King Maybe (8 page)

“When you're standing in the middle of a hail of bullets, you cocksucker, when time slows down so far that your heart sounds lower than a bass drum, when you know you're a millisecond away from seeing patches of sunlight appear in the middle of your own shadow—”

“Got it, Jake. Before I do the big blink. Before I'm tucked away for the dirt nap. Before I'm date bait for a taxidermist. Before I'm stitched like a pillowcase—”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” he said. “I'm writing these down.”

“Why? You got a script you want to spoil?”

“You're colorful, Junior, I'll give you that. I'll almost miss you.”

“Shame you've decided to kill me, then, isn't it?” I said, and hung up. Almost instantly my other phone began to ring. I ignored it and dialed him on the one I'd just hung up. When he snapped a hello, I said, “Sorry, someone's calling me on the other line,” and hung up.

Then I got up and turned down the blanket. Nothing scurried out of sight, although the sheets were the gray of a London fog. I was testing with both hands for more lumps, and finding them, when both phones began to ring.

“Hi, Jake,” I said. I dropped the phone on the bed and went into the bathroom, where I washed my hands, undid the zipper on my suitcase, and shook out a T-shirt so I could let it unwrinkle on a hanger overnight. Then I went back to the bed. “You still there?”

“You're not taking this seriously.”

“You think?”

“Get over here.”

“What, I'm going to make it that easy? Actually
show up
someplace so your shooters can autograph my chest in bullet holes?”

“That one's not so good,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “If I'd been writing instead of talking, I'd have gone back and replaced that with something better. The tragedy of our life, Jake, is that it's a first draft.”

“And in your case, it'll be an unfinished first draft.”

“Oh, come on. As someone wiser than I once said, ‘This is
obviously
not a death threat. It's the beginning of a negotiation.'”

There was a moment, during which I located several more lumps, and Jake said, “Hey, honey?”

“Too late for that Jake. There was a time perhaps, but—”

“Not you, you asshole. Honey, you wanna trot all that prettiness in the other room a couple minutes, gimme a chance to talk to my acquaintance here?”

I said, “Acquaintance? That stings.”

“I don't know,” he said in a voice that was mostly edge, “put a fucking log on the fire, do yoga, work up a cheerleading routine, but do it
out there
, okay?”

“That's the tone they all love,” I said.

“You have no idea what I just kicked outta the room,” Jake said. “You oughta get over here just to make it up to me.”

“I'd love to, but you want to kill me.”

“Awww, come
on
,” he said. “You know I love you.”

“Of course I do. Still, you were pretty persuasive earlier this evening, and those emojis took a year off my life. Where'd you find them?”

“Aren't they great? I'm trying to option them as animated characters. Junior-high-school site called Hatebook. Nobody can hate like kids. That's right, you got a kid, don't you?”

“I do. And I'll agree with you that you have to go to the Middle East to match the level of malice you find in the average junior high.”

“She pretty, your daughter?”

“Jake,” I said, “don't take this wrong, but I can't think of anyone from whom that question would sound creepier than it does from you.”

“I know someone,” he said, “making a movie. He can't find the girl he needs, and I mean he's talked to everybody. Whatever else I might think of you—and remember, I love you, I'm your biggest fan—there's no getting around that you're a good-looking guy. I'm thinking maybe the apple doesn't fall far—”

“Please, please, please. Just turn off the goo and tell me what you want before the sun rises.”

“You ripped me off pretty good,” he said, and then he covered the phone not very effectively and said, “Looks great, looks great. You go practice the high kicks and track that back in here in, say, five minutes.” To me he said, “The things I do to live up to my reputation. So okay, so the Klee you sold me wasn't. And I paid pretty good for it.”

“It was a steal,” I said. “Or it would have been if it had been real.”

“And I looked like a
shmendrik
when I showed it to someone.”

I said, “I can imagine that was embarrassing, but taking out a contract on me seems like an overreaction.”

“Oh, quit kidding around. We're past that. Yeah, I was a little pissed off, but then I got to thinking, what does Junior have that I want?”

“Are you waiting for an answer?”

“Listen, give me half an hour with my little friend and then come over here, we'll talk about it.”

“I can't. My car's rear window is broken.”

“Yeah? How'd that happen?”

“Bullet.”

“No wonder you pushed my nose in it. People must take shots at you all the time. You're
used
to it. Hey,
there's
a movie: A crook, maybe Nic Cage, he gets bored 'cause nobody's tried to kill him in a while, so he pushes it, tries to double the excitement—”

“I need to fix the window before I go anywhere unless I want to get pulled over. But I'm not getting near you until I know what I've got that you want.”

