L.A. Mental Read online

  L.A. Mental

  A Thriller

  Neil McMahon

  www.harpercollins.com

  Dedication

  To Carl Lennertz, who has carried me for a thousand pages

  Epigraph

  I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons . . .

  —WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Part Two

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Part Three

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Part Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Part Five

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Fifty-Four

  Fifty-Five

  Fifty-Six

  Fifty-Seven

  Fifty-Eight

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Neil McMahon

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Los Angeles Times, February 2

  Bizarre Rampage Leaves Judge in Critical Condition

  Police were summoned to the Santa Monica home of municipal court judge Allen Berthold by neighbors late last night. Reports of shouting and breaking glass led them to expect a crime in progress, but it now appears that Berthold was alone through the entire incident.

  According to a source who spoke on condition of anonymity, Berthold had damaged his house extensively, throwing furniture through windows and streaking the walls with his own blood. “It looked like he’d been running around trying to bash his brains out,” the source said. He was unconscious when police arrived, and they have refused to speculate as to a possible cause. He was taken to Cedars-Sinai hospital and is listed in stable but critical condition.

  Los Angeles Times, March 5

  Accused Celeb Heiress in Pool Accident

  One of the decade’s most sensational murder cases took a twist last night when Pamela Dutton, a onetime Miss California and widow of wealthy philanthropist Clifford Dutton, was found in a coma in the pool of her Beverly Hills condo.

  In 2006, less than two years after their May-December marriage (Mr. Dutton was eighty-three, his wife, thirty-six), she was accused of murdering him by pushing him off their yacht. After a highly publicized trial, she was acquitted and the death ruled accidental, leaving her more than $200 million. The verdict was bitterly contested by prosecutors and by Mr. Dutton’s family. This acrimony was recently renewed when she announced her engagement to investment banking magnate Warren DeKampe.

  No official details have been released, but private sources say that alcohol and drugs don’t appear to be factors.

  Pasadena Star-News, April 7

  CalTech Tragedy Saddens, Disturbs

  CalTech graduate student Peter Janacek died last night in an apparent suicide by running onto the westbound Foothill Freeway. He was struck by several vehicles before traffic could stop, and pronounced dead at the scene.

  Janacek, twenty-six, was a doctoral candidate in astrophysics. Friends describe him as a talented student, cheerful and well-adjusted. He had followed his usual evening routine of going to work in one of the school’s labs, although no one has reported seeing him during the last hours before his death.

  To anyone paying close attention, the city of Los Angeles seemed to be going insane.

  This was not just the usual everyday madness, but people erupting in destructive rampages, all directed at themselves. Over the past year, almost forty such incidents had made the front pages and nightly newscasts, with many more that had not.

  Gunnar Kelso sat working at his laptop—copying and pasting online news clips to update the file that he kept of the incidents. It was evening, and he was very much alone in an old log hunting lodge in the mountains outside L.A. His makeshift office was arranged, with a careful appearance of carelessness, to suggest his former life. The bookshelves were stacked with scientific texts and journals, the desk scattered with computer printouts of complex equations and modular graphics. A text in German on the physics of magnetic resonance lay open to his left.

  Kelso paused a moment in regret at the third clip, the CalTech student. That had been a mistake.

  Perfume, Gerald Wainwright thought—maybe that was what was getting to him, prickling his sinuses and making his head feel like a balloon was blowing up inside.

  The party was like a thousand other glossy Hollywood events he’d been to—a plush house in Beverly Hills stuffed with young actors, hangers-on, and a sprinkling of local celebrities and players. A few, like Wainwright, had the money to back up their stature here.

  As the vibrant lovelies came around flirting, he basked in their fragrance, imagining how the warm aura would exude from their skin when they were wearing only that and jewelry. But tonight, it seemed he’d had too much of a good thing. He felt euphoric but unsettled. He put down his drink, eased his way out of the crowded room, and stepped through a sliding glass door onto a patio. The night air was cool and fresh from the April breeze, and he walked into it gratefully, letting it wash over his face and into his lungs.

  “Hiding from the girls, Gerald?” a woman’s voice said from the doorway.

  He swung around to look back. The party’s hostess, Cynthia Trask, was coming outside to join him.

  “Not from you,” Wainwright said, although his smile was guarded. She was damned attractive, in her late thirties, but with a cold edge. She made him uneasy, not just because of herself but because of what she embodied—the party’s other atmosphere besides the perfume, a subtle undercurrent that the physical senses couldn’t pick up but that was just as present.

  In a word, Parallax, an organization that bonded together all the people here tonight.

  All except Wainwright. So far.

  Cynthia closed the door behind her, muting the chatter and laughter from inside.

