Popcorn

Chapter TwentySix

Detectives Jay and Crawford got the surprise of their lives.

A few moments earlier, just when Brooke was confronting Wayne, the two officers had turned their unmarked car into Bruce’s drive. The main gate was open, which aroused their suspicions immediately, and they had driven up the long gravel road slowly and with caution.

‘Nobody leaves their gate open these days,’ Crawford opined nervously.

As they turned the last corner and quietly halted before the vast frontage of Bruce’s mansion, they both knew that Jay’s hunch had been right and that they had found the Mall Murderers. There were three cars slewed casually outside the house, Bruce’s Lamborghini, Farrah’s Lexus, with FARRAH spelt out in silver on the numberplate, and a big old ‘57 Chevy.

Very gently Crawford slipped the car into reverse and pulled back round the corner and out of sight.

‘Detective Jay to control,’ Jay breathed into his radio, struggling to contain his excitement. ‘Request urgent support.’

No sooner had he said the words than behind and above them they heard a rumble which turned almost immediately into a roar. They turned round to look out of the rear window.

‘Son of a bitch!’ exclaimed Crawford. ‘That was quick.’

A convoy of trucks and cars was piling through Bruce’s gate. Some had the markings of various TV news stations on them, some bore the badge of Los Angeles ’s finest. The noise of chopper blades joined the cacophony as a couple of helicopters appeared, swooping overhead. Both aircraft were owned by the media; the police had taken a little longer to scramble theirs, but they would be arriving soon.

The two detectives watched from their car, and Wayne watched from the window, as the convoy surged up the long drive and spread out dramatically on to the immaculate lawns (crushing the sprinkler system) and started to disgorge hundreds of people. Within no more than three minutes the quiet solitude that Jay and Crawford had so recently enjoyed was just an impossible memory. There was a marksman behind every wall and hedge, and a news reporter plus his or her crew on what seemed like every available piece of open ground. The only things missing were the gawping sadacts who like to stand in the background waving and grinning whenever an event is occurring and news reports are being filed.

Within the besieged house, Bruce joined Wayne, uninvited, at the window. Suddenly, just when he had nearly given up, hope was dawning. They were no longer alone.

‘They’ve found you,’ he said ‘like they were always going to.’

‘Found me Bruce?’ Wayne responded without taking his eyes off the extraordinary amount of activity going on outside. ‘Found me? They didn’t find me, man, I told them where I was. I told them to get on up here right now.’

Wayne turned away from the window, grabbed the TV remote control and began channelhopping.

It was not difficult to find what he was looking for. Basically, the choice was either kids’ morning cartoons or Bruce’s house. It divided up at about twenty channels each.

Wayne flicked through the news shows.

‘… notorious mass murderers, Wayne Hudson and his beautiful young female companion, Scout…’ the first channel said, its reporter standing against a backdrop of Bruce’s prime orange grove.

‘They never know my whole name,’ Scout remarked petulantly, although secretly she was delighted to be called beautiful by a genuine Hollywood cable TV news reporter.

Wayne flipped to one of the network channels, the Today Show, or Good Morning America.

‘… the criminals appear to have taken refuge at the home of Bruce Delamitri, the renowned filmmaker, the man who is said to have inspired their brutal killing rampage…’ The immaculately groomed young reporter was making her report from beside Bruce’s pool.

‘Daddy, that’s our pool!’ Velvet exclaimed in astonishment.

Bruce stared at the screen. He scarcely knew what to think. There were so many things to think. The danger his daughter was in… Brooke bleeding to death on his carpet… His murdered agent and the security guard… Wayne ’s inexplicable behaviour in telling the authorities of his whereabouts…

But despite all these thoughts, any one of which could have stood some considerable mulling over, Bruce’s paramount preoccupation at that point was one of intellectual outrage. ‘They’re blaming me. Jesus! Those facile morons are blaming me!’

‘I sure hope so, man,’ Wayne remarked, and hit another channel.

‘… Mr Delamitri, last seen leaving the Oscars ceremony in the company of nude model Brooke Daniels…’ A couple of photos from Brooke’s Playboy spread appeared on the screen. Somebody at the TV station been doing some excellent and very speedy picture research.

Astonishingly, despite the fact that Brooke’s whole body was in shock and she was already semidelirious, she was still able to take in the sense of what was being broadcast. ‘I’m a fucking actress!’ she gasped from her position on the floor.

‘Keep it down, Brooke, I’m watching TV here,’ Wayne said, and flipped to another channel, where another immaculate, hairsprayed head appeared, this time standing in front of Bruce’s garages.

