BY MID-MAY, the city was drifting into summer, a season of muggy, overcast mornings followed by days of asphalt-melting heat and nights when the air was filled with grit and smelled of gasoline. From the parched hills, the houses of the rich looked down upon a burning plain, where the metallic flash of sunlight in the windshields of a million cars was like the frantic signaling of souls. I was working twelve-, fourteen-, sixteen-hour days. I justified the hours with a caseload that included three active death-penalty appeals, but there was a maniacal quality to my busyness I recognized from past experience as flight. When I was still drinking, it preceded a binge. Now that I no longer drank, I didn’t know where it would take me.
Late at night, when I couldn’t read another line of transcript or compose another sentence of argument, I got into my car and started driving. By two or three in the morning, Los Angeles had settled into a restless sleep beneath a red, starless sky. The labyrinth of freeways that arced above the city was as deserted as it ever got and I sped east to west, north to south, with the windows down and wind rushing through the car. Grief drove me, but this grief was a shape-shifter that often felt like other things. Like anger or fear or, surprisingly, like lust. I was as guiltily horny as a teenager, looking at other men with the same abashed eyes as when I was fifteen, tormented by the same fantasies. I felt like an animal slamming itself against its cage, as if my body was reacting in terror to Josh’s death, with a frantic desire to generate or, failing that, for living flesh.
One night I found myself parked on a back road of Griffith Park, watching other men slip out of their cars and disappear into the brush. This was a dangerous spot for a lawyer—it teemed with undercover cops—and public sex had never appealed to me. I knew I was acting self-destructively but, for once, knowing was not enough to stop me, and all those years of disciplined sobriety counted for nothing against the emptiness in my gut. On a hill in the distance was the graceful hulk of the Griffith Observatory and somewhere in the hills behind me the Hollywood sign. A car pulled up beside me, a top-of-the-line Land Rover with tinted windows and a sun roof. The window on the passenger’s side slid low enough to reveal a shiny pate and a set of intense, arrogant eyes. They took me in and rejected me, the dark window closing. A moment later, a different man, this one small and compact, got out of the driver’s side and headed down the trail. By then I had concluded my own internal debate and went down the path behind him.
The trail dipped into a valley between a shaggy wood of shrubs and low growing trees. The shadowy figures of men moved among them. I plunged into the wood and waited beneath a eucalyptus tree. The little man whom I’d followed had been swallowed by the darkness. I heard a rustle and then a young Asian smoking a cigarette appeared at my side. He flung the cigarette down and ground it into the dust. Behind me, I heard a deep, cajoling voice whisper to someone else, “Come on, my car’s parked on the road. We can party inside.” The young Asian took my hand, guiding it to his crotch. I touched him, then pulled my hand away.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“I made a mistake.”
He looked at me. “Married guy, right?”
“No, I thought I was into this. I’m not.”
He rolled his eyes. “Whatever. You better get home to the wife and kids.”
He zipped up and moved away.
I retraced my steps to my car. The little man had returned to the Land Rover with another man. I wondered if they were the two I’d overheard. They got into the backseat. A moment later, the second man jumped out of the car, slamming the door behind him. He was a boy, nineteen or twenty, a dusty-haired blond in a tank top and jeans. Hard blue eyes. He saw me, grinned spitefully.
“Troll,” he said, jerking his thumb at the Land Rover.
“What?”
“The bald guy in the car. Scary.” He’d come close enough to get a good look at me. His eyes glazed over. “See you around.”
“Whatever,” I said, getting into my car.
The little man emerged from the backseat and looked in my direction. I could not make out his features clearly, but a dark handsomeness registered that made me think of Alex Amerian. He smiled, shrugged and lunged back down the trail. I started up my car and pulled into the road. I noticed the plates on the Land Rover: PROUDJD. Another distinguished member of the profession.
My late-night meandering sometimes found me in Alex Amerian’s neighborhood, slowly driving past his house. If the lights were on, I’d park across the street and think about getting out, but what would I say to him? I’m obsessed with you because the first time I saw you I thought you were my dead lover? Not much of a pickup line. But I was obsessed, to my embarrassment, and conspicuous enough that one of Alex’s neighbors, who pegged me as a cruiser, came out to my car one night and warned me off with, “Don’t you guys ever give it a rest? Get out of here before I call the cops.” I felt demeaned and out of control, but I couldn’t keep him out of my thoughts or my fantasies. I would awaken from an erotic dream not sure whether the image fading into my unconsciousness was Josh or Alex.
