought in order to stay looking so good at the age of sixty. Her last birthday had been devastating, no matter how much she had tried to prepare for it psychologically. Leona Brueger's natural hair color had been milk chocolate brown at one time, and she hated to think what color it would be now if she ever stopped the monthly color and highlights.
On a summer afternoon while sitting by the pool skimming Elle and Vogue and reading Wine Spectator cover to cover, she happened to see a mention of a Beverly Hills art gallery where Sammy had bought three very expensive pieces of Impressionist art, two by French artists and one by a Swede. Leona couldn't remember much about the artists and hardly noticed the paintings back when Sammy was alive, opining to girlfriends that trees and flowers should look as though they were living things distinct from the land that nourished them. And the nearly nude body of a peasant woman feeding a kitten in one of the paintings depressed her. She feared that she would look like that when, despite Pilates and a weekly game of tennis on the Brueger tennis court with her Pilates partners, her ass finally gave up and collapsed from boredom and fatigue.
But the article she was reading made her wonder why it had taken her so long to have the paintings appraised after Sammy died, trusting him that they were of "museum quality." He'd always said that the very pricey pieces should hang exactly where he'd placed them: in their great room, the dining room, and along the main corridor of "Casa Brueger."
She strolled inside from the pool, sipping an iced tea, wishing it were late enough for a nice glass of cool Fume Blanc, and studied the three oldest pieces to try to see why anyone would think they were so valuable. She stood before the largest, the one of a woman squatting beside what looked to Leona like a pond or a lagoon. She decided to call the Wickland Gallery on Wilshire Boulevard to ask Nigel Wickland when he'd be coming back for the appraisal. The art dealer had stopped by a week earlier at her request and taken a preliminary look, but he'd said he needed to "research the provenance" before he could give her accurate information. It was hard for her to think about appraisals or any other business when she was about to embark on one of the great adventures of her life.