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Harry’s hand she said, “Harry, I feel as if I know you. I’ve been a fan of yours ever since Slime Creatures. They remind me of so many people I know in the industry.” Harry told Elaine he’d been following her career with interest ever since she broke in. Elaine turned to Chili and gave his hand a good grip as Karen introduced them and Elaine said, “My word, both the gentlemen in suits, I’m flattered. You should see the way most of them come in, like they do yard work and I guess some of them do, the writers, if they’re not parking cars.” Still holding on to his hand she said, “Chili Palmer, hmmmm,” in the slow way she spoke. It surprised him, this offhand manner she had about her, talking a lot but in no hurry. Maybe her mind somewhere else. Not what he’d heard about dynamic women executives. Elaine sat down, now the four of them around a coffee table where there was a big ashtray loaded with butts. She brought a pack of cigarettes and a lighter out of her jacket saying, “Mr. Lovejoy . . .” and Chili got ready to take his first meeting at a movie studio.
Harry: “What hooked me, Elaine, is the theme. Redemption and retribution, the little guy’s triumph over the system.”
Elaine: “Yeah . . . well, I’m as turned on by redemption and retribution, Harry, as anyone; but what’s the system he triumphs over?”
Harry: “The legal system.”
Elaine: “I don’t see the ending exactly as a triumph. The man who killed his boy is dead, but Lovejoy would still owe—what is it, a hundred thousand to somebody, the guy’s heirs?”
Harry: “We’re revising the ending . . .”
Elaine: “Good.”
Harry: “Roxy has brought Lovejoy to court, but the case is still pending when Roxy is killed. So Lovejoy keeps his flower shop, doesn’t have to pay anything.”
Elaine: “Uh-huh, yeah . . . But what about motivation? Why he goes after the guy with a video camera.”
Harry: “Why? To see justice done.”
Elaine: “But it isn’t. The guy gets his license revoked again—so what?”
Harry: “What we plan to do as part of revising the ending, is have Lovejoy do something to cause Roxy’s death. I don’t mean murder him, but not have Lovejoy just standing there either.”
Elaine: “That gets us back to his motivation. I can’t see this mingy florist becoming so vindictive.”
Harry: “Who, Lovejoy?”
Elaine: “Even his name.”
Harry: “We’re thinking of changing it. No, but the idea—here’s a guy you think is a schlub, right? But beneath that quiet exterior he’s passionate, impulsive and extremely likable. Once you get to know him.”
Elaine: “He’s passionate? Who does he fuck?”
Harry: “You mean in the script?”
Elaine: “In his life. His wife left him—who does he sleep with. He’s quiet, low-key, yeah, but does that mean he doesn’t fuck?”
Chili couldn’t believe he was hearing her say that. There were all kinds of movies where nobody got laid in them. Unless she meant it as something the guy did that you never saw. Like people in movies never went to the bathroom even though you
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know they would have to.
There was a pause, a silence right after Elaine spoke. And then Karen got into it.
Karen: “What he needs—what the story needs is for somebody to give him a kick in the ass, get him going. I’m thinking about a woman who’s been abused by Roxy, knows his life, his habits, that he’s into something illegal. And she also knows he’s driving—that’s it, when he’s not supposed to. Otherwise where does Lovejoy get the idea to catch him at it? She goes to Lovejoy and lays it out. Let’s get this son of a bitch. Catch him driving. What’s the girl’s name in the script, the hooker?”
Harry: “Lola.”
Karen: “Lovejoy, Ilona, Lola—come on. Call her—I don’t know—Peggy. Working class but bright. From a big family she’s had to help support. Worked all her life . . . Roxy’s hobby is making porno films he shows to his friends. He gets Peggy stoned and shoots nude footage of her. She discovers it, burns the tape and he beats her up . . . This is the kind of situation I mean, not necessarily what will work best. But get her personally involved. Where does the video camera come from? It’s Roxy’s. She rips it off . . . You see what I’m getting at?”
Elaine: “You’re on the right track.”
Harry: “But then it’s not Lovejoy’s story, it’s the girl’s.”
Karen: “It’s a subplot. We’re looking for motivation, what gets Lovejoy started.”
Harry: “And I’m looking at a property, as it is, Michael Weir wants to do.”
Elaine: “Oh, God. Michael.”
Chili watched Elaine look over at Karen.
Harry: “Elaine, Michael read it and flipped. Why? Because it’s about life. It’s cosmic, it’s about universal feelings and values. But he won’t touch it if it isn’t his story. You know that. Michael is bigger than the idea.”
Elaine: “Mr. Indecisive, won’t be pressured into making a commitment. I love him, but he’s worse than Hoffman and Redford put together, and his price isn’t even as high as theirs. You know what he does, don’t you? He puts his writer on it and every few months or so they show up with a different version of the story. Then he’ll bring a director, some guy who’s in awe of Michael and if the picture’s ever shot he’ll make the mistake of allowing Michael in the cutting room. You go over budget, miss release dates and post-production goes on forever while Michael fine-tunes.”
Harry: “And if you can get him, it’s worth it.”
Elaine: “Why don’t you bring me a nice sci-fi / horror idea? Something original. No pissed-off teenagers or comic-book characters. Drama, if it’s offbeat, quirky but real. I want to discover new actors, do something different.”
Chili saw her looking at him over her glasses. She blew out a stream of cigarette smoke.
Elaine: “Mr. Palmer, what do you think of Michael Weir?”
“I think he’s a great actor,” Chili said, “and I think you could get him to do it. When I was talking to him last night he said he likes the character a lot.” That got their attention. “He also likes the idea of putting a girl in it and fixing the ending, but he thinks it turns into a B movie in the second act.”
Elaine: “He means whenever you cut away from him.”
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“I think he was talking mostly,” Chili said, “about the visual fabric of the movie and the theme, what you’re doing here, so it doesn’t start to look like something else.”
Elaine: “You know Michael?”
“I know the girl lives with him, Nicki. She introduced me.” Harry was looking at him from across the coffee table, staring. Karen, on the sofa next to him, had her head turned to look right at him. “Speaking of the ending,” Chili said, “I think if Lovejoy runs the guy over with his van the audience in the theater would get up and cheer.”
Elaine: “The direct approach.”
“Say he wants to do it,” Chili said. “He starts out with every intention and then changes his mind. But it happens anyway, he runs the guy over and kills him and you don’t know for sure if he meant it or it was an accident.” He watched Elaine take her glasses off. She kept looking at him without saying anything.
Karen: “I kind of like that. Keep it ambiguous till the very end. Say he tells Peggy it was an accident and she believes him . . .”
Elaine: “But the audience still isn’t sure.”
Karen: “That’s what I was thinking. Give them something to talk about after they walk out.”
Elaine: “You mean leave the theater.”
Karen, smiling: “Right.” Still smiling: “Warren’s idea—did he tell you?”
Chili placed the name, the studio exec Karen had mentioned who sounded like an asshole.
Elaine: “We talked about it briefly.”
Karen: “Lovejoy videotapes a couple of robberies and becomes a surveillance expert?”
Elaine: “With Mel Gibson. We do sequels or sell it to a network for a series.”
Harry: “So, the next step—”
Karen: “I thought he’d be here.”
Elaine: “Warren’s no longer with us. He’s in Publicity.”
Karen: “Oh.”
Harry: “So, we know the script needs a little work, no problem. I’ll give Murray our comments.”
Elaine: “Which Murray is that?”
Harry: “Murray Saffrin, my writer.”
Elaine: “Oh . . . Well, I’ll tell you right now, I wouldn’t have a chance with Murray Saffrin. Karen could take the script upstairs bareass and not sell Murray Saffrin.”
Harry: “So I’ll get somebody else.”
Elaine: “It’s your decision. I can give you a few names, writers I know would be acceptable, like . . .”
Chili listened to the names, not surprised he’d never heard of any of them. How many people knew who wrote the movies they saw?
Harry: “So we’re talking development?”
Elaine: “Not till I have at least a treatment I know I can sell. It’s still your project, Harry. Your decision, if you want to see how far we can run with it.”
Harry: “You’re saying I pay the writer. Any of the guys you mentioned, what’s a rewrite gonna cost me?”
Elaine: “Depending on who you get, I would say anywhere from one-fifty to four, and a few points. Call their agents, see who’s available and might want to do it.”
Harry: “I love talking to agents, right next to having a case of hives. You don’t think bringing Michael Weir deserves a development deal?”
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Elaine: “Michael Weir signed, gagged and chained to a wall till you start shooting, I can take upstairs. I tell them Michael Weir likes the part . . . Yeah? What else is new? Harry, it’s your decision, think it over. Karen, I wonder if you’d stay a few minutes. If the gentlemen wouldn’t mind waiting . . .”
Chili got up with Harry. They started out.
Elaine: “Harry? What about romance among less than attractive people?”
Harry: “Marty?”
Elaine: “Beyond Marty.”
Harry: “The seven-hundred-pound broad who crushes her lovers to death when she climaxes?”
Elaine: “Call me, Harry, okay?”
They waited for Karen in Harry’s car, parked next to a sound stage as big as a hangar, up the street from the Hyman Tower Building and the front gate. Chili half expected to see extras walking around in period costumes and military uniforms, the way you saw them in movies about movies, but there didn’t seem to be anything going on. Harry, coming out of the building, kept asking about Michael Weir. And then what did he say? He really seemed interested? How was it left? Why did-n’t you call me last night? Why’d you wait till in the meeting? You trying to make points? All that. Chili said, “I think you ought to listen to what Elaine says about the guy. He doesn’t sound too reliable.” Getting in the car, the front seat, Chili said, “Last night I noticed he’s a lot shorter than I thought.”
Next, Harry started bitching about how studio people never come right out and say yes or no, they string you along. They put you in a high-risk position you can’t afford to be in and say it’s up to you.
It was hot in the car. Chili rolled down his window. “What’d she say a writer would cost?”
“Between one-fifty and four hundred thousand.”
“Jesus Christ,” Chili said, “just to fix it? That’s what I thought she meant, but I wasn’t sure. The writers do okay, huh?”
“It’s the fucking agents ruining the business. Agents and the unions. But you know what? If I had the dough I’d hire one of those guys. That’s how sure I am of this one.”
Chili, not at all sure, didn’t say anything.
“With a little luck, say if you were to run into your pal the drycleaner,” Harry said, “and could negotiate me a quick loan . . .”
Chili watched two young ladies walking up the middle of the studio street: long blond hair, miniskirts, a couple of Miss Californias.
“I found him, Harry.”
Harry said, “Where?” jumping on it, twisting around in that tight space between the seat and the steering wheel.
“What’s the difference where? I took the money off him and sent it to his wife.”
“You didn’t.”
“Three hunnerd grand. I kept ten for Bones, if I decide to pay him.”
“You had the money in your hand?”
“Take it easy, Harry.” The guy looked like he might go berserk. “I didn’t have to tell you, ’cause it isn’t any your business, is it? But I did. Okay, so forget it.”
“Three hundred thousand.” Now he was shaking his head, still not looking too stable. “I don’t know what good you’re doing me.”
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“I don’t raise money for you, Harry, that was never in the deal.”
“What deal? I’d like to know what you do for me.
“You telling me you’d use Leo’s money? Take a chance of him getting picked up—’cause he will, I know it. The first thing he’d do then is try and lay it on us, the whole con, and throw his wife in too.”
Harry, staring straight ahead now, didn’t say anything. He looked uncomfortable, his suit too tight for him.
Chili got out and held the door open as Karen approached the car. He couldn’t tell anything by her expression. When she got close to him, before ducking inside, she said, “The visual fabric of the theme? You might just make it, Chil.”
He got in back. Harry started the car but didn’t move, looking at Karen. “You want to tell me what that was about?”
“Elaine’s going to call Michael,” Karen said. “If he shows enough interest and you have the script revised, she’ll put it into development.”
“Fucking studios,” Harry said, “they can’t give you a simple yes or no, they have to intrigue it up. Why’d she tell you that and not me?”
“That wasn’t why she asked me to stay,” Karen said, and paused and said in a quieter tone, “Elaine offered me a job.”
Harry squinted at her. “As what?”
“Production exec. Maybe vice-president in a year.”
Harry said, “Jesus Christ, I don’t believe it.”
Chili reached over the seat to touch Karen’s shoulder. He said, “Nice going,” and just for a second she laid her cheek against his hand.
21 
The last person Catlett would ever imagine having a tender feeling toward was Marcella, the woman that kept the limo service going. But he had one today. Walked in from the garage through the working office where Marcella looked up from her computer to say, “Mr. Zimm has been trying to get hold of you,” and Bo Catlett wanted to hug her.
He said, “You don’t mean to tell me.”
“He didn’t leave a message. He’ll call back.”
“When?”
“I don’t know, but he sure called a buncha times,” this big doll in her pink outfit and pink-frame glasses said. Just then the phone rang on Marcella’s desk. He watched her pick it up and say, “Wingate Motors Limited,” dainty for a woman her size, the way she moved, the way she held her fifty-year-old head of golden hair. He had never noticed this before. Marcella said, “Yes, Mr. Catlett’s here. Just a moment, please.” Looked at him and nodded and this time he wanted to kiss her.
He took it in Ronnie’s office, feet up on the desk, ankles crossed, looking at his shiny Cole-Haan
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loafers as he said, “Harry, I was thinking of calling you, man. How you doing?”
Harry said just great. The way he always did, sitting on the other side of this desk times before, here to ask for investment money—oh, everything was just great— though he did happen to have a few points left over if they wanted in. A few points meaning half the budget for the movie. In financial shit up to his chin, no doubt as he was at this moment, Harry was just great.
“We got a deal going at Tower . . .”
“On Mr. Lovejoy?”
“They’re extremely high on it.”
“I hear you got Michael Weir.”
“Boy, this town. Word gets around, doesn’t it?”
“So how can I help you?”
“I’m looking for a little working capital.”
“Like how much?”
“Couple hundred.”
“What’s wrong with using the money we put in Freaks?”
“That’s in escrow, I can’t touch it.”
Meaning the man had spent it. So for the time being Catlett resigned himself to forget it. Move on to bigger things.
“You offering a participation in Lovejoy?”
“A small one, considering it’s a twenty-milliondollar shoot, minimum. Maybe twenty-five.”
“So we’re talking about like one percent.”
“Around there.”
“Or less.”
“Tell me what you want,” Harry said. “Let’s see if we can work it out.”
Listen to him. Cool for a man who was desperate or wouldn’t have picked up the phone. “I was about to call you, Harry.”
“Is that right?”
“Tell you how much I like Lovejoy.”
“You read it?”
“I think so much of it, man, I’m prepared to make you a deal you might not believe. But I also want to participate actively. You understand what I’m saying? I want to work on the movie with you, be part of it, man.”
“I’d like to know where you got hold of a script.”
“Harry, let’s me and you meet someplace and have a drink. I’ll tell you how you can put your hands on a hundred and seventy thousand and you won’t have to give me any points or pay interest on it. You pay me back at your convenience. How’s that sound?”
“You serious?” Harry said.
No mention now of the script.
“Where you want to meet?” Catlett asked him.
“I don’t care,” Harry said. “Where do you?”
After going around on that Catlett called the Bear, named a restaurant and asked him to be there in half an hour. When Catlett left, going out through the working office where Marcella the pink woman sat behind her computer, he wondered what it was like to go to bed with a woman you would never think of going to bed with, if it was different.
A Mexican in a white busboy coat and crummy-looking pants brought drinks to them on Karen’s patio. She sounded different, so polite saying, “Thank you, Miguel. I’ll see you tomorrow.” The Mexican didn’t say anything. He was bowlegged and had big gnarled hands on him. After Miguel went in the house Karen said, “Would you think he’s only in
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his forties? He’s been a migrant farm worker all his life. He came by one day asking to do yard work and I hired him as my houseman.”
Chili sipped his drink and said, “Jesus, I don’t think he put any tonic in this. It’s good though.”
“Miguel’s learning,” Karen said, and looked up at the trees. “It’s nice out here, isn’t it? This is my favorite time of the day.”
