THERE WAS A MESSAGE WAITING for me at the check-in desk at LaGuardia. Heidi Dillinger had to take care of some business matters and would be taking a flight a couple of hours later. She’d meet me in Los Angeles at the hotel. Before boarding I called my banker, Harold Berger, and told him that my building concierge was holding an envelope containing a bank draft for a quarter of a million dollars payable to me. After he finished saying “Oh God, oh God, what have you done now?” I told him I thought it was worth his personally picking it up at his earliest convenience. I told him to relax, money was not necessarily the root of all evil. He replied that as a banker he was surely better equipped to comment authoritatively on anything related to money and it certainly was the root of all evil and the root of everything else, too, for that matter. Sometimes Harold gets philosophical and I have to hang up on him.
Settling back in my first-class seat, I was confronted with fruit and champagne and several varieties of Danish and scrambled eggs with smoked salmon and steaming coffee. While eating I opened the envelope from the night before. Reservations had been made and confirmed at the Bel Air Hotel. A car from Rent-A-Wreck, bit of humor, that, would be waiting for me. And there were the names of two men with whom I should speak. I knew both names but neither of the men personally. I’d seen the names on letters and contracts relating to my becoming the legal heir to JC’s interests and to the rights of the book I’d written.
Manny Stryker was the producer preparing the film about the last days of JC Tripper’s life. Freddie Rosen was the record producer who now headed MagnaDisc.
Allan Bechtol suggested in his accompanying note that these men might well know more than had previously been suspected about the secret fate of JC Tripper.
I’d only had a couple of hours of not very satisfactory sleep after my chat with Morris Fleury. Consequently I dozed off shortly after my five-thousand-calorie breakfast and came back to life somewhere approaching the Rockies. I poured fresh coffee into the bottomless pit and began to think things over.
My first thoughts turned to Heidi Dillinger. I didn’t know what was going on in her mind any more than I did Bechtol’s, but I’d been around enough highbinders in the old days not to trust either one of them. Not yet. Highbinders. That had been one of JC’s favorite words, an archaism whose meaning seemed clear without resorting to the Unabridged. Ms. Dillinger and Bechtol were or were not highbinders, but I was bound to find out. In the meantime I had to figure out just how much I could tell her if I was going to be working with her.
Was there any point in telling her about Morris Fleury?
Was there any point in telling her about the suspicions he said Sally Feinman had had about me?
How far could I trust her?
Not far enough. Not yet.
If somebody was out to tie me into some nutty plot to kill my brother or hide him, then I had no allies. Not until I’d made sure. Not until they’d proved themselves.
She showed up at the Bel Air two hours after I checked in. She found me outside on one of the picturesque bridges looking down on the swans. It was hard to take my eyes off the black one, who was the star of the show and seemed to know it.
We went back to the shady veranda and sat down at a table giving an enchanting view of the grounds, emerald green from steady watering beneath the thick stands of trees. She was in what I took for California dress, splashes of color and not at all businessy. “What’s your plan?” There was just a hint of mockery in the tone and the smile, as if she were kidding both of us. I could see it in her mouth and her eyes: she felt that we were skipping school. I doubted that she ever looked quite this way in New York. Maybe her guard was slipping. Maybe she was falling for my boyish charm. Maybe she liked that in a man.
“I’m going to start with Stryker.”
“We are going to—”
“No,” I said, heading her off at the pass. “There’s no point in duplicating our efforts. I want you to do some checking on exactly what happened to Shadow Flicker. What do the cops say? They can’t just ignore it. I want the story—talk to people at the radio station, find a reporter who covered the story. Flicker may have been killed for reasons that have nothing whatever to do with our investigation. Maybe he was still a big doper. Maybe he had violent friends … getting stuffed into a cistern may be a message for other dopers who aren’t paying their bills. He could have been an informer for the narcs. He used to spend a lot of time out at the track. Maybe he had gambling debts. We don’t know a damned thing about what happened to him.”
She didn’t look overly enthused. “I thought we were going to work together. That was the point. That’s why I came out here. Two heads are better than one.” Well, either she was falling for me or was supposed to keep me on Bechtol’s leash.
“Look, leave all that out. If you’re going to hang around, you’re going to do it my way.”
“Next you’ll tell me you work alone and keep a bottle in the desk drawer.”
“I do work alone. Particularly when people are getting killed.” I was fighting against the impulse to feel like Bogart. I was much too large, for one thing. And I sure as hell wasn’t a private eye. Everything I knew about how to act I’d learned from books and movies. I was pathetic, but maybe I could keep everybody else from finding out the truth.