“Skills,” Jake said.

I tested the folded blankets and got right back up. “No,” I said. “I've learned my lesson. No more jobs on commission.”

In a voice as hard as slate, Jake said, “I actually
can
have you killed, you little
vantz
. No, wait, wait, wait, that was a tactical misstep. Off target, out of tune, wrong key altogether. Here's the pitch: My life is at stake here, Junior. My legacy, my reputation, everything I've ever done, the work of a lifetime, and it's one simple job. An office, in and out in ten minutes. You don't even take anything. You're my only hope.”

“God,” I said, moving my pillow and blanket to the shiny couch. The bed was lumpy enough to be stuffed with the skulls of the sleepless. “It must be something to be able to change channels like that. And to have those violins available.”

“An
office
, for Chrissakes, probably not even locked. Were you listening? You don't
take
anything.”

“I don't? Then what am I doing there?”

“You find a piece of paper, you read it, you're out of there.”

“One piece of paper,” I said, settling in. “In an office full of paper.”

“It'll be filed. The guy, the guy with the office? He's famous for his files.”

I was interested in spite of myself. “Who is it?”

Jake said, and I could hear the satisfaction in his voice, “It's King Maybe.”

PART TWO

TURNAROUND

Hollywood Boulevard is a clogged artery

with no heart attached to it.

—Columnist Louella Parsons

9

Designer Rot

“I'm flattered,” Louie the Lost said as I undid the second lock on one of my three storage units. “This is like . . . I don't know, getting a look at your closet.”

“I've always trusted you,” I said, fingers crossed. I pulled open the unit's door to reveal a cubist mountain of cardboard boxes, stacked any old way across the room, shoulder-high in places. “And, of course, my car's in the shop you took me to, so I have no other way to get—”

“You know, when you called this morning, I said to Alice—that's my wife, Alice—I said—”

“I know Alice,” I said. “I've even
met
Alice.”

“So I said to Alice, even before I saw the number, I said, ‘You know who that is?'”

With a grunt I took a box off the tallest stack. “This is all about you complaining how long it's been since I—”

“I said, ‘'Cause it's been
so long since he called
,'” Louie said, “‘it
has
to be him,' and Alice, she jumped right in and said, ‘You mean that nice boy, that burglar George?'”

“George?” I said, opening the box. Many books, spines up, exhaled a hopeful hello. The box was full of A's, with Kingsley Amis and Jane Austen, an odd couple if ever there was one, nestled side by side as though they'd fought their way through the alphabet to find each other.

“It's been so long since we heard from you and all,” Louie said. “You can't blame her.” He craned into the box. “You read all those?”

“I have, and others, too. And you can't make me feel guilty about not calling. I lack the gene for guilt.”

“You don't have shelves?”

“Motels are short on shelf space.” Maybe the only thing Louie didn't know about me was that I had a secret apartment in Koreatown with an actual library in it, by which I mean a room full of books that was originally designed to
hold
books, if you can imagine that. Built in the late 1920s, when people still read. Today it'd be a
media room
. “Have you read any Austen?”

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “Colin Firth.”

“Stinky is on the fade,” I said, hauling down another box and opening it. “Be nice if you could figure out where he is.”

“Why would Stinky be on the fade? Why would anybody want to find him?” He nudged me aside for a better look. “Balzac, huh? A whole box of Balzac?”

“Two and a half boxes. He's on the fade because someone tried to kill him. I want you to find him because he might decide to get out of the line of fire by having
me
killed to get a piece of merchandise that I currently possess and then returning that piece of merchandise to the person who used to own it, who is also the person who tried to kill him.”

Louie nodded. My possible death was just another piece of pronoun-littered information, and Louie dealt in information. “What's the merchandise?”

“The heiress to the Vaseline fortune.”

“Okay, fine, be that way. Usual rates?”

“If that means you pick a number out of the air, sure.”

“Only way I know. Wow,” he said as I took the lid off a third box, “that's a whopper.”

“It is,” I said, pulling out a bright orange edition, a good three inches thick, of Balzac's
Droll Stories
with illustrations by Gustave Doré, the first English translation and a real showboat item published in London in 1874. “But don't get your hopes up.” I opened the book, which was hollowed out in the center to house something wrapped in oilcloth, and then I removed the oilcloth to reveal a Glock and a couple of magazines.

