Show Business Is Murder (29 page)

Janson was sobbing now, sobbing so thickly he barely noticed when the “d” went out. The underside of the key was soaked with blood from his split finger, and it stuck. He had to type a “c” next to an “l,” to make a “d.” He had come this far sprinting underwater through blood, and a single damned key wasn't going to stop him. He saw he was at the bottom of the last sheet of paper, and the words had slowed from a torrent to a trickle, but still they came relentlessly.

They hoistecl me up with strong arms onto my metal bircl, the angel of heaven which woulcl commancl me through the wincls ancl the rains ancl bear me home. Bear me home to the smell of hospitals with forever walls of white ancl to my mother's kitchen ancl the full breastecl sobs ancl vicarious embrace of Wencly Wilcler, a woman grayecl past the age which she sharecl with my mother to the clawn of a new sunset. Ancl they bore me on, these strong arms, to a forgotten hero's welcome, ancl to half paracles where they clressecl me in recl, white ancl blue. Because that's what I was. A

The paper ran out. The stack, the whole stack was out and gone, and with all the tears gone from his eyes, all the sobs racked from his chest, Janson had a word, a single word, left stuck in his throat. He yelled once, a hoarse, frightened choke, and pushed back from the typewriter, sending it and the crates crashing to the floor. Stumbling into the hallway, he found what he was looking for, a crumpled-up page from a newspaper that was lodged in the wall beneath some pipes to keep the cold air at bay. He pulled it out and smoothed it flat on the wall. There was an advertisement on the back side with some blank space at the top, and he ripped out a small segment of the grayish-white paper and returned to his room.

He sank to his haunches and righted the typewriter, noticing, as if for the first time, the blood sprayed through
it. Turning the small blank piece of newspaper to meet the keys, he typed his final word.

The weight, a weight he had been living with for so long that he felt it as a part of himself, lifted slowly from his aching shoulders. He left the word in the jaws of the typewriter and fell to his back on the mattress, the rotating paddles of the fan breaking up the neon flickers into dove-like featherings across his face and bare chest. He cried a different cry this time, a softer cry. The tears were just as resonant with pain, but they cleansed him. They fell like a late autumn snow, blanketing Janson Tanker as he fell into an exhausted sleep.

HIS FEET HURT
like hell by the time he got there, but he felt better overall. Lighter, somehow. It had been weeks since the exorcism, and although he didn't have his story (manuscript), he knew that his demons were laid out on paper, and contained in words and sentences.

He grimaced when he saw the security cop, a large mustached man with neat hair flipped back at the front. He felt a wave of disgust as he recalled his “escort” to the street, the cop's meaty hand closing on his forearm. The humiliation had left a red stain on his cheeks, and the blush returned as he entered the building. He skulked past the cop, both of them pretending they did not recognize each other.

Please let him give me something for the book,
he prayed.
Anything, even an option fee for the rights like Barry explained. Just don't let him give me nothing
.

The receptionist was much nicer this time, and then he was up and up and being buzzed through, once again, to the office of Adam Diamond.

He was on the phone. “I need the writing samples. Damn right I'm getting aggravated—his new script's in every office and I don't have a fucking file on him? Find them. Make it.” Adam hung up the phone, shook his head, and raised his eyes
to Janson's. His left hand twitched around on the desk, searching for the duo balls. “Hello, Janson. Now I'd imagine you're pretty tense so I'll cut the bullshit and let you know where you're at. When I first read your manuscript, I was a little hesitant. We have two rules right now about material: no Vietnam, no AIDS. Now your manuscript was good—I'm not saying it's not good, I'm not saying you're not a talented writer. You just have to understand that when it's all said and done, nobody wants to see another Vietnam movie right now. It's the material, it's not you.”

Adam's last sentence struck Janson like a blow. Realization settled in, fluttering like a black sheet over his expectations.
It's the material, it's not you.
It echoed until it pounded in his ears. When he could finally hear again, he was not surprised to find that Adam had not stopped speaking.

“—and a more likable protagonist. I mean, are we supposed to like this guy? It's tough to sympathize with someone who kicks an old friend to the wolves, you know what I'm saying? We need more of a stud for the hero. When it's all said and done, every guy who reads this book's gotta want to be him, every chick's gotta want to fuck him. Stupid? Of course. But that's how this industry runs. It's a stupid industry because it caters to a stupid populace.

“Now don't be discouraged. This went a long way—what with it being (I assume) your first piece, and you having no professional editor. Everyone likes your style, likes your writing, just not the material.” Adam leaned forward and recited, again, the phrase that he had uttered across his desk to countless writers. “It's the material, not you they don't like.” It had an aged quality, the phrase, as if it had been stored in oak wine barrels, only brought out to be savored from time to time. Adam hoped it didn't sound as rehearsed to Janson as it did to himself. As trite with repetition. His fingers dug the jade balls out of their intricate case, and the chimes sang to him quietly as he spun them in his hand.