She actually batted her baby browns at me. At least we seemed to be in the same story. “You don’t trust me, do you?”
“Not much farther than Gallivan,” I said.
“Who’s Gallivan?”
“Man I used to know. Pray you never meet him.”
“What did he do to you?”
“Let’s just say he was a lowlife.”
“How low?”
“Low enough to sit on a dime and kick his heels. Thanks for asking.”
“Why don’t you trust me?”
“You suckered me. Anybody can get suckered once. But if I let you do it to me again, then it’s my fault. It’s like an inside straight. Anybody can try to fill it at first. But if you keep doing it, then you’re just not learning. I hate being a chump.”
“Chump? I don’t believe I’ve ever heard anyone actually use that word before.”
“If you stick around, who knows what you might hear. I may call you ‘sister’ soon or tell you you’ve got great stems that go all the way to the floor.”
“You mean you’re capable of almost any enormity.”
“Almost.”
“You might just say ‘Follow that cab!’ without warning.”
I stood up. “You’re catching on. Now let’s get to work.”
“Shall we meet back here for dinner or something?”
“Let’s just wait and see.”
“You’re suddenly awfully mysterious and—”
“Don’t say it.”
“—and I like that in a man.”
The car from Rent-A-Wreck was a white ’58 Cadillac convertible with tires that reminded me of Yul Brynner, one broken taillight, and the smell of stale cigar smoke clinging to the black leather. The huge engine sounded as if it had been tuned yesterday. You could probably have seen the tips of the tail fins with a good pair of binoculars. From behind the steering wheel you really should have sent word by messenger to the front end before you hung a left, which is what I did once I passed through the huge Bel Air gates onto Sunset Boulevard.
I wondered if the car was Heidi’s touch. Maybe there were depths of humor among the shallows and reefs of ambition, greed, and calculation. Were those qualities I liked in a woman? I’d have to give it some thought. I wouldn’t have to think much about her eyes and her mouth and the willowy length of her arms and legs. I wondered where she kept her tan up-to-date. On Bechtol’s penthouse deck? Or did he have a place in the Hamptons? And what the hell difference did it make to me? She was growing on me, that was the difference.
What I really wanted to know was her place in the equation Bechtol had worked out. Was she helping me or spying on me for her master? Wouldn’t it be a good one on me if the Great-Author-and-possible-psychopath was among those who believed I was the one who needed investigating?
I’d called Stryker from the hotel to get directions to his home. It turned out Bechtol had called him and such was Bechtol’s influence that Stryker had made time for me. He said, “I’m throwing Katz here and I’ve got Lamas on the way. But sure, sure, come on. Things can’t get any more fucked up than they are.” He told me how to get to his place up on Mulholland. “If the gate’s locked, just honk your horn until that moron lets you in. Christ.” He sounded like a man who was letting things wear him down. I didn’t know who Katz was or why he was throwing him around. Or where. And Fernando Lamas was dead. In the back of my mind I had the idea that Lamas had a son who passed for an actor. Maybe he’d be there. Unfortunately I’d left my autograph book in New York.
The gate was, of course, locked. I honked the horn and in the fullness of time a young man appeared wearing cut-off jeans and a maroon-and-gold University of Southern California sweatshirt with the sleeves chopped jaggedly off. He was tall and tan and young and lovely, like someone from Ipanema. He also looked strong enough to take the gate off the hinges with his bare hands. He had a sweatband holding in place yellow hair, short back and sides and long on top. He was carrying a tennis racket and waved it at me. I nodded, he did something to the gate, and it swung back.
He looked down at me. He was probably twenty. He leaned on the doorsill. I hoped he wasn’t going to pick up the car with me in it. “You’re not the man,” he said, “to fix the tennis-court fence.”
“How true.”
“Huge hole in the fence. It was just there one morning. The ball usually stops rolling between Sunset and Santa Monica. What can I do for you?”
“Point me at Manny Stryker. He’s expecting me.”
“Well, I’m the son and heir. William Randolph. The poor man’s Harry Cohn is out back throwing Katz off the deck.”
“So I keep hearing.”
“It’s an experiment.”
A teenage girl the color of honey strolled up the driveway from the tennis court. She was, from twenty feet away, so beautiful you wanted to die for her. Then, like so many California girls, she diminished with each step closer until she was just another kid by the time you could reach out and grab a handful. It was the Great California Illusion.
“We’re out of balls, Bill,” she pouted.
The big kid looked at me. “Wouldn’t you know,” he said, “out of balls.” He pointed to a spot where I could leave the car. “Great wheels,” he said.