I had learned with Josh that as much as you may want another human being, you don’t really get to have them, not in a possessory way. You don’t own, you absorb them. You adopt a gesture or a figure of speech or a preference for a certain color or kind of food. Then the transfer becomes subtler, a way of seeing things, a way of thinking, feeling. Eventually you can’t tell where they leave off and you begin. One day, the part of Josh I’d absorbed into myself would fade into memory, but for now this shadow Josh inside of me continued to project itself onto the world of the living. It had projected itself onto Alex and because it kept Josh alive, I couldn’t let go. But I wouldn’t humiliate myself, either, by giving in to the obsession and calling Alex. So I buried myself in work, suffered my aging, lustful body and waited for it all to go away.
I was sitting at home one hot night at the beginning of June, leafing through the sex ads of a gay newspaper, when the phone rang and it was Richie on the other end asking, “Do you have clean underwear?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Because if you don’t, you can bring them with you when you pick me up and wash them at the laundromat.”
“Are you on something?”
“Just a deadline, honey. You know that page in the magazine where we cover the trend du jour? Well, the latest thing is called the PLF, the Poet’s Liberation Front. They want to bring poetry to the people.” He paused for breath. “They give readings on buses, in shoe stores, with your rigatoni. Tonight there’s one at a laundromat in Silver Lake, and you know Mother never ventures east of La Brea unescorted. You have to come. I’ll buy you dinner afterwards.”
“Why me, Richie?”
“Who else? You were a lit major and you live in the neighborhood.”
It was like Richie to remember that English was my college major. He filed away facts when you didn’t even think he was paying attention and then surprised you with them at a strategic moment.
“Why not?” I said. “I’ll be at your place in fifteen minutes.”
Richie lived in the neighborhood of West Hollywood just below the Sunset Strip, where the black hearses of the Grave Line Tours ferried tourists to the sites of celebrity suicides, murders and hauntings: the carport on Holloway, where Sal Mineo was stabbed to death; the sidewalk outside of the Viper Club on Sunset, where River Phoenix died in convulsions. Richie’s building was on the tour as the last domicile of Bette Davis, by whom it was said the building was haunted. Richie claimed it was true, that he had seen her ancient, wasted figure tottering through the halls whispering, “What a dump.” It was a five-story brick building, whitewashed with green shutters. The dark-haired, handsome doorman sat in a little office beside the gate to the garage, waiting to be discovered. A brass plaque by the front door attested to the fact that the building was on the national register of historical places. The apartment Richie shared with Joel Miller was in the back of the building on the first floor, just past the unused swimming pool where I always half-expected to find William Holden floating facedown in the water.
The walls of Richie’s apartment were pink and blue, the colors of a decadent nursery, and decorated with Fragonard-like murals of tubby gods and goddesses mistily seducing each other. Above a seventeenth-century French writing table of inlaid woods, a blunt black-and-white drawing by a prison artist depicted one tattooed gang member going down on another. A hundred-year-old Mexican reliquary held a plastic vial which, according to Richie, contained a bit of fat removed from Elizabeth Taylor’s thighs by liposuction. On the walls of the dining room was a triptych of black-and-white photographs of Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford and Marlene Dietrich taken by George Hurrell, framed in heavy silver; “my mothers,” Richie explained to bemused guests.
I rang the doorbell expecting to be admitted by Javier, the silent, dignified houseman Richie employed, but Joel Miller let me into the apartment. He was a plump, unprepossessing man whose face had been lifted, peeled and collagened to the smoothness, if not the innocence, of an infant. The expensive, baggy sweats he wore to hide his bulk only made it more obvious.
“Hello, Joel,” I said. “Where’s Javier?”
“It’s his night off,” he said. “Richie’s getting ready.”
“How are you?” I asked, following him into the living room.
“Busy,” he said. “I have a lot of calls to make.”
He disappeared into the library, and a few minutes later I heard him screaming at someone over the phone. Joel was a studio executive at Universal Pictures, vice-president in charge of something or other, but it was not clear to me what he actually did, no matter how often Richie explained it to me.
