Chapter

TWO

I’M AN AUTHENTIC American hero. Really. That’s what I am.

First, you start out with that I’m basically a little guy. I don’t mean that I’m lacking in physical stature or I’m inadequate. I mean I’m kind of a regular guy. So there I am, a regular guy. Not out to change the world. Not out to be some kind of big shot. I got no ax to grind. I’m just a guy with a job to do and I try my best to do it. Well, what the job is, that’s something else of course. I’m a dick. A gumshoe. A P.I. The stuff that dreams are made of. Books, TV, movies.

The difference between me and them, the guys you usually see on the tube, is that I’m not a small-time loner working out of a shabby upstairs over some dry-cleaning plant or a playboy with a Lamborghini who’s a detective just as another way to get his kicks. I work for a major corporation. Not Fortune 500, but not too far from it either. Our national headquarters is in Chicago. We have offices in twenty-two U.S. cities and in fourteen foreign countries. A business, you understand, like Wackenhut or Pinkerton. Whatever a client needs, in the way of security, we do it. Alarm systems, armored cars, around-the-clock armed response, commercial guard services, we do it all. We have a sales-incentive system that runs through the whole company. Like if you decided you needed one of these many services that we do, I could make a commission by introducing you to it, even though what I am is an investigator.

I work here in Los Angeles. Hollywood sometimes. Sometimes in the Valley. Even East L.A. Though not too much. We follow the money. So most of what we do, it’s corporate. I’ve done work for Bank of America, Gulf Oil, Toshiba, Matsushita, Hitachi, Boeing, K mart, all kinds of places. Do we do divorces? Sleazy keyhole peeking? You bet we do. But if I had to figure it, I would say that the lowest amount of money someone’s going to be fighting over, if they come to us, it would probably be a million-dollar divorce. Look at it this way. Say you just want to put a tail on your spouse. That’s round-the-clock, usually, because screwing knows no timetable. In fact, it is frequently active outside of your usual hours. I followed a guy one time, his wife thought he was an early-morning jogger. Four-thirty in the morning, he’s out there, in his Yves Saint Laurent coordinates and Asics Gel Ills. This is so early it’s like a moonlight run—what’s that line?—“I’m so horny the crack of dawn better watch out.” He comes home at six, six-thirty, jumps in the shower, then off to work. How far you think he runs? He runs about a quarter mile, that’s how far he runs. His girlfriend, she’s waiting for him on the corner. A maroon Dodge minivan, not chic at all, but functional. They do it in the van. Then she drives maybe half a mile away so he can jog back. Work up a sweat over the other sweat. Thoughtful. You’d be surprised how many divorces start with “I smelled the bitch on him.”

I’m wandering. But I think you should have a picture of the kind of work I do, the kind of place I work for. I was talking about money. For example, in a divorce, you want to watch someone round-the-clock. We bill out, to the lawyers, at $60 an hour, per man, plus expenses. That’s bare minimum—$2,880 per day, $20,160 a week, $86,400 for a thirty-day month. You could double that, easy. On a simple WSW. WSW is Who’s Screwing Whom. So you understand that you don’t spend that kind of money investigating a divorce where there’s just a couple of hundred thousand in community property. You have to be talking about real money.

What do I get? About $22 an hour is what it works out to, with vacation time and sick leave. And we have a decent benefits package—medical, dental, and pension. I’m told it costs the company about 33 percent over our wages.

It’s less than real cops make. But the working conditions are better. So is the company we keep.

The building I work in is a typical L.A. office building. A glass box with tinted windows, downtown. There’s nothing to distinguish us from any other corporation. There really isn’t. I used to keep a bourbon bottle full of tea in my desk drawer. As a joke, you know. So I could play it like a TV detective. I wouldn’t have real booze there, in the office, even if we didn’t have regular urinalysis. By the way, that’s another service we offer. Complete drug screening for your entire work force, or any part thereof, blood or urine. We test for alcohol, marijuana, all opiates, cocaine, barbital, amphetamine use. Full spectrum or targeted, it’s your choice.

The office space is modular. Dividers, not walls. We got standard-issue desks, chairs, phones. Fluorescent lights. Not glamorous, but not seedy. The way I see it, this is an advantage. This is something your average Joe and Jane out there, they can relate to. Its very ordinariness is something refreshingly different

Also, what I’m addressing here, right at the beginning, is the issue of credibility. Because this is an incredible story. An unbelievable story. I’ve been doing this ten, fifteen years. For the same company. I get photographed biannually. I’m bonded. You can take a look at our client list—top law firms, Fortune 500 companies, major studios, and record companies.