Janson was quiet.
And cool nights with stars laid out like holes clear through to heaven.
It slipped away, it all slowly slipped away like sand through an hourglass and suddenly he was pale and thin and so, so tired. His mind filled as if with the rust-tinged water from the sink in the corner of his room, and he saw his years unfold slowly before him, a series of small checks on the first Wednesday of every month, checks that stretched about three weeks wide. The town that was not a city was whisked away by the short deft movements of Adam's hands. Whisked away. And yet the city remained.

Adam saw Janson's green eyes go dull and he worried, for a moment, that he would have a crier on his hands. He shifted in his large leather chair, rolling to his left side, and casually checked the clock on his desk. It was 12:57. He had a one o'clock.

He tried to soften his voice, but it sounded effeminate even to his ears. “When it's all said and done, we think you're talented, Jaston. I will personally read anything you write. I just think you need to shift your subject matter around a little. Vietnam is out, it's old. Nobody wants to see another Vietnam film, read another Vietnam book. You know what's huge right now?”

He leaned forward, imparting a precious jewel of knowledge, a stock market tip, the secret password. Even the air seemed to wait on him as the clock on his desk moved silently to one o'clock. “Women's road movies.” Adam was quiet, letting the magnitude of his pronouncement settle around the room. “They're selling left and right this year. I think if you work in that direction, with your talent, we could really go somewhere.”

There was a moment of awkward silence that stretched an eternity in the distance between the two men. Janson waited for the watch to flick out from its cover. It did. Adam cleared his throat. “I'm really sorry, I've got another meeting right now.” Another silence.

The bastard's going to make this difficult for me, Adam thought. “Any questions I can answer, anything I can help you with before you leave?”

“Yes,” Janson said. “My name is Janson, not Jaston.” He rose to his feet, running a hand up the scruff on his neck and along the ridge of his jaw. He leaned over the desk and plucked his tattered story from the other papers. A memo floated loose from atop the stack and fluttered down like a feather to Adam's desk, but neither man turned his eyes to the distraction. They kept them locked, until Adam felt that his would bruise on the hardness of Janson's. Janson squinted slightly, and Adam felt him looking over and through him before he turned.

“Oh yeah. I forgot to tell you. There's a part missing at the end of the manuscript. Maybe even just a word.”

“Yeah,” Janson said. “There is.”

The door clicked softly behind him as he exited, and Adam's breath left him in a rush of relief. He felt better with the door between them.

JANSON WALKED OUT
onto the crowded New York streets and filled his lungs with the moist New York air. Clutching his story tightly under his arm, he turned into the crowd, losing himself in the bustling sea of elbows and shoulders. It was a long walk to his apartment and an even longer walk home, and his feet ached with each touch of the concrete. The buildings rose in firm spires about him, and as his feet pattered on the sidewalk, somewhere, miles and mountains away in a lost town, a wisp of smoke curled from a country fireplace and made its way sleepily up the chimney to the darkened sky above.

STEVE HOCKENSMITH

IT WAS JULY
in Los Angeles, and my little one-room office was hotter than the glowing steel foundries of Minsk that were busy pouring out the molten foundation of a worldwide workers' state. A woman walked through the door, and things got even hotter.

She was dressed plainly in a brown shirt and matching slacks, with a mannish jacket wrapped around her broad shoulders. Steel-toed boots covered the sturdy feet at the end of her stout legs. Her dark hair was cut severely, barely reaching her thick neck. But most enticing of all were her hands. They were big and calloused, the hands of a woman who wasn't afraid she was going to break a nail when she wrestled the controls of production from the withered claws of the bourgeoisie.

I was in love.

“Are you Fred Menace?” she said, and she didn't purr like those soft, dime-a-dozen starlets who pop up in a P.I.'s office every ten minutes. Her voice was hard and strong, yet still unmistakably feminine. She was all business, so to speak, but all woman, too.

“I ain't Joe McCarthy,” I drawled back at her.

I instantly regretted it. Cynicism is a decadent pose, a
facade of apathetic ennui that's antithetical to the committed idealism of the true internationalist. But when you're a private eye, it sort of gets to be a habit.

“Yes, I'm Fred Menace,” I said, dropping the hard-boiled routine. “Please have a seat, Miss . . . ?”

She sat in one of my rickety old office chairs and locked eyes with me across my desk. She regarded me coolly for a moment before speaking.

“Smith. Mary Smith,” she said. “My brother is missing, and I want you to find him. His name is John Smith. He's a screenwriter. He's been gone for four days.”

