But then I should have realized this sooner because, in my own way, I had put Julian there, and I'd seen what had happened to him in another - and very different - movie.
The blue Jeep starts following us on the 405 somewhere between LAX and the Wilshire exit. I notice it only because the driver's eyes have been glancing into the rearview mirror above the windshield I've been gazing out of, at the lanes of red taillights streaming toward the hills, drunk, in the backseat, ominous hip-hop playing softly through the speakers, my phone glowing in my lap with texts I can't read coming in from an actress I was hitting on earlier that afternoon in the American Airlines first-class lounge at JFK (she had been reading my palm and we were both giggling), other messages from Laurie in New York a total blur. The Jeep follows the sedan across Sunset, passing the mansions draped with Christmas lights while I'm nervously chewing mints from a tin of Altoids, failing to mask my gin-soaked breath, and then the blue Jeep makes the same right and rolls toward the Doheny Plaza, tailing us as if it were a lost child. But as the sedan swerves into the driveway where the valet and a security guard look up from smoking cigarettes beneath a towering palm, the Jeep hesitates before it keeps rolling down Doheny toward Santa Monica Boulevard. The hesitation makes it clear that we were guiding it somewhere. I stumble out of the car and watch as the Jeep slowly brakes before turning onto Elevado Street. It's warm but I'm shivering in a pair of frayed sweats and a torn Nike hoodie, everything loose because of the weight I dropped that fall, the sleeves damp from a drink I spilled during the flight. It's midnight in December and I've been away for four months.
"I thought that car was following us," the driver says, opening the trunk. "It kept moving lanes with us. It tailed us all the way here."
"What do you think it wanted?" I ask.
The night doorman, whom I don't recognize, walks down the ramp leading from the lobby to the driveway to help me with my bags. I overtip the driver and he gets back into the sedan and pulls out onto Doheny to pick up his next passenger at LAX, an arrival from Dallas. The valet and the security guard nod silently as I walk past them, following the doorman into the lobby. The doorman places the bags in the elevator and says before the doors close, cutting him off, "Welcome back."
Walking down the Art Deco hallway on the fifteenth floor of the Doheny Plaza I'm aware of the faint scent of pine, and then I see a wreath has been hung on the black double doors of 1508. And inside the condo a Christmas tree sits discreetly in the corner of the living room, sparkling with white lights. A note in the kitchen from the housekeeper is a reminder of what I owe her, listing the supplies she's bought, and next to that a small stack of mail that hadn't been forwarded to the New York address. I bought the condo two years ago - leaving the El Royale after a decade of renting - from the parents of a wealthy West Hollywood party boy who had been redesigning the space when after a night of clubbing he died unexpectedly in his sleep. The designer the boy had hired finished the job, and the dead boy's parents hurriedly put it on the market. Minimally decorated in soft beiges and grays with hardwood floors and recessed lighting, it's only twelve hundred square feet - a master bedroom, an office, an immaculate living room opening into a futuristic, sterile kitchen - but the entire window wall that runs the length of the living room is actually a sliding glass door divided into five panels that I push open to air the condo out, and where the large white-tiled balcony drops into an epic view of the city that reaches from the skyscrapers downtown, the dark forests of Beverly Hills, the towers of Century City and Westwood, then all the way to Santa Monica and the edge of the Pacific. The view is impressive without becoming a study in isolation; it's more intimate than the one a friend had who lived on Appian Way, which was so far above the city it seemed as if you were looking at a vast and abandoned world laid out in anonymous grids and quadrants, a view that confirmed you were much more alone than you thought you were, a view that inspired the flickering thoughts of suicide. The view from the Doheny Plaza is so tactile that you can almost touch the blues and greens of the design center on Melrose. Because of how high I am above the city it's a good place to hide when working in L.A. Tonight the sky is violet-tinged and there's a mist.
After pouring myself a tumbler of Grey Goose that was left in the freezer when I escaped last August, I'm about to turn on the balcony lights but then stop and move slowly out into the shadow of the overhang. The blue Jeep is parked on the corner of Elevado and Doheny. From inside the Jeep a cell phone glows. I realize the hand not holding the vodka is now clenched into a fist. The fear returns as I gaze at the Jeep. And then a flash of light: someone lit a cigarette. From behind me the phone rings. I don't answer it.