Looking pained, Louie said, “You cut up a nice book like that just to hide a piece?”

“I did not.” I slipped a magazine in and listened to the click. “I bought it this way from Duck Dixon.” Duck Dixon was well known, in certain circles, as a dealer not only in guns but also in all things gun-related. He was called “Duck” because, as far as anyone knew, he was the only crook in California who'd ever ducked a bullet and lived. Heard the bang, ducked, got up, and ran like hell. I always figured the shooter had just missed, but Duck was touchy about that. “When you've got a lot of books,” I said, “hide stuff in books. If nothing else, it slows the thief down.”

“Says the expert. But I mean, Stinky? You so worried about
Stinky
you're gonna be carrying?”

“I'm worried about everybody,” I said. “It's that kind of day.”

“Outta my league,”
Louie said. We were in a coffee shop on Ventura that Louie liked because he thought the waitresses were motherly, which said a lot about his childhood. “I mean, sure, he's a crook, but not my kind of crook. So what that means, I got history but nothing current.” He was lipping a cigar longingly, and a waitress who was passing patted him on the shoulder.

“Ah-ah-
ah
,” she said. “I'm not going to have to pour boiling water in your lap, am I, honey?”

I said, “It was nice of her to warn you.”

“She loves me,” he said. “They all love me. I been eating here for years.”

Louie the Lost looked to me like a free sample of middle-aged male Mediterranean genetics, something you might be given a bit of if you were comparison shopping. He had olive skin, eyebrows so heavy they looked like they were planning to spread, and very lively brown eyes beneath a high forehead in a big round face, in the center of which his features gathered snugly in a way that always reminded me of a roomful of furniture that's been pushed together so the walls can be painted. He wore his hair in a short, graying ponytail that at the moment stuck out of the back of a San Francisco Giants cap like a little pump handle. He'd started life as a getaway driver, but a substandard sense of direction earned him a nickname that did not inspire confidence, and after six months of waiting, like some falling movie star, for the phone to ring, he'd repackaged himself as a telegraph, the person you go to when you want either to get some information or spread some.

I said, “When you say he's out of your league, does that mean you don't know anything about him?” I looked at my watch—12:10
p.m.
Jake Whelan would be snorting himself into a waking state any hour now.

“Ain't nobody I don't know anything about,” Louie said. “But like I said, history, not current, and mostly when laws got broken. French fry?”

“Thanks anyway.” I had a Reuben sandwich cooling in front of me, next to a coffee cup that had been refilled half a dozen times. “So what do you know?”

“Okay, Jeremy Granger, a.k.a. King Maybe, producer and studio exec. Started out as a
patzer,
you know, like a personal assistant to well-known jerks: agents, third-season TV stars, Brian Sampson.” Sampson was a producer who was noted for having intentionally backed over a meter maid one day when she was writing him a parking ticket and he was late for his tennis game. “Got a rep as a guy who could really put up with it, just eat it all day long, no matter how much the boss shoveled out, and still give you a big grin without caring what was on his teeth. That's a valuable trait in this town, what with all the reincarnated Roman emperors and popes and whatnot running things. So bigger and bigger assholes stole him from each other, and he ate and grinned his way up.”

“Nothing illegal?”

“Depends. I mean, in LA plagiarism is like a character flaw, you know? Like, if it was an addiction, you could get over it with a three-step program.” He unscrewed the top of the salt shaker, poured a little dune of salt onto his plate, took the cigar out of his mouth, licked a french fry to make it sticky, and dredged it through the salt. “He was an assistant to some development guys for a while—you know, the ones who scout the ideas, if you wanna call them ideas and if you wanna call stealing scouting. So there were some charges that he bagged other people's stuff, like some poor hack in Van Nuys would submit the one inspiration of his life to one of your guy Jeremy's employers, and Jeremy would read it, and it would get returned stamped
unread
, and a year later that very same movie would come out, only the central character wasn't a superhero anymore, he was one of the Seven Dwarfs or something. Anyway, he got sued a couple times for stuff like that.” He picked up another fry, wiggled it, rejected it, and took another. “About eight, nine years ago, just before his big jump—and this is why I know anything about him—he had this little brush up about trafficking in minors.”

I said, “Really.”

