Dazzle The Complete Unabridged Trilogy (67 page)

But now it was he who was damning the house, all five
vertical acres of sparsely vegetated grounds, the sixteen huge
rooms and four-car garage, the granite-tiled patio surrounding the heated swimming pool—he was cursing, in fact, everything
and everyone. Angrily he watched his beautiful house crack
neatly in half, one part sliding piecemeal down the steep hill
side, the other still perched precariously on the hill. For a
long, intensely sad moment he had a child's-eye view of the
rear of a dollhouse—three stories of exposed, cut-away rooms:
the sweeping, monumental staircase, the dining room, and the
bedroom where the mud was still gushing through to fall in a
perfect brown waterfall down into the canyon bed three hun
dred feet below.

'Goddamn sons of bitches who sold me this fucking place!'
he thundered. 'I'll sue their goddamn asses off!'

'My watch!' the girl sobbed quietly. 'My clothes.' She stood there pathetically trying to cover her exposed breasts and the
blonde patch of hair between her thighs. 'All of my best things
were in that bedroom!' she wailed, her teeth chattering and
her body racked by shivers from the cold.

'Fuck you, you two-bit whoring thief!' Ziolko bellowed. 'It's
my goddamn house I'm worried about!'

Ziolko and the girl, staring from their ringside spot beside
the Chrysler, watched awestruck as, with a doomsday rumble
and a decidedly Cecil B. de Mille effect, the remainder of the
house cracked into four giant pieces, alternately sliding and
somersaulting down the rain-drenched hillside. Tons of
molten mud slid down after it, a slow-moving river to bury it
forever.

Slowly Louis Ziolko lifted his rain-and-tear-streaked face.
Abruptly he threw back his head and began to laugh uproari
ously, the rain pouring down his face, not caring that the girl
thought he was a psycho bound for the loony bin.

What a farce!

Hell, now that he'd had a minute to think things out, they
weren't all
that
bad after all! At least he'd managed to obtain
this grand house in the first place, he still had his enviable
position as the number-one director in a town full of directors,
and as such, wielded immense influence and power—no easy
feat for anyone to obtain, let alone Louis Ziolko from
Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Thank God he'd managed to escape
that.
It hadn't been easy, but he'd always had sense: street
sense, business sense, art sense, motion-picture sense. The
senses he hadn't been born with, he'd simply cultivated.

'My son, the
macher,'
his mother, Zelda, used to complain disparagingly to anyone who would listen. 'Too smart for his
own good, he is. He'll come to no good, I know it. A nogoodnik
he is.'

But these very qualities had served him well in the past and
were serving him well now. Otherwise, he'd never have had
the foresight to sign an enormously expensive insurance policy
to go along with the deed to the house. The place was tremen
dously overinsured.

Hell, he'd end up
making
money!

Things were looking better and better. Who would have
believed it? If he'd needed the money, which he didn't, and if
he'd tried to sell that goddamned white elephant of a house,
he would have had to wait for years to find a sucker. So right
there, he was coming out ahead. The insurance company
might scream and tear out its hair, but it had no choice but to
pay up.

And as far as the film business went, his position had never
been better. The Depression was bringing out moviegoers by
the droves, perhaps because it got people's minds off their
problems. His studio boss, Oscar Skolnik, O.T. as he was
known, the legendary wunderkind of International Artists—
what Irving Thalberg was to MGM—had already selected him
to direct three new pictures for IA over the next eighteen
months. Another ninety thousand dollars there.

Indeed, California wasn't called the Golden State for
nothing!

'Now what do we do?' the girl wailed plaintively, yanking
Louis Ziolko back to harsh reality to the rain-drenched, men
acing present of the chill Los Angeles hillside.

Ziolko didn't waste time or words. 'We drive out of this
hellhole before the rest of the goddamn hillside ends up down
there and buries us along with it,' he said grimly. 'That's what
we do.' He yanked the driver's side of the midnight-blue
Chrysler's door open and climbed inside, gratified to see the
key. The leather upholstery felt like sticky ice against his bare
wet buttocks, but he scarcely noticed the discomfort. He
reached across the seat and flung open the passenger door for
the girl. She stood there stupidly, not knowing quite what to
do.

'Well, get in!' Ziolko ordered tersely.

