My flight to JFK was delayed forty minutes for some reason. Drunken copilot. Monster on the wing. It didn’t matter, really.
I had forty minutes to kill. I could watch CNN, have a cocktail, buy a souvenir cap with a palm tree on it, but even if I hid out in the Million Milers Club, there’d be somebody wanting to know all about the Des O’Day murder.
I have discovered that the only place in an airport where you won’t be bothered, outside of a bathroom stall, is when you’re talking on a public phone. You can lean in, embracing the phone, turning your back on the rest of the world, and it would take a kamikaze celebrity stalker, operating on their own or under the aegis of TMZ, to invade your space.
There were only two problems with that plan.
It’s not that easy to find a public phone anymore. I uncovered one hiding behind a Burger King. Then I had to think of someone to call. Which is why I wound up returning Harry Paynter’s message from the day before.
“Yo, Billy, what’s the hap?”
“You tell me. I’m returning your call.”
“Oh. Yeah. Well. I was just checkin’ in.”
“You getting anywhere on the book?”
Silence on the other end.
“Harry?”
“Yea’, bro. You, ah, talk to Wally the Winger lately?”
“Not today. Should I?”
“Big changes, bro. Sandy’s refocused.”
“What’s that mean?”
“New project on the front burner.”
“What about mine?”
“You better talk to Wally. He and Sandy worked something out. I think you got points in the new project.”
“What is it?”
“The hottest property in town. Get this title: Blowout: The Stew Gentry Story. It’s got it all: sex, showbiz, violence, heart, and lots of CGI potential, including, wait for it, 3-D.”
“Stew’s cooperating?”
“Hell, yeah, he’s cooperating. Wouldn’t you for two million bucks? You can buy a lot of defense with that.”
“I thought there was a law against profiting from a criminal act.”
“Listen to yourself,” Harry said. “This is L.A., Jack. Five minutes after that rule went into effect, any contract lawyer worth his Century City address had come up with a half-dozen loopholes.”
“Well, they just called my flight,” I lied. “I’ve got to run.”
“And I better get back to the old word maker. Man, it’s great working on a project I believe in. What do you think sounds better, Blowout or Blowup?”
“How about Blow Me,” I said, and replaced the phone.
The plane was actually an hour and twenty minutes late. I never learned why. Stardust in the fuel tank, maybe. Lotus leaves on the runway.
My seat in first class was beside an eighteen-year-old girl with Day-Glo yellow hair and a ring in her left nostril who’d just won a fourteen-million-dollar California lottery and was hooking up with her Internet boyfriend in New York for a monthlong trip to, as she put it, “Paris and other countries.” She had a box of tiny rubber bands that were supposed to be for her braces, but every so often she’d shoot one at me and pretend it was a mistake.
A filter problem necessitated a shutdown of the AC, and things got a bit hot and clammy in the cabin. An attendant spilled half a Coke down my pants leg and into my shoe. And the movie turned out to be Ghost Rider Two with Nicolas Cage.
But I didn’t care. I was alive. I had my health. And every hot and sweaty, Coke-drenched, Cage-mumbling, rubber band–dodging minute I spent was taking me closer and closer to the one and only Capital of the World.