The Devil_s Workshop

BUDDY
Chapter 17

Buddy Brazil shot his Porsche Spyder out the front gate at Paramount Studios and hung a wide right, barely missing a westbound bus on Melrose Avenue. He was on his cellphone screaming at his assistant, Alicia Profit, because he had no idea where the Santa Monica morgue was.

"It's in fucking Santa Monica is all I know!" he yelled impatiently. "That's all the guy said, 'the Santa Monica morgue.' Do I have to do everything? Call 'em, get me an address, and get back to meShit!" he said, as he accidentally ran a red light at La Brea.

Buddy Brazil was loaded. He had done two lines in his bathroom at the studio before he got the call telling him that his only son, whom he barely knew, was dead. It would be another twenty minutes before he got level. Driving when he was wired had already cost him his black Testarossa and his license. He had flipped the Italian sports car on Angeles Crest Highway, then had bricked the substance abuse test. As a result, he was driving without the permission of the State of California.

He decided to go down Fairfax and get on the Santa Monica Freeway, south of Olympic.

He wasn't sure how he felt about Mike's death; lately all his introspections were puzzles. His personal feelings had become more hidden from him than his asshole. Of course, he reasoned, he'd just done two lines of primo rocket fuel, blocking some neurons, along with his faltering internal voice.

He got to Fairfax and turned left. The guy at the morgue had mentioned that the family physician would be permitted to witness the autopsy, so Buddy snatched up his cellphone and called his pool house out at Malibu. The phone was answered on the twentieth ring. Dr. Gary Iverson's voice sounded like he'd just been dragged up from drug hell.

"Fuck," Gary croaked, as he answered the phone, then dropped it and got it back again. "What is it? Who is it?"

"Jesus, Gary, it's three-thirty in the afternoon. What'd you take last night?" Buddy yelled over the rushing California air that was slipstreaming over the windshield into the sports car.

"Buddy… geeze, just a minute. I'm putting the phone down. I'll be right back."

"No! Don't put the fuckin' phone down, Gary. I need help now! Sit up and put your feet on the floor. Don't zone out on me, man."

There was a long pause, and then he heard Gary Iverson's voice again. "Jesus, my head is buzzing. What a cocktail…"

"What'd you and Ginger take? You gotta get straight. I need you. I need a doctor."

Dr. Gary Iverson had been prescribing most of Buddy's drugs since Buddy'd flipped the Testarossa. Buddy had pulled every favor he had in city government to keep the D. A. from filing DUI charges against him. As a result, he had given up street dealers and cultivated Dr. Iverson's friendship.

They had met at a party at Charlie Sheen's, where Gary was set up in the bar, prescribing the alphabet, everything from Atarax to Xanax. It was too good for Buddy to believe. Later that night, Buddy had driven a wasted Dr. Iverson home. When he found out that Gary had lost his residence to his ex-wife, he moved the doctor into his pool house, where Iverson took root like a mushroom fungus, writing prescriptions faster than freeway graffiti. In return, Buddy got the geeky doctor laid with A-line hookers from Heidi's old stable. He told Gary they were actresses. When Dr. Iverson had become so unreliable that he had lost most of his practice and was in danger of losing his medical license, Buddy paid for him to take the cure at Windsong Ranch in Montana. Buddy had detoxed there three times himself.

The doctor had returned from drug camp twenty-eight days later, freshly pressed and ready to go, and they had taken up where they'd left off. It was an ideal solution for Buddy, who could now get his prescription of morphine or Seconal or gamma-hydroxyl barbiturates by simply walking down the garden path. Buddy had neatly switched from street drugs, with their potential for serious medical and legal risk, to Dr. Iverson's squeaky-clean drugstore prescriptions.

The problems came from a totally unexpected place. Buddy had agreed to fund a hair transplant for the balding doctor. After Windsong, Dr. Iverson had cut back to a baby habit, taking only sporadic hits off of someone's ganja stick, or doing an occasional half-line of white ghost. But the pain from the transplant had quickly driven him to self-prescribe some heady painkillers. He started shooting Toradol, which caused him depression, so he began taking Prozac for mood swings, but that caused anxiety, so he shot a few loads of Vistaril, and so on. Now Gary Iverson could barely haul his drugged ass and new plugs of bushy gray hair out of bed to piss. Worse still, Buddy was having trouble getting the doctor's eyes to focus long enough to write his own prescriptions. He began to fondly remember the good old days when he could just meet his dealer and get hooked up in some gas station bathroom.

"Mike's dead," Buddy said to Gary, going for shock value and getting nothing.

"Who the hell is Mike?"

"You're sleeping in his bedroom, asshole. Michael my son… he's dead! They sent his body to the morgue in Santa Monica. I'm on my way there now."

"Oh," Gary said, and from his tone, Buddy knew that was going to be the whole reaction.

"You've got to meet me there on the double. Get out of bed and get truckin'. If you're too zooted, have Consuelo drive you."

"What's the hurry?"

"He's in the Santa Monica morgue. We gotta go! I don't know where it is yet, so get the address out of the phone book!"

"Is he deceased or have they got some new back-from-the-dead Code Blue unit that's gonna revive him?"