I had just finished an investigation into securities theft for one of the major brokerages. I was catching up on my paperwork, transcribing my handwritten notes to the company data base from the workstation at my desk.

Then Maggie Krebs walks in. Maggie is one of the ten most beautiful women in the world. That’s official. Right out of People magazine. You know her as Magdalena Lazlo, movie star. I know her as Maggie Krebs, divorcée. I helped her get that divorce and keep her fortune.

Having that much high-powered glamour walk into our drab offices is not unique, but it is unusual. A lot of stars are products of their handlers—makeup people and hairdressers, wardrobe and plastic surgeons. Products of our imagination in a way. But even offscreen and dressed down, Maggie has it. Everybody watches her, men and women, when she comes down to my office.

“Hi-ya, Joe,” she says. She looks me direct in the eye, gives me that smile, and that voice—you can read anything you want to into that voice—just the way she talked in Over the Line—and boom, you could knock me over with a toothpick. I don’t let it show, but I figure she knows what that “Hi-ya, Joe,” can do. How can she not know? It’s her business, making strong men weak and weak men strong.

“Hi-ya, Maggie,” I say. I speak low, slow, and level. Not because I think I’m John Wayne or something, but to keep my voice from squeaking like a fourteen-year-old’s.

She looks around. Then she leans forward: “Joe, is there somewhere we can talk?”

“We got a conference room,” I say. I don’t have to work so hard to talk, my voice and breathing are coming back under control.

“Hey, Joe,” she says. “You got two bits?”

“Yeah.”

“Then why don’t you take me out and buy me a cup of Java?”

“Maggie, there isn’t much that you could ask me that I wouldn’t do.”

Now let me explain a bit about this little piece of dialogue. First of all, it is verbatim. That’s a gift I have, like a photographic memory, except I don’t have it for the printed word, not at all, but I do have it for the spoken word. So that when I tell you through this story that so-and-so said one thing then them-and-such said another, it’s like our transcription services department typed it right off the audiotapes.

Second, in real life our patter isn’t always this snappy.

Third, there is nowhere in Los Angeles, maybe in America, that I can think of that you can get a cup of coffee for twenty-five cents. It would be easier to find the five-dollar cup of coffee. Clearly, Maggie is being jovial here. In fact, I find out later, both her lines are from a script she’d been working on. There is a certain charm in having a real-life movie star run her lines on you like you’re her real-life costar. It’s a memory a lot of fellows could lie down with even when they take that final rest, if you know what I mean.

Fourth and finally, there is something that I don’t know if she knows, but maybe she suspects, which is that all our conference rooms are wired more thoroughly than the Nixon White House. Everything that happens in a Universal Security conference room is recorded. Audio is routine. Intermittent video and real-time video are both available. So is vocal-stress analysis.

Our personal offices and telephones are monitored, but not always recorded. The principle is “Do unto ourselves what we would have others pay us to do to their employees.” We are a shining example of life under total management supervision.

We take her Cadillac and leave my old wreck behind. It might surprise you that a star of her magnitude would drive a Caddy, but it was a gift from GM. A promotional thing. They think the new Seville can compete with Mercedes, BMW, Lexus, and Infiniti. I think it is pretty nice. It is a convertible. She drives. The top is down.

She doesn’t say much in the car. Just plays the radio. Country and western. That’s for me. Shows you what kind of class—and memory—the lady had. She once asked what kind of music I liked, back during her divorce action. I told her. It was Hank Williams and Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash and Ernest Tubb and Patsy Cline that got me through the war. That’s the truth. All the guys in my platoon that listened to rock ‘n’ roll, they died. Except for two of them. Mike Galina—he’s in a veterans’ hospital still—no eyes, no legs. Paul Frederic Hight also came back with pieces missing—of his body and his mind and his heart—died five years after coming home. Accidental OD or suicide. Who’s to say? Who’s to judge? Three of the blacks lived. They didn’t listen to rock ’n’ roll either. Two of them came back junkies and I lost track. But Steve Weston, he came back straight and with his body intact. We have a drink now and again. Don’t say much. Just have a drink. He listened to C&W like me or soul, like his people. His favorite, though, is gospel.

Also she looks over at me, smiles, and touches my hand.

She puts the car in a lot a block off the beach in Venice. We get out and walk. She puts her arm through mine. Makes me feel six feet tall and good-looking to boot. There is a fancy espresso and cappuccino joint on the corner where you can have your refreshment al fresco and view the human comedy as it passes on the boardwalk. You don’t have to be an Angelino to know that Venice Beach is the place for viewing humanity at its most comedic. That’s the place they use in all the movies when they do the L.A. montage with the girls who roller-skate in G-string bikinis and Muscle Beach and everything.