‘… leaving a trail of pillage, mayhem and death, murdering indiscriminately in the manner of the fictitious antiheroes of Bruce Delamitri’s Oscarwinning movie, Ordinary Americans…’

‘They’re blaming me! Jesus Christ, they are blaming me…’ Bruce was astonished. This reporter was in front of his garage, literally only yards from where he himself stood, broadcasting live from outside his house, where he was being held prisoner by armed killers, and she was blaming him. Blaming him for the mayhem going on, mayhem which, as he had been assuring people for many months, had nothing to do with him.

Wayne changed channel again.

‘Homer, I’ve been reading Bart’s report card,’ said Marge. ‘It says our boy is academically challenged.’

‘Really?’ said Homer, drinking some beer. ‘Academically challenged, huh? That sounds good. He probably gets it from me.’

‘It mean’s he’s stupid, Dad,’ said Lisa.

‘Eat my shorts,’ said Bart.

‘Sorry about that,’ said Wayne, and flipped to another channel.

‘Leave it on,’ Scout protested. ‘I like The Simpsons and I don’t think I ever saw that one.’

‘Later, precious pie.’

Another reporter was speaking out of the screen. ‘… and so these two “Ordinary Americans” have taken refuge in the home of the man who foresaw their coming, who, some might even argue, brought them forth…’

Bruce shouted at the TV, ‘Nature makes killers not movies!’

Wayne turned the television off.

‘Well, I guess if you’re just going to keep on talking we might as well have the damn TV off. Can’t hear it none, anyways.’

Farrah spoke up. It had taken her some time to recover from the terror of staring down Wayne ’s gun barrel, but her spirit was returning. There were already hundreds of police officers outside. Maybe they were going to make it after all.

‘Look,’ she said, lighting a very long, very thin cigarette, made with pink paper and a golden filter, ‘if the cops are here you can’t escape-’

‘I told you already, lady, I don’t want to escape. I asked them to come here. I called them when I came down to get you.’

Bruce could make no sense of this at all. ‘You called the cops?’

‘Well, no, as a matter of fact I called NBC, told ‘em to get all the stations down here. I guess they must have called the cops as well. It don’t matter none. Me and Scout here are used to ignoring cops.’

There were now so many cops in the grounds of Bruce and Farrah’s mansion that Wayne would have had to have been Buddha himself in order to ignore them. There were nearly as many cops as journalists, and more were arriving all the time. Detectives Jay and Crawford passed them as, with heavy hearts, they themselves left the scene of the action.

‘Nothing more for us to do here,’ Jay had been forced to admit.

It was a bitter pill to swallow. Having pulled off a brilliant piece of intuitive police work, locating two desperate and elusive felons, he was now forced to accept that virtually the whole force had been only seconds behind him. There was nothing left for them to contribute and so, as the helicopter and trucks disgorged squad after squad of paramilitary human gunships, the two detectives retired from the scene with what dignity they could muster.

One of the helicopters swooping overhead contained the chief officer of the LAPD, and he was in a hurry. Chief Cornell had been woken with the thrilling news that the Mall Murderers had Bruce Delamitri and his family held hostage in the Delamitri mansion. Chief Cornell had immediately decided to take charge of the operation himself.

He had no choice. He desperately needed the air time.

Thirty years before, when he had joined the police, Cornell had not done so in order to turn into a showbiz tart. But that was what had happened. He, who as a boy had dreamt of catching crooks, now spent half his time having lunch with them. In fact he had become one himself. His actions were no longer governed by the need to uphold justice as laid down by law. They were governed by the necessity of balancing the various social and political consequences of whatever action he took. He wasn’t a cop any more, he was a politician – and a crooked one at that. All city officials were, whether they liked it or not, because the whole sad, crumbling edifice was built on lies and halftruths. Nobody could tell it straight any more because there was no straight to tell. Every group, be it defined racially, financially, geographically, sexually, by religion or by choice of knitwear, had its own truth. And that truth was diametrically opposed to everyone else’s truth. More than that, it was threatened by everyone else’s truth. The city was out of control and the police chief’s number one job, like that of every politician, was to persuade people it wasn’t.

For that he needed profile. He needed air time.