She sounded different this evening. Neither of them said anything for a minute or so, looking at the trees and the sky changing color. It reminded Chili a little of sitting with Fay as it got dark and they waited for Leo to come home; except Leo and Fay didn’t have a swimming pool. He had thought they were waiting for Harry—the plan, to go out to dinner—till Karen said Harry had already stopped by. Changed his mind, made a phone call and left. Still upset about the meeting, among other things.
Chili took the “among other things” to mean him. “He doesn’t think I’m doing anything for him.”
Karen turned to look at him. “Are you?”
“What’s he want? I’ll do it.”
“He wants Michael . . . But listen,” Karen said, “the way Harry’s acting, that’s his personality. To help him, you first have to break through this barrier he sets up—doing it his way, the independent producer, nobody knows anything but him. His last three pictures might’ve broken even, but didn’t do nearly as well as his early stuff. I tried to tell him. You know why? You haven’t kept up. If you’re going to do low budget exploitation you either have to go much heavier on the special effects, or you have to get outrageously campy, make pictures like Assault of the Killer Bimbos, Surf Nazis Must Die, Space Sluts in the Slammer—they’re so bad they’re fun. Or, you have to approach horror in a new and different way, like Near Dark, that I think is brilliant. A love story about a guy who falls for a vampire. But there’s not one scene in a dark empty castle, the vampire dressed like Fred Astaire in white tie and tails. These are raunchy vampires; they roam around this flat, empty farmland out west in a station wagon looking for blood, hurrying to get what they need and stay out of the sun or they’ll catch fire and burn up. It shows what it’s really like to be a vampire,” Karen said. “And I couldn’t get Harry to go see it.”
Chili sipped his vodka and not much tonic, glad Harry wasn’t here, comfortable in the cushioned patio chair, more impressed by Karen every time he talked to her. She wasn’t anything like Fay, but she’d understand Fay and could play her in a minute.
“You know all that stuff,” Chili said. “I don’t mean just what movies are about, but other things, the business.”
“I’ve been out here fifteen years and I pay attention,” Karen said. “Harry’s upset, and one of the reasons is my being offered a studio job. He said, ‘I don’t believe it,’ because he still thinks of me as the girl he hired with nice tits and a great scream. My dad teaches quantum physics at a university and my mother’s a real estate broker, has her own company and is incredibly successful; she has a super business mind. I’m not saying I follow after either one of them exactly, but I did-n’t come into the world on a bus to L.A. I have a background. I know more about the film industry now than Harry does because I keep up, I know what’s going on and I have good story sense. Elaine knows that, it’s why she wants to hire me.”
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“You gonna take the job?”
“I’m thinking about it,” Karen said. “Meanwhile, poor Harry’s off trying to raise money, so he can hire a writer . . .”
Chili paused, about to sip his drink.
“. . . and get deeper in debt. That’s where he went, to talk to his investors.”
Chili said, “You mean the limo guys?”
“I know it’s the same ones he’s been trying to avoid. I said, ‘Harry, you told me you’ve been dying to get out from under them,’ and he said he didn’t have a choice.”
“He went to their office?”
“No, they’re meeting somewhere . . . Tribeca, it’s on Beverly Drive.”
Chili put his drink down. “Can we have dinner there?”
Karen said, “If you’d like,” and stared at him for maybe ten seconds before she said, “Harry’s a big boy,” and continued to stare as if wanting him to say something. “Isn’t he?”
Chili got up. He said, “You ready?”
They were in the big corner booth upstairs at Tribeca, Catlett, Harry, now the Bear sliding in and Catlett had to stop what he was saying to introduce his associate, this former movie stuntman, bodybuilder and health nut in the Hawaiian shirt. So what did the health nut do? Immediately dove into the bread basket and started eating rolls thick with butter, getting crumbs in his beard and all over the table in front of him. Now Harry, watching him, grabbed a roll for himself before they were gone. Harry was on his second Scotch, Catlett still sipping his ice-cold Pouilly-Fuissé. Harry had ordered the meatloaf, which Catlett liked the sound of, basic food, indicating the man was in a basic frame of mind and would not get tricky on him. Catlett had ordered the shrimp salad, not wanting to make this one his dinner; he’d have that later on at Mateo’s with people he liked, some cute woman who’d laugh at his wit and bullshit. The Bear ordered a beer— another simple soul—and would eat later, at home.
So far Catlett had explained once again he’d give Harry one hundred and seventy thousand dollars, interest and point free, pay it back when you can, for the privilege of working on Lovejoy and learning from the expert how moving pictures were made. Fringe benefits would come up later. All he wanted, Catlett had mentioned this time, was some kind of small credit up on the screen, head gofer, anything, his friends would get a kick out of seeing. Now then . . .
“I told you it was your boy, didn’t I, let me have the script?”
Harry didn’t know who he meant. “My boy? . . .”
“Chili Palmer, from Miami, Florida.”
“He gave it to you?”
“Loaned it. Was the other night in your office.”
Harry said, “Well, you say you read it,” not yet convinced.
“Ask me something.”
“All right, what’s Lovejoy’s brother-in-law’s name?”
“You mean Stanley? I was thinking it wouldn’t be bad if something happened to Stanley, the way he gets on your nerves. Even though as Lovejoy says to his sis, her and Stan have their own problems, being stuck with each other.”
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Now the man couldn’t have a doubt in his head, just questions.
“Why’d he show it to you?”
“I thought maybe you told him to.”
“I sent him to pick up a script, that’s all.”
“Well, he called me, I went over. Man, I’ve been wondering why ever since. This town, you don’t want to go showing your ideas around. I know of a guy left a script in one of the limos and the producer fired him. I thought that was heavy. The producer—I won’t mention his name, one of the big power play-ers—he said if the guy wasn’t any more reliable than that he didn’t want him around.”
Catlett sipped his wine, giving Harry a minute to think about it and then took a shot saying, “I asked this Chili Palmer what his position was and he said you and him were partners, gonna produce the movie together. It surprised me, him coming in off the street and not knowing shit, you know, about the business. I noticed he didn’t even know how to read a script, what some of the directions meant. In fact, he’s talking about producing the movie with you, he hadn’t even read it. Man, that didn’t sound right to me.”
Harry picked up his roll and took a bite out of it like he was eating an apple, crumbs dribbling down the front of him. The Bear, spreading butter on his, paused to watch this.
“I don’t mean to sound like I’m sticking my nose in your business,” Catlett said, going at him again, “and if you don’t care to tell me, don’t. It’s just I’m curious to know what this Chili Palmer does for you.”
“Not much,” Harry said.
Good, starting to speak.
“He run errands for you?”
“He has different functions, you might say.”
“Kind of a tough guy, huh? That was how he came on,” Catlett said. “See, I suspected you had him around to do heavy work, deal with me and Ronnie, and that was something I couldn’t get straight in my head. What would you need him for? Has Ronnie ever given you any trouble? I know I haven’t. Ronnie might’ve shot off his mouth, but that’s Ronnie. Man, he’s from Santa Barbara and he’s gonna let you know it. Anyway, Ronnie isn’t in this deal— the one hundred and seventy thousand dollars I’m giving you as working capital in good faith. You’re gonna find out, Harry, I know more about movies than most people in the business. You watch me.”
Harry said, “When can I have the money?”
Getting right down to business. Never mind all the bullshit, huh? This was the meatloaf man.
“Whenever you want it, Harry. The money’s in hundred dollar bills inside one of those jock bags, you know? In a locker at the airport, waiting to be picked up.”
Harry looked at him. “The airport?”
“It was waiting out there on another deal, one that didn’t go through you don’t want to know about,” Catlett said. “Or maybe you should know something about it. I don’t want you to get in any trouble. It was money put there to make a buy, if you know what I mean.”
Harry picked up his glass and took a drink on that one.
“Yeah?”
But was still interested, look at that. Anxious.
“What I’m saying to you, Harry, you could go out there, take the bag out of the locker and be on
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your way, nobody bother you. But you never know
who’s hanging around that airport.”
“You mean cops,” Harry said.
“Well, that’s possible, yeah. Maybe Drug Enforcement individuals—I don’t know. I was thinking more of other people in the product trade know buys are made out there, money changing hands. You understand what I’m saying? They the ones you have to watch out might rip you off. Like if you look, I don’t mean like one of them, but kinda suspicious, you act nervous taking the bag out of the locker . . .”
“I don’t know,” Harry said, shaking his head.
Wanting it, you could tell, but afraid.
“It’s what I’m saying, it’s not the kind of thing you do,” Catlett said. “That’s why I was thinking you could send your boy, Chili Palmer. He gets hit on the head you aren’t out nothing.”
They took Chili’s rented Toyota, down Rodeo to Wilshire to come back around on Beverly Drive. On the way he told Karen about going into a restaurant on Little Santa Monica when he first got here. Went in all dressed up and was put way in the back after waiting at the bar about an hour, while these people who looked like they’d been out camping would come in and get the empty front tables right away. He told her about the worn-out leather jacket Michael had been wearing.
“You buy them new like that,” Karen said. “What did you think of him?”
Chili said he thought he was basically a nice guy, but it was hard to tell. “He was on most of the time. I think he has trouble being just himself.”
“He do any imitations?”
“Michael Jackson.”
“He used to do Howard Cosell constantly.” She said, “You know it isn’t easy being Michael Weir.”
Chili didn’t comment on that, thinking seven million ought to make it a little easier.
They were quiet and then she said, “What’s Nicki like?”
“She’s a rock-and-roll singer.” He thought a moment and said, “She doesn’t shave under her arms.”
“Michael probably goes for that. He thinks he’s earthy.”
“You still like him?”
“I don’t hold anything against him. He’s Michael Weir . . . and he’s great.”
“You mean his acting.”
“What’d you think I meant, in bed? In bed he was funny.”
“Funny in what way?”
“He was funny. He said funny things.”
For a few moments they were quiet again.
“He’s a lot shorter than I thought.”
“That’s not his fault,” Karen said.
Chili dropped her off in front of Tribeca, a storefront kind of café with the name on the plate glass, and drove up the street looking for a place to park.
They weren’t at that old-time-looking bar or anywhere on the main floor. Chili headed for the open stairway and started up. The place could be called the Manhattan or the Third Avenue, that’s what it looked like, one of those typical overpriced New York bar-restaurants. The TriBeCa area, he thought of warehouses, buildings with lofts, but it was as good a
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name as any. He saw a railing along the upstairs, this end of it open, overlooking the bar. And he saw a guy standing near the top of the stairs, the guy a few steps down but not coming down, standing there waiting for him. A guy in a Hawaiian shirt with beef on him and a full reddish-brown beard.
Moving up the stairs Chili got a good look at the guy and his size. Now he saw Bo Catlett appear above the guy to stand on the top step, almost directly behind him, and Chili knew the guy wasn’t going to move. He got within three steps of the guy and stopped, but not looking up now, not wanting to put himself in that awkward position, his head bent back. He was looking at the guy’s waist now at eye level, where the Hawaiian shirt bloused out of the elastic band of the guy’s blue pants, double-knit and tight on him.
Catlett’s voice said, “I like you to meet my associate, the Bear. Movie stuntman and champion weight lifter, as you might’ve noticed. Picks up and throws out things I don’t want.”
Chili looked at the thickness of the guy’s body, at red and gold hibiscus blossoms and green leaves on a field of Hawaiian blue, but wouldn’t look at his face now. He knew they were hibiscus, because Debbie used to grow them on Meridian Avenue before she flipped out and went back to Brooklyn.
Now the guy was saying, “I know Chili Palmer. I know all about him.”
The Bear sucking in his stomach and acting tough, his crotch right there in Chili’s face. This guy was as nuts as Debbie. You could tell he had his stomach sucked in, because the waistband was creased where the guy’s gut ordinarily hung over and rolled it, the pants as out of shape as this guy trying to give him a hard time. But Chili didn’t look up.
Catlett said, “We think you ought to turn around and go back to Miami.”
Chili still didn’t look up. Not yet.
The Bear said, “Take your ten grand with you, while you still have it.”
And Chili almost looked up—this guy as much as telling him he had been in his hotel room, nothing to it, saw all that dough and left it—but he didn’t. Chili kept his eyes on the guy’s waist and saw the stomach move to press against the elastic band, the guy still putting on his show but giving his gut a breather. Chili looked at the guy’s crotch one more time before moving his gaze up through the hibiscus till he was looking at the guy’s bearded face.
Chili said, “So you’re a stuntman,” with the look he’d use on a slow pay. “Are you any good?”
What the Bear did in that next moment was grin and turn his head to the side, as if too modest to answer and would let Catlett speak for him. It made the next move easier, the guy not even looking as Chili grabbed a handful of his crotch, stepped aside and yanked him off the stairs. The Bear yelled out of pain and fear and caught Chili’s head with an elbow going by, but it was worth it to see that beefy guy roll all the way down the stairs to land on the main floor. Chili kept watching till he saw the guy move, then looked up at Catlett.
“Not bad, for a guy his size.”
* * *
Karen saw it.
There was a scene like it in an Eastwood picture only Clint grabs the guy a little higher. The thug asks
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him where he thinks he’s going. She couldn’t remember if Clint had a line. He’s going upstairs in a hotel to have it out with Bobby Duvall. Grabs the guy with one hand and in a Reverse you see him tumble down the stairs to crash at the bottom. It was a western.
Karen had left the table within moments of seeing Catlett stop at the top of the stairs with the bearded guy, the Bear, in front of him, a few steps below, and knew they were waiting for Chili and something was going to happen. As a film sequence it would work from her point of view if she represented a third party in the scene. Then another setup to get the effect of it on her face. But there would have to be close shots too of what was going on. His hand grabbing the guy’s crotch. A tight close-up reaction shot of the guy’s face. As he begins to scream cut to a Reverse to see him go down the stairs. Catlett was down there now. They were leaving, the guy looking back this way, but not Catlett. Karen watched from the upstairs railing, people from tables around her now asking what happened. Chili was coming past the ones at the top of the stairs. She heard him say, “I guess the guy fell.” Now he was looking at her. He came over and she said, “What did he do to you?” Chili shook his head. He touched her arm and they moved through the tables to the corner booth where Harry was standing with his drink in his hand.
Harry said, “What was that all about?”
Karen sat at one end of the round booth so she’d have an angle on both of them at once and wouldn’t have to turn her head looking from one to the other. She moved the shrimp salad that hadn’t been touched away from her, and the half glass of white wine. Chili brushed bread crumbs away from his place. He would look over, wanting to include her at first, telling them Catlett and the bearded guy, the Bear, had broken into his hotel room and gone through his things. Telling it matter-of-factly, making the point: “These are the kind of people you’re dealing with, Harry. They want me out of the way so they can have a piece of you.” Nice irony. The ex-mob guy telling Harry to look out for the limo guys, they’re crooks.
Harry had been acting strange ever since she arrived and he introduced her to Catlett and Catlett introduced her to his friend the Bear and they let her stand there a few minutes, Harry’s broad, nothing more, while Catlett spoke to him and placed a key on the table next to Harry’s meatloaf. Most of it and the baked potato eaten; he hadn’t touched his green beans. When Catlett got up he smiled and touched her arm and said it was a pleasure. A good-looking guy, he reminded her of Duke Ellington, dressed by Armani or out of that place on Melrose, Maxfield’s, wearing about two thousand dollars’ worth of clothes.
The key wasn’t on the table now.
Harry said to Chili, “You know what he is, you told me. So what? I need a hundred and a half, at least, and he’s loaning it to me, no strings, I write any kind of agreement I want. All I have to do is pick up the dough. Okay? If you have a problem with him that’s your problem. I don’t.”
It seemed that simple till Chili asked, “Is he giving you a check or cash?” and it got interesting. Harry said cash. He said it happened to be waiting right this moment in a locker at the airport. He said
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something about a business deal that didn’t go through and Chili said, “Jesus Christ, the guy’s setting you up. Don’t you see that? You pulled out of their Freaks deal so he’s teaching you a lesson. He’s not giving you anything, Harry, he’s paying you back.” Harry said he didn’t know what he was talking about and Chili said, “Harry, I could write a fuckin book on paybacks. You reach in that locker, you’re gonna come out wearing handcuffs, I’m telling you.”
