Bogart Sleeps Here: A Trace Novella (Chapter Five)

Trace wasn’t scheduled to meet Marcel in Long Beach until three o’clock. He wasn’t in the mood to start work on the treatment for “Stalag Dracula” yet so he avoided driving toward home when he steered the Packard out of the Warner Brothers lot. He made a left onto Olive and drove a few yards to the Taco Bell across the street from the studio.

Seated at an outdoor table with four paper-wrapped tacos and an extra large Pepsi, Trace began pawing through the life of David Dulce as assembled from internet clippings by Lisa. There was a gentle breeze blowing from the mountains, a mere hint of a Santa Ana condition. He used the paper and wax soda container to hold the pages fast to the hard ceramic table.

He studied a photograph of David Dulce snapped in 1985. The man that Trace met at the sushi bar the day before was a mere memory of the blonde Adonis once loved by the flamboyant entertainer Lee Vine.

“I suffer from Hepatitis C,” Dulce told Larry King in a 1999 interview. The Hepatitis, Dulce explained, was the result of a series of blood transfusions required for the plastic surgery that altered his face to resemble the unmistakable features of his long-dead celebrity lover.

Gone are the Lear jets, the Rolls-Royces, the ostentatious jewelry that once dripped from every finger.

Gone was David Dulce’s life as he once knew it. He was disabled and unemployed, living a quiet, anonymous life in a cramped West Hollywood apartment.

In 1987 he wrote a book about his life with Lee Vine and the “palimony” suit that he eventually won. But shortly before the book’s release – just as he was about to go out on a nationwide publicity jaunt – the FBI appeared and whisked Dulce away into the Witness Protection Program for his testimony against L.A. mobster Nasser Reid in Reid’s trial for the infamous Laurel Canyon drug dealer slayings in 1981. The book’s publisher declared bankruptcy and David never laid his fingertips on a dime from the slim handful of units that sold.

He was The Man With Lee Vine’s Face. No Witness Protection Program or assumed name (Davis Grahame) could hide that fact after five years he bolted from the constraints of federal protection. And days later he was gunned down in the streets of Miami during what appeared to be a botched robbery attempt.

He had been laying low for years, until he slithered into a sushi bar in Studio City and asked Trace to be his conduit to the outside world.

When the late Lee Vine – a man dominated by a mother who forced him into a concert career – met David Dulce he was already a world-renowned entertainer. He was a man hungry for power, given to every excess. His motto of “Too much of a good thing is wonderful” was reflected in his luxurious homes, gaudy lifestyle, and a steady stream of gorgeous young men.

David Dulce was a 16-year old veterinary assistant in Las Vegas when he met Lee Vine in 1973. Within two days after their first backstage meeting at a Lee Vine concert at The Sands, Dulce moved into Vine’s Vegas home.

“It was a tender love affair at first,” Trace read from a New York Times review of Dulce’s book as he unwrapped the first taco and took a healthy bite. “The pair traveled all over the United States and Europe – a dizzying, intoxicating life of wealth and fame that the product of a dozen foster homes could never have imagined for himself.”

But the sloth of a hedonistic, jet-setting lifestyle soon caught up with young David Dulce. He put on weight. His features began to sag. Lee Vine had just the solution to return the spring to David’s step: David would undergo plastic surgery to resemble the son that Lee Vine always wanted.

“The son that would also be his lover,” Trace muttered with disgust as he took a swig of the ice cold Pepsi.

The surgeries, Trace read, were a nightmare. The surgeon was a chronic alcoholic who would later shoot himself to death. After the facial alterations were complete, the surgical barbarian placed Dulce on The Hollywood Diet: Quaaludes, Biphetamine, Demerol. Life with Lee Vine post-surgery began to normalize but David was hopelessly hooked on drugs to quell the pain from the surgeries.

When David angrily confronted Lee over an affair the entertainer was having with a popular male singer, Lee literally threw him out of their Beverly Hills penthouse in the middle of the night.

Their five-year relationship was over and what ensued was another five years in court battling the great Lee Vine in one of the nation’s first same-sex palimony suits.

In the interim, David Dulce immersed himself in the fast-paced L.A. night club scene of the early 80s. He became fast friends with Israeli-born mobster Nasser Reid, owner of The Blue Orchid on Wilshire Boulevard. David was still dependent on drugs and began pawning all of his priceless jewelry to Reid in exchange for narcotics.

Nasser Reid reveled in the company of fringe celebrities like David Dulce and porn star Rick Rock. When Reid was violently robbed in his home one June evening in 1981 — the armed gunmen walking away into the night with thousands of dollars in cash,
drugs, and jewelry – it was Rock that Nasser fingered as the one who set him up. Who did it – who the gunmen were – was what Nasser needed to know.

On a July evening in 1981, Dulce was in Reid’s Hollywood home when Reid’s 300-pound bodyguard dragged a drug-addled Rick Rock into the house and began interrogating him. Rock quickly revealed the identity of The Laurel Canyon Gang – as local lore refers to the low-life junkies and thugs who robbed Nasser Reid – and the vengeful result was a gruesome quadruple murder that rivaled the Manson killings in brutality and headline grabs.

Nasser Reid escaped prosecution until 1987. And when he was brought to justice for the first time – Reid was never convicted until 2003 – one of the prosecution’s star witnesses against Reid was David Dulce.

With such a lush background to Dulce’s story, Trace was starting to consider a sale to Esquire or Vanity Fair, the latter having recently ran a damning article on the pop star, Rhapsody Williams, that Dulce alleged he had an affair with.

Trace refilled his Pepsi container at the Taco Bell counter and returned to the pile of research.

In the spring of 1988, Trace read, the FBI placed David Dulce in the Witness Protection Program for his testimony against Nasser Reid. He spent most of the next three years in Alaska living under the assumed name Davis Grahame. He was still dependent on drugs – the Feds did not care and did not attempt an intervention – and when funds began to run low he scored a deal.

A deal with The National Tattler. For $30,000 David Dulce spilled all about his five-year affair with Lee Vine, dead at that point from AIDS.

Dulce began making the talk show circuit and, of course, was summarily dumped by the FBI. Literally, too. They dropped him in the streets of Miami, Florida, where he was shot five times in a so-called attempted robbery.

David took refuge in a Christian-run homeless shelter. Within time he was a convert to Christianity – born again, as it were – and became the head of the shelter’s outreach program. His efforts and his conversion to God caught the attention of tele-evangelist Evan Wilkes, who invited David onto his syndicated TV show, “The Hour of God.” Before long, David Dulce was a regular flavor on Christian TV.

“When did he give up that gig?” Trace pondered aloud, leafing through the stack of articles. There was nothing more to read. At some point David Dulce simply went
underground and became anonymous — until he came to Trace for help selling dirt on Rhapsody Williams to the tabloids.

Trace tossed the paper wrappings from the tacos and the empty drink cup into the trash container, collected the paperwork into his canvas bag, and headed for the Packard. He had to see Marcel in an hour to talk about selling a poem.

(Next: Trace engineers a sale to The National Tattler and gets pulled deeper into David Dulce’s world, attracting the unwanted attention of aging L.A. mobster Nasser Reid.)