Shit, he's right, Buddy thought, and backed his foot off the gas. "Look, Gary, I wanna know why my son is dead, and I don't want those county clucks sawing him up. I want him… y'know, in one piece for the funeral… I'm thinking like, doing the whole deal. A temple funeral, sit Shiva at the beach house, invite everybody. You gotta meet me at the morgue, kill this idea they got of doing an autopsy. It's against my religion to desecrate the body," Buddy said, forgetting to mention he hadn't been to temple in ten years, not counting Bar Mitzvahs. "You gotta do this. You know how to talk to doctors."

"My scalp is on fire," Gary whined.

"Don't go back to sleep, Gary. You go back to sleep, I'm gonna evict you. You'll be writing prescriptions under a fucking bridge someplace." He hung up.

Before he got to Olympic, Alicia Profit called back and gave him the address of the morgue. "They said you can't get in there. It's not open to the public."

"I ain't the public!" he snapped maniacally, and hung up.

The morgue was on Lincoln Boulevard, halfway between Wilshire and Olympic. He parked in an emergency lot in a space marked "Doctors Only" and walked toward the hulking five-story concrete structure that looked like it had been designed by the same people who made Lego.

He had still not focused on the loss of his only son. He was sort of hoping he'd get some kind of emotional reaction, maybe even cry, so his faltering opinion of himself wouldn't take another direct hit. So far, he felt nothing. Of course, he told himself, he barely knew his son. Mike had been a love child with a beautiful but vapid model named Tova Conte. She didn't want the baby because it's hard to screw Italian royalty with a kid sucking on the other tit. For almost six years, Buddy had legally avoided being Mike's father. Then Tova hired Gloria Allred. That evil cunt had chased him with papers until they made him give blood. His DNA had sealed his parental obligation. Mike had become his legally designated offspring, which meant Buddy now had to pay for boarding school and summer camp, while Tova traveled through Europe bone-dancing with her fop princes. His ex had eventually died in a speedboat accident off the coast of Cannes. It didn't even make USA Today.

After Mike had spent two abysmal years at Pepperdine, Buddy finally agreed to let him move into the pool house. It lasted for six months. They barely saw each other, because Buddy had been in production on Silver and Lead, which was ten million over budget after only three weeks of shooting. He was practically sleeping on the set. During that summer, Mike had crashed the Porsche on Mulholland, trashed all his front teeth in the accident, and been busted three times for possession. Soon there was a small tent city of vice cops with long lenses living in the hills behind the Malibu house because of Mike's drug parties. That surveillance had inevitably overlapped to Buddy, who was now also under police observation. Buddy explained to his son that he had to be more discreet, but Mike just told him to eat shit, a flavor Buddy had never acquired a taste for despite twenty years in Hollywood.

Buddy entered the county building and found the morgue on the third floor. He'd approved half a dozen morgue sets in his thirty or so movies. He always thought morgues should be low-lit dungeons with no sunlight. The theatrically dead needed low lighting and dank windowless privacy. This morgue was sunny and bright.

He stopped a woman doctor and told her he wanted to talk to somebody about a deceased: Michael Brazil.

"Are you here to view his body and make an identification?" she asked.

"Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm doing. An identification." He was now well off the cocaine train and seesawing into a miserable paranoid snap. His mood swings were getting bigger and wider; he knew he had to head for another detox before he began hitting psychological curbs instead of concrete ones.

Buddy waited in the brightly lit human chop shop while the woman went to summon the right person to help him. After a minute, a fifty-year-old heavy-set man came out of a door at the end of the hall. "I'm Dr. Rackovitch," the white-coated, gray-haired man said.

"I'd like to make an identification," Buddy said. "Michael Juan Brazil." He'd always hated the "Juan," sitting like an uneducated brazero in the middle of an otherwise acceptable name. Tova had put it there to honor her liberal leanings and Hispanic mother.

"I'm afraid that's not going to be possible," the doctor said. "We've been contacted by a doctor of biology at USC and warned of extenuating circumstances. The County Medical Examiner is coming over this evening to personally conduct the autopsy. The body is in bio-containment."

"What're you talking about, asswipe? What extenuating circumstances?" Buddy snapped.

"You won't get anywhere talking to me like that."

"You know who I am?" Buddy said, glowering at this bone-cutter, who was obviously such a schmendrick they'd only let him practice on dead people.

"I'm afraid who you are really isn't the point."

"I'm Buddy Brazilhe said, spitting it out. "Buddy Brazil? Movies? I wanna see my son's body. This is going to happen, so let's not shed blood over it." Buddy didn't really want to see Mike's body, but he hated anybody telling him he couldn't.

"It's not going to happen, Mr. Brazil. Leave, and in a day or so, we'll release the body to the next of kin. If that's you, fine."

Buddy moved to the payphone in the lobby, which was only a few feet behind him. "Okay, who gets me past you? Huh? Who's your scout leader?"

"Nobody gets you past me," Dr. Rackovitch said.

"That's not the way the world works, buster. Could the Governor of the State of California press your grapes?"

"We have reason to believe your son may have died of a highly contagious unknown fatal disease. You can call the Governor, the U. S. President, or the Crown Prince of Liechtenstein, but that body stays in quarantine until we find out what killed him."

"Is that supposed to be a joke? The fucking Crown Prince of Liechtenstein?" Buddy shrieked, thinking he remembered reading that Tova had actually gone out with the asshole. Why had this doctor mentioned that? Was it some kindai plot? Was this some crazy plan aimed at driving him nuts? Could the world be that small? Or was he just paranoid from all the drugs?