But then, Richie maintained that no one in Hollywood really knew what they were doing, and that pictures got made at all was an accidental byproduct of deal-making. Joel, I gathered, was in the business of making deals. He rarely volunteered any information about himself. He could scarcely get in a full sentence without incurring Richie’s ridicule, so he retreated into an aggrieved silence. The few times I had made an effort to talk to him away from Richie I sensed a rage beneath his platitudes I usually associated with the violent criminals I defended, a bottomless fury against the world. When I mentioned to Richie that Joel seemed to be a pretty angry guy, his eyes narrowed and he whispered, “Don’t ever let him know you know.” They’d been together for almost twenty years. Richie joked that he and Joel had an old-fashioned gay marriage: “It’s based on mutual contempt.”
Richie emerged from the bedroom, dressed entirely in black except for a necklace of large, fake pearls. “What do you think?” he asked, preening. “I call this Jack Kerouac meets Barbara Bush.”
“No hat?”
He whipped a black beret out of his coat pocket. “I’m way ahead of you, Daddy-o. Where’s Joel?”
“He said he had to make some calls.”
“Did he offer you anything to drink? That asshole.”
“I’m not thirsty. Shouldn’t we be leaving?”
“Joel,” Richie banged at the library door. “You shit. I know you’re doing drugs in there. You better have 911 on redial because I won’t be here when you OD.”
Joel cracked the door open. “I’m on the phone, Richie. Working. Do you mind?”
“Just wanted to give you a kiss, honey,” Richie simpered, planting a kiss in the air in the vicinity of Joel’s cheek. “Don’t wait up, pumpkin.”
“Have fun,” Joel replied, and shut the door firmly.
“Now, I’m ready to go,” Richie announced.
I followed Richie’s directions to a bad stretch of Sunset in Silver Lake, a neighborhood that increasingly defined what Los Angeles was becoming. In the hills above the reservoir that gave Silver Lake its name, the terra-cotta, white-walled houses of the affluent sprawled like a Mediterranean village, while down in the flats stood the graffiti-covered tenements of the poor. For a while, cheap rents in the flats had drawn artists to Silver Lake where, briefly, storefront galleries and coffeehouses had flourished, but crime had driven most of them away.
Outside the laundromat, a photographer from the magazine was waiting for Richie. I went inside to find seats while they talked. A microphone at the back of the room faced a half-dozen benches occupied by twenty or thirty people, many of them dressed as severely as Richie in shades of black, minus the whimsy of his pearls. They were mostly young and conspicuously white, lank-haired, bristling with attitude, smoking furiously. In contrast were the Latino families who had come not to hear poetry but to wash clothes. They milled around, unable to sit, since the benches had been appropriated for the reading, mothers, fathers, children, too polite to stare at the interlopers who were too indifferent to take notice of them. The room smelled of detergent, sweat and clove cigarettes, the washers and dryers thumped and chugged above the murmur of English and Spanish. I made my way to the front of the room, the only dark-skinned person to cross the invisible line separating the two groups. The room was sweltering.
Richie sat down just as the first reader was announced by the “facilitator,” a pale, red-haired woman dressed in a black brassiere and a black petticoat over black tights. The poet was a young woman in black jeans and, daringly, a white shirt.
“This is a poem about LA,” she drawled in a Valley accent. “It’s called, ‘The Seventh Circle.’ It’s based on, like, the Inferno?” She paused, waiting, apparently for some kind of recognition. When none came, she said, rhyming the name with panty, “By Dante? Dante Alighieri?”
“Just read the fucking poem,” a bearded hipster called out.
“Whatever,” she sniffed, and began her declamation.
It was a long, bad poem, and well before she finished, the restless audience had drowned her out.
“Hey,” she protested. “This isn’t the movies. Shut up.”
“Sit down, sit down,” her bearded heckler yelled.
“Fuck you,” she said, and went on reading her poem. There was scattered applause when she sat down. Richie nudged me and said, “Let’s get out of here.”
“I’m with you.”
“What was that all about?” Richie laughed, when we were safely outside.
“I think she was trying to compare LA to hell,” I said.
“Please,” he said, lighting a Marlboro. “Hell is where you go when you want a vacation from LA. What the fuck’s the seventh circle?”
“Have you ever read Dante?”
He stared at me. “I saw the movie. The Norma Shearer original, not the Debbie Reynolds remake. Of course I never read Dante. Have you?”
“In college. The Inferno gave me nightmares, it was scarier than anything Stephen King has ever written. The seventh circle is where Dante puts the violent, including homosexuals …”
“Violent fags? What did they do, mix stripes with plaids?”