I nodded. “One at each corner. Standard on these older models.”
They went off to look for more balls and I set off around the corner of a house that was made of some sort of stone and looked flat, like an elongated gun emplacement defending the spine of the hills. It lived out the back, as the real estate agents love to say. I stood at the corner and watched a man in sweatpants and a loose-fitting blue shirt holding a ball of black fur at arm’s length before him. He was above me on a balcony, a story and a half above my head, leaning out over the grassy slope. A girl in a bikini waited below, aiming a video camera at the ball of fur. “Okay,” she called. “Fire one!”
The man released the ball of fur, which turned into a cat. The girl in the bikini shot the process as the cat performed a blindingly quick series of acrobatic maneuvers and landed lightly on its feet. It shook itself, gave the girl’s bare feet a look that implied it was thinking of using them as a box of kitty litter, then strolled off with massive insouciance.
Manny Stryker wasn’t throwing Katz. He was dropping cats. Hurray for Hollywood. You just never knew, that was the lesson.
He launched a couple more feline conscripts, saw me, and dropped a third without bothering to watch its landing. He called my name and came down the stairway barefoot. “Hey, nice to meet you, pal. Nice to know who you’re doing business with. Listen, Shirl, that’s enough for now. Take a look at the tape and we’ll talk and get it over to the costumer. That’s the girl.” The girl in the bikini went away, one of the cats grumbling along beside her. Stryker led the way to a large round table sitting out on a promontory of stone, and looking down on the neighbors scattered on the hillside among the blue, shimmering disks of swimming pools. Stryker’s pool was being attended to by a pair of men in coveralls. They were trolling with large nets. Below us Los Angeles seemed to be burning beneath a scary brown haze of smoke. Through the brown murk it seemed to be a city sacked and left to smolder by vandals.
Stryker motioned me into a canvas chair as a small Mexican woman arrived with a tray containing a pitcher of iced tea, a plate of lemon wedges, and two glasses also full of ice. The day wasn’t nearly as hot as it had been in New York City. “Funny thing about cats,” he said. “The higher up they are, as a general rule, the safer they’re likely to be when they fall or jump. They’re very different from people. No matter how far a cat falls, it never falls faster than sixty miles per hour. People, see, have a much lower ratio of body surface to mass, ergo less air resistance. So people reach a velocity of a hundred and twenty miles per hour when they fall. And of course your cat is your natural acrobat, having descended over several million years from your tree leapers. But—tell me if I’m boring you, ’kay?—it takes the cat about five stories of falling, or more accurately five stories of accelerating to reach its top speed … and it’s only then that the little bugger really relaxes and splays out its legs and begins a kind of floating. Like a flying squirrel. Thus the drag’s increased and the impact of landing is spread out over a larger area. Results are incredible—there’s the case of a cat in New York who fell thirty-two stories onto a sidewalk … What do you think happened?” He waited patiently for an answer. Here was a man with a hobby.
To prove I was paying attention, I said, “Sidewalk splattered with cat as far as the eye could see.” I knew my cue. His research report was giving me a chance to look him over. His dark curly hair was cut close to his head, his nose looked as if it had repeatedly fallen thirty-two stories to the sidewalk and been considerably broadened by the experience. His eyes were dark and quiet while the rest of him tended to fidget. He was pouring iced tea, dropping lemon wedges in our glasses.
“Cat chipped a tooth.” He sighed. “Thus, the cat’s nine lives. I’ve gotta find a taller building. I might kill one of the little bastards here. They don’t have the time to spread out and increase drag and get the landing gear down properly.”
“Are you crazy or is there some point to this?”
“I’ve got a screenplay about a cat burglar. Almost a comic-book figure but not quite. He escapes by turning himself into a cat. Literally, figuratively speaking. Concept’s a little hazy, but it’s easy to catch on to, y’know. So who can say? We could have a hit, we could have a fart in a space suit. No way to tell. But you didn’t come here to listen to me rave on about cats—”
“You could have fooled me,” I said.
“Bechtol said something about your brother. Well, hell, I bought the rights to your book, we’ve got the screenplay in development. The writer’s a turd, but what can you do, he’s a writer. Bane of my fucking existence. So what’s Bechtol’s problem?”
“You know. He thinks JC is alive. He seems to think you’re of the same mind. Why does he think that?”
“What do you think?” He gave me a look so shifty it had to be a joke. “Is he alive?”
“Look, I’m just glad we’re off cats.”
