the Plan (1995) (5 page)

She made a turn on Pico and headed up on the 405 freeway.

"Elizabeth, I can't take the freeway. I told you. Go through Culver City, will ya?"

"This is nuts, Ryan. People use the freeway every day. My mother's coming over for dinner. I have a gazillio
n t
hings to do. If I go on surface streets, I'm nevergonna get home."

She stayed on the 405 to Santa Monica as he held the armrest and battled a panic attack. He didn't know why the freeways had started scaring him. For the last two months, he had been incapable of driving his own car. The minute he got into his Mercedes and turned on the engine, he was filled with such bone-numbing fear that he couldn't get out fast enough.

Just a year ago, he'd been in control not only of his life but most of his relationships. He'd won Writers Guild awards and two Emmys. He'd been lionized by the press.

Then Matt died and everything went wrong.

They were scooting off the end of the Santa Monica Freeway and heading up the Coast Highway. As a kid, he had surfed this whole coast in the summer, cruising the black ribbon in his VW convertible.

In college he'd been an all-conference wide receiver at Stanford University. He'd been too small for the pros, but football and his blond surfer good looks made him a king on campus. He'd won the school lit contest in his senior year. Against his father's advice, he began writing TV scripts on spec instead of taking an entry-level job flipping Happy Burgers at one of his father's Happy Boy restaurants.

Two years later he sold his first script and moved into a small office at Universal Studios. Nobody could chum out work faster or better, and he'd gotten a big reputation. He'd made enough to marry Linda, his college sweetheart. She was as beautiful and blond as he was handsome and popular, and it took them a long time to find out that they weren't in love with each other as much as they were in love with the image they could create together. It was cool being half of somebody else's fantasy. But the envy of others failed to sustain them. And after Matt died, the lights went out for Ryan.

They roared out of Santa Monica. Elizabeth hadn't asked about the fiasco at NBC. She had to know. Probabl
y o
ne of the secretaries over there had called with the news and it was already spreading like wildfire, scorching his reputation, driving lies and half-truths ahead of it like fleeing animals. In show business, failures clung like wet clothing.

"You didn't ask about the screening," he finally said, to take his mind off a red pickup that was beside them. A big, burly six-pack, with heavy tattoos ringing his biceps like African jewelry, was crowding the passenger door of the Ghia.

"I heard you threatened to beat the shit out of Marty Lanier and called him a Jew faggot."

"I never called him a Jew faggot." His stomach did a slow porpoise roll.

"Well, that's what they say. It's all over the lot." "You gotta call people, say it's not true."

"I already tried, but these things have a life of their own, Ryan."

Thirty minutes later, Elizabeth pulled the Ghia up in front of his condo north of Malibu. It was a Spanish complex with arched doors and red-tiled walks. He got out, and she started to back out of the drive, in a hurry to get home.

Ryan's condo was on Broad Beach, amid heavy sand dunes. Inside, the apartment was more to Linda's taste than his--lots of French floral prints on overstuffed chairs. Linda had taken the big house in Bel Air and he was out here. He preferred the beach. He couldn't bear the upstairs hall of the Bel Air house, with all those pictures of the three of them before Matt drowned. The faces stared at him from behind antique lacquer frames. What had they been thinking . . . smiling at the base of a ski lift . . . or on the back of the Linda, his fifty-foot sailboat named after his ex-wife? The pictures seemed to be of three strangers. So he'd left the house with its framed reminders and moved to the beach.

He saw his message light was on. He hit the playback.

His own voice, tired and lifeless: "Hi, this is Ryan. After the tone, leave your message."

Beep.

"Ryan, this is Jerry. What the fuck went wrong at NBC? I got six calls already. Call me. I can't deal with this shit."

His agent. Great! There were no other messages. It was as if he'd already been thrown off the Hollywood bus.

Why was this happening? Ryan looked out at the ocean . . . at the white foam, skipping playfully ahead of the green water. Then he picked up the channel changer and absently turned the TV on.

"
. . . not a matter of employment or even deficit reductions," the man on television was saying. 'This is hardheaded economics . . . not the pabulum President Cotton tried to make us swallow." Cotton, plagued by ill health, had decided not to seek a second term.