But we walk right by the boardwalk, out onto the beach. She pauses a moment and slips her shoes off. Do movies make us or do we make the movies? What I’m saying is, this gesture she does, leaning on my arm, slipping off her shoes, carrying them in one hand by their straps, it’s got grace, and I don’t know what else to call it but femininity—when I watch her do it, I’m seeing the scene from a movie. You get what I mean—did she learn it from the same movies I saw, or is this one of those quintessential feminine moves that directors and actresses, they’re aware of and they set out to capture for the silver screen?

Do a close-up of her hand on my shoulder when she leans on me.

We walk out toward where the surf is breaking. She barefoot, me in my Florsheim’s. I’m wearing a suit and tie of course, which is company dress code unless you’re on an assignment that specifically calls for something else. See, it’s like I’m in my own movie with her. I’m daydreaming that it’s going to be like a personal thing. But the professional part of me knows that it won’t be. A lot of clients take you to strange and out-of-the-way places to discuss their business. Different reasons. Privacy, embarrassment, and sometimes it’s just that they too are in their own movie and they want the cloak and dagger.

Out by the water, where the sand is wet and packed, she says, “Joe, I need help.”

“That’s what we’re here for,” I say.

“Not them. Not all of them. Just you,” she says.

“Tell me what the problem is,” I say. I’m a company man. I have been for quite a while. We have longevity bonuses on top of the automatic annual raises, I have an investment in my pension, I’m part of the company’s employee stock-option plan. Sure, I’m going to do something without the company. Sure I am.

“Promise me something,” she says.

“What?”

“That you’ll listen to what I have to say. If you can’t do it without telling the company, you’ll forget we ever had this conversation. You’ll go back and tell them it’s the first anniversary of my divorce and I wanted to find a way to thank you, that we went for coffee because I’m in a twelve-step program. Something like that.”

I start to make the promise. That’s what you do, then you bring them around to explaining why the company has to know. It’s tedious but basic.

“No,” she says, “look me in the eye and tell me.”

So I look her in the eye. I’ve looked lots of people square in the eye. Con men, psychos, gamblers, corporation presidents, lawyers. Anyone who tells you the eyes are the windows to the soul, they’re full of it. Except sometimes. Like when you look in the eyes of a boy who’s about to die and he knows it. You can see his soul fly away. You can. That’s true. And the windows close. Like someone just reaching out and shutting a pair of old-fashioned shutters. What was transparent becomes opaque. The other time is when you look in the eyes of a woman you want more than is good for you. I’m talking about more than sex wanting. I’m talking about hungry, stupid hungry. She opens those eyes to you and they say “Look right in.” Even if she is an actress and the smart part of you figures that they pay her $1.3 mil per picture plus gross points, according to the latest press releases, to do exactly that for the camera, your own eyes might open then and become the window to your soul and she sees what you are and puts her hooks in. I guess that’s alright. I guess nature made us to be that way sometimes.

I tell her, “If I can’t do it, I’ll forget it.”

“Joe,” she says.

“Just tell me, will you?” I say, irritated.

“A year ago I signed on to do a picture. With John Lincoln Beagle directing. You know his work?”

I nod. Everyone does. Even if you don’t go to the movies. Like Spielberg or Lucas or Lynch or Stone.

“We’re both at RepCo.5It’s their package. Director, star, writer. I read the script. I loved it. It’s not fluff. It’s not light-weight. It’s not bounce my boobies, wiggle my butt, and act like I think that’s cute. It establishes me as a serious actress. That’s the picture I’m scheduled to be shooting now. Right now.

“Then the project was canceled.”

“But that happens a lot,” I say.

“Yes, it does. But this time it shouldn’t have. Everything was in place. The package was intact, the studio was on board, a producer had been selected. The money was in place. Suddenly, it gets shut down.

“Officially, the story is that Beagle is sick. I don’t believe it In fact, I’m certain I saw him once or twice up near his place in the Napa Valley. He owns a vineyard there. So do I. Also, there was a period between when the deal was made and the cancellation when I saw him mentally go away from the project. One meeting he was all there. This picture was the thing he most wanted in the world. And he was intently *** in me.”

“*** he name of it?”

“Pirandello.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You know who he is? He’s a playwright. Italian. But it’s not about him. That was a working title. Not a finished title. The next meeting, he was off. There was something else he cared about more. There is nothing in Hollywood a director cares about more than his next picture.”