And today he was going to get it. The chopper landed and Cornell stepped masterfully and purposefully into a barrage of clicking cameras. He was a general in a war zone, and beyond the cameras he could see the might of his army manoeuvring into position. It felt good. This was a dream come true. Suddenly, when he had least dared to hope for it (which is to say, three months before the city elections), Cornell had a real, one hundred per cent macho, shitkickin’, buttwhippin’, asskissin’ siege to deal with. A genuine proper piece of highrolling, highoctane, highprofile police work, which above all, above double all, above all and hallelujah, was race free! A racefree crime! In election year! Chief Cornell thanked his stars. He thanked his God. He would have happily conceded that somewhere in his youth or childhood he must have done something good, because all his Christmases (or holiday seasons, as the city now referred to them) had come at once. For the first time in a long time he was dealing with a crime of citywide, statewide, national and international significance in which race was not an issue. He had never dared to dream he would see its like again.

Chief Cornell was himself black. He had experienced plenty of racism in his life and he hated it. But his particular private and current hatred of racism was to do not with his colour but with his job. He was the city’s top cop. He was proud of that and he wanted to do a good job, but racism, from whichever hue it emanated, had made that impossible. Proper police work was no longer an option available to him. Every day he encountered what appeared to be openandshut cases. The man killed the woman, the gang beat the guy. Simple, it would seem, but no, then it turns out that the main protagonists are of different races and suddenly the openandshut case turns into an impenetrable maze in which what people actually do is irrelevant. What matters is what the jury, and ultimately the public, feel about it.

But now, glory of glories, he had a racefree case. Victims and villains were the same colour. Imagine, Chief Cornell thought, if those had been black or Asian punks in there, shooting white Playboy centrefolds and holding little white girls hostage. Absolutely everything about the case would be different. Nearly as bad would be if the director or the model had been black and the punks white. Either way, the case would already be a political football, there would be pickets and protestors at the gates. It did not bear thinking about.

But the chief’s luck was in. Fate had delivered to him the perfect case in which to do, and above all be seen to do, a bit of proper policing, and by hell, Hades, glory and damnation, he was going to make the most of it.

Unfortunately for Chief Cornell, there was another chief on the scene and he was equally excited. Brad Murray, Chief of NBC News and Current Affairs, recognized the Delamitri siege as probably the sexiest bit of news and current affairs it had ever been his extreme good fortune to preside over.

‘If this one wasn’t true,’ Murray remarked to his gorgeous power PA as they stepped off their own helicopter, ‘I’d never have dared to invent it.’

But it was true, and what was more the principal villain appeared to understand the central and overriding principle of news and current affairs: that the most important element in any drama is television.

In an armoured police command vehicle the two chiefs met: an irresistible force and an immovable object. Their quarrel was over who should put the call through to Bruce Delamitri’s house and open up negotiations with the villains. Understandably, Chief Cornell felt that it was a matter for the authorities. Chief Murray, however, reminded Cornell that Wayne Hudson had called the networks, not the cops, and had been most specific that he wanted to talk to a top news man.

A decade earlier, Cornell might have had a couple of his constables throw the NBC guy off the truck but not now. Not with elections looming, not with a city perpetually on edge. The police chief knew he had to cooperate with the media every bit as much as they had to cooperate with him, and so a compromise was reached. Having instructed AT amp;T to block all incoming calls to the Delamitri mansion (every acquaintance Bruce had in LA was of course trying to call him), the two chiefs agreed that they would call Wayne together, on a party line.

As it happened, they need not have bothered arguing about it because Wayne did all the talking anyway.

‘OK, shut up and listen up,’ he barked into the phone, without even bothering to enquire who was calling. ‘This is Wayne Hudson, the Mall Murderer. Now me and my baby are in control here, you understand? We got Bruce Delamitri, we got Brooke Daniels, who is an actress by the way – you tell your reporters that, you hear? Also we got Bruce’s wife and their daughter, Velvet, who is as cute as a button and will make very good TV, whatever I decide to do with her. Now you just give me a number right now where I can call you back when I’m ready with my demands.’

Police Chief Cornell gave the number, and having done so began to try and negotiate. He was, after all, trained in this type of thing.

‘OK, Wayne,’ he said. ‘I think you want to make a deal.’

‘What I want is for you to shut the fuck up, OK?’ said Wayne. ‘I will talk to you when I’m ready, and when I do it will be me that says what’s what. Understand? You know what I’m capable of. Don’t call back now. Meantime, you have a nice day.’

The police chief and the NBC chief put their respective phones down and looked at each other.

‘Guess we’ll have to wait, Chief,’ said the cop. ‘Maybe this would be a good time for them to put a little makeup on me?’

‘You got it, Chief,’ said the newsman.

Inside the house, Wayne too had replaced the receiver.