“Dante was Catholic, of course, so he thought of sodomy as an act against nature and homosexuals as the violent against nature. The seventh circle was a plain of burning sand. The souls of homosexuals are forced to run around the perimeter of the plain for eternity while a burning rain bakes them.”
We walked to my car in silence, past shuttered shops and a Mexican bar. From inside I heard a rancheria I recognized as one of my father’s favorites.
“So let me see if I get this,” Richie said. “You’ve got all these guys running on a track, so they’re in good shape, and there’s this burning rain that keeps them tan. Gee, Henry, that doesn’t sound like hell to me. It sounds like Palm Springs.”
We got into my car. “Where to, Richie?”
“Well, there’s nothing decent here,” he said, dismissing, with a sweeping gesture, the entire east side of Los Angeles. “Spago? No, it’s Tuesday. No one there but tourists. The Ivy? Even I can’t get us in without a reservation. Maple Drive’s too 90210. I know. Musso’s. I love their creamed spinach.”
Musso and Frank’s was the oldest restaurant in Hollywood, a place of dark wood, high-backed booths, starched tablecloths, elderly white-jacketed waiters, lethal martinis and a menu that listed such antiquarian items as consommé and a salad of iceberg lettuce. It was on Hollywood Boulevard, not far from Richie’s office, on the tenth floor of a high-rise that overlooked what Richie insisted on calling Grauman’s Chinese Theater, long after everyone else had accepted its change of ownership and name to Mann’s Theater. Such sites were holy places to Richie, who often said everything he knew about life he’d learned from watching old movies. And it was true that while he might not have read Dante, he could recite big chunks of Gloria Swanson’s dialogue from Sunset Boulevard by heart or rattle off the filmography of Maria Ouspenskaya.
I understood Richie’s childhood devotion to old movies, because I had been as devoted to books, which, just as his movies did for him, helped me escape the loneliness of being different by creating an alternative reality where I was not alone. Richie had once told me the only thing that had kept him alive in the private mental institution to which his parents had committed him when he was fourteen was creeping into the day room at midnight to watch the late show.
“The last time I was here,” Richie confided over his martini at Musso’s, “Bob Hope came tottering down the aisle. His hair, Henry. Bright orange. And his face looked like it was carved out of tapioca.”
“What are you going to say about the poetry reading?”
“Blah, blah, blah. I only need a couple of ’graphs. Did you get a look at that blond by the door? Yummy. Of course, he’s an actor.” Richie smirked. “I think every actor in town ought to wear a sign that says, ‘I am not a real person, I am an actor.’”
Our waiter came, a fussy ancient whose six dyed strands of hair were carefully plastered across his bald pate. He moued his disapproval over my order of an omelet and a salad, but Richie made up for it, ordering filet mignon in béarnaise sauce, a baked potato, broiled mushrooms, creamed spinach, a Caesar salad and a half-bottle of Bordeaux. I knew from other meals with him that Richie would eat every bite, then demand dessert, and yet he never gained weight. “I’m blessed with a starlet’s metabolism,” he boasted when I pointed this out to him, but a likelier reason was that his father used to scream at him at the dinner table to act like a man until Richie was so terrified his throat closed up.
“Alex Amerian is an actor,” I said, after the waiter left. “He seemed real enough.”
Richie raised an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me you’re sweet on him.”
“Could you be serious for a moment?”
He dropped the supercilious eyebrow. “What’s wrong, Henry?”
“I think I’m cracking up here.”
All affectation vanished. “Tell me,” he said quietly.
I told him everything, about the frantic work and the aimless driving, the incident at Griffith Park, parking in front of Alex’s house, the neighbor who’d run me off, the shame, confusion, grief. I trusted Richie to understand me despite our many differences, because when I lay in bed at night in a small town in California, reading about Achilles and Patroclus, while he sat in front of a TV set in suburban Ohio, watching Joan Crawford in Rain, we had been learning the same lesson about the impossibility of our desire; a lesson that, as grown men, we were still trying to overcome.
“Ask him out,” Richie said, when I finished.
“Alex? Just like that?”
“That’s what people do when they’re interested in someone,” he said, signaling the waiter for another drink.
“It’s all mixed up with Josh.”
“Alex isn’t Josh. You’ll see that when you spend some time with him.”
“What if he says no?”