  “The decision’s been made,” she said. “You’re in. Now you start to find out what Parallax really is. But we need a commitment from you.” She moved closer to him as she spoke.

  “What are we talking?” he said.

  “You sign on to the film as executive producer. Make the important things happen. And a good faith buy-in—call it twenty million for now.”

  Wainwright’s eyebrows rose. “That’s a little on the steep side.”

  “This is not a buy-sell arrangement
. You and Parallax open up to each other. Power like you never imagined—learn to use it, and you’ll get anything you want. In return, you help us with our work. Everyone gains.”

  Wainwright shoved his hands in his front pockets and stepped away from her, shaking his head. He’d been to a few of these Parallax events by now, sizing up the people while they did the same with him. But he was cynical by nature, and more so from his years in the film industry; the secretive allure that captivated the others had not taken hold on him.

  Not twenty million bucks’ worth, that was for sure. The sheer brazenness of it pissed him off, and the irritation in his head joined in to tap the mean streak that was never far below the surface.

  “Cynthia, I’ve got a problem with this. I just can’t take any of it seriously. All this hinting about how you’re somehow tied in with the power of the universe. You know what I see? A bunch of people blowing smoke up their own ass. And your film project—nobody’s ever heard of Parallax Productions. It’s like kids making a home movie. You think I’m going to touch it, you can’t be serious.”

  He expected her to lash back with cold anger, but instead she smiled—slowly and, somehow, disturbingly.

  “But I am serious, Gerry,” she said, “and I have a feeling that you’re going to be happy to help us kids make our little movie. In fact, the price just went up.”

  Hollywood Insider, April 28

  Category: Movie Biz (1–10 of 744)

  Producer Wainwright announces stunner. He’ll head dark horse Parallax deal with rumored $24 mil investment.

  PART ONE

  One

  The shrill chirp of my cell phone rousted me out of a dream, a familiar kind that had started in childhood and still came around every so often. I’d be trying to run—whether toward or away from something, I was never sure—but my feet weighed a ton and my body felt like it was struggling through glue. These dreams seemed to last a very long time, and while they weren’t exactly nightmares, once or twice a year was plenty.

  The clock on my bedside table read 3:17 a.m. I groped in the dark for the phone, already knowing who it was—my younger brother Nick ripped on whatever dope he’d gotten his hands on. These late-night calls were as familiar as the dreams, and about as welcome. But I couldn’t ignore them.

  Nick and I were close in age, and we’d been tight growing up. In most ways, that was long gone. We were in our midthirties now, and over the years, increasingly, he’d brought little to our family and me except grief. Still, a trace of that bond remained, and I had become the default brother’s keeper.

  “What’s going on, Nick?” I said, careful not to sound annoyed. He usually just wanted money, but there’d been a couple of times when he was in dangerously bad shape, and I’d had to walk a thin line to keep him calm.

  “Tommy?” he breathed.

  I sat up straighter in bed with the queasy feeling that this was one of those times. He sounded genuinely out of it, much different from his typical brash, cajoling style that stemmed from the beach-boy good looks he’d grown up with. By and large it still worked surprisingly well for him, considering that his body had gone slack, his face was a map of what he’d done to himself, and his once sun-bronzed skin was now glazed with a bar tan.

  “Yeah, it’s me,” I said. “Are you okay?” In the background, I could hear a faint, regular rumbling. It wasn’t thunder—there were no storms in the L.A. area now. Surf, maybe.

  “Something’s fucking with me,” he said in that same tense whisper—struggling not to lose control. “It snuck into my head, and I can’t get rid of it. It made me come here all alone. Now it’s after me.”

  He wasn’t just out of it. He was scared.

  “Where are you?” I said. By this time I was across the room, clumsily pulling on the jeans I’d worn yesterday.

  “Home. But I can’t get in. Somebody nailed boards over everything.”

  For a second, I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then it came—our family’s old house near Malibu, where Nick had once lived. That would explain why I was hearing surf.

  Except that he’d moved out several months ago—in truth, he’d been kicked out—and now the place was a vacant husk, boarded up and slated for demolition.

  “You mean the beach house?” I said.

  “Yeah. Home.”

  “That’s not home anymore, Nick. Are you sure it’s where you are?” I found a sweatshirt and started working it over my head, managing to keep the phone pressed to one ear or the other.

  “Sure. Sure, sure, sure.”

  “Okay, I’m coming up there right now,” I said. “Stay where you are and stay on the phone. We’ll make sure nothing hurts you.”

  “It is going to hurt me, Tommy. Hurry.”

  The connection went dead.

  “Son of a bitch,” I snapped, and called his cell phone number back. No answer—just five rings and then voice mail.

