The Sunset Crowd by Karin Tanabe

Author:Karin Tanabe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Eighteen

I didn’t find Theodora in time to go see Hu Lingwei in Chinatown. But after I left his studio, I flew through West Hollywood to Cuisine Milan. Luca was there, but he said he hadn’t seen Theodora either. She hadn’t come home the night before.

“Look, Bea, I don’t know where she is. I fuck her, I love her, but I don’t follow her around town.”

“Fair enough,” I said, heading for the door. “But if you were trying to find her, where would you look?”

“Here.”

“Second choice?”

He shrugged. Even his shrug was Italian, expressive and full-bodied. “Theodora is not a creature of habits. She goes where she wants when she wants with whomever she wants. With her, it’s endless surprises. You’ll see.”

I nodded. I was already getting that vibe. But I also needed the man she lived with to point me east or west. “If you had to guess,” I pressed.

“Okay.” He put his hand on one of the marble dining tables, his gold signet ring gleaming in the afternoon light. “Lately, I’d say try Sunset on Sunset.”

“I already did.”

“Then Chateau Marmont. She’s never met a celebrity she didn’t like.”

That I believed.

“Strange,” I said, readjusting my bag on my shoulder and fixing my posture to match Luca’s exclamation-point stance. “That I’ve never seen her there before.”

He opened the button of his Armani suit jacket. “You only see people at Chateau Marmont who want to be seen. But if you do stop there, which I assume you will, only bother with one room.”

“Sixty-four?”

“Where else?” He looked at a chef coming out of the kitchen. “Veal to go?”

I took it, of course. Better to have a panic attack on a full stomach.

Unlike most people slithering into Chateau Marmont, I never spent the night. I’d never locked myself up in one of the rooms with a wide view of wild Hollywood, or a peaceful view of the hill behind the hotel. I’d never camped out in a storied but dingy room cooking my own macaroni and cheese, writing a screenplay sprinkled with magic. I didn’t have any desire to treat the place like home. I went in on assignment, taking shots of bona fide rock stars, sometimes rockers reaching for the stars, and I went out. Usually between my entrance and exit I begged whomever I was photographing not to burn anything down because the magazine couldn’t handle another phone call that started with, “We have to pay five hundred in damages because the guitarist burnt, broke, smashed, crashed, stole, peed on…” I snapped; I left. But all that coming and going, crossing the red-tiled lobby floor, meant that I knew the staff, and they wouldn’t stop me as I went upstairs without declaring my destination.

I left Luca, climbed up Marmont Lane, and started searching for Theodora’s red marvel at the top. It wasn’t there. I parked anyway and looked up at the buff-colored California castle, the seven floors of imposing chaos that made up the city’s famous apartment-hotel. Its French Gothic style, with too

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