Richie said, “He won’t.”
Dinner arrived and we talked about other things. We were drinking coffee when Richie’s eyes widened at something or someone behind me. A tall, thickly built man in a beautifully tailored suit passed our table, with a thin woman on his arm. He nodded acknowledgment at Richie.
“Who is that?” I asked.
Richie dabbed his mouth with a napkin. “Are you serious? That’s Duke Asuras.”
“And he is?”
“The head of Parnassus Pictures, Henry.”
“Oh, he’s the guy who said Hollywood’s going to take over the world,” I said, telling Richie about the article in the Times.
“Don’t think he can’t do it,” Richie said.
“Who was that woman with him? His wife?”
Richie snorted. “He’s not married. That was Cheryl Cordet.”
I was trying to place the name. “Isn’t that—”
Richie stood up, again dabbing his mouth on a napkin. “I’ll be back in five minutes.” He returned in three. “Come on.”
“Where?”
“Duke asked us to join them for a drink.” He threw some money on the table. “You mind?”
“No, I’ve never met a movie mogul before.”
I followed Richie through the restaurant to a remote booth that was further protected by a curtained doorway. He poked his head in, mumbled something, and then pulled the curtain back and said to me, “Hop in.”
I slid into the booth. Richie followed and drew the curtain shut. The booth was very cold. Asuras and Cordet sat across from us, their backs to the wall. A wall lamp cast a pinkish light. A candle flickered on the table. The remains of a shrimp cocktail lay between them. Asuras was tanned to the color of mahogany. His bright blue eyes were the liveliest feature in a bullet-shaped, bull-necked head. He was bald except for patches of side hair which were shaved to salt-and-pepper stubble. Thick eyebrows, a flat nose and a wide mouth conveyed power and appetite. His shoulders were massive beneath the crepe-like material of his black suit—a weight lifter’s shoulders—but his jowl had begun to sag. He conveyed a combination of strength and self-indulgence, and his heavy, imperious face recalled profiles of a first-century Caesar on an ancient coin.
Cheryl Cordet was a thin woman, with pale skin and a frizz of graying blond hair. She had a strong, plain face and small, shrewd eyes. Her black sheath dress was made for someone younger and more opulent and it hung on her gracelessly. She radiated nearly as much authority as he did and, despite the intimacy implied by the candlelit booth, the shared food, romance was distinctly not in the air.
When Richie finished making introductions, Cheryl Cordet said, “You never returned my calls, Henry.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You defended the guy who was accused of killing the gay judge. His boyfriend? You got him off. I had my people call you to discuss selling the rights to his story.”
I had a vague recollection of talking to someone about the movie rights to the Chandler case. I remembered that the caller’s eagerness to buy the story had been exceeded only by his ignorance of the events.
“I wasn’t interested.” I said.
“I remember that case,” Asuras said. “I don’t know, the gay angle would be a problem.”
“We could change that,” Cordet said. “Soften it. Maybe make the boyfriend a girl? What do you think, Henry?”
The conversation was so ludicrous, I didn’t know what to say.
“Speaking of gay,” Asuras rumbled, in a voice so deep I thought he had bronchitis, “I read that piece in your magazine about attacks on homosexuals, Richie. Kind of an unusual piece for you, wasn’t it? You’re not the Advocate.”
“We cover the news,” Richie said.
“I guess you checked to make sure what those people in the piece said was true.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Of course. I’m a serious journalist, Duke.”
Asuras grinned. “Come on, Richie. As a journalist you’re somewhere between Liz Smith and the National Enquirer.”
“Well, in the interests of accuracy, Duke,” Richie said, “is it true the board of Parnassus Company is still trying to get you fired?”
Asuras turned a slow, angry gaze on him. “I better not be reading that in your magazine.”
“Is that a denial?”
“You ought to know better than to play games with me,” he said.
Cheryl Cordet glanced at her watch and said, “God, Duke, it’s almost eleven and I’ve got be on the set at five. Mind if we cut this short?”
Richie and I stood outside, waiting for the valet to bring my car. He was uncharacteristically quiet.
“Maybe I don’t understand the nuances here,” I said, “but did you just get into a pissing match with that guy because he criticized your gay-bashing piece?”
“That’s not the piece he’s worried about,” Richie said.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you know anything about Duke Asuras?”
“No,” I said. “Hollywood’s your obsession, not mine.”