The girl glanced around uncertainly, as if she had any other
option, then slid in awkwardly beside him. 'I haven't got any
clothes,' she complained morosely, staring out the rain-
streaked windshield.

'You'll get some.' Ziolko turned the key and stepped on the
starter. The engine hesitated, sputtered, and abruptly died.
Ziolko cursed and pressed on the starter again, careful not to
wear out the battery. After a few more coughs and stops, the
engine finally turned over steadily. He let out a sigh of relief.
'Goddamn rain,' he muttered. 'How come it never rained like
this in New York?' he growled.

'Because it snows in New York,' the girl muttered sullenly.

Ziolko ignored her and switched on the windshield wipers.
They began squeaking slowly to and fro, barely able to keep up with the blinding buckets of rain the sky seemed to fling
against the glass. Finally a vague, blurry arc of vision
appeared. He jerked at the gear lever, threw the car into
reverse, and looked over his shoulder in vain to make out the
end of the drive through the rain-streaked rear window. The
rear bumper made unceremonious contact with the hillside
behind them, and both he and the girl were flung forward in
their seats.

'Jesus!' the girl breathed, gingerly touching her forehead. 'I
hit my head on the windshield. I could have been killed, you
bastard!'

'Not soon enough,' Ziolko grunted under his breath. All he knew was that the further he got away from this goddamn sliding hillside, and the sooner he dumped the girl, the better.
After that he'd have a chance to get resettled, to think. The
last thing he needed now was a shrew.

But he consoled himself with the fact that the engine
throbbed steadily in anticipation, and he swerved the car in a
half-circle and nosed the hood straight up the steep drive,
more by memory than vision. He didn't bother to come to a
stop at the intersection, and swung right onto the canyon road.
He figured that chances of a collision were rare; the road was
hardly ever used, especially not in miserable weather like this.

Ziolko sneaked a glance sideways. The girl sat hunched
over, shivering convulsively, her teeth chattering and her
flawless, sculptured skin textured with gooseflesh. At least
she was keeping quiet about his lethal driving on the hairpin
curves.

After a long silence, the girl slid a sideways glance over at
Ziolko. 'Got any cash to tide me over?' she asked in a small
voice. 'I need to buy some clothes to replace those. Besides,
you didn't pay me yet.'

Ziolko burst out laughing, a laugh from the depths of his
guts. It was the first good laugh he'd had all morning, and it
did him a world of good.

'What's so funny?' the girl demanded belligerently, furtively
sliding further down in her seat.

Ziolko slammed his fists on the horn for emphasis. 'I'll tell
you what's so funny. Money! You want money, I'll back up
the way we came and you can go scavenging around down
where the house is. That's where my fucking money is!'

The girl muttered a curse under her breath.

'Reach in back. There're some blankets on the seat. Give
me one of them, you take the other. Least we won't be naked
as jaybirds. That's all we need now, being thrown in the clink.'
Ziolko pulled over to the shoulder of the road, screeched to
a halt, and they wrapped themselves into the scratchy plaid
Shetland wool. 'Where should I drop you?'

'I told you. My apartment's down near the Strip.'

Ziolko reached past her, punched the walnut glove com
partment open with a stab of his finger and fished out a five-
dollar bill he kept handy for gassing up in emergencies. 'Here's
a fin. Take it. I'll drop you off and send the rest to you later
today.'

The girl palmed the money eagerly, and sat in a less sullen
silence. Ziolko tried to guess her age. She claimed to be
twenty-one and looked it, but close up, seventeen was prob
ably more like it. Well, the younger the better.

The girl looked surprised when Ziolko made a sudden left
turn into a deserted side road, the branches of wet trees brush
ing and whipping the car. Then he slammed the brakes so hard
they were both thrown forward once again.

'Where are we?' the girl demanded. 'You crazy or some
thing? We aren't even in town yet.'

'You got your fin, didn't you? So we aren't quite finished with our business deal yet.' He grinned lasciviously, flipped
open the lap blanket at his groin and, grabbing the girl by the
neck, pulled her down into his crotch. 'Just because I lost my
house doesn't mean we've finished.'

The girl glared up at him with murderous eyes. Then the fight seemed to go out of her and she slumped, bending for
ward. Her lips found Ziolko's penis and she began licking and
sucking halfheartedly.