“Listen, pal, I’ve got an interest in JC. Obviously. We’ve all got an interest in JC. If he’s alive, well, hell … I don’t want to have fifteen, twenty million in a picture that has the wrong ending. Not if I can help it. I don’t want to picture him dead as a lox and suddenly he’s on the front page of every paper in the world, making me look like a total asshole. Only makes sense, ’kay? Who knows what it could mean for the picture, plus or minus? Nobody, that’s who. But I’d like some warning if he’s gonna pop up on Entertainment Tonight. Maybe it would give the picture a real boost, maybe it would sink it for all time. I’m not saying I know. But I’d like to have the time to lay out a campaign for any eventuality … so, sure, I’ve got some inquiries out, some of my people looking around, trying to pick up a piece of information here and there. No crime in that. For instance, I’m going to Paris tomorrow, I’ve got a lead there, some A-rab camel driver or some goddamn thing, says he knew JC in Casablanca a couple of weeks before he died …”
There was an explosion of honking from up above the house. Another visitor. Fernando Lamas’s son, perhaps.
“Lamas,” he said, sensing my curiosity. “Been waiting three days.”
“Camel driver,” I said. “Sounds weak to me.”
“Maybe yes, maybe no. Thing is, this guy says your brother talked to him about some crazy escape route he’d laid out, told the A-rab it was foolproof. He says your brother wanted to hide away and spend the rest of his days writing poetry.”
“Not exactly the brother I remember so well. Pornographic limericks, maybe.”
“Well, wait a minute. He wrote a lot of lyrics, ’kay? Some are pretty bloody marvelous, ’kay? I don’t think the A-rab’s story is so farfetched. Listen to some of his stuff again—”
“Please,” I said.
“Anyway, this A-rab says JC was pretty sexed out in Casablanca. Says he was providing JC with some very young girls—”
“So he was a pimp, not a camel driver. You and he have credibility problems, my friend.”
“Very, very young girls and boys of all ages. Sort of burning his candle at both ends, as they say.”
“What utter bullshit!”
“Well, you’d naturally protect his reputation, wouldn’t you? He’s your brother—”
“Look, I was there. Girls maybe, but JC was not into boys, young or old. If you’re paying this Arab anything, you’re dumber than your cats.”
I looked up. Something funny was being led around the corner of the house. It had four legs and looked as if it had started out to be a horse and run into design difficulties. Another one followed the first.
“I’m not impressed,” Stryker said. And he wasn’t even looking at the recent arrivals. “Not with your indignation and your outrage. What’s it to you, anyway? You’ve made your pile off your brother … Maybe you’re afraid he’ll come back and the record royalties will go to him—is that it?”
“I believe my brother is dead. I want it to stay that way. I don’t want him, the memory of him, dragged through the slime just to hype your movie. He’s dead. I don’t want to look up at the screen and see him turned into some crazy Arab procurer’s idea of a sex-crazed rocker, not when he’s not here to defend himself. That isn’t why I sold you the rights to my book.”
Stryker stood up. His back was still to the three—count ’em, three—creatures being led past the pool in our general direction.
“Why did you sell the movie rights? ’Cause you wanted the money. Don’t kid yourself about that. Look, why not just keep your shirt on, Sunny Lee. We’re talking about show business here. Which is the money business. A money business which to a very large extent depends on the total, brainless crap the twelve-year-old mind clamors for. Leave us have no illusions. I’m in this for the money. MagnaFilms is sure as hell in it for the money. So don’t be a sanctimonious asshole while you’re still getting your cut, ’kay? There’s plenty for everybody. If you don’t like it, find him yourself … or prove he’s dead. Do you hear me saying that maybe you killed him yourself and then pulled that disappearing act in Switzerland? No, you do not. But there are people who believe that. They’re around, my friend. So don’t make an enemy out of somebody who’s got nothing against you, ’kay?”
One of the creatures made a peculiar sound and Stryker’s face broke into a broad smile. He was fifty or so but his teeth were clearly about a year old. He spun around to face the animals and their two attendants.
“My llamas! My llamas are here! You little fuckers, come to Poppa!”
I hadn’t needed my autograph book after all.
No one took much notice of my departures except for William Randolph Stryker, who was poking around in the shrubbery looking for a ball. I slowed the Caddy and he looked up, grinned. “Lost two just since you were here. It’s Ellen, no sense of direction.”
I gave him an address and asked him how to get there from here. He said, “Hey, that’s Freddie Rosen’s place. Silver Lake. It’s a lot closer to downtown. Freddie’s a good man. I work for him sometimes. Y’know, little stuff. He gives me free CDs.” He told me how to get there.