He lit a cigarette. “That’s right,” he said. “I love the movies and I’m not going to let Duke Asuras destroy them.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The car came. The valet opened the passenger door and Richie deflated into the front seat. “Let me give you a crash course in the Industry,” he said. “The first thing you need to understand is that Hollywood isn’t one place, it’s two. LA, where the studios are and the movies get made, and New York, where the companies that own the studios are headquartered. It’s been that way forever, moviemakers versus moneymen, art versus commerce.” He blew a smoke ring. “Movies are risky investments. When they pay big, they pay really big, but when they flop, they can take a company down with them, like Heaven’s Gate killed United Artists. Every year, the cost of making movies climbs higher and higher until now, a medium-sized, medium-budget, no-big-name movie is costing a studio like Parnassus around fifty million to make.”
“That’s astonishing.”
“The moneymen try to contain the costs of their investment in case it goes down the toilet. The moviemakers complain that the only thing the penny-pinching accomplishes is to make sure the movies will suck and lose money. It goes back and forth between New York and Hollywood on almost every movie that gets made by the big studios.”
“Is that why you asked Asuras about his board?”
“Yeah. Duke runs Parnassus Pictures, but he doesn’t run Parnassus Company in New York. He answers to the president, Allen Raskin, and Raskin answers to the board of directors, and most of them are Wall Street types who know shit about movies. Raskin does. His grandfather was one of the original producers at Parnassus, back in the thirties and forties. His dad was an exec at Parnassus. When he became president, the company was about to go under because of the idiot they had hired to run things before him. He brought Duke back from the dead and made him studio president. That was four years ago. Now Parnassus is the most successful studio in town.”
“Then why would the board want to fire Asuras?”
“Because he’s a crook,” Richie replied.
“What does that mean?”
“It means he’s a crook, Henry. He steals.”
I pulled up in front of Richie’s building. “Steals what?”
“Money,” Richie said. “Duke started out as an agent representing some big names. He perfected the art of packaging, putting together stars with directors and writers and forcing them all down a studio’s throat while he picked up multiple commissions. One of his clients was Twila Rhodes. You remember her?”
“No,” I said.
“I’m not surprised,” Richie said. “She was a second-tier actress with a drug problem. Duke forged her name on twenty thousand dollars in checks.”
“He couldn’t have borrowed it?”
“He didn’t need it. The guy was clearing a couple of million a year.”
“Then why did he do it?”
“Why does a dog lick its balls?” Richie said. “Because it can.”
“That’s it?”
“Look up ‘greedy,’ ‘stupid’ and ‘arrogant’ in the dictionary,” he said, “and you’ll find pictures of studio executives and movie agents. Of course, Duke told a much more complicated story when he was found out. He said he had a nervous breakdown, that it was an act of self-sabotage. You know, the diminished-capacity defense.”
“Did the jury buy it?”
“It didn’t get that far,” Richie said. “Twila Rhodes overdosed and there was no one left to prosecute. But the scandal drove Duke out of agenting. He laid low for a while then started up an independent production company that had a couple of big hits before he suddenly quit and left the country to ‘find himself.’”
“I can hear the quotation marks in your voice.”
He flicked his cigarette out the window. “The rumor is that his partners caught him embezzling again and gave him the option of resigning or going to jail.”
“And then Raskin brought him back from the dead?”
“From Thailand, actually,” Richie said. “In any other business he’d be considered a criminal. In Hollywood, he’s a victim, but not to the Parnassus board.”
“Moral scruples?”
“Give me a break,” he scoffed. “With Duke as head of the studio, Parnassus’s stock has never done as well as it should have, given the company’s earnings. The board thinks it’s because Wall Street doesn’t like a crook at the till. They’ve been looking for a reason to get rid of him, but as long as he was making them piles of money, they were stuck. Last year, he lost money, ten million, not much, but it was all the board needed to start screaming for his head. When Raskin refused to fire him, they started threatening him.”
“What happened?”
“Raskin and Duke decided to counterattack.”
“How?”
“That’s the piece Duke’s afraid of.” He opened the door. “Goodnight, Henry. Remember Mother’s advice. Call Alex.”
I didn’t give Richie’s account of the nefarious goings on at Parnassus Company any more thought that night, and when I woke up the next morning, the details were already receding. The gist of it seemed to be crooks versus assholes, which more or less summed up Hollywood as far as I could tell. But I did call Alex.