Natural Causes (11 page)

I followed the same pathway that Jack and I had taken
the night before. In the daylight, I could see the signs that Moon
had mentioned, identifying the genus and species of the exotic plants
and trees. The midday heat made the smell of the flowers almost
overpoweringly sweet and just the slightest bit rancid, as if the sun
were burning the bougainvillea off their stalks.

I got to the southernmost courtyard and took a look
around. Helen Rose's room was in the building on the left. The door
was open and I could hear a buzz of conversation coming from inside.
There was another stucco building on the right side of the court,
with the gated wall running between. I walked up to the right-hand
veranda and began peeking into windows. Most of the rooms were
unoccupied. There is nothing quite as bleak and uninviting as an
empty hotel room-even if it is in the Belle Vista Hotel. I was
halfway up the walk when I heard the sound of a vacuum cleaner coming
from a nearby door.

I looked inside 307 and saw a black-haired girl in a
white uniform bent over a Hoover. She had a Sony Walkman on her head.
It must have been playing salsa, because the girl was mamboing to the
beat and slapping the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner on the carpet in
time to the music. I knocked at the door, and when she didn't look
up, I shouted "Hello in there!"

The girl jerked the Walkman off her head and shoved
it into the pocket of her dress. Then she patted her thick black hair
down, clicked off the vacuum, and turned around. She had black eyes
and a high-cheeked, pretty, Indio face.

"Yes?" she said with a "j"
instead of a "y."

"Can I help you?"

The kid in the lot had been right about one
thing--she was a sexy-looking girl. She had round hips and small,
pointed breasts that were clearly visible through the thin fabric of
her uniform. She gave me a quizzical look and tugged casually at her
collar.

"Can I help you," she said again.

"I'd like to talk to you, Maria."

The girl frowned. "How come you know my name? I
don' know yours."

"My name is Harry. I got your name from the kid
in the parking lot."

"From Jerry, huh?" she said, as if it
suddenly made sense to her. She eyed me curiously. "Wha'chu
wanna talk about?" she said.

"About what happened here on Monday."

"You a cop?"

"Nope."

"Then wha'chu wanna know about that for?"

"I've got my reasons." I pulled another
twenty out of my wallet and held it up to the light. It had worked on
Jerry. And this one looked just as wised-up as he had been. Maria
sashayed over to me.

"What's that for?" she said coyly.

"For a little information."

"About Monday, huh?"

She was almost on top of me--so close I could smell
her. She smelled interestingly of sweat and flowers. The girl wet her
top lip with the tip of her tongue.

"I like to help you, Harry," she said
sweetly. "But I got work I gotta do. You know?" Maria's
time was apparently valuable--like everyone's in L.A.

I waved the twenty under her nose. "I might be
able to dig up a few more of these, for a little cooperation."

"I tol' the cops what I know," she said.

"I'd still like to talk."

She nodded slowly, mulling it over. "Maybe I
talk to you," she said after a time. "But it'll cost'chu
more than that."

"How much more?"

"I gotta think about it." She pivoted on
one foot and eyed the twenty greedily, as if she wanted to eat it for
a snack. "I gotta talk to a few people, you know? Check
everythin' out."

If she'd just had some trouble with the cops, I could
understand her cautiousness, although Jerry the carhop was probably
the only person she would check me out with.

"You stayin' at the Belle Vista?" she
asked.

"I'm at the Marquis."

"Oh, yeah? That's some nice place, man. Maybe I
call you there tonight."

"Ask for Harry Stoner," I said.

She gave me a cagey grin. "Maybe we do more than
talk, huh?"

"Maybe," I said.

She plucked the twenty out of my hand and tucked it
in her bosom, deliberately giving me a look at her breasts. "Bring
some of his brothers, O.K.? We coul' have a party."

Maria stuck the Walkman on her head and strolled back
to the vacuum cleaner. She turned the Hoover on with her foot, bent
down to lift up the nozzle, and wiggled her ass at me as she stood
up.

"Mercy," I said to myself.
 

13

It was somehow reassuring to discover that extortion
and sex were alive and well on the south quadrangle of the Belle
Vista Hotel. The place had seemed staid unto death, before I met
Maria the maid and her pimp, Jerry. I walked back up the flowered
pathway, chuckling over my secret, and went into the bar behind the
lobby courtyard.

It was dark and relatively empty at eleven in the
morning. It was nothing special at any hour of the day just a leather
bar rail with chrome-spouted bottles lined up on mirrored tiers
behind it. A large cocktail lounge was built around the bar, with
horseshoe-shaped, tufted leather booth seats jutting out from the
walls. I sat down at a booth near the door and a waitress came by to
take my order.

"Scotch-up," I told her. "I'm
expecting somebody at eleven, so if a guy comes in and asks for Harry
Stoner, point him in this direction."

"Yes, sir."

The girl brought me a Scotch, and a few minutes later
she brought me a paunchy, balding, gray-haired man in a blue
pin-striped suit-like second prize in a raffle.

"You Stoner?" he said in a hostile voice.
He had a big walrus moustache that moved instead of his mouth when he
talked.

"I'm Stoner."

"Sugarman," he said abruptly and sat down
across from me. He was wearing huge square glasses with thick bifocal
lenses tinted brown on the tops. His dark eyes and bigpored
cheeks looked squeezed in behind them, reduced in size by the lenses
so that you could see a little bit of the room on either side of his
face.

"I'll take bourbon on the rocks," Harris
Sugarman said to the waitress. "Put it on his tab."

"Yes, sir," the girl said.