“Yeah, I guess he'd had enough of people his own size. Well, not minors so much as
minor
. One. Starts taking out this little sparkler, said she was seventeen, just graduated from high school—Catholic school no less—went to auditions in her uniform. So your guy, Jeremy, he was working for Barry Zipken in like 2007, when Barry was the head of Farscope Pictures, and Barry had an eye for uniforms. Anyway, Jeremy sets it up for the sparkler to get the standard audition with Barry, but it has a different ending, which is she punches Barry in the eye and then her and her mom press charges. Barry, he tells the cops he thought she was of age and everything, and he says that Jeremy, your guy, told him she was eighteen but actually knew what the game was and intentionally gave old Barry the wrong impression to set him up, and both of them are looking at a lifetime on the sex offenders' registry, the Gucci ankle bracelet, and the whole thing, but the studio springs into action, and suddenly Jeremy's got ten million dollars' worth of lawyers, and then the sparkler changes her story. Says she told Jeremy she was eighteen, even showed him a driver's license. Which she displays on the witness stand. Jeremy gets off, Barry gets off but gets fired by the board of directors, and all of a sudden Jeremy doesn't even have an office anywhere—he's working out of delis and coffee shops, but everyone knows he's the Man at the studio. Like a ghost executive, not even getting paid on the books. And that's when he started putting his name on movies.”

“So she was eighteen,” I said. My Reuben was cold, and nothing, up to and including an oil well, is greasier than a cold Reuben. I looked up, found a waitress staring at me like a pointer that's scented a bird, and nodded toward my coffee cup. She sprang into action. I said, “Kind of a long story if she was eighteen. There wouldn't be any consequences—”

But Louie, with his mouthful of french fry, was waving me off. “License was duff,” he said, spraying salt. “She wasn't even
seventeen
, she was
sixteen
.”

“Where'd she get the license?”

“Ever hear of Garlin Romaine?”

“The painter? Does passports or something?”

“Not just passports, every kind of document there is, all from countries that don't exist,” Louie said. “Complete with royal seals or whatever, and all filled with immigration stamps from
other
countries that don't exist. Whatsittoyastan, places like that. And 'cause they're not real places, it's not forgery, it's art,”

I said, “She sells them in albums, right?”

“The whole thing,” Louie said. “In a package, like a briefcase, a—what's the word?—a folio. The passport, some letters home from these fake countries in envelopes with fake stamps on them—”

“Don't talk about stamps.”

“Even snapshots, painted by hand. A whole . . . a whole whatchamacallit, a grand tour, all to places that ain't there. With hints of things that might have happened. Like a mystery, but with pictures.”

“I'll stick with Van Eyck.”

“Garlin's kind of a big deal now, but before she started getting on the cover of art magazines, she used to do documents for people who
really
needed documents. And she wasn't cheap even then, so my guess is that the studio ponied up for that license.”

“And what happened to the sparkler?”

“Your guy Jeremy. He put her in a TV series—”

“Which one?”

“You don't watch TV.”

“Humor me.”

“Just lasted a couple years. Called
Dead Eye
. She was a zombie private eye in the future when the whole world is zombies, but it's far enough in the future that they've smoothed out some and kind of got the lurch thing under control. They've become like executive zombies. The only humans are the ones they raise on ranches like cattle, and even though she's a zombie, too—the sparkler, I mean—she's in love with this handsome alive guy who doesn't own a shirt, the leader of the big human rebellion who's like riling up his herd on this huge ranch.”

I said, “She played a
zombie
?”

“A cute zombie. You know, kind of designer rot, and only in the right places. Her blouse was always torn. Or maybe it was falling apart, but, you know, it was falling apart
right
.”

“So it only lasted two years. Then what happened to her?”

“Well, first she was awful, okay? No career ahead of her unless there was a show like
America's Most Embarrassing Series Outtakes
. Anyway, by then she was eighteen no matter what papers you checked, even though she still barely looked it. Show went off the air, he married her.”

I found myself rubbing my eyes. I hadn't slept well, I'd been bitten in numerous places by the other residents of my room at the Dew Drop Inn, I was worried about Rina, my car was a mess, and I didn't want anything to do with someone whose idea of recreation was a sixteen-year-old. “Married her,” I said. “What was her name?”

“Tasha something, by then. Something kinda shiny, you know, a stage name. Dawn, Tasha Dawn.”

“Yes,” I said, “just possibly a stage name.”

“She's in her twenties now. Goes to art galleries, raises money for one of the major political parties and who cares which one, gets her picture taken with the Dalai Lama wearing big jewelry. Weighs about eighty pounds and looks like most of it is teeth.”