  “Pick up, Nick—come on, we’ve got to keep talking,” I said when the message tone came.

  Nothing.

  I stomped my feet into a pair of running shoes and headed out the door.

  Two

  It was mid-May, but the night was chilly and damp with fog rolling in from the Pacific. Even at three o’clock on a Saturday morning, the Santa Monica Freeway was a rushing conveyor belt of electric glare, thousands of mist-blurred headlights. Turning off to the relative quiet of Highway 1 was a relief.

  I drove as fast as I could, but my ride was a boxy ’84 Land Cruiser that was basically a Jeep, designed for the Australian outback instead of the urban fast lane; I’d bought it used when I was lifeguarding through college, and now it had a quarter million miles on it and looked every one of them. On top of that, the fog kept getting thicker until I felt like I was fighting my way through the swirls dancing like ghosts in my headlight beams. The long glittering arc of the coastline was almost wiped out, blanketed down to flickers that seemed to move.

  I tried calling Nick again every couple of minutes, warring with myself over whether to call 911 instead. The sheriffs could get to him sooner, but that would almost certainly mean a drug bust. He’d already had his share of those, to the point where another one was an excellent bet for serious jail time. Then there was the deeper fear that he’d freak out when they showed up, and do something that really would get him hurt.

  It was a bad choice to have to make. I ended up deciding to keep on going alone. He’d seemed all right physically, and there were explanations for why he wasn’t answering—he was too paranoid; he’d wandered away from his phone; he was busy trying to kick through a door and reclaim the home he still thought was his.

  I slowed as I passed through the posh enclave of Malibu—traffic was usually so backed up that speeding was impossible, but right now cops might be on the watch—but got on the gas again until I turned off the highway at Point Dume.

  Then I started driving into a part of my past that I would have erased if I could have—in a word, money, and a hell of a lot of it. My great-great-grandfather and namesake, the first Thomas Crandall, hadn’t technically been a robber baron but was of that stamp. He and his descendants had created one of the private empires in Southern California, rivaling others like the Dohenys, Crockers, and Huntingtons.

  I’d started getting uncomfortable with that as soon as I was old enough to understand what it entailed, and the older I got, the less I liked it.

  That Thomas Crandall—Tom the First, as he was known in the family—was particularly astute about foreseeing the potential value of real estate and buying it for next to nothing. We still owned a lot of choice turf, and one of the jewels was this place in Malibu—almost four acres of oceanfront headland on the cliffs, sheltered from surrounding development by rows of windswept trees. The only drawback was the ramshackle old house, and that was about to be torn down and a new one built by my other brother, Paul.

  That left a real sour taste in my mouth.

  The security gate at the driveway entrance was hangi
ng open. As I drove in, my headlights caught the glint of Nick’s parked car, a carnival red Jaguar XK8 that he’d bought brand-new, five or six years ago. Now it was dirt-caked and dinged up, the leather interior trashed, and it ran with a sound like there was gravel in the crankcase. In a way, it was like Nick himself—once beautiful and high-powered, but he’d hammered them both into the ground.

  At least it meant that he had been here, although I couldn’t be sure he still was. He might have left with someone else or taken off on foot, making his way across the headlands to the beach or going the other way to the highway.

  I parked beside the Jag and stepped out into the misty breeze and the boom of the breakers against the cliffs, a giant slow pulse that I could feel through my feet.

  “Nick?” I yelled. “Nick, where are you? It’s me, Tom. I’m here.” I waited ten seconds, listening hard. The offshore wind was strong enough to muffle my shouting—maybe he just didn’t hear me.

  Then again, maybe he did.

  I got a Maglite from my car and checked his Jaguar first, just in case he was passed out in there. He wasn’t, but he’d left tracks. The console was streaked with white powder, and a small paper bindle was lying on the driver’s-side floor.

  I grimaced at this new bad choice. Just touching the shit would constitute tampering with evidence. But if I left it and had to call for help, sheriff’s deputies would spot it right away. I couldn’t dump it, either; Nick might need medical attention, and the doctors would want a sample to analyze. But they weren’t legally required to inform the police, at least short of a serious crime or autopsy, and I’d learned from experience that if I said the magic words patient confidentiality, that would raise the demonic specter of lawsuits and keep hospitals quiet as clams. I found an unused Taco Bell napkin in the litter strewn around, collected the loose powder and bindle into it, wet my sweatshirt sleeve on the car’s fog-damp fender and wiped down the console, then stowed the folded napkin in one of my Land Cruiser’s storage compartments. I took a quick look around for more dope but didn’t see any, and I couldn’t take the time to search thoroughly. At least it wouldn’t be right in front of the cops.