No flirting, no innuendo, just the facts. I liked that. I like that a lot. I knew immediately that I was going to take the case, whether she could pay or not.

“My fee is thirty dollars a day, plus expenses,” I said anyway, just as a formality.

She nodded brusquely. “Fine. That seems reasonable.”

It was reasonable. Maybe too reasonable, but what could be done about it? I'd tried to organize the other private investigators in Los Angeles into a collective so that we could create a sliding scale tied to the means of our clients and the needs of each individual dick. Unfortunately, I hadn't gotten very far with the idea. The other P.I.s in L.A. don't talk to me anymore.

“Do you have some reason to suspect foul play?”

“Foul play?” Mary raised a thick black eyebrow. “I don't know. I just know that my brother has disappeared.”

“Did he have any reason to skip town in a hurry?”

“Yes, I suppose so,” she said, still icy cool. “But that's not John's way. He's a very brave, committed man. He wouldn't just run away.”

“He wouldn't just run away from what, Miss Smith?”

That finally warmed her up a degree or two. “The House Committee on Un-American Activities,” she said, spitting
the words out as if they were a mouthful of rotten borscht. “John's been subpoenaed. He was supposed to testify yesterday. He never appeared.”

I leaned back in my chair, my mind spinning back to the years before the war. John Smith. Screenwriter. Pinko. Sure, I remembered him now. I'd met him through the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. He was a squirrelly little knobby-kneed guy with all the sheer animal magnetism of a paper cup. His sister had fifteen pounds on him, easy.

I hadn't seen him since 1945—six years ago. Like so many Tinseltown Communists, his passion for revolution cooled once Hitler was out and Red-baiting was in.

“I know what you're thinking, Mr. Menace,” Mary said, and her voice was softer now, almost pleading. “Everybody in town knows about you. You're a proud Marxist through and through. When it comes to the fight against bourgeois capitalism, you won't back down an inch.”

I knew she was stroking my ego, but what the hey, I liked it. The way her lips caressed the words “Marxist” and “bourgeois” was enough to get Lenin up out of his tomb.

“You got that right, sister,” I said.

“My brother . . . he was a true believer, really he was. But he couldn't just throw away his career. He had to make a living.”

“I thought you said he was a brave, committed man.”

Her expression turned cagey. “Keep waving the flag of the proletariat from the mountaintops, Mr. Menace,” she said, the vulnerability gone from her voice. “But don't think that it's the only way to serve the cause.”

“What do you mean?”

“My brother planned on confronting the Committee. He wasn't going to name names. He was going to throw their fascist grandstanding back in their fat faces.”

“That's what a lot of these weekend revolutionaries say.
Fifteen minutes under the spotlights and they're coughing up names like a talking telephone directory.”

Mary reached into the pocket of her slacks—she didn't carry a purse—and pulled out a small wad of bills. “Believe what you like, Mr. Menace,” she said as she counted out three tens. She held them out across my desk. “Just find my brother.”

I looked at the money. Sometimes it really eats me up that I run a business. But until the day an American workers' state nationalizes private investigation services, what can I do? Like the lady said, a guy's gotta make a living.

I took the money.

THESE DAYS, YOU'RE
not a real American—which is to say amember in good standing of the dominant consumer culture—unless you own a car. So I don't. That can be a little tough on a guy in my racket. Tailing somebody without being seen is rough enough. Tailing them when you're relying on the Los Angeles public transit system is next to impossible. But I manage.

After picking up a bus from Wilshire to Culver City, I hitched a ride with a fruit truck and a moving van before hoofing it the last twelve blocks or so to 545 Venice Boulevard—the home of John Smith, screenwriter. It only took me three hours to get there.

Some Hollywood types go in for shabby chic—homes where a little peeling paint and crumbling stucco add a touch of faux bohemian ambiance. But the rotting wood and weed-choked yard of Smith's little bungalow weren't there for show. His place was just plain shabby.

I let myself in with the key Mary had given me—her stubby, muscular fingers brushing my tingling palm all too briefly—and headed straight for the refrigerator. I didn't hope to find any clues there. I was drenched with sweat and
I needed a cold beer. And I found one. Property being theft and all, I felt free to help myself.

Beer in hand, I gave the place the once-over. It wasn't exactly neat—dirty plates were piled up in the sink, clothes were scattered across the floor, the sheets on the pull-down bed looked like they hadn't been made since the Battle of Stalingrad. But I didn't see any signs of a struggle. A plain, wooden dining table was wedged into one of the bungalow's dark corners. A typewriter sat on it next to a stack of white paper and a dictionary. I sat down at the desk and tried to put myself in the mind of John Smith, hack. I stared at the typewriter, searching for inspiration. I didn't have to search long.