Karen wished she could write some of it down.
Harry said, “Oh, is that right? I’m being set up? Then how come Catlett said I should send you out to get it, since you haven’t done a fucking thing for me since you got into this?”
Karen watched Chili start to smile and for a moment it surprised her. Smiled and shook his head and said, “Harry, I was wrong, I’m sorry. You’re not the one he wants to set up.”
Harry was not the Harry she had known for fifteen years; he was too quiet. But pouty, acting offended, Harry realizing he was into something he couldn’t handle—that was it—and afraid of looking dumb.
Chili said, “Give me the key. If it’s there and I don’t see a problem, I’ll get it for you.”
Karen watched Harry turn his head to look at Chili as though he had a choice and was appraising him, thinking it over.
She watched Chili shrug. He said, “It’s up to you, Harry. But don’t do it yourself, I’m telling you.”
She watched Harry put his hand in his coat pocket and bring out the key. He didn’t hand it to Chili, he laid it on the table between them. He said, “A hundred and seventy grand. I wonder if I’m ever gonna see you again.”
Harry left after that, which was fine with Chili. He and Karen went downstairs to sit at the bar for one, not sure if they’d eat here or go someplace else. She was full of questions, asking about the limo guys and how they made their money. Then asking if he was going out to the airport later this evening. He told her he was thinking of waiting till tomorrow around noon, when there’d be a lot of people there.
Right after that was when Karen said, “Oh, I forgot to tell you. A friend of yours from Miami called the house.”
“Tommy Carlo?”
“No that wasn’t it. I wrote it down,” Karen said. “Ray something. Ray Bar-bone? . . .”
22
The way the lockers in the Delta terminal worked, you put in three quarters for twenty-four hours. If you expected to use the locker any longer than that, you left two bucks inside for each additional twenty-four hours and a locker attendant would come by and check the time and collect the money. Chili had to read the instructions, printed on each locker, twice before he figured it out. He did this before walking past the bank of lockers where C-018 was located, noticing the lockers on both sides of it had keys sticking out. He liked that as much as he liked all the travelers here today. This LAX, ten-thirty in the morning, was a busy airport.
Next thing he did was check the Arrivals monitor to see what flight he was waiting for if anybody should ask. The one that caught his eye was 83 from Newark, due in at twelve-forty. He imagined Debbie coming out of the gate carrying a makeup kit full of pills and with that pissed-off look she had. Hi, honey, how was the flight? It was awful. The food was awful, the stewardess was a snip and I have a headache. He seemed to be thinking of Debbie and his situation more, still married to her, since meeting Karen, even though he wasn’t thinking of Karen in any serious way beyond—he was-n’t sure what. The thing he liked about Karen, his past life and associations didn’t seem to turn her on or off. She was natural with him, didn’t put on airs. Also she was a knockout, she was smart, she was a movie star, or had been, and was starting to give him a certain look and call him Chil. All last night after the business with the stuntman, she had looked at him in a different way, he felt, than she did before. Like she wanted to know things about him. And she was quieter, even while asking a lot of questions, though she didn’t ask if he was married or anything too personal. Dropping her off he thought she was going to ask him in. He believed she came close before changing her mind for some reason. Still looking at the Arrivals monitor he noticed Flight 89 from Atlanta up there, the one Bones had connected with from Miami and arrived on yesterday. Karen called him Ray Bar-bone, but didn’t ask about him, so he did-n’t tell her what kind of pain in the ass this fuckin Bones was turning out to be: the way he kept showing up, Christ, for twelve years now, here he comes again, Bones the mob guy and playing it for all it was worth, but basically second-rate muscle, Bones could be handled. As long as he didn’t have that big colored guy with him. Chili thinking he didn’t need that one too, he already had a colored guy on his back, the dude. What was this? The first time in his life having trouble with colored guys.
In the gift shop Chili bought an L.A. Lakers T-shirt, purple and gold, and a black canvas athletic bag, a small one. The T-shirt went in the athletic bag inside the paper gift-shop bag. He looked around at the souvenirs, all the different kinds of mementos of Los Angeles, at the wall
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of books and magazines. There was a scruffy kid about eighteen who looked promising, checking out the skin magazines. Chili went up to him and said, “You want to make five bucks, take you two minutes?” The kid looked at him but didn’t answer. “You go over to those lockers across the aisle there and put this in C-017.” The kid still didn’t say anything. “It’s a surprise for my wife,” Chili said. “But you have to do it quick, okay? While she’s in the can.” That sounded as if it made sense, so the kid said yeah, okay. Chili gave him the paper bag his purchases were in, a five-dollar bill and three quarters. The kid left and came back with a key that had C-017 on the round flat part of it.
What Chili didn’t do was look around the terminal to see if he could spot any suits—the way in movies you saw them standing around reading newspapers. That was bullshit. Maybe you could spot them if you were out here all the time doing business. Maybe the limo guys could spot them and that’s why the hundred and seventy grand was sitting untouched in the locker. Chili had no doubt it was there or this wouldn’t be a setup. The suits grab you with something incriminating, with what they called “suspected drug money,” or there could be more than cash in the locker, some dope, to make the bust stick. There was no sense in looking around, because if it was a setup Catlett would have called it in and the suits would be here dressed all kinds of ways watching locker No. C-018, here and there but not standing anywhere near the locker, so why bother looking?
What Chili did, he left the airport for a couple of hours: drove over Manchester Avenue where he found an Italian place and had a plate of seafood linguine marinara and a split of red. While he was here he wrote the Newark flight number and arrival time on a piece of Sunset Marquis notepaper. It seemed like a lot of trouble, the whole thing, but it was better to have a story just in case, not have to make one up on the spot.
By half past twelve he was back in the Delta terminal waiting at the gate where 83 was due to arrive at twelve-forty. It was on the ground at five past one. He watched all the passengers come off the plane and out through the gate till he was standing there by himself. Okay, he turned and walked down the aisle now to the bank of thirty-three lockers, three high, where C-018 was about in the middle. He looked both ways, taking his time, waiting till a group of people was passing behind him, giving him a screen, giving him just time enough to open C-017, grab the black athletic bag, leaving the gift-shop bag inside, and close the locker. He got about ten yards down the aisle, heading for daylight, when the black guy in the suit coming toward him stopped right in his path.
“Excuse me, sir. Would you come with me, please?”
Now there was a big guy in a plaid wool shirt next to him and another guy, down the aisle, talking on his hand radio. All of them out in the open now. The black guy had his I.D. folder open. They were Drug Enforcement. As Chili said, “What’s wrong?” acting surprised. “What’s this about?” The black guy turned and started off.
The one in the plaid shirt said, “Let’s follow him and behave ourselves. What do you say?”
They took him to a door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY the black guy opened with a key. It was bare and bright inside the office, fluorescent
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lights on. Nothing on the metal desk, not even an ashtray. There were three chairs, but they didn’t ask him to sit down. The one in the plaid shirt told him to empty his pockets and place the contents on the desk, actually using the word contents. But that was as official-sounding as it got. Chili did as he was told acting bewildered, saying he thought they had the wrong person. The black guy opened his wallet and looked at the driver’s license while the other one pulled the Lakers T-shirt out of the athletic bag and felt around inside. They glanced at each other without giving any kind of sign and the black guy said, “You live in Miami?”
“That’s right,” Chili said.
“What’re you doing in Los Angeles?”
“I’m in the movie business,” Chili said.
They glanced at each other again. The black guy said, “You’re an investor, is that it?”
“I’m a producer,” Chili said, “with ZigZag Productions.”
“You have a card in here?”
“Not yet, I just started.”
The one in the plaid shirt looked at the “contents” on the desk and said, “Is that everything?”
“That’s it,” Chili said. He watched the black guy pick up the note with the Newark flight number and arrival time written on it. Chili said, “I’d appreciate your telling me what this is about.” He could act nervous with these guys without trying too hard.
“I got a John Doe warrant here,” the one in the plaid shirt said. “I can strip-search you if I want.”
“Pat him down,” the black guy said.
“Why don’t I strip-search him?”
“Pat him down,” the black guy said.
Chili was starting to like the black guy, his quiet way, but couldn’t say as much for the other one. The big guy in the plaid shirt put him against the wall, told him to spread his legs and did a thorough job going over him as the black guy asked what he was doing at the airport. Chili said he was supposed to meet his wife, but she wasn’t on the flight. The black guy asked why, if he lived in Miami, his wife was coming from Newark? Chili said because they’d had a fight and she left him, went back to Brooklyn. He said he asked her to come out here, maybe with a change of scenery they could get back together and she said okay, but evidently changed her mind. He didn’t mention it was twelve years ago she’d left him.
The black guy said, “Your wife a Lakers fan?”
“I am,” Chili said. “I’m a fan of everything that’s
L.A. I love it out here.” And looked over his shoulder to give the guy a smile.
The black guy said he could go. Then, when Chili was at the desk, asked him, “What was the number of the locker you used?”
Chili paused. “It was C . . . either sixteen or seventeen. He said, “Can I ask you—are you looking for a bomb? Something like that?”
“Something shouldn’t be there,” the black guy said.
“Why don’t you get the attendant to open all the lockers and take a look? Maybe you’ll find it.”
“That’s an idea,” the black guy said. “I’ll think about it.”
“That’s what I’d do,” Chili said. “I’d make sure I got the right guy next time.”
That was it. Time to collect his “contents” and his new bag and leave. He didn’t like the way the black guy was looking at him.
23
Chili didn’t see the stuntman until he was up on the third level of the parking structure. There he was, the Hawaiian Bear, standing by the Toyota. So he must have been here all day. Walking up to him Chili said, “I don’t know how I could’ve missed you with that shirt on. It’s the same as the other one you had on only the hibiscus are a different color, right?”
The Bear didn’t answer the question. He looked okay, no cuts or bruises showing from his fall down the stairs. He said, “So you didn’t have the key with you.”
Chili said, “You think I’d be standing here? You set somebody up and you want it to work, it has to be a surprise. Can you remember that?”
“You spotted them, huh?”
This guy was either dumb or he was making conversation.
“Who, the suits? If I know they’re there, what’s the difference which ones they are? Tell that colored guy you work for he blew it. Whose idea was it, yours or his?” The Bear didn’t answer and Chili said, “Did you see it work in some movie you got beat up in? There’s quite a difference between movies and real life, isn’t there?”
Now Chili was making conversation. For some reason he felt sorry for this guy in his Hawaiian shirt.
“What movies were you in I might’ve seen?”
The Bear hesitated as if he might be thinking of titles. He wasn’t though. He said, “I have to ask you for that key.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“The locker key.”
“I know what one you mean,” Chili said. “I can’t believe what you’re telling me. The setup didn’t work so you want the key back?”
“Catlett says if you don’t open the locker the deal’s off.”
“You serious?” Chili said. “This is how you guys do business? I can’t believe you aren’t dead.”
The Bear kept staring but didn’t say anything.
“Look,” Chili said, “you know as well as I do there’s no fuckin way I’m gonna give you the key, outside of you point a gun at my head. Then we might have something to talk about. Otherwise . . . I’d like you to step away from the car.”
“I don’t need a gun,” the Bear said. “Where is it? If it isn’t on you, it’s around here someplace.”
Chili shook his head, tired of this, but still feeling a little sorry for the guy. The Bear didn’t seem to have his heart in it; he was going through the motions, doing what he was told. Chili looked off in kind of a thoughtful way, turned to the Bear again and kicked him in the left knee, hard. The Bear stumbled, hunching over. Chili grabbed him by the hair with both hands, pulled his head down and brought his knee up into the guy’s face. That straightened him and now Chili hit him high in the
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belly as hard as he could, right under the rib cage. The Bear gasped and sucked air with his mouth open trying to breathe, helpless now and in pain. Chili took him by the arm saying, “Lie down on your back. Come on, if you want to breathe.” He got the Bear down on the concrete, straddled his midsection and reached down to lift him up by the waist of his pants, the same blue ones he had on yesterday, telling him, “Take deep breaths through your mouth and let it out slow . . . That’s it, like that.”
Once the Bear was breathing okay, checking his teeth now, feeling his nose, Chili said, “Hey. Look at me,” and got him to raise his eyes. “Tell your boss I don’t ever want to see him again. He made a deal with Harry and a deal’s a deal. I’m talking about if we get the dough out of the locker. We don’t, then okay, there’s no deal. But either way I don’t want to see him coming around anymore. You understand? Will you tell him that?”
The Bear seemed to nod, closing and opening his eyes.
“What’re you hanging around with a guy like that for? You were in the movies, right? A stuntman? What’s he ever done he can talk about? The guy pimps you and you let him do it. You feel okay?”
“Not too bad,” the Bear said.
“How ’bout when you went down the stairs?”
He touched his left thigh. “I think I pulled my quadriceps.”
“If I was you,” Chili said, “I’d quit that guy so fast. No, first I’d kick him down some stairs, let him see what it’s like. Then I’d quit.”
The Bear didn’t say anything, but had a look in his eyes that maybe he was thinking about it.
“How many movies you been in?”
“About sixty.”
“No shit,” Chili said. “What’re some of ’em?”
* * *
The locker key was down on the first level of the parking structure, stuck in a crack where the pavement joined one of the concrete support posts. Chili made sure nobody was in sight before he picked it up.
Now he drove to the Avis lot to return the Toyota, walked over to National and took out a Cadillac Sedan de Ville, a black one. There was more to this than switching cars just in case. He felt he deserved a Cadillac. If he had one at home, he should have one out here. At least a Cadillac. Driving up 405 he began thinking that if somehow he got the cash out of that locker he’d tell Harry he wanted a ten percent commission on it, then turn in the Cadillac and lease a Mercedes or that expensive BMW. Karen said top agents and studio execs were driving BMWs now. She said a Rolls was too pretentious; low-key was in. Other things to remember: you don’t “take a meeting” anymore, you say you have “a two-thirty at Tower.” If a studio passes on a script, you don’t say “they took a Pasadena.” That was out before it was in. Like “so-and-so gives good phone.” If they say it’s “for a specialized audience” or it’s “a cast-driven script,” that’s a pass. But what Elaine Levin gave Lovejoy was a “soft pass,” which meant it was salvageable. There were a lot of terms you had to learn, as opposed to the shylock business where all you had to know how to say was “Give me the fuckin money.” He’d call Karen later on, after he had a talk with Harry.
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* * *
Pulling into the parking area beneath the Sunset Marquis he wondered if he should switch hotels. He liked this one, though, a lot. The people here were friendly, relaxed. They gave you free shampoo, suntan lotion, moisturizing cream. The food was good. You could cook in your room if you wanted. There were ashtrays everywhere you looked. A Sunset Marquis ashtray right there by the elevator, if you forgot to take one from your room when you checked out.
Chili unlocked the door to 325 and stepped inside, not too surprised to see the message light on the phone blinking. That would be Harry dying to know how he made out, Harry becoming a nervous wreck lately. He’d tell Harry it was still possible to get the money, but it wasn’t going to be easy. Show Harry, first, he still needed him, then straighten him out about the limo guys—stay away from them. Chili took off his suitcoat, turned to drape it over one of the chairs at the counter and saw that someone had been in here.
Not the maid, someone else. The maid hadn’t come in yet to clean up the room. You could tell, the newspapers on the sofa, the ashtray by the phone . . .
What had caught his eye, the cupboard doors in the kitchenette were open. Not all the way, but not closed tight either, the way he’d left them. But the desk drawer, Chili noticed, was closed, and he had left that one open about an inch. He had set the drawers in the bedroom the same way, some open an inch or so, some closed—a little nervous about security after the Bear had come in and tossed the place and didn’t leave one clue that he’d been here. This one who’d come in either didn’t know how to cover his moves or didn’t care. The Bear had left the ten grand in the suitcase in the bedroom closet, but this one was different, this guy . . .