“He’s supposed to be sick,” I say. “Does that mean AIDS? A guy who’s going to die, he might care about something besides his next picture.” Young guys who are about to die, and know it, care about its not being fair. Or they care about convincing themselves it’s not quite going to happen. Maybe that’s good, to go not believing that you’re going. I don’t know so much about what old people think when they’re ready to die. I haven’t seen that many old people die.

“A director who’s about to die cares even more,” she says. “Good God, it’s not only his next film, it’s his last.”

“Where is he now?”

“He’s missing.”

“I read somewhere,” I say, “that he’s working with the Japanese on high-definition TV.”

“I’ve heard that story too. But you would think he would take my calls.”

“Oh,” I say, “it’s that way, is it?”

She takes my arm. We walk a couple steps before she says the next thing, which is “When someone’s lying to you, you know it.”

“Do I?”

“Oh, Joe,” she sighs and kind of leans into me. I’m a sucker for this, I admit it. “I’m a woman. Men are supposed to lie to me. I’m a beautiful woman, I’m supposed to enjoy it. I live in Hollywood where truth is a speech defect. You’d think I wouldn’t care anymore.

“I wanted that movie. Someone took it away from me. They’re lying to me about why. On one level it’s about money. If they cancel because Beagle got sick, that comes under the act-of-God clause. It doesn’t in all contracts, but in this one it does. If they cancel because Beagle changed his mind, or got another picture, or almost anything except tidal wave, earthquake, typhoon, or war, they have to pay me a serious cancellation fee.”

“How much?” I ask her.

“Bottom line, it cost me close to seven hundred fifty thousand dollars.”

“OK,” I say, “that’s worth going after.”

“Joe, there’s something else going on. I got pissed off. I wanted to know what was going on. What the game was. My own agent, Bennie Hoffrau, he bullshitted me. This means you have to do a little reality check. You have to find out what it is that’s more important to him than you are. I went to Hartman—”

“Hartman?”

“David Hartman is the head of RepCo. Which makes him one of the ten or five or three most powerful people in this business. We had lunch. We talked about everything except what we’re there to talk about. Which is, sometimes, how it’s done. After the entree and before the coffee he says ‘Isn’t it a shame about poor Linc—’”

“Linc?”

“If you know Beagle well enough, you call him Linc. It’s one of those thing things. I’m about to reply, ‘Yes, isn’t it. What exactly is wrong with him?’ or something to that effect. But what I don’t know is that Tom Cruise is coming up behind me. David has to schmooze. For that matter, if I’m smart, I have to do a number too, even if my act is that I’m totally disinterested. David timed his remark so that he could drop it into the conversation and I couldn’t pursue it. That’s a lot of work to say nothing.

“The day after I had lunch with Hartman, Bennie calls me, he’s got a picture for me. It’s a World War II home-front picture. Me, Gena Rowlands, Bette Midler. Heavy duty, right? You remember that movie The Best Years of Our Lives?”

“Yes,” I say. It was supposed to be an ironic title. A story of three guys who went to war and came home to realize that that’s what the war had been—the best years of their lives. They’ll never make a movie about Nam with a title like that.

“This is a remake. From the women’s point of view. How they blossomed, even though they hurt, while the men were away. Good concept, fair script. Woman director, Anita Epstein-Barr. She’s not bad. It’s not the Beagle film, but it’s a definite A picture. A big enough prize to distract me from thinking about the movie that disappeared. So I say to Bennie, ‘Thank you very much. I am grateful, I am glad, I will do it, and by the way, what did happen to John Lincoln Beagle and the movie I was supposed to do?’

“Bennie says, ‘Maggie baby, be a good girl. Go do this picture with Midler and Rowlands, which is the most heavyweight women’s cast since The Witches of Eastwick. Forget about what’s not your business. You’re being taken very good care of.’”

“Which you are,” I say.

“Which I am,” she says. “Very good care. Too good, almost. Knowing Bennie, if there was nothing wrong, what he would have said was . . .” and she does a Bennie Hoffrau routine. I’ve never met the man and still I know it is a deadly accurate imitation. “ ‘What the fuck, babe?’ What the fuck? You lose one picture, you get anudder picture. You got action. Go wid the action. ’Cause that’s what it’s allll about. The action. Go make a pic-ture, collect your check, keep your panties on in publick places. What the fuck, you know what I’m saying.’ See, that’s what he would’ve done, his caricature of an agent. It’s supposed to be a joke, but it’s his real, true self. If it was normal Hollywood bullshit, if they were just trying to sleaze me out of some cancellation money, that’s what he would have said.