The typewriter wasn't empty. A small wedge of white was still wrapped around the cylinder. I pulled it out. It was about a third of a sheet of typing paper, ripped. Somebody had been in a hurry to pull the page out of the typewriter—too much of a hurry. I read what was on the paper.

D'ARTAGNAN

Thou hast erred, fiend! At this moment, Athos nears!

CARDINAL RICHELIEU

Ahhh, ridiculous rubbish, I vow!

Zontak strikes Richelieu with the butt of his ray gun, sending him to the floor.

ZONTAK

Earth scum!

CARDINAL RICHELIEU
(cowering)

A terrible mistake, I declare!

ZONTAK

No, I g

That was it. For a second there, I considered dropping the case. A writer this bad needed to stay lost for the good of mankind. Then I remembered his sister. And her thirty bucks. And my rent. I slipped the scrap of paper into my jacket pocket and got back to work.

Somebody had nabbed Smith's screenplay, but they hadn't done a very thorough job. Maybe they'd left even more behind. I leaned over Smith's typewriter and pushed down the shift key.

Bingo. The typewriter ribbon was still there. I carefully removed it and put it in my other pocket. Then I turned, ready to nose around some more.

I didn't get far. Before I'd taken two steps, I heard voices outside. Someone was walking up to the front door.

“So this guy was some kinda pinko?” voice number one said.

“Not a pinko—a Red to the core,” voice number two replied gruffly.

Voice number one I didn't recognize. Voice number two I did. I started looking for a place to hide.

I threw myself on the floor and slid under the bed just as the front door opened.

“Not locked,” said voice number one.

Voice number two—a.k.a. FBI special agent Mike Sickles—just grunted.

The two men stepped inside.

I began sweating worse than Henry Ford at a union rally. Sickles and I have a little arrangement: If he doesn't see me, he doesn't shoot me.

I was anxious to keep my end of the bargain. But if Sickles or his flunky looked under the bed, this comrade would be headed to the big workers' paradise in the sky.

“Pretty lousy dive, ain't it?” said the first FBI agent.

“I dunno,” Sickles replied absently. I could see his big feet moving slowly toward the sink, then to Smith's desk.
He needed new shoes. “Makes my place look like the Ritz.”

The other agent moved over to the desk next to Sickles. “Say, what's that?”

They stood side by side for a moment, silent.

“Nothing,” Sickles finally pronounced. His feet moved in my direction, then suddenly swiveled.

I braced myself. His weight came down on the flimsy bed frame like the Battleship Potemkin. The mattress sagged under him, pinning me to the floor. A bed spring poked my back. Somehow I stayed quiet.

“You think he skipped town? Maybe the country?” Sickles' partner asked.

“Could be,” Sickles mumbled. “Dirty Reds. Turn on the lights and they scatter like roaches.”

“So what's our next move?”

“Well, there's that producer he was working for—Dominic Van Dine. We should lean on him a little, see if he knows anything.” Sickles leaned back and sighed. The spring gouged my back like a shiv. “Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? Why tomorrow?”

Suddenly the crushing weight on my back was gone. I could breathe again. Sickles' scuffed shoes shuffled away from the bed toward the door.

“Because I've got an itch to play the ponies today, knucklehead,” Sickles said. “And Dominic Van Dine's not going anywhere.”

The other agent followed Sickles out the door like the loyal lapdog he was. I waited a minute, just in case Sickles was toying with me. There's not much to do when you're stretched out underneath a bed, so naturally my eyes started to wander. Having a rat's-eye-view of the place gave me a whole new perspective.

I caught sight of a bright yellow ball on the floor under Smith's desk. I slid out from my hiding place and groped under the desk for it.

It was another piece of paper, balled up tight. I flattened it out.

It was notebook paper from an oversized steno pad. Covering it top to bottom, back and front, was a list of scribbled words. It started with “t” words: tacky, tantalizing, tardy, tedious, tempting, tender, terrible, tiresome, etc. Then the list switched to “m” words, then “i” words, “d” words, “n” words and finally a few “g” words.

I folded the list and stuck it in my pocket. There would be plenty of time to puzzle over it later. Right now, I had to get moving.

So Sickles was going to visit Smith's producer tomorrow. Good. That meant I could drop in for a chat today. But first I wanted to pay a call on an old acquaintance of mine—a safecracker known as Barney the Bat. He had good fingers and tight lips and bad habits. He owed me a favor.

I left Smith's bungalow and started looking for a ride.

ABOUT FOUR HOURS
later, I was standing in front of Dominic Van Dine's house in West Hollywood. I'm using the term “house” a little loosely here. It was actually something halfway between a house and a mansion. It was big alright, but it had the wide, flat roof and squat, squashed look of those ultra-modern boxes they've been throwing up all over Southern California since the war. I figured at least three families could live in there comfortably. And after the Revolution, they would.