Chili was about to go in there and thought, Wait a minute. What if the guy’s still here? As he fooled with that idea, looking toward the hall where you went into the bathroom or turned right and two steps took you into the bedroom, he knew who it was. Bones. There was no doubt in his mind now, that fuckin Bones had been here. Or was still here. In the bedroom.
There was one way to find out, but he didn’t want to walk in there, maybe surprise him, even though Bones, if he was there, would have heard him come in. Except that you couldn’t tell what Bones might do, the guy being either too dumb or crazy to act in a normal way.
What Chili did, he called out, “Hey, Bones? I’m home.” Waited maybe ten seconds watching the hall and there he was.
Bones appeared extending a pistol in front of him, some kind of bluesteel automatic. In the other hand he was holding a paper laundry sack you found in hotel closets. Chili didn’t have to guess what was in it. His ten grand. Bones waved the pistol at him.
“Get over there, by the sofa.”
“You don’t need that,” Chili said. “You want to sit down and talk, it’s fine with me. Get this straightened out.”
Chili turned his back on him, walked over to the sofa and sat down. He watched Bones come in the room to stand by the counter, by the suitcoat hanging on the chair, and began to see what was going to happen.
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Bones had on a shitty-looking light-gray suit with a yellow sport shirt, the top button fastened. It might be the style out here, but Bones looked like a Miami bookmaker and always would. Jesus, and gray shoes.
“I gave up looking for the drycleaner,” Chili said. “This place’s all freeways, you can drive around forever and never leave town. How’d you get in here?”
“I told them at the desk I was you,” Bones said. “I acted stupid and they believed me.”
He came to the middle of the room, still pointing the gun, and held up the laundry sack.
“Where’d you get this?”
“Vegas. I won for a change.”
Bones stared at him, not saying anything. Then swung the sack to drop it on a chair.
“Get up and turn around.”
“What’re you gonna do, search me?”
Chili got to his feet. Bones motioned with the gun and he turned to face the painting over the sofa that looked like a scene in Japan, misty pale green and tan ricefields, the sky overcast, not a lot going on there. He felt Bones lift his wallet out of his back pocket.
“You won the ten grand in Vegas?”
“That’s where Leo went before he came here and I lost him.”
“Las Vegas.”
“Yeah, it’s in Nevada.”
“Then how come the straps on the ten grand say Harrah’s, Tahoe? Can you explain that to me?”
There were figures in the painting he hadn’t noticed, people way out in the field picking rice.
Chili said, “You sure it says that, Harrah’s?”
He hadn’t noticed any printing on the money straps either, or didn’t remember.
“You’re the stupidest fuckin guy I ever met in my life,” Bones said. “Let’s see what’s in your pockets.”
Chili shoved his hands in and pulled the side pockets out.
“What you should’ve done was told me the guy was alive and skipped, soon as you found out.”
Chili heard the voice moving away. He looked over his shoulder to see Bones pulling his suitcoat from the back of the chair at the counter.
“Why would I do that?”
“ ’Cause the guy’s my customer now, stupid. His ass belongs to me.”
Bones laid the pistol on the counter, held the suitcoat up with one hand and felt through it with the other. Chili waited for his expression to change. There—his eyes opening wider.
“What have we here?” Bones said. His hand came out of the coat with the locker key.
Chili sat down in the sofa again.
“Give me my cigarettes. They’re in the inside pocket.”
Bones threw the coat at him. “Help yourself.” And held the key up to look at it. “C-oh-one-eight.” Frowning now, putting on a show. “I wonder what this’s for, a locker? Yeah, but where is it?”
Chili sat back to smoke his cigarette and let it happen.
“I checked a bag at the airport, when I came.”
“Yeah? Which terminal?”
Chili hesitated. He said, “Delta,” and it was done.
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Bones said, “You found Leo, didn’t you? . . . Took the poor asshole’s money and put it in a locker, ready to go.” Bones looked over. “Why haven’t you left?”
“I changed my mind. I like it here.”
“Well, there’s nothing for you in Miami.”
Bones was nervous or anxious, touching his thin strands of hair, his collar, making sure it was buttoned.
“How much’s in the locker? Just out of curiosity.”
Chili drew on his cigarette, taking his time. “A hunnerd seventy thousand.”
“Jesus Christ, that drycleaner left with three hunnerd,” Bones said. “I hadn’t got here you would’ve pissed the rest of it away. You knew I was coming, right? That fuckin Tommy Carlo, I know he phoned you.”
“Yeah, but he didn’t know why. ’Less you told him about the drycleaner.”
“I didn’t tell him nothing.”
“What about Jimmy Cap, you tell him?”
Bones paused. He said, “Look, there’s no reason why you and I shouldn’t get along. Forget all the bullshit going back to that time—I don’t even remember how it started. You took a swing at me over some fuckin thing, whatever it was—forget it. You owe me eight grand, right? Forget that too. But, you don’t say a fuckin word about this to anybody. It’s strictly between you and I, right?”
“I get to keep the ten in the laundry bag,” Chili said.
Bones had to think about that one.
“Look,” Chili said, “I was gonna pay you the eight I owe you out of the ten. See, but now you tell me I don’t have to. So . . .”
“So I take two out of it and we’re square,” Bones said. “How’s that?”
“Sounds good to me,” Chili said.
He looked up the number for the Drug Enforcement Administration in the phone book, dialed it and told the woman who answered he wanted to speak to the agent in charge. She asked what it was in regard to and he said a locker out at the airport, full of money.
A male voice came on saying, “Who’s speaking, please?”
“I can’t tell you,” Chili said, “it’s an anonymous call.”
The male voice said, “Are you the same anonymous asshole called last night?”
“No, this’s a different one,” Chili said. “Have you looked in that locker, C—oh-one-eight?”
There was a pause on the line.
“You’re helping us out,” the male voice said. “I’d like to know who this is.”
“I bet you would,” Chili said. “You want to chat or you want me to tell you who to look for? The guy’s on his way out right now.”
This DEA agent wouldn’t give up. He said, “You know there’s a reward for information that leads to a conviction. That’s why I have to know who this is.”
“I’ll get my reward in heaven,” Chili said. “The guy you want has a bullet scar in his head and is wearing gray shoes. You can’t miss him.”
24
“This was Warren’s office,” Karen said, “before he was shipped off to Publicity. Warren Hurst, I think I mentioned him to you.”
“Beth’s Room,” Chili said, sitting across from Karen at her big oak desk. “The one that said if you did it your way they wouldn’t have a movie.”
“You remember that.”
She said it with that nice look in her eyes she had been using on him lately. Interested, letting him know she liked him. The only difference today, she had on glasses, round ones with thin black frames. She was telling him now the office decor was pre-Warren, he hadn’t been here long enough to redecorate; that it wouldn’t be bad in a men’s club, but she wasn’t going to touch it. “Not till I see if I get a vote here.”
Chili said, “You don’t fool around.”
“What, taking the job? Why not?”
Karen’s shoulders moved in the beige silk blouse, the little ninety-pounder behind the big executive desk.
“I think I’ll be good at it if they let me. Look at the scripts.”
She picked up one from a stack of about ten and moved it to another part of the desk.
“Elaine says all of them have spin in varying degrees. That means they’re supposed to be good.”
She picked up another one. “Beth’s Room, still under consideration.”
She picked up another and laid it down again.
“Elaine wants to know what I think.”
“Tell her the truth.”
“Don’t worry.”
“I got an idea spinning around.”
“You told me about it.”
As he said, “It’s getting better,” Karen’s phone buzzed.
She picked it up. “Yeah?” Said, “Tell him I’ll call him back,” and looked at Chili as she hung up. “Harry. That’s the third time today.”
Chili said, “I have to call him too, tell him what happened.”
And Karen said, “That’s right, you were going out to the airport,” her expression changing, her eyes losing that nice glow as they became serious. She took off her glasses as he told her about the DEA guys and hunched her shoulders leaning on the desk, looking right at him but maybe picturing it too, the scene. That was the feeling he had. He finished the part at the airport and she said, “You really did that?” sounding amazed. “So the money’s still there?” He had to tell her about Bones then, and she listened to that part, every word of it, without blinking her eyes. When he finished she sat back in her chair for a moment thinking, still looking at him, then came forward again asking about Bones, who he was. So Chili had to take her all the way back to Vesuvio’s and the leather coat.
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This time when he finished Karen said, “He’ll tell the DEA guys you set it up. Won’t he?”
“If they get him,” Chili said. “Yeah, Bones’ll try to put it on me. If they come around looking and I get hauled in, I say I don’t know what he’s talking about.”
“But they saw you there today,” Karen said, “at the airport.”
“Yeah, well, they’d still have to prove I put the money in the locker and there’s no way they can do that, ’cause I didn’t. I never touched that locker. If I see I’m in too deep I can always give ’em Catlett. But I don’t want to go through all that right now. Even if I didn’t have to post a bond it would be annoying, the way they keep after you asking questions. So I checked out of the Marquis. Now I have to find another place.”
She was giving him that amazed look again. “You’re serious.”
“Yeah, I tried the Chateau Marmont, see if I could get Jean Harlow’s room, but they’re full up. One thing I did, not knowing any better at the time, I told the DEA guys I was with ZigZag. They didn’t write it down, so they might not remember it, and I didn’t have a card to give them. But if they do, they’ll look up Harry, try to find me that way.”
“What Harry will have trouble accepting,” Karen said, “you didn’t get the money, not that you could go to jail.”
“Yeah, I’ll have to explain it to him. Once Bones found the key, the way his one-track mind works it was out of my hands. I had to let it happen.”
“I’d like to have seen that,” Karen said. She pushed out of her leather chair, came around the desk in a black skirt a few inches above her knees and leaned against the edge of the desk, close, looking down at him. He thought for a moment she was going to touch his face. She said, “I’ll bet you have scars . . .”
“A few.”
“I like your hair.”
“That’s another story I could tell you sometime.”
She said, “Why don’t you hide out at my house?”
“Sleep in the maid’s room?”
She said, “We’ll work something out.”
There was a certain look about the Mexican gardener that made Harry think of one of his maniacs: the little gnomelike one in Grotesque Three who took over after the original hideously disfigured maniac was burned to death in Grotesque Two and the picture went on to gross twenty million worldwide. The Mexican gardener coming this way across the lawn was bowlegged. Maybe that was it. Grotesque Three did almost eight million, which still wasn’t bad. Or it was—of course, it was the shears the guy was carrying, the way he held them in front of him with both hands. The gnomelike maniac had used shears a lot.
Harry was on Karen’s patio. Out here now as he kept moving, waiting for the phone to ring. Harry nodded to the Mexican approaching with the shears, wishing he’d point them down. “How are you?”
“Miss Flores isn’ home.”
“I know that,” Harry said.
“She’s at work.”
“I know where she is,” Harry said, “and she knows I’m here. It’s okay, I’m a good friend of hers. We’re amigos.”
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This Mexican, with his dark skin and big nose, reminded Harry of an Aztec figure carved in relief on a stone wall. It got Harry thinking about human sacrifices, a blood cult four centuries old, virgins into the volcano . . . like movie ideas presented to a studio. The Mexican was saying something.
“What?”
“I ask you want a drink.”
“Do I want a drink—I thought you were the gardener.”
“The houseman, Miguel. I do outside, inside, everything.”
Harry said, “You’re Miguel?” feeling a change in his mood, a sudden lift knowing Karen wasn’t sleeping with her houseman, not this old guy and not that it made any difference, really, but he felt better in general and said, “Yeah, Miguel, let me have a Scotch, lot of ice.”
Four times now Catlett had tried to get hold of the Bear: phoning his house from home, from the limo office, from his Porsche coming here and now here, in the turnaround part of the driveway at Karen Flores’s French-looking house. Still no answer, only the Bear’s recorded voice: Leave a message if you want. The only thing good happening Catlett could see was Harry’s old Mercedes parked there, and Harry was the reason he’d come. Catlett went up to the door and rang the bell, set his sunglasses on straight, smoothed down his double-breasted navy blazer he wore with a white cotton shirt open wide at the throat and cream-colored pants.
The door swung in and the man standing there startled him, flashed him back in his mind to migrant camps and hundreds of guys with round, tired shoulders just like this one. Catlett said, “Man, I haven’t seen you since picking lettuce down the Imperial Valley. How you doing?” Found out this was Miguel the houseman and got taken out to the kitchen where his good friend Harry Zimm was sitting at the table with a drink, a bottle of Chivas Regal and a big pair of garden shears, the kind with ten-inch blades and wooden handles. Harry had that expectant look in his eyes, hoping for news.
“You hear anything?”
“I was about to ask you,” Catlett said. “There’s been plenty of time to do it.”
He turned his head and there was Miguel the houseman asking what would he like to drink, this stoop-labor field hand, Catlett thinking Karen Flores must be a strange kind of lady.
“Let me have a glass of chilled white wine. Some Pouilly-Fuissé, you happen to have it in the house.”
Harry said, “Well, I guess he ran with it.”
Harry sounding tired out, depressed.
“Or, as I mentioned could happen if he wasn’t careful,” Catlett said, “somebody hit him on the head. Or, there’s the chance he got busted.”
“What he got was the money,” Harry said. “I called his hotel. They said he checked out.”
“He could’ve done that before.”
“I spoke to him at ten this morning. He was just leaving.”
“That’s right, that’s what I heard.”
From the Bear, phoning as he tailed him, the Bear in communication up to that time.
“He didn’t check out,” Harry said, “till two-thirty this afternoon.”
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Catlett said, “Hmmmmm,” to Harry, nothing to Miguel, noticing the man’s broken fingernails, big knuckles, handing him the glass of wine; or when Miguel said he was leaving, going home, and walked out the back door to the garage.
Harry looked so depressed he seemed in a daze.
“I didn’t think he’d do it. I said to him, ‘I wonder if I’ll ever see you again.’ But I honestly thought I would.”
Catlett sat down with Harry at the table wondering why, if Chili Palmer was going to run with it, he didn’t take a flight out while he was at the airport. Why come back to the hotel? The Bear would have the answer if he could ever locate the Bear.
“Harry, you can’t trust nobody like that, has those bad connections. This man come in off the street, nobody speaking for him, you don’t know who he is.”
“He was working for Mesas. I know the people there and they know him. They use him for collections.”
“They know the guy that takes out the garbage too. Harry. How’d he find you right away if I could-n’t?”
“Through Frank DePhillips.”
“Man, what does that tell you? What you’re saying to me right there?”
“I was staying here that night . . .”
“Yeah, with Karen?”
“We’re in bed, we hear a noise. Voices. We listen awhile. It’s the TV, downstairs. Karen says, ‘But it can’t just come on by itself.’ I tell her, ‘That’s right, somebody had to push the button.’ So I go down . . .”
“You have a gun?”
“Where do I get a gun? Karen doesn’t own one. No, I went downstairs figuring it has to be somebody she knows. Some friend of hers probably stoned, thinks he’s a riot. I walk in the study, the TV goes off—it was the Letterman show—the light comes on and there’s Chili sitting at the desk.”
“Chili Palmer,” Catlett said, “yeah. Sneaky, huh? You should’ve known right then, just from the way he does things. Man breaks in the house . . .”
“The patio door was open.”
“Yeah? Was there a sign on it, ‘Come on in’? Harry, you walk in where you don’t belong it’s breaking and entering, whether you have to break in or not. Chili Palmer commits a felony against the law and you take him in, make him your partner.”
“He isn’t my partner,” Harry said, and took a drink from his glass. “I don’t know what he is.”
That was okay as far as it went. But what Catlett wanted would be for Harry to kick and scream, call the man names. A no-good lying motherfucker would cover it. Harry though, for some reason, did-n’t seem all the way unsold yet on Chili Palmer. So Catlett reset his gold-frame sunglasses and went at him again saying, “The man robs you and you tell me you don’t know what he is? If he managed to get his hands on the hundred and seventy thousand and took off with it . . . Harry, you paying attention?”
“Yeah, if he got it, what?”
“Or, if he messed up out there and they got it, but somehow or other they didn’t get him . . . What I’m saying is either way, Harry, it was your money. You understand? Soon as I presented you with the key to the locker it was the same as giving you the money. So you the one he ripped off, huh?”