‘What did you mean about me being good TV?’ Velvet asked, her voice understandably rather shaky. ‘What are you going to do to me?’

‘It’s OK, baby,’ said her mother, though it clearly wasn’t. ‘Are you holding us hostage?’

Wayne poured himself another drink; he felt he’d earned it. Scout was still sipping at her first crème de menthe. She was not a big boozer.

‘In a manner of speaking, you’re hostages,’ said Wayne. ‘Basically, what I got here is a plan.’

‘ Wayne ’s had a plan right from the start,’ Scout said proudly.

‘What plan?’ Bruce was angry. He shouted at Wayne, ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Well, I guess a plan to avoid being executed for murder, Bruce. I can’t think of an agenda more immediate than that for people in the position me and Scout find ourselves in.’

Brooke was still conscious. Velvet had briefly attended the Guides during her extremely short childhood, and knew a little first aid. Showing a composure that would have surprised her classmates and teachers, she had done her best to manoeuvre Brooke into the correct position and pad her wound with cushions, so that for the time being at least Brooke was still capable of following the conversation.

‘Plan? Fuck you,’ she said. ‘You’re going to die, you bastards. You don’t stand a chance.’

‘Don’t talk,’ said Velvet. ‘Your wound is real big and any physical activity at all will screw any chance of the blood starting to clot.’ She turned to Wayne. ‘She’s got to have a doctor. Can’t we ask them to send in a doctor?’

‘Maybe. I don’t know yet,’ Wayne replied.

‘But she’ll die.’

‘Miss Delamitri, I thought you might have understood by now that I don’t mind none if people get dead.’

Bruce was still standing at the window. Media cars and trucks and police vehicles continued to pour through his gate. He had eight acres of grounds and it was all already crowded. Incredible. A veritable village had sprung up in twenty minutes. Satellite dishes, tripods, fabulous hairdos, fourwheeldrives, a million metres of electric cable. The hum of the massed mobile generators could be heard for miles.

Bruce struggled to get a handle on what was happening to him.

His security guard was dead, Karl was dead. Brooke was dying. He’d just won an Oscar and the entire LA media community plus half its police force were camped out on his lawn. What was more, the man who had brought all these things about (except the Oscar, although even that was apparently connected, according to the TV) was standing in Bruce’s lounge, calmly sipping Bruce’s bourbon and covering the room with a machinegun. How could all this have happened? And in so few short hours?

What was going on?

‘What’s your plan, Wayne?’ Bruce asked. ‘Please tell me your plan.’

‘OK, Bruce, I’ll tell you. As you know, Scout here and me have committed murder and mayhem across four states. We can’t deny it, ‘cos we done it and it’s true. Now I wish I could tell you that every one of those corpses we left lying all over America deserved to die. I wish I could say it was like the movies, where rapists, rednecks, bad cops, hypocrites and childabusers get just what the fuck they deserve. But it just ain’t so.’

Scout felt that perhaps Wayne was being a little hard on himself. Why should all the burden of proof lie with them?

‘They might have been all those things, Wayne,’ she said. ‘We never knew any of them long enough to find out.’

‘Well, whatever, honey. The point I’m making here is that we are in deep shit. They know who we are and they’re going to get us. We’ve been caught on about one hundred security videos. On top of which, Scout could not resist sending her picture to her hometown local paper, for which I forgive her, even though it was dumb.’

‘They all said I was trash and wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans. Well, I showed them.’

‘Yes, you did, baby doll. You sure showed them. So basically what I’m saying here, Bruce, is that whatever we do we are going to get caught damn soon now, and when we do I guess we have a higher than average chance of getting fried in the chair.’

Brooke gurgled at this from her position on the carpet. A gurgle that could be roughly translated as saying, ‘The sooner the better, pal.’

Wayne ignored her. ‘And that, Bruce, is where you come in.’

‘What do you mean? What can I do?’

‘We need you, Bruce. You’re going to save our lives.’

‘You’re our saviour,’ Scout added. ‘That’s why we came to you. You can make it different.’

‘Give them what they want, Bruce. Anything – just give it to them!’ This was from Farrah, for whom hope continued to dawn. Was it possible that they would be able to buy their way out of this? And did Bruce have insurance for holdups?

‘I don’t know what they want!’ Bruce shouted at her. He swung back to Wayne. ‘What do you want? Tell me, I’ll give it to you, whatever it is.’

‘We need an excuse, Bruce.’ Wayne said.

‘What we’re looking for here is someone else to take the blame.’