It was Senator Paul Arquette on a taped weekly news show. The United States senator from Nevada had been getting more airtime lately than any other presidential hopeful. He had not announced yet, but he was obviously about to. Ryan remembered him from twenty years before, when Ryan had been just fifteen and had visited Mickey Alo at Thanksgiving. He hadn't been in touch with Mickey since Matt died. Then he remembered Mickey's dog Rex, running ahead of them, snapping at the air. And he remembered Rex lying on the grass. Headless. Dead. *

Ryan turned off the set and went out on the porch to watch the sun go down, painting the Pacific with greens and reds. And then, for a brief moment in his mind's eye, he saw a seven-year-old redheaded boy. He was on a swing, pumping his legs to make it go higher. He didn't remember ever seeing him before, but somehow the memory of the boy was familiar. Then, almost before he could focus on him, the image was gone, leaving him with a feeling of dread he couldn't comprehend. Ryan had no idea who the boy was. He sat in the reclining chair and put his head back.

He fell asleep, and again his dreams were dark an
d d
eadly. He was swimming with Matt. There was a black shadow in the water next to him, and as always, it terrified him. It was after Matt, but Matt was laughing. As the shadow beast swam past, Matt climbed on, riding its back. And then the giant blackness swerved and came at Ryan. . . . A beast he couldn't make out or identify but which seemed to contain all the evil in his imagination. His dead son was laughing. "Here we come, Daddy." For a second he glimpsed the huge monster's eye, rich with red and green markings--a paisley eye--then the shadow was ripping into him, eating his flesh. Matt was still laughing. "Does it hurt, Daddy?" And Ryan woke up. For almost a minute he didn't know where he was, then realized he was on his deck.

Shaking, he went into the house and lay down on his sofa.

Ryan was bone-tired but too afraid to close his eyes.

Chapter
5.

MICKEY AND HIS FATHER WERE IN JOSEPH'S ROOM
watching a news report about the return of Paul's mutilated body to McCarran Field in Las Vegas. The UBC anchor, Brenton Spencer, told America that Bahamian police surmised that the senator and his media consultant Warren Sacks had gone swimming late at night and been savagely attacked by sharks.

Paul's wife, Avon, met the plane, dressed in a dark suit. She was crying as Paul's casket was unloaded from a military cargo plane, and Brenton Spencer droned on about the late senator's political accomplishments.

Mickey watched, without feeling. He had not told his father about the inflammatory Polaroid pictures he'd found in the Flamingo Suite because it served no purpose now. The pictures showed Paul and Warren and a pretty sixteenyear-old Bahamian girl, locked in a bisexual daisy chain of anal bliss. Mickey had cut them up and flushed them down the toilet. They were of no use to him now and only defined the depth of his father's mistake in judgment about Paul. As the funeral procession left the airfield, Mickey switched off the TV and moved back to his father.

"I think you're right," Joseph wheezed. "This Rhode
Island governor Haze Richards looks good, but this whole thing happens now or not at all. We got no time."

"Okay, but it's not like with Paul," Mickey said. "We knew Paul since he was governor. Haze Richards is a stranger. We need somebody who's got the candidate's ear and can control him. Somebody who can godfather this whole thing. I've been checking it out, and I found a guy who could help. He's real tight with Governor Richards--all the way back to grade school--helped him win the Rhode Island Governor's mansion. If we pick Haze Richards to be our candidate, this guy could rope him for us."

"What's his name?"

"Albert James Teagarden," Mickey said. "They call him A
. J
."

"What kinda leverage you got on Teagarden?" Joseph asked, then exploded into a coughing spasm, cursing as he barked out stale air and phlegm, spitting it into a wastebasket. Mickey turned on the oxygen tank, but Joseph waved it away, his eyes hard and yellow as dry corn.