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Harry was looking at him with a frown turning all of a sudden from worried to mean.
“You’re saying I still owe it to you? A hundred and seventy grand I haven’t even seen?”
It wasn’t the point Catlett had intended to make. Yeah, but it was true. He opened his hands, helpless, and said to Harry, “Man, you owe me something.”
Karen had given him a key to the front door, in case her houseman had already left.
Chili dropped his suitcase in the foyer, checked the study, the living room, then moved down the back hall to the kitchen. He knew Harry’s car, could guess who the Porsche belonged to and got it right— Mr. Bo Catlett in the kitchen with Harry, Catlett looking this way through his hotdog sunglasses. It was in Chili’s mind to grab a frying pan from the rack, go over the table with it and whop him across the head. Right now, not say a word. But he was no sooner in the kitchen Catlett was on his feet, Christ, holding a pair of shears in front of him. Chili said, “You knew I was coming, huh?” looking at the shears, the blades gunmetal, clamped together. “The Bear tell you?”
He wanted Catlett to answer, keep it between them and settle with this guy. But now Harry got into it, Harry again, ruining the moment.
“I don’t know how many times I tried to call you,” Harry said. “Where’ve you been?”
“Talking to federal agents,” Chili said, still looking at Catlett. “DEA, the ones were waiting for me.”
“They let you go?” Harry said.
“It didn’t take too long.”
Catlett said, “Uh-huh. Harry, you understand what he saying? If he was talking to federal agents, how come he’s here talking to us?”
Chili said, “I didn’t have the key on me.”
Catlett said, “You didn’t have the key . . .” and let his voice trail off. “All right, why would they pick you up then, if you didn’t have the key?”
“They thought I opened the locker.”
“But you didn’t?”
“Ask the Bear, he saw it.”
“Is that right? You talk to him?”
“After. He wanted me to give him back the key,” Chili said, and watched Catlett take that and run with it.
“Sure, ’cause I told him, anything goes wrong, see if you can help out. Like take the key off your hands, case you get followed and picked up again they won’t find it on you.” Looking at Harry: “I told you it could happen, didn’t I? That’s why I said don’t you go out there, send your man here.” Looking at Chili again. “You know what I’m talking about. You experienced in shit where you have to keep your eyes open. Was I wrong? If you still have the key, what’s the problem? Wait for it to cool and try again. Only be more careful next time.”
Chili said, “That’s all you have to say?”
Catlett frowned in his sunglasses. “I don’t see what the problem is.”
“I told you, they were waiting for me.”
“You’re the type they go for, man. I can’t help it how you look.”
This guy was not only sure of himself, he was starting to get cocky, insulting even. Chili fingered the button holding his double-breasted jacket closed.
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He said, “I’ll make you a deal. If you can get out of here before I take my coat off, I won’t clean the floor with you, get your yachtclub outfit all messed up.”
Catlett shook his head, acting tired. He said, “Harry, you hear this?”
“Harry, stay out of it. This’s between me and him,” Chili said, undoing the button to let the jacket come open. He said to Catlett, “You have your choice.”
“You don’t know me,” Catlett said, his voice quiet now. “You only think you do.”
“I know if I wanted to,” Chili said, “I could take those shears away from you and cut your nuts off. You want to stay around, take a chance?”
“I think the party’s getting rough,” Catlett said. “Harry, this make any sense to you?”
“It will, when I tell him how they knew I was coming,” Chili said, holding the coat open now to slip it off his shoulders. “You want to add something to that? Ask me how I found out?”
Catlett shrugged, keeping whatever he felt about it to himself, behind his sunglasses. He said, “What’s the difference? I’m not gonna get into it with you,” and laid the shears on the table. “This kind of shit is not my style.” He moved to the door saying, “Whatever is, huh, Harry? But you still need all kinds of money, don’t you?” and walked out of the kitchen, into the hall.
Chili reached across the table to pick up the glass of wine, ice-cold on the tips of his fingers, and took a sip, Harry watching him.
“What it comes down to after all that, you didn’t get the money.”
Chili stood listening till he heard the front door close.
“There’s more to it, Harry.”
“But you still have the key?”
“There’s a lot more to it,” Chili said, pulling a chair out from the table.
Turning out of Karen’s drive, Catlett was busy handling all the stuff flashing in his head at once. He had to talk to the Bear, find out before he did anything else what happened at the airport, where the key was, how Chili Palmer knew he was informed on unless he was lying, telling Harry stories now, except the only good thing about it was Harry needed money more than he needed Chili Palmer, but Chili Palmer still had to be removed from the situation. There was something else flashing in his head, that suitcase . . . And Catlett had to crank the wheel, quick, waking up to the BMW turning in directly in front of him. The cars came side by side, the windows going down, the woman’s face in the BMW a bit higher than his. Catlett put his sunglasses up on his head. He smiled, seeing late sun reflected in her sunglasses, not smiling. He said, “Miss Flores, this is my pleasure. Harry Zimm might’ve mentioned my name to you, Bo Catlett?”
She kept looking, though her face didn’t change.
So he said, “Can I tell you I’ve always been one of your biggest fans?”
Her face still didn’t change as she said, “What’re you doing here?”
He said, “I was with Harry,” acting a little surprised on account of her tone. “We had a meeting.
Her face still didn’t change, this time saying to him, “If I ever see you here again I’ll call the police.”
The BMW was there and then it wasn’t and he was looking at shrubs. Man. Whatever the woman
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had heard about him couldn’t have been too good. Like Chili Palmer had been talking to her. Already today, with everything going on he had taken the time. Came back from the airport, checked out of his hotel . . . And there was that other thing that had flashed in his head to think about, the black nylon suitcase sitting in her front hall by the door.
The suitcase hadn’t been there before Chili Palmer came.
Checked out of the hotel and was moving in with Karen Flores. Sure, the one he wanted in the movie as the girl. Checked out in case the DEA people wanted to look him up again and came here to hide. Which presented new possibilities, didn’t it? Catlett drove down the hill thinking of some, deciding which one he might use. The one he liked best was the simplest. Shoot the motherfucker and have it done.
For a few moments he wasn’t aware of her standing in the doorway.
Karen watched him sitting alone at the table. Saw the bottle of Scotch, the garden shears, saw him raise his glass of wine and take a sip. He had a cigarette going too. She watched him draw on the cigarette and raise his head to exhale a thin stream of smoke. Karen the camera again watching him, this guy who had told her in a matter-of-fact way federal agents might pick him up and he might have to post bond. . . . She wanted to know what happened while Catlett was here. Where was Harry and why the garden shears? She had questions to ask and something amazing to tell him—Chili Palmer in his pinstripe suit, tough guy from Miami. Not a movie tough guy, a real one. She kept watching him with her camera eye wondering if, real or not, he could be acting. If
he was, he was awfully good.
“Not a worry in the world,” Karen said.
He looked over. “Hey, how you doing?”
“You really aren’t worried, are you?”
He said, “About what?”
And she had to smile because that was an act, the bland expression. But he wasn’t serious about it, he was smiling now and that seemed natural.
“Where’s Harry?”
“I think he’s in the bathroom. He didn’t say where he was going, but that’d be my guess.”
She said, “Catlett was here? . . .”
“Yeah, did you see him?”
“I almost ran into him, on his way out.”
“I think basically he’s all the way out now,” Chili said. “I explained the whole thing to Harry, told him if he ever saw the guy again he oughta have his brain looked at. Harry kept nodding, yeah, he understood, till I got to the part, Bones walking out with the locker key? He hasn’t said a word to me since.”
“He does that,” Karen said, “he pouts.”
She wondered again about the shears, but was more anxious to tell him the latest amazing development.
“Meanwhile, back at the studio, Elaine spoke to Michael . . .”
Right away Chili said, “Hey, where’s Harry?” looking toward the door. “He’s got to hear this.”
“He wants to meet with you,” Karen said. “He didn’t mention Harry.”
She kept her eyes on Chili, who didn’t say anything now, staring at her as she sat down across the table from him.
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“You told Michael about the drycleaner and the shylock.”
“That’s what he wants to talk about?”
“And he told Elaine it was the best pitch he’s ever heard. Now Elaine wants to hear it.”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t a pitch. He was pretending he was a shylock, wondering what it’d be like. So I gave him a situation, that’s all.”
“He wants to have dinner with you this evening, at Jimmy’s. That is,” Karen said, watching him, “if you can make it.”
He said, “Is it a nice place?” with his bland look, eyebrows raised.
And she said, “You think it’s funny. You do. But you’re going to meet with him, aren’t you?”
“It depends,” Chili said. “Who pays?”
“You don’t have a script. You have the beginning of an idea that doesn’t go anywhere . . .”
“I’ve added to it. There’s a girl in it now.”
“Yeah—and what happens? What’s the story?”
“You mean what’s the theme? I’m still thinking about the visual fabric, as they say.”
“I can’t believe you’re serious.”
“The guy wants to talk—I know how to do that. But Harry has to be there too.”
“Or you won’t meet with him?”
“Why’s it have to be like that? Get his permission. Harry comes along, he’s there, right? What’s Michael gonna do, tell him to leave? We’ll talk about Lovejoy, bring it up, see what happens. If Michael says no, Harry’ll have a chance to argue with him. He won’t blame me if the guy doesn’t want to do it.”
“You’re serious,” Karen said.
“I don’t see what’s the big deal.”
“Right, it’s only a movie.” She had to smile at him. “Fifteen years in Hollywood . . . I’d give anything to be there.”
“You can come. Why not?”
She was shaking her head as Harry walked in and Chili said, “Michael called. He wants to meet.”
“Well, it’s about time,” Harry said.
Karen shook her head again, this time slowly, in amazement. Harry, pouring himself a Scotch, didn’t notice. But Chili did. He gave her his innocent look, with the eyebrows.
25
When he asked Karen if it was a nice place he was kidding and she never said, or told him who was supposed to pay. As soon as they walked in through the dark cocktail lounge area, Chili knew dinner for three would run at least a hundred bucks with wine.
He and Harry were taken to a table in the middle of the front section, eight-thirty, the restaurant crowded. Michael had made the reservation, but did-n’t show up till after nine. Then it took him about ten minutes to get to the table, stopping off to say hello to people sticking their hands out at him, Michael pleasant about it, smiling at everybody. Like Momo coming into a joint on 86th Street, getting the treatment. Only Momo would have a suit on, as most of the guys did here; Michael was wearing his World War Two flight jacket with a dark T-shirt under it.
As soon as he sat down at the table he looked at their drinks, ordered a Perrier and then started fanning the air in front of him.
“Would you guys mind terribly not smoking?”
Harry stubbed his cigarette out in a hurry saying of course not, he was trying to quit anyway. Chili took another drag on his and blew it out past the empty chair at the table, toward the entrance to the room where a little guy with dark shiny hair was standing there looking around as the maître d’ hurried up to him, the maître d’ giving him the same treatment he had given Michael, though the guy was not a movie star or Chili would have known him. Chili believed ninety percent of the guys in Hollywood had dark hair and looking around the room confirmed it. What he saw was a lot of hair, dark hair on the guys, different shades of blond hair on the women; older guys with younger women, girls, which was what he had expected. He observed this as Michael was saying that, according to a study he read, smokers exercised less than nonsmokers, were not as likely to use seat belts, were more prone to argue, missed work more often than nonsmokers, and were two-point-two times more likely to be dissatisfied with their lives, not to mention they were two-point-six times more likely to have bronchitis and emphysema.
Harry was saying, “They made a study, huh? Gee, that’s interesting, I’d like to read it,” as the maître d’ was looking this way now and the little guy with the dark shiny hair was coming to the table. Chili noticed he had on a dark-gray shirt and tie with a dark-gray sport coat and light-gray pants that looked like pajamas. Drab colors, but the guy still had a shiny appearance. He pulled out the empty chair and sat down. A waiter tried to push his chair in and the guy waved him away, turning the chair and hunching toward Michael, his back to Chili. As this was happening Michael said, “Buddy—” sounding a little surprised.
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So this was Michael’s agent.
Buddy was supposed to know Harry, but didn’t even glance at him. He started right in with, “They want you to take a meeting with this producer they keep talking about. You believe it? The guy’s a fucking writer. I mean he writes books, not even screenplays, but he wants this broad as the producer. I never heard of this in my life.”
“I want the property,” Michael said.
“Don’t worry about it, you’ll get the property. I said to the guy’s agent, ‘The fuck is this, you trying to hold a gun to my head? We have to take the broad?’ Which is out of the question. I said, ‘What if there’s no communication between she and Michael? What’s she made, three pictures?’ One did okay, the other two barely earned back negative costs.”
“I want that book,” Michael said.
“Michael, you’ll get the book, soon as we get done with this pissing contest. If it was a director— yeah, I can understand he’s got a producer he likes to work with. But this is a fucking writer. I said to his agent, ‘Hey, Michael doesn’t have to option this book, you know.’ And the agent goes, ‘And we don’t have to sell it.’ I go, ‘Well, what the fuck is the guy writing for, he doesn’t want to sell his work?’ You ever hear anything like that?”
“You have to understand his motivation,” Michael said. “A writer can spend years working on a book he isn’t sure will ever sell. What makes him do it?”
“Money. The idea of hitting big,” Buddy said. “Selling one to Michael Weir. What else? Look, what we do, we say okay to the meeting. The broad arrives, we ask her to wait a minute, be right with you. I call the guy’s agent and I say, ‘Do we have a deal? Come on, we have a deal or not? We don’t have a deal, I’m sending the broad home.’ Put it to them like that, I guarantee you within five minutes we’ll have a deal.”
Chili watched Michael playing with a book of matches that would never be used for lighting cigarettes, Michael saying, “How you handle it is up to you.”
Buddy said, “I’ll give you a call.”
Getting up he seemed to notice Harry for the first time, Harry waiting to be recognized, Harry saying, “Buddy, how you doing?” The agent nodded, said yeah, great. Chili watched him glance this way now—like, what, another one? Where’d these guys come from? Michael didn’t tell him. He said one more time he wanted that book. Buddy told him it was his, and left.
Harry said, “Well now . . .”
But there was something Chili wanted to know and he said to Michael, “What he mentioned to you there . . . You mind my asking—what if the other agent says okay, you got a deal? Then will you have the meeting with the woman, the producer?”
“I don’t know, I suppose,” Michael said, “we’d talk to her. I’m not really involved in this.”
Harry said, “Chil, it has nothing to do with Michael.”
And now Michael was nodding. “All it amounts to is a power play, the dance of the agents, circling each other for position.”
“With the woman in the middle,” Chili said, “not knowing what’s going on. I was thinking she’s sitting there like a hostage. Use her to get what you want.”
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“Hey, come on, man. All I want is a book.”
“They say no deal, what do you do, shoot her?”
Chili smiled.
Michael didn’t.
He said, “Why is everybody giving me a hard time?”
It was dark and Catlett still hadn’t spoken to the Bear. Had been calling him since coming home and getting no answer, the Bear’s machine turned off. Right now Catlett was standing out on his deck looking at the night, trying to get his head to settle.
Looking at the view he started thinking about his great-great-grandfather with the cavalry sword, because that original Bo Catlett had lived on a mountain and must’ve had a view of his own, but without any lit-up swimming pools and girls laughing or, tonight, the cool sound of Jobim coming from down there. The original Bo Catlett had his view, had his sword, had his squaw wife—but what did he do? This Catlett’s grandmother said, that time before she died, “Oh, he had plenty to do,” but never said what. So this Catlett started thinking of western movies, wondering what people outside of cowboys did back then. They lived in little towns that had one street, wore six-guns and were always crossing the street going someplace, the extras in the movies. The stunt-men were always getting shot off of horses or off of roofs or falling through the railings on upstairs porches and balconies. Fall against the railing shot and it would give way every time, like the carpenters of the Old West didn’t know shit about putting up railings. Bump against a railing shot, man, you’re going through it . . .
And here he was leaning against a railing himself, his head having come all the way around a hundred years back to now.