Sugarman pulled a huge cigar out of his coat pocket
and bit off the end. He picked the cigar tip out of his mouth,
dropped it in a glass ashtray, and wiped a few strands of loose
tobacco from his tongue. "You got until this is half smoked,"
he said, lighting the cigar. He puffed on it a few times, filling the
booth with smoke.

"I want to ask you a couple of questions about
Quentin."

"It's your dime," he said.

"Did you see him or talk to him this weekend?"

Sugarman chewed on the fat cigar. "Nope."

"Was Quentin working on another project for
television?"

He shook his head.

The girl came back with the bourbon. Sugarman
swallowed it in one gulp and wiped his mouth with the back of his
hand.

"Is that it?" he asked.

"No. I've got a few more."

"Then, I'll have another one of these," he
said to the waitress.

"Quentin usually came into L.A. on Sunday. Last
weekend he came in on Friday afternoon."

"So?" Sugarman said.

"I had a talk with his mother and she thought he
was coming in for a series of conferences about a new TV show."

"She thought wrong."

"Could he have been working with another agent?"
I said. "On some special deal?"

Sugarman laughed hoarsely. "No, sonny," he
said. "He could not have been working with anyone but Sugarman.
Quentin and I go back too far--to the dawn of time."

"That far, huh?"

He flicked the ash off his cigar and studied it like
a watch. "You got about ten, twelve more puffs."

"I understand Quentin was having some trouble on
`Phoenix'."

"Yeah. He was having a few problems. Nothing
major."

"That's not what I heard."

Sugarman sighed impatiently. "What did you
hear?"

"I heard that he hadn't produced a thing in six
months. And that because of him the show was in ratings trouble. I
also heard that he didn't write some of his own material, that he got
his breakdown man to write it for him."

"You been talking to his enemies," Sugarman
said.

"I've been talking to Helen Rose and Jack Moon."

"Let me explain a few things to you." The
girl brought him another bourbon and, this time, he took a small sip.
"You don't go talking to the producer and executive producer of
a soap if you're interested in finding out the truth. Naturally
they're going to blame the writer. It's automatic. Like the Army, the
game is cover your own ass. And with Helen Rose that goes double.
Why? Because she's a woman doing a man's job. She practically had to
suck Frank Glendora's dick off to get the job in the first place.
United does things by the book. Hell, they wrote the book. And,
believe me, there ain't a chapter in it says you hire a washed-up
production assistant to run a daytime show. Glendora broke the rules
when he gave Helen Rose the job. He knew it and so did she. Now the
show is kaput. You wanna figure whose fault it is? Look and see who
had the most to lose."

"A half million dollars isn't exactly peanuts,"
I said.

"Quentin had other irons in the fire. Some real
estate. A house in New Mexico. A mansion in Cincinnati. He would have
done all right. He was a survivor, baby. Trust me on that."

"You sound like you knew him well."

"Since he was a kid," Sugarman said. He
glanced at his cigar. "The meter's running."

"Why do you think he stopped writing six months
ago?"

"His health. His wife. He had problems with a
couple of investments. Things just piled up on him. It happens. He
would have snapped out of it. He had a lot of moxie, Quentin."

"Moon says he was all bluff that he had nothing
left."

"Who the fuck is Jack Moon?" Sugarman said
angrily. "How many songs has he written? How many knocks did he
take? I've handled Quentin since he was a twenty-two-year-old kid
fresh from the sticks. I watched him work his way up from nothing on
sheer guts. No experience, no contacts, no looks, no excuses. Just
desire, sonny. And if you think that's easy in this town, you're an
idiot."

"I thought he had family money."

"You been drinking from a Sterno can? Who you
been talking to? I'm telling you the boy had nothing but the shirt on
his back. He was one step above a bum."

"Why'd you take him on, then?" I asked.

"He wanted it," Sugarman said. "That's
why. There are those who want it and those who don't. I never met a
kid who wanted it more. He'd do anything for it. And he did."

"What do you mean by that?"

"I mean he had to pay some heavy dues. Kapiche?"

Sugarman pulled at his cuffs. "Time's up,"
he said, swallowing the rest of the bourbon. He stubbed the cigar
out, got up, and left.

A few minutes later Jack Moon walked into the bar. He
spotted me at the table, came over, and sat down.

"Helen and Walt will be along shortly. We've
concluded negotiations--or paid the extortion money, depending on
your viewpoint--and now we have a new head writer. And a long-term
document."

"Great."

"Why so gum?" he said.

"I just met Quentin's agent."

"Sugarman? He's a character, isn't he?"

"He's something more than that," I said,
but I was thinking about Connie Dover. She'd certainly given me the
impression that Quentin had been born to the life he led, although
everyone else seemed to think that he'd either made it up out of
whole cloth or eked it out like a farmer working the soil.

Jack Moon was thinking about Sugarman. He eyed me
nervously. "Did Harris say something about the show?"

What he really meant was--did he say something about
me? He had said something, but it wasn't worth repeating. "No,"
I said. "He just made an impression, that's all."

Jack smiled with relief. "He'll do that, all
right. Sugarman's the old-style Hollywood agent, right down to the
ten-dollar cigars. He's a dinosaur compared to the new breed. You
should talk to one of them some day, if you really want a laugh.
They're so laid back they have trouble standing up. At least
Sugarman's got a sense of who and where he is. Of course, his sense
of himself is a little dated--like late nineteen-thirties. But he's a
step above the space cadets of today. What did he say about Quentin?"

"He seemed to feel that he'd been going through
a phase."

"His blue period?" Jack said. "That's
shit. Never trust an agent, Harry."

I laughed. "He told me never to trust a
producer."