"I talked to our people in Rhode Island. They wanted to get a handle on Haze Richards before he was elected governor 'cause of all our racetrack action up there. Tea-garden was running the governor's campaign. Our people threw a party in a hotel mom in Providence. There was pussy and booze, and then in comes some guy with this suitcase and he turns it upside down and spills out two hundred and fifty large all over the bed. It still had racetrack wrapping bands on it. They told Teagarden it was to buy campaign TV ads and to take what he needs. This fuck, A . J
., is stuffing his pockets like some kid at a Halloween party. They also got a video of him with one of the girls. We got the prick by the balls."

Haze Richards had made his way to the top of their short list. Paul's old campaign manager, Malcolm Rasher, had found him. Ken Venable and Guy Vandergot, the two pollsters they had hired for Paul, had confirmed the choice at a meeting they had with Mickey the day Paul's body was found.

They'd been in the back booth of one of his father's Mr. A's steak houses in Atlantic City. The dinner crowd was just streaming in from Resorts International next door. They were wedged into a booth in the back, hidden by a partition from most of the crowd. The din was growing as the tables filled. Ken Venable was dissecting the Democratic field along with a turf 'n' surf special, gesturing with a serrated knife blade, pointing the tip at Mickey. Guy Vandergot, fat and slothlike, was eating with his head down, grunting in agreement as Ken rambled on.

`Thing you gotta understand here, Mickey, is the Democrats are factionalized, always have been. They can't agree on shit. You got liberals in the North and conservatives in the South. You got New Age intellectuals in the West, labor guys in the Midwest, along with farmers and subsidy protectionists. It's a patchwork of ideologies, and Malcolm thinks this gives us a chance . . . and I agree with him."

"How so?" Mickey said.

" 'Cause in a four
-
or five-horse race where nobody is winning, there's a chance with financing to jump in and grab the thing early. . . . While the rest of these guys are fighting over little pieces of the pie, we sweep in and grab the whole deal."

Ken looked over at Guy Vandergot before continuing.

"Okay, here's the Democratic field now that Paul's gone. All these guys have announced, and in a week or so, all of 'em are gonna be in Iowa cornfields, sitting on Jap tractors, talking about farm subsidies like they actually give a shit. . . . So we gotta get in this now if we're gonna," Ken said, still pointing with his knife. "Your front-runner is gonna be Leo Skatina, the second-term U
. S
. senator from New York. He's got name identification, good local organizations, and the media likes him. He's the early poll leader. He's been real vocal about women's issues. I think the Democratic National Committee is getting set to endorse him. The DNC probably thinks he has the strength to win against Vice President Pudge Anderson , who we all know is gonna be the Republican candidate. Then you got the Democratic senator from Florida, Peter Dehaviland. Environmentalist, that's his beachhead issue--offshore drilling, air pollution, nuclear waste. He also has a strong stand against unrestricted immigration. . . . He's gonna fade unless he gets really lucky in Iowa and New Hampshire. Malcom agrees."

"Go on." Mickey took out a notepad and began making notes.

"Okay . . . Eric Gulliford, nickname Gilligan 'cause he kinda looks like Bob Denver. He's an old-time Democrat. Hubert Humphrey in a fishing hat. U
. S
. congressman from Ohio. He's for all the traditional Democratic Party stuff: labor, welfare, jobs for everyone, government spending. Tax the shit out of everybody. He's strong with the old party hacks. Could only be trouble if, for some reason, the party shifts off Skatina. And then the last announced candidate is Benjamin Savage. He's a New Age liberal from California, a three-term U
. S
. senator and he's got all the hot-button Melrose Avenue issues western liberals love--recast the workplace to fit society, tough sex harassment laws, animal rights, gay rights, women's rights, health care for everyone, legalized drugs . . ."

Mickey winced slightly, but they didn't see it.

Ken set down his knife pointer and leaned back. 'That's the field," he concluded. "These guys couldn't agree on due north if they were each holding a compass. Malcolm thinks we should try and lump them all as insiders and run against the whole lot like they were one candidate. Tar them with the same brush. That means we should try and find a candidate that has never held a national office, somebody who's never bounced a check on the congressional bank or cast a midnight vote for a pay raise. Rhode Island governor Haze Richards is our choice. He has no legislative record to attack that would mean anything to anybody. He's photogenic. Show him the picture."