You could bump against this railing all you wanted. It was California redwood, bolted together, built solid. The drop was about the same as looking down from a hotel room on the twelfth floor he had stayed in one time. If you fell through like in a movie, you wouldn’t come close to that swimming pool. You’d hit on the slope partway down and from there it would be like falling down stairs, only you’d land in the scrub and shit where the coyotes hid. . . . Seeing this and thinking, Invite Chili Palmer out here.
Thinking, I don’t know why, Officer, but it just give way on him.
Catlett picked up the phone from a deck chair, punched a number for about the twentieth time today and got him. Damn. The Bear’s voice came on and Catlett said, “How you doing this evening?” having decided hours ago to be cool with the Bear, save his emotions.
“The guy faked them out,” the Bear said.
“This Chili Palmer you speaking of? I know that much.”
“You see on the news the drug bust at LAX? They picked up a guy from Miami. Alleged member of organized crime.”
“You watching the news?” Catlett said. “What else? Watch some sitcoms ’stead of calling me?”
“I had to take Farrah to Costa Mesa, to her mother’s. She had the news on and that’s when I saw it. Then I had to stay a while and visit, talk about how I’m always late with the check. I got back, I had to eat. I figured you’d have talked to Harry, found out
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what happened. But I didn’t actually give a shit if you did or not. I don’t work for you no more, or Ronnie. I quit.”
Catlett said, “This the man use to jump offa high buildings talking?”
“Into air bags,” the Bear said. “There’s no cushion under what you’re doing. I got responsibilities, I got Farrah to think about.”
“You always had Farrah. Took her on buys with you.”
“I’m out of it, Cat. Ronnie picked up two keys for Palm Desert. I’ll drop off the rest tomorrow morning and I’m done.”
“Been giving it serious thought, huh?”
“All the way down to Costa Mesa and back.”
“How ’bout we talk about it tomorrow? Tonight, later on, I got one for you doesn’t involve any heavy work. Chili Palmer’s staying with that woman, Karen? I need you to get me in the house.”
“I’m already an accessory on one count,” the Bear said. “You want to get in, bust a window.”
“I’m thinking she might have an alarm system.”
“Good, so don’t do it.”
“Something happened to you, huh? Like that tumble down the stairs shook you up.”
“Or straightened me out,” the Bear said. “It’s different. It isn’t like a stunt gag, you’re ready, you know what’s gonna happen. This guy doesn’t fool around, he comes right at you. You talked to him, yeah, but you don’t know him.”
Catlett said, “Uh-huh,” and said, “Bear, I had an idea. Listen to this.”
Making it sound as though he was starting over and they were still friends.
“You get your saw—no, get your wrench, and fix my deck railing to give way like they do in movies. You know what I’m saying? Like when the guy gets hit he falls against it and it gives way on him? All you do is loosen the bolts that hold the upright part of the rail to the deck. So then I invite Chili Palmer out here to look at my view. Get him to lean over the railing, see what’s down there . . . Huh? What you think?”
“This isn’t a movie, Cat. This guy’s real.”
“It could be done though. Sure, loosen some bolts. I can see it . . . Except how would I get him out here? So I better go in the woman’s house and do him. You helping me.”
There was a silence on the line before the Bear said, “I’m not gonna do it.”
“You sure?”
“I told you, I quit.”
“I hate being alone, Bear.”
“That’s too fucking bad.”
“I hate it so much, man, if I go down I’ll pleadeal you in. Give ’em this ace burglar now one of the West Coast dope kings, if they go easy on the Cat. You dig? Tell ’em where you live, where you keep the product, all that shit they love to hear.”
There was that silence again. This time all the Bear said was “Why?” in a quiet tone of voice.
“ ’Cause I’m a mean motherfucker,” Catlett said. “Why you think?” and hung up the phone.
It was fun playing with the Bear, putting fear in a man his size. Now forget him. He hadn’t needed the Bear to do Yayo or the gas station man in Bakersfield or the fools he did over business, the one in his car waiting at a light, the other one on his front
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steps. He didn’t sit down and plan doing those people. He saw the need and did them. Do this one the same way and don’t think so much, worrying if there was an alarm system in the house. Harry said Chili Palmer had come in the house at night. He didn’t say nothing about any alarm system going off. Chili Palmer had come in the house and turned the TV on and Harry had to go downstairs being the man, but without a gun, ’cause there wasn’t a gun in the house, was there?
It took Harry about two minutes to decide on the Norwegian salmon—anxious to talk, get things going—and another Scotch. Chili kept reading the menu while Michael told them about the curious negative influence his father became in motivating his career. Harry was willing to bet Chili, after all the time he spent on the menu, would order a steak; and he did, the filet rare, baked potato, house salad, the soup, a half-dozen bluepoints and, yeah, another Scotch. But Michael wasn’t finished telling about his dad, this tyrant who manufactured hairpieces and wanted his sonny to follow him in the rug trade, the headwaiter standing by. Then Michael had to look at the menu for a while, Harry willing to bet anything he wouldn’t order from it. It was an unwritten rule in Hollywood, actors never ordered straight from the menu; they’d think of something they had to have that wasn’t on it, or they’d tell exactly how they wanted the entrée prepared, the way their mother back in Queens used to fix it. The seven-million-dollar actor in the jacket a bum wouldn’t wear told the headwaiter he felt like an omelet, hesitant about it, almost apologetic. Could he have a cheese omelet with shallots, but with the shallots only slightly browned? The headwaiter said yes, of course. Then could he have some kind of light tomato sauce over it with just a hint of garlic but, please, no oregano? Of course. And fresh peas in the tomato sauce? Harry wanted to tell him, Michael, you can have any fucking thing you want. You want boiled goat? They’ll send out for it if they don’t have one. Jesus, what you had to go through with actors. The ideal situation would be if you could make movies without them.
“What fascinates me about this one,” Michael said, “is the chance to play an essentially cliché-type character in a way that’s never been done before, against his accepted image.”
Harry liked the sound of that. He wished he could light up, so he could enjoy it more. Chili, busy eating ice cream, might or might not be paying attention.
“It’s not unlike the way I saw Bonaparte in Elba, “Michael said. “The script had him morose, dour, bound by his destiny to play the tragic figure. I thought, yeah, that’s the portrait we’ve all seen, with the hand shoved inside his coat. But why were his troops so loyal? Why were they willing to follow this neurotic guy, with the original Napoleon complex, to hell and back time after time, until finally Waterloo?”
Harry thinking, To Hell and Back, Audie Murphy, about 1955.
As Michael said, “What I did was separate the man from the historic figure, visualize a dichotomy, imagine him offstage making love, getting drunk, generally kicking back . . .” Michael grinned. “No pun intended.”
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Harry didn’t get it.
“And you know what? I saw him rather impish in his off moments. Maybe because he was a little guy and I had to play him that way. I saw him childlike with a love of life, a mischievous glow. I have him telling jokes, mimicking his generals, I do one like a French Howard Cosell. I drink wine, smoke hash and giggle, I moon Josephine a couple of times in the film . . . Anyway it’s this human side that my grenadiers sense, the reason they love me, not the historic figure, and are willing to die for me.”
“Sure,” Harry said, “you bring out that human side you’ve got the audience empathizing with you.”
Chili said, “Why’d he put his hand in his coat like that?”
“It was a fashionable way to pose,” Michael said. “And that’s what I’m talking about. There’s the pose of the character, as most people see him, and there’s the real person who laughs and cries and makes love. I think the romance angle in our story is critically important, that it isn’t simply a jump in the sack for either of them. These two become deeply in love. There’s even a certain reverence about it, the way they fuck. Do you know what I mean? And it’s totally in contrast to the guy’s accepted character.”
“From the way he appears in the beginning,” Harry said.
Michael didn’t even glance over. He went on saying to Chili—no doubt because Chili had spoken to him about it that other time—”Once their lives are in danger and you have the mob guy coming after them, it not only heightens tension, it adds a wistful element to their love. Now, because they have more to live for, they also have more to lose.”
Harry said, “The mob guy?”
Michael, the typical actor, onstage, ignored that one too. A simple, honest question, for Christ sake.
“I also have to consider, I mean as the character, this is another man’s wife I’m sleeping with. I know the guy’s a schmuck, he’s a sneak . . . By the way, what does he do?”
“He’s an agent,” Chili said, “and his wife, he handles, is a rock-and-roll singer.”
Michael nodded. “Like Nicki. I like that. I don’t mean for the part, but a character like her.”
Harry stared at Chili now, Chili eating his ice cream and refusing to look over this way, Chili telling Michael, “We’re still working on the ending.
Michael said, “You are?” sounding surprised. “I thought you were bringing the script.”
“You have the first draft,” Harry said, wanting to start over, make some sense out of this. “The one you read I sent to your house?”
He saw Michael shaking his head with that surprised look and Chili saying right away, “Basically it’s the ending has to be fixed, but there some other parts too.” The hell was be talking about? Now Michael was looking at his watch.
“Elaine wants us to come by tomorrow, sometime in the afternoon. How does that sound?”
Harry saw Chili nodding, so he nodded.
“I have to run,” Michael said. “But what I hope to see, they begin to have misgivings about wanting the money. It becomes their moral dilemma and they try to rationalize keeping it, but in the end they can’t.” Looking at Chili the whole time. “Can they?”
“Which money,” Harry said, “are we talking about?”
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That got Michael’s attention, finally, but with a kind of bewildered look on his face. “The three hundred large. What other money is there? I’m not being facetious, I’m asking, since I haven’t read the script. I think their idea, ultimately, would be to let the husband keep it, knowing he’ll get caught sooner or later. No, wait.” Michael paused. “The mob guy gets to the husband first, the agent, and whacks him, knocks him off. But he doesn’t have the money. Somehow the lovers have gotten hold of it. We see it piled on a bed. Make it a million—why not? The mob guy, who scares hell out of the audience, is closing in but the lovers don’t know it. So now you’ve got the big scene coming up. But just before it happens . . . Well, it could be after, either way, but it’s the shylock who makes the decision, they can’t keep it.”
Harry said, “The shylock?”
Michael turned to him saying, “Look at me, Harry.”
Harry was already looking at him.
Now Chili was saying, “That’s not bad. I think you got it down.”
Harry turned to Chili and back to Michael again.
“Jesus Christ, you mean all this time . . .”
But Michael wasn’t listening. He was getting up from the table saying, “I should keep quiet, I know, till I’ve read the script, but I’ve got a feeling about this one. I’m that shylock. Really, it scares me how well I know him. I could do this one tomorrow, no further preparation.”
“What am I thinking?” Chili said.
Michael grinned at him. “Well, I might need a week to get ready. But I’ll see you tomorrow, right? At Tower.” He started to go, paused and said, “Chil, work on that moral dilemma. Harry? Remember that time you turned me down for Slime Creatures? I’m glad you did. I might’ve gotten typecast.”
Michael table-hopped and touched hands all the
way out. Harry watched him before turning to Chili. “All that time he’s talking about your movie.” Chili nodded. “That’s what we came for?” Chili nodded. “You told Michael about your movie when you
saw him that time? You never talked about Lovejoy?”
Chili finished his ice cream. He said, “Harry,” getting his cigarettes out, “let’s light up and have an after-dinner drink. What do you say?”
26
Karen was waiting for him. He saw her coming away from the front steps in a heavy-knit white sweater as he got out of the car. They walked around to the patio side of the house and over to the swimming pool that was like a pond with a clear bottom, leaves, dark shapes on the surface, Chili telling about the dinner with Michael, most of what happened, and finally asking her, “Guess who paid?”
Karen said that, first of all, high-priced actors never picked up the check. They had no idea what things cost. They seldom knew their zip code and quite often didn’t know their own phone number. Especially guys who changed the number every time they dumped a girlfriend. Telling him this quietly in the dark. He felt they could be in a woods far away from any people or sounds or lights, unless you looked at the house and saw dim ones in some of the windows. They could have walked in the house when he got out of the car, but she was waiting for him with the idea of coming out here. It told him they were going to end up in bed before too long. He was-n’t sure how he knew this, other than being alone in the dark seemed to set the mood, the idea of moonlight and a nice smell in the air, except the moon was pretty much clouded over. Her waiting for him outside was the tip-off. He didn’t ask himself why she wanted to go to bed with him. It never entered his mind.
“So who paid, you or Harry?”
“I did.”
“You felt sorry for him.”
“Well, yeah, maybe. Twice in one day I have to explain something where he’s already made up his mind I’m trying to stick him. Michael left, we sat there another hour and talked. You know what his omelet cost?”
“Twenty bucks?”
“Twenty-two-fifty.”
“And he ate maybe half of it,” Karen said.
“Not even that. The whole shot came to two and a quarter, with the tip, and we didn’t have any wine.”
“Harry went home?”
“Yeah, feeling sorry for himself. I said to him, ‘This wasn’t my idea, I didn’t call it. If you wanted to ask him about Lovejoy, why didn’t you?’ Harry says, ‘What, follow him out to the parking lot?’ Harry had a point. Michael does all the talking and then he’s gone, never mentioned the check. You know, at least offered. No—see you tomorrow at the meeting. Now I either have to make up something quick or forget the whole thing. Or let him do it. Michael knows more about it than I do anyway. All the time at dinner he’s telling me how it should work: that the love part should be important and how he wants to play the shylock as a nice guy—like people don’t mind paying him a hunnerd and fifty percent interest. You know what I’m saying?”
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“That’s what Michael does,” Karen said. “He turns the story around to suit himself and then walks away. The shylock becomes a brain surgeon. The drycleaner—who knows?”
“I’m thinking of making him an agent,” Chili said, “and his wife, Fay, a rock-and-roll singer. It’s a little different’n what I told you and Harry. She comes here with the shylock and they fall in love looking for Leo. Also there’s a mob guy that’s after them.”
Karen stopped and turned to him. “His name Ray Bones?”
“Yeah, but I think I’ll change it. I don’t want to get sued. I’ve had enough of Ray Bones to last me the rest of my life.”
They started walking again, strolling toward the house. Karen’s shoulders hunched in the bulky sweater, hands shoved into the sleeves. She said, “What about Catlett?”
“He’s not in it.”
She said, “Are you sure? You have an idea for a movie based on something that actually happened, but now you’re beginning to fictionalize. Which is okay, like bringing Fay into it more . . .”
Chili said, “After I saw that’s what Lovejoy needed.”
“That’s fine—but what exactly are you keeping and what are you throwing away?”
“Well, if I have Bones as the bad guy, what do I need Catlett for? It’s not about making a movie, it’s about getting your hands on money without getting killed. Or it’s about a moral dilemma, as Michael says. If they do get their hands on the money, can they keep it? Michael says no.”
“So you resolve that,” Karen said. “You have action, suspense, romance, good characters . . . You have that wonderful scene with Bones in the hotel room. He takes the locker key and you set him up.” She paused and said, “It’s cool the way it works, but you can’t end the picture with it. What happens next, at the airport, is offstage. But if it did play as a scene you wouldn’t be in it.”
“You mean the shylock.”
Karen said, “Yeah, right,” thinking of something else. “What you might do is play the hotel room scene with Leo instead of Bones—it’s too good to throw away. Leo finds the key, leaves to pick up the money and you call the DEA.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“But you did.”
“Yeah, to Bones. I wouldn’t do it to Leo.”
She said, “Well . . . I don’t know. I like Catlett as a character, if you could use him somehow. Doesn’t he fit into this at all?”
“He’s Harry’s problem.”
“Isn’t Harry in it?”
“I left that part out, the shylock looking for him.”
He thought of Catlett again. He thought of the Bear, the Bear falling down the restaurant stairs, but didn’t see how he could use that either.
Karen said, “I wouldn’t throw anything away just yet,” as they reached the patio and she turned to him. She looked cold, hugging herself with her hands in the sweater sleeves. “What’re you going to call it, Chili’s Hollywood Adventure?”
“That’s a different story. I like it, though, so far.”
She said, “What happens next?”
He said, “I’m ready if you are.”
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* * *
He’d open his eyes and she’d be watching him, the first time smiling, and he remembered her telling him Michael said funny things. Then she’d close her eyes and he’d close his, moving with her, all the time moving, and he’d open his eyes and she’d be looking at him again, face-to-face in the lamplight. She was feeling it, not just going through the motions, he could tell by her face, a certain look around her nose and mouth that was almost a snarl, but her eyes would still be looking: like she was riding a bike with no hands to look at something she was holding, doing two different things at once: her body turned on and having a good time, but her mind still working on its own, watching, until her eyes glazed over and it became more the way it usually was in those final moments of hanging on, no time to think or do anything but ride it out. She opened her eyes with kind of a dreamy look, thoughtful, and said it was like falling backwards . . . a time you could let go knowing you were safe. He wondered if she analyzed everything she did and had been watching, before, to see her effect on him. When Karen left the bed, went into the bathroom and came back a few minutes later, he got to see all of her at once—a picture he now had for life— before she turned the lamp off and got back in bed.
Chili had his arm ready in case Karen wanted to snuggle in, as they usually did after, but she stayed on her side and was quiet. They were alone in a different kind of dark now that they’d made love, a dark for sleeping. He thought, Okay, fine. Though had expected there would be a little more to it. It surprised him when she said, lying there in the dark, “I’ve been watching you.”
“I noticed that.”
“I think you could be an actor. I know you’re acting sometimes, but you don’t show it.”
“You thought I was faking?”
“No, I don’t mean then.”
“What was I doing? I was auditioning?”
“We made love,” Karen said, “because we wanted to. That was the only reason.”
“Yeah, but you were watching.”
“For a minute.”
“A minute—it was a lot longer’n that.”
“Why’re you getting mad? I say I think you could be an actor, you take it the wrong way.”
“I don’t like being watched.”
“That could be a problem.”
“Why would it?”
“If you want to act.”
“I never said I did.”
“You don’t want to, then don’t.”
It was quiet for a minute or so.
“You don’t mean become a movie star. More like a character actor.”
“Let’s talk about it in the morning. I’m beat.”
“I ever made a movie, you know who’d go set it? My mother and my two aunts. Tommy, he’d go, for a laugh.”
Karen didn’t say anything, meaning that was the end of it.
He could see himself in different movies Robert De Niro had been in. He could maybe do an Al Pacino movie, play a hard-on . . . He couldn’t see himself in ones, like say the one where the three guys get stuck with a baby. They don’t know how to take care of it and you see these big grownup assholes acting cute. Put on a surprised look and that was as
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far as they could take it. People liked that cute shit, they went to see it. But, man, that would be hard, try and act cute.
What else could he play? Himself? The shylock?
No, he’d start trying to act like himself and it wouldn’t work, because acting wasn’t as easy as it looked. He knew that much. No, what he needed . . .
He heard Karen’s voice in the dark say, “I forgot to tell you. The Bear called.”
Chili said, “Yeah?” even though for some reason he wasn’t surprised. “He say what he wanted?”
“He left a number.”
“I’ll call him in the morning.”
The Bear could wait. What he needed to think about was an ending. And maybe a title. Get Michael. Except that wasn’t the movie, that was real life. He kept getting the two mixed up, Chili’s Hollywood Adventure and whatever the other one was . . .
He must have heard the sounds coming from downstairs, because something woke him up before he heard Karen say, “Not again.” He turned over on his back and was looking at a faint square of light from the window reflected on the ceiling. Karen said, “It’s Harry, downstairs.” He could hear the sounds as faint voices now, a movie playing on the TV in the study. “Harry pulling the same stunt on you,” Karen said. “He was drinking, I’m sure of it, and got this wonderful idea.” He saw Karen sitting up, her face and breasts in profile. Another picture to keep. The clock on her side of the bed—seeing it behind her—said 4:36.
“If he was drinking all night . . .” Chili let the words trail off before saying, “he’d be out of it, wouldn’t he? How could he drive?”
“Ask him,” Karen said, “he’s waiting for you.”
She turned to fix her pillows, puff them up, and sunk back in the bed.
“If I know Harry he’ll act surprised to see you. ‘Oh, did I wake you up? Gee, I’m sorry.’ What happened at dinner, well, not forgotten, but put aside. This is Harry the survivor. Sometime during the past five hours or so he realized that if his project is dead, he’d better quick get a piece of yours. He’ll offer to take over as producer . . .”
“I don’t know,” Chili said, wanting to listen for sounds, different ones than the TV.
But Karen kept talking.
“He’ll get a writer, probably Murray, and handle all negotiations. He’ll already have a plot idea and that’s why he’s here at four-thirty in the morning. He’ll say he couldn’t wait to tell you. But the real reason is he wants to be annoying. He still resents what he thinks you pulled on him, stealing Michael, and I know he doesn’t like the idea of us being together . . .”
Telling him all that until he said, “I don’t think it’s Harry.”
And that stopped Karen long enough for him to hear the TV again and what sounded like gunshots and that sharp whining sound of ricochets, bullets singing off rocks.
Karen said, “If it isn’t Harry . . .”
“I don’t know for sure,” Chili said, “and I hope I’m wrong and you’re right.” It was a western. He heard John Wayne’s voice now. John Wayne talking to the West’s most unlikely cowboy, Dean Martin. Getting out of bed he said to Karen, “I think it’s Rio Bravo.”
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Catlett sat in the dark with the big-screen TV on loud the way Harry said Chili Palmer had done it; the difference was a movie instead of David Letterman and Ronnie’s Hardballer .45 in his hand resting on the desk and pointed at the door part open. He believed the John Wayne movie was El Dorado, the big gunfight going on now with the sound turned up so high it was making him deaf, but he wanted Chili Palmer to hear it and come down thinking it was Harry paying him back. He’d checked to make sure Harry was home and not here and after so many rings he almost hung up, got Harry on the line slurring his words bad, the man almost all the way gone. He told Harry to go to bed before he fell down and hurt himself. All there was to do now was do it. Chili Palmer walks in the door—let him say something if he wanted, but don’t say nothing back. Do him once, twice, whatever it took and leave the way he had come in, through the door on the patio he found unlocked.
He had waited this long so as not to be seen or run into by other cars on the street. Most went to bed early in this town, but some stayed out to party and drove home drunk when the bars closed or in a nod. Four A.M. was the quietest time. He had been here now since four-twenty. Shit. If Chili Palmer didn’t come down in the next two minutes he’d have to go upstairs and find him.
Chili put on his pants and shoes, Karen watching him, and got out the Lakers T-shirt he’d bought at the airport to go with Karen’s Lakers T-shirt if he got lucky. But when he did, when they came upstairs earlier and jumped in bed, he wasn’t thinking of T-shirts.
This one fit pretty well. Karen probably couldn’t see what it was. He walked over to the bedroom door and stood listening. He was pretty sure the movie was
Rio Bravo.
After about a minute Karen said, “Are you going down?”
He turned to look at her.
“I don’t know.”
She said, “Then I will,” getting out of bed.
“You’re as bad as Harry.”
He watched her pull on the bulky sweater and a pair of jeans. She looked about twenty. When she came over to the door he raised his hand and then laid it on her shoulder.
“What if it isn’t Harry?”
“Someone else comes in and pulls exactly the same stunt?”
She was calm about it. He liked that.
“I think Harry might’ve told Catlett, and that’s who it is.”
She said, “Oh.”
Maybe accepting it, he wasn’t sure. “Or it could be somebody Catlett sent. You don’t have a gun, do you? Any kind would be fine.”
Karen shook her head. “I could call the police.”
“Maybe you better. Or call Harry first, see if he’s home.”
She moved past him to the bed, sat on the edge as she picked up the phone from the night table, punched Harry’s number and waited. And waited. Karen shook her head. “He’s not home.”
“He could be asleep, passed out.”
“It’s Harry,” Karen said, coming away from the bed. “I’m sure. Paying you back.”
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Maybe, though it wasn’t Chili’s idea of a payback, the kind that kept you looking over your shoulder waiting to happen. He wanted to believe Karen was right. It was Harry trying to be funny. She knew Harry a lot better than he did. He wanted so much to believe her that he said, “Okay, I’ll go. I’ll sneak down the stairs.” He looked through the doorway to the big open area that reached from the foyer below at a high domed ceiling above the curved staircase and the upstairs landing. “You stand over there by the railing, okay? You can see the door to the study. I don’t want any surprises. You see anything at all, let me know.”
“How?” Karen said.
“I don’t know, but I’ll be watching you.”
Time to do it. Catlett got up from the desk with the big Hardballer ready to fire. He moved past the lit-up noisy screen where John Wayne and Dean Martin were shooting bad guys and ducking bullets singing off walls, the bad guys falling through those rickety porch railings. El Dorado was the name of it. Fine sound effects to go with what he was about to do. Loud, but not as loud as the Hardballer would be once he had it pointed at Chili Palmer. Catlett moved through the doorway into the front hall, heard his heels click on the tile and turned enough to face the stairway. He bent his head back to look at the upstairs railing that curved around the open part of the second floor and looked back at the stairway: did it quick to catch something dark there partway down, a shape against the light-colored wall. There was that moment he had to decide was it Chili Palmer or the woman and said Chili Palmer, though right then didn’t care if he had to do them both, he was this far. Catlett raised the Hardballer to put it on the shape, got it almost aimed and a scream came at him out of the dark—a scream that filled the house and was all over him and he started firing before he was ready, firing as that scream kept screaming, firing at that shape dropping flat on the stairs, firing till that fucking scream turned him around without thinking and he ran down a hall to the back of the house and got out of there.
The first thing Karen said was, “I haven’t screamed in ten years,” amazed that she could still belt one out. Chili told her it was a terrific scream, she ought to be in the movies. The second thing she said was, “We’d better call the police.” And he said, not yet, okay? But didn’t say why.
Now they were downstairs: Karen waiting in the kitchen, lights on, the television off, Chili looking around outside. She watched him come in shaking his head and noticed his purple and gold T-shirt for the first time.
“You said last night the Bear called?”
She nodded toward the counter saying, “The number’s by the phone,” and watched him walk over and look at the notepad next to it. “I have a T-shirt like that only it’s white.”
He said, “I know you do.”
“Is that why you got one?”
She watched him with the phone in his hand now punching numbers. He waited and said, “Bear? Chili Palmer.” She watched him listen for several moments before he said, “Yeah, well he tried. Tell me where he lives.” He listened and said, “I’ll find it.” Then lis
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tened again, longer, for at least a minute, and said, “It’s up to you,” and hung up. “You didn’t answer my question,” Karen said. “Is
that why you bought it?” He said, “I guess so,” and turned to walk out. “You’re going to Catlett’s house—why?” “I’m not gonna spend another twelve years wait
ing for something to fall on me.” “What did the Bear want?” “He’s gonna meet me there.”
27
Catlett had put on Marvin Gaye to pick him up, Marvin Gaye’s voice filling the house now with “I’ll Be Doggone.” No sun yet: barely starting to get light out on the deck.
This tape he was playing had all of Catlett’s favorites on it gathered from other tapes and records. It had “The Star-Spangled Banner” on it, Marvin Gaye doing our national anthem, and had “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” he did with Tammi Terrell, deceased. Both of them now. Marvin Gaye, the Prince of Motown, shot dead by his own father in the hot moment of an argument, a pitiful waste . . . Catlett thinking, And you can’t shoot a man needs to be done?
If it was the man, Chili Palmer, on the stairs and not the woman. Trying to decide which was what had thrown him off at the time and then the scream coming to finish the job, a scream like he hadn’t heard since Slime Creatures, Karen Flores doing her famous scream, which meant it must have been Chili Palmer on the stairs and maybe he did hit him and the job was done, ’cause Chili Palmer had gone
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down, shot . . . Or had dropped down to get out of the way. All that had been in his head coming home, thinking Karen Flores would call the cops when she quit screaming. That was the reason he wiped the gun clean and almost chucked it in some weeds going up Laurel Canyon; but didn’t.
Came home, put his car in the garage part of the house, ran inside and changed from his black racecar-driver coveralls to his white silk dressing gown, barefoot. Mussed up the bed, mussed up his hair and then combed it again, Marvin Gaye doing his “Sexual Healing” now when he heard the car outside the front and thought of cops. He knew they couldn’t have a court-signed search warrant this soon, so did-n’t worry about the gun; he went to the front window with a sleepy innocent expression ready. But it was-n’t even a car. The headlights aimed at the house close went off and it was a van parked in the drive: the Bear getting out now, coming to the door with a suitcase.
Catlett let him in saying, “You know what time it is?” What anybody would say.
“I want to get rid of this,” the Bear said, holding the Black Watch plaid suitcase Yayo had brought. “I came by last night after you called me, but you weren’t home, so I came in to leave this stuff,” the Bear said, talking all at once, “but then I thought no, I better deliver it in person and you check what’s in here. Less what Ronnie took out for Palm Desert.”
Catlett said, “Wait now. You came in my house last night?”
“I just told you I did,” the Bear said.
This stove-up muscle-bound stuntman sounding arrogant. Catlett took it as strange. He said, “Bear, why you talking to me like that? I thought you and I got along pretty good, never argued too much. I always considered you my friend, Bear.”
“I’m the one falls down the goddamn stairs,” the Bear said. “But you take a fall, that other kind, and I go with you, huh? Well, I don’t need a friend that bad.”
“What?” Catlett frowned at him. “What I said on the phone to you? Man, I was putting you on is all. How’m I gonna scare you? I said, ’cause I was a mean motherfucker, right? When do I ever talk like that?”
“It’s what you are, whether you say it or not,” the Bear said. “I’ll tell you right now, I don’t fucking trust you. I want you to look in this suitcase and see what’s in it, so you don’t say later on I took any.”
Catlett watched the Bear lay the bag on the floor and get down on his knees to zip it open.
“Eight keys,” the Bear said, “right?”
“Right. You want a receipt?”
He watched the Bear zip the bag closed and said to him on the floor, “Listen to Marvin Gaye doing ‘Ain’t That Peculiar,’ Bear. Ain’t it, though. You coming by this time of day, can’t wait? How come you haven’t asked me anything?”
Catlett watched the Bear get to his feet, the size of him rising up in that shirt full of flowers.
“You haven’t asked did I get in the woman’s house without you helping me. Did I do what I went in there for.”
“You didn’t,” the Bear said, “or you’d have told me soon as I walked in. Then you’d give me some shit about keeping my mouth shut, saying I’m in it too.”
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Look at that, Catlett thought, surprised, but not taking it as strange anymore, seeing how the Bear’s mind was working.
“I told you I quit and I meant it.”
Telling him more than that.
“What’s wrong with me?” Catlett said. “You talked to Chili Palmer, didn’t you? Since you quit. When was it, last night? . . . This morning?”
The Bear didn’t answer, or have to, Catlett seeing the dumbass half-a-grin on the Bear’s face, trying to look wise, the Bear here because Chili Palmer was coming.
Catlett said, “Bear, I’m glad you stopped by,” and left him, went in the bedroom and got the big .45 out of the bureau where he’d put it, slipped it in the pocket of his dressing gown and had to keep hold of it on account of the gun’s weight and size. He heard two sounds then, as if timed to come one right after the other:
Heard a car drive up to the front.
And heard Marvin Gaye begin his “Star-Spangled Banner,” recorded at the Forum before an NBA All-Star game: Marvin’s soul version accompanied by a lone set of drums. Listen to it. A way to start this show by dawn’s early light. Marvin’s soul inspiring Catlett, setting his mood, telling him to be cool.
Chili found the house looking for a van parked in front, a little stucco Spanish ranch house, half two-car garage, it looked like, till he was inside and saw how the house was built out into space. Across the living room the doors to the deck were wide open. All he could see out there was sky starting to show light. He wanted to have a look and must have surprised Catlett and the Bear when he walked past them saying, “So this’s one of those houses you see way up hanging over the cliff.” Meaning from Laurel Canyon Drive. It didn’t get any kind of comment.
He half turned in the doorway, light behind him now, to see the Hawaiian Bear standing by a suitcase on the floor, Mr. Catlett in his bathrobe, hands shoved in the pockets, soul music coming from somewhere in the white living room. Hardly any color showing at five-thirty in the morning. White carpeting, white sectional pieces forming a square, white artwork on the walls that might have spots of color. Green plants showed dark, the suitcase on the floor, dark, Catlett’s face dark, his bare feet in the white carpeting dark. He would say he hadn’t been out of the house. It didn’t matter. Chili knew where to begin and was about to when he realized, Jesus Christ, it was the national anthem playing, some guy doing it as blues.
Chili got his mind back on Catlett and started over saying, “I’ve been shot at before—once by accident, twice on purpose. I’m still here and I’m gonna be here as long as I want. That means you’re gonna have to be somewhere else, not anywhere near me or Harry. If you understand what I’m saying I won’t have to pick you up and throw you off that fuckin balcony.”
“My turn,” Catlett said, feeling Marvin Gaye behind him and the big .45 in his right hand, inside the silky pocket.
He moved toward Chili Palmer saying, “You mean out there, that balcony? That’s my sun deck,
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man. You gonna try your rough stuff I want to move us off my seventy-bucks-a-yard carpeting, so it don’t get messed up.”
The way Chili Palmer stood looking at him Catlett thought he’d have to show the gun; but the man moved, walked out on the deck looking across to where the canyon road cut through to climb over into the Valley. Catlett glanced aside, motioning to the Bear to go out there too.
“Say you been shot at before,” Catlett said, following them out. “I can believe it. What I can’t understand is you’re not dead.”
“I been lucky,” Chili said, “but I’m not gonna press it. Okay, what can I do, go to the cops and complain? I read in the paper a guy was knocked off and dumped out’n the desert ’cause he was trying to ace this woman out of a movie deal and she had him killed. I was surprised—you know, it’s only a movie. But it’s high stakes, so I guess it can happen. I look at me and you in maybe the same kind of situation. I get shot at over it and I think, you bet your ass it can happen. But I’m in and you’re out. You understand? That’s the way it’s gonna be.”
“It cost forty million and some to make that movie,” Catlett said, “the one the guy was killed over. But you know what? The movie bombed, man, and everybody lost money. It’s high stakes and it’s high risk too. What I’m saying, I’m not gonna let you be in my way.”
He heard Marvin Gaye coming to “home of the brave,” the end of the anthem, and felt a need to hurry, get this done. Time to bring out the Hardballer and he did, putting it on Chili Palmer standing in the middle of the deck.
“You broke in my house and I have a witness to it,” Catlett said, glancing at the Bear. “Witness or accessory, I’ll go either way.” He said to Chili Palmer, standing there looking stupid in a purple Lakers T-shirt and suit pants, “Only no sound effects this time, huh? John Wayne and Dean Martin shooting bad guys in El Dorado.”
“It was Rio Bravo,” Chili said.
“Robert Mitchum was the drunk in El Dorado, Dean Martin in Rio Bravo, practically the same part. John Wayne, he also did the same thing in both. He played John Wayne.”
Chili couldn’t tell if Catlett believed him or not, but it was true. He had won five bucks off Tommy Carlo one time betting which movie Dean Martin was in. He could mention it though he doubted it would interest Catlett much. So he got down to what this was all about and said to him, “Okay, you win. I go back to Miami and you become the mogul, how’s that? I’m not gonna argue with anybody holding a gun on me.” The biggest fuckin automatic he’d ever seen in his life. “I’ll leave today. You want, you can see me get on the plane.” Catlett kept pointing the gun, but with a fairly calm look on his face. Chili had a feeling the guy was going to say okay, go. And then maybe threaten that if he ever saw him again . . .
But it was the Bear, for Christ sake, who got into it then, the Bear saying, “I’m a witness, Cat. Go ahead, do it.” And Chili saw the gun barrel come up an inch or so to point right at his chest.
“You don’t have to,” Chili said, “I’m telling you. It’s not worth it, man.”
That fuckin Bear, now what was he doing? Taking Catlett by the arm, telling him, “You got to
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set it up, have a story for when they ask you how it happened. If I’m in it, I won’t do it any other way. It’s like I used to choreograph fight scenes,” the Bear said. “You’re over there and he’s coming at you. You don’t want to shoot him and he knows it. So you keep backing away till the last second and you don’t have any choice.”
“Like I say, ‘I warned him, Officer,’ ” Catlett said, getting into it, “ ‘but he kept coming at. me . . .’ Hey, but he should have a weapon, a knife or something.”
“We’ll get it later,” the Bear said. “He’s here . . .” The Bear took Chili’s shoulders in both hands and moved him two steps back, toward the door, then motioned to Catlett. “You’re around on that side. Yeah, right there. Okay, now you start backing away. Go ahead.”
Catlett said, “You worked this in a movie, huh?”
“Now you go toward him,” the Bear said to Chili.
Chili didn’t move. He said, “You’re out of your fuckin mind,” and tried to turn, get out of there, but the Bear got behind him to grab hold of his shoulders again.
“This’s okay where he is,” the Bear said to Catlett. “You understand why we’re doing this. You see it happen, you’re able to remember each step when you tell it.”
Chili watched Catlett, about five feet from the railing, the view of Laurel Canyon behind him, give the Bear a nod. “Don’t worry, man.”
“Okay, when I say go,” the Bear said, “I duck out of the way. Give it two beats and move to the railing, quick, you’re desperate now. Grab it with your hand, turn and press your back against it for support as you aim the piece with both hands. You ready?”
Catlett nodded, half turned, ready.
“Go!”
Chili wanted to turn, make a dive for the living room, but the Bear was still behind him, his big arms going around him tight and he couldn’t twist free, couldn’t move because the Bear hadn’t moved, the Bear not even trying to get out of the way.
That’s why Chili was looking right at Catlett as Catlett looking back took two quick barefoot steps to the railing, got his left hand on it, the gun pointing out of his other hand, and kept going, screaming as the railing fell away behind him and Catlett, it seemed for a moment, hung there grabbing at space.
The guy who had sung the national anthem was doing “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” Which wasn’t exactly true, Chili thought, standing at the edge of the deck looking down. He could see Catlett, the white silk robe, lying in weeds and scraggly bushes, more than a hundred feet from here, not moving. The Bear came up to stand next to him and Chili said, “Jesus, how’d that happen?”
The Bear started taking bolts and nuts, old used ones, out of his pants pockets. Wiping each one on his shirt before dropping it over the side, he said, “Beats the shit out of me.”
Looking at sky, Catlett knew everything he should have known while he was still up there looking at Chili Palmer instead of the Bear, the Bear too dumb to have the idea himself, shit, he had given the Bear the idea and the Bear had come in his house last night, even told him he did, but he kept seeing Chili Palmer instead of the Bear. Even knowing he was going to do them both he had listened to the Bear
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’cause it sounded like movies and he said yeah, not taking even half a minute to look at it good . . . But, shit, even if he had taken the half a minute and said forget it and then did them both, he wouldn’t know what the Bear had done to his deck, no, he’d walk out there some night hearing bossa nova or the nice sound of that girl laughing, look over the rail at the lit-up swimming pool down there in the dark, movie people having some fun, knowing how to live. He believed he was almost in their yard, but couldn’t turn his head to look, couldn’t move, couldn’t feel nothing . . .
28
The way Chili told it when he got back to Karen’s and they were in the kitchen: “He fell off his sun deck and was killed.”
She said, “He fell off his sun deck.”
“The railing gave way on him for some reason. When he leaned on it.”
She said, “The railing gave way . . .”
“Yeah, and he fell. I’d say about a hunnerd feet.”
“You went down, looked at him?”
“The Bear did. I never would’ve made it, it’s steep.”
“It was an accident?” Karen said. “I mean you didn’t hit him or push him and he happened to fall?”
“I’ll take a polygraph neither one of us touched him.”
“But you didn’t call the police.”
“Not with a suitcase full of cocaine in the house. Also he had that gun in his hand. He still wanted to shoot me.”
Karen poured their coffee. She sat across from him at the kitchen table and watched him put two spoons of sugar in his and stir it slowly, carefully,
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smoking a cigarette. He looked up at her. She thought he was going to ask if she was still watching him, but he didn’t. He smiled, stirring his coffee. He said after a moment, not smiling now, “You think I might’ve done it. I say I didn’t, but you still think I might’ve. What can I tell you?”
Karen didn’t say anything. He was a cool guy. Or seemed cool because she didn’t know him and maybe never would. She thought, All right, the guy fell off his sun deck. She said to Chili, “Were you scared?”
“You bet I was scared.”
“You don’t act like it.”
“I was scared then, not now. How long you want me to be scared?”
There was a silence. She heard him blow on his coffee and take a sip.
“The meeting’s at two-thirty,” Karen said. “Harry wants to pick us up.”
They sat around the coffee table in the living room part of Elaine’s office at Tower waiting for Michael to get off the phone. Chili listened to Harry saying that as soon as this guy told him the story he knew they had a picture. Elaine saying that from what she’d heard so far it did sound off-trail, a shylock not your usual good guy. Harry saying that was the beauty of it, a hard-on type metamorphosized by his love of a woman. Elaine saying she hoped he didn’t soften up too much, become limp. Chili thinking, Jesus Christ. Michael came over from Elaine’s desk and took a seat next to Karen on the hard sofa. Chili, in his dark-blue suit, looked at Michael in his beat-up flight jacket thinking, What if it’s that same fuckin jacket was at Vesuvio’s?
They waited while Michael put his hand on Karen’s leg, told her she looked great, then started explaining to everybody why he was leaving his agent who—they wouldn’t believe this—could not acquire a property Michael wanted, could not make a deal with the writer, and if an agent couldn’t make a deal with a writer, for Christ sake . . . Until Chili said, “You want to talk about that one or this one?” It got a surprised look from Michael and Harry, deadpan reactions from Karen and Elaine, and the meeting started.
* * *
Elaine: “Mr. Palmer?”
Chili: “Okay. Open at the drycleaning shop. You see the shylock talking to Fay, the wife.”
Michael: “I thought the guy was an agent.”
Chili: “I changed him back to a drycleaner.”
Michael: “You still don’t have a script?”
Karen: “They’re working on the moral dilemma.”
Michael: “That writes itself. I want to know what happens.”
Chili: “Yeah, that’s what I’m telling you.”
Michael: “Let’s go to the third act and then come back if we want. You build to a climactic scene. What is it?”
Chili: “You’re referring to the action, with Ray Carlo.”
Michael: “Who’s Ray Carlo?”
Chili: “He was Bones, I changed his name. Okay, Randy finally catches up with Leo . . .”
Michael: “Wait. Who the fuck is Randy?”
Chili: “Randy’s the shylock. You need a nice-guy name. You don’t want to call him Lefty, Cockeye, Joe Loop, one of those.”
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Elaine: “Sonny’s nice.”
Chili: “It’s not bad. I know a Lucky, a Jojo, Momo, Jimmy Cap, Cowboy, Sucky, Chooch . . .”
Elaine: “Sucky?”
Michael: “Okay, I’m Randy, for the moment anyway. What happens?”
Chili: “They catch up with Leo the drycleaner, Randy leans on him a little, not much, and Leo tells them, okay, the dough’s out at the airport in a locker. So Randy and Fay have the key and are at the moral dilemma part when Ray Carlo shows up. Actually he’s already there, searching the place when they get home from Leo’s. Carlo, he’s got a gun, takes the key offa Randy and Randy says okay, you win, the dough’s out at the airport. Ray Carlo leaves to go get it and Randy calls the FBI.”
Michael: “All he’s doing is picking up money. What would they arrest him for?”
Chili: “They’d at least give him a hard time. Randy knows this and wants to see it, so he and Fay go out to the airport. They see the bust and look at each other with surprise, ’cause what’s in that locker is not money but cocaine. You understand? Leo was setting them up, or anybody that got on to him.”
Michael, frowning: “That’s how it ends?”
Chili: “No, you still have Leo.”
Michael: “I thought Carlo was the heavy.”
Chili, noticing the way Karen was staring at him: “That’s what you’re suppose to think. No, that’s the surprise. Leo’s the bad guy, from the beginning.”
Elaine: “Good. I like Leo.”
Harry: “Leo has delusions of grandeur, wants to be famous, hobnob with movie stars, entertainers.
Elaine: “He could be fun to watch, while the other guy’s just a heavy.”
Michael: “Leo’s a schmuck.”
Elaine: “He’s sort of schmucky, that’s all right.”
Karen: “He could have some funny lines, out of desperation.”
Michael: “Wait a minute—”
Chili: “Yeah, he could be funny. I still think, though, he oughta fall off the balcony.”
There was a silence.
Michael, quietly: “Okay . . . what balcony?”
Chili: “Leo’s apartment, twenty floors up overlooking Sunset. He’s with this starlet, they’re drinking, doing coke, when Fay and Randy walk in. Basically what happens, here’s Leo and here’s the guy he’s been paying for years and was always scared to death of. But right now Leo’s flying on coke and booze and doesn’t know enough to be scared of thing, this little drycleaner. What he wants to do is put the shylock down—you know what I mean? Dishonor him, this guy he thinks of as a hard-on, a regular mob kind of guy.” Chili paused. “Suddenly Leo jumps up on the cement railing of the balcony and says, ‘Let’s see if you got the nerve to do this, tough guy.’ The starlet screams. Fay yells at him to get down. The shylock doesn’t do nothing, he watches, ’cause he knows this guy basically is a loser. He watches Leo take three steps and that’s it, off he goes, screaming all the way down twenty floors to the pavement.” any
There was a silence again.
Michael: “That’s how it ends?”
Chili: “After that, they find the money in the closet. They have another moral dilemma talk, a short one, and take off for Mexico in a brand-new Mercedes.”
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Michael, to Elaine: “You know what I do in this picture? I stand around and watch.”
Chili: “You want to shoot somebody? Or, hey, you want to play Leo? Take the dive?”
Elaine: “I don’t know why, but Leo fascinates me. The little drycleaner with all that money. I’d like to see what he does with it.”
Harry: “Sure, the guy must think he’s died and gone to heaven.”
Michael: “Elaine—”
Elaine: “He wouldn’t have to take the dive, would he?”
Karen: “Not if he lives on the ground floor.”
Michael: “Is it a comedy? At this point, who knows?” Grins. “I can see why you don’t have a script. All you have is an idea, and you know what ideas are worth.”
Chili: “Michael?”
Michael: “I’m going to London tomorrow. New York a few days and then grab the Concorde. But I’ll put my writer on it first. By the time I get back next month we should have a treatment we can play with and then go right into a first draft.”
Chili: “Michael, look at me.”
Michael, grinning: “Right. That’s what it’s all about, right there, the look.”
Chili: “You don’t mind my saying, Michael, I don’t see you as the shylock.”
Michael: “Really . . . Why not?”
Chili: “You’re too short.”
* * *
Harry waited till they were in the car, driving along the street of sound stages toward the main gate.
“You have to be out of your mind, talk to a guaranteed box-office star like that. You blew any chance of getting him.”
Chili, in the backseat, kept quiet. It was too hard to explain why during the meeting he started seeing Michael as Leo, thinking that if he wanted to play Leo, great; and after that couldn’t see him as the shylock. It had nothing to do with the fact he didn’t like the guy or trust him or would never loan him money, the guy was still a great actor.
Karen said, “Harry, we knew going in he’d back out sooner or later, it’s what he does.”
“Then what was the meeting for?”
“Elaine, she loves the whole idea, except the ending. You heard her, she thinks Pacino would be perfect.”
Chili said, “He’s kinda short too, isn’t he?”
“They all are,” Karen said. “You shoot up.”
They drove through the gate and followed a side street to Hollywood Boulevard.
“What if,” Chili said, “Leo hops on the railing and makes a speech. Says how he sweated, worked his ass off all his life as a drycleaner, but he’s had these few weeks of living like a movie star and now he can die happy. In other words he commits suicide. Steps off the balcony and the audience walks out in tears. What do you think?”
Karen said, “Uh-huh . . .” Harry said he wanted a drink and Karen said that wasn’t a bad idea. Chili didn’t say anything, giving it some more thought. Fuckin endings, man, they weren’t as easy as they looked.
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