“Two nights later,” she says, “I went to a party and got a little high. Bennie was there. I was talking to Janice Riley. She’s an old, old friend. And I say, ‘See that, that’s my agent over there. He takes good care of me, but he lies to me. That makes me unhappy. Do you think that should make me unhappy?’ Janice asks me what I’m talking about. I tell her.

“The next day Bennie calls me to come to his office. A summons. OK, I go. ‘I told you to forget about the Beagle film. There is nothing mysterious or strange about the cancellation. He got sick. I can show you a note from his doctor. I’m sure he’ll get well sometime in the near future. I don’t know the details. You don’t have to know the details. You’re off this Rowlands-Midler picture. Sorry. Don’t argue. Leave it alone. Go home. Go on vacation. Take a break, lie in the sun, somewhere you can breathe real air, you know what I mean. Forget about things. I’ll send you a couple of scripts you should consider doing. Come back, we’ll have something ready to shoot.’

“There are people,” she says, looking me in the eye, “who can actually say ‘You’ll never work in this town again,’ and your life is over. David Hartman is one of them. So I shut up and I left.”

“Sounds sensible. So why are you starting up again? With me.”

“Joe, please, let me finish. And Joe, if you agree that I may be right about this, I have to be more than just a client to you.”

“What do I have to be, Maggie?”

She looks at me. When she’s in heels, she’s actually taller than me. But now, in bare feet, on the wet sand, her eyes are level, even a couple of millimeters below mine. I break eye contact first.

“Better finish the story,” I say.

“Well, I let it alone. Then, three days ago, my maid, Anita . . . you remember her?”

“Yes.”

“She said, ‘You remember Mr. Beagle, when he get sick and you don’t believe it?’ I said ‘I believed it,’ but a little sarcastic, because we both knew that I didn’t. ‘Well, my cousin,’ she said, ‘she work for Mr. Beagle. I am going to see her tomorrow. I will find out for you.’ ”

“Yeah? Then what happened?”

“She got deported,” Maggie says.

“When?”

“The next morning.”

“You’re lucky they didn’t come after you, employing an illegal.”

“She’s not,” Maggie says.

“She’s not?” I say, not understanding. Though of course I should. It’s a real straightforward statement.

“She’s not. She has a green card. A social-security number. All of it.”

“What do you want?” I ask her.

“I want to know what’s going on,” she says.

“That is foolish,” I tell her. “You got sent a message. If you forget about whatever it is, they’ll take care of you. If you mess around, they’ll break you.”

“Tell me something, Joe. You’re a guy. A man’s man. For real. Not some actor playing a tough guy. What would you do?”

“I don’t know, Maggie. The truth is, I don’t play in the same league you do.”

“If someone owed you seven hundred fifty thousand dollars, would you let them walk away with it?”

“I guess I wouldn’t. But that’s what you got lawyers for.”

“Hey, this is Hollywood. It’s not supposed to be nice,” she says. “But I feel like I signed on to swim with piranhas and suddenly I find out that the great white shark may be cruising in the same waters I’m in. Joe, I have to know what I’m up against. Is it about what they say it’s about? Or is my career over? Do I have an enemy out there I don’t know about? Is something going on that I don’t know about? If I say the wrong thing by mistake, is my career over? Do they make me disappear like they did Anita?”

“What do you want me to do?” I say.

“I want you to find out what’s going on. I want you to protect me. I want you to take care of me, Joe.”

“Why me?”

“Can they buy you, Joe?” she says, like she knows the answer, like she knows the part I’m supposed to play.

“I don’t know,” I say. I smile. “No one ever gave it a serious try.”

“If they do try, come to me for a counteroffer first, promise me that.”

“That should be easy,” I say.

“It may not be. But I won’t let anyone top what I can give you,” she says.

“We’ll go back to the agency. I’ll have a contract drawn up.” There was going to be some serious spending here. I tried to calculate the commission in my head. But standing that close to Magdalena Lazlo screwed up my powers of computation.

“I don’t want you to mention the investigation to anyone.”

“How can I do that?”

“Have them assign you to me as my bodyguard and driver. Twenty-four hours a day. I do need protection. I do. This is serious, Joe. Don’t tell them about the other. That’ll work, won’t it?”

“Maggie, you don’t understand how an investigation works. The manpower, equipment, contacts, organization, sources. It takes a major company to do it right.” This is, of course, part of our standard sales pitch. It’s the routine we use to steer a potential client away from some two-man shop that promises to do it cut-rate. It’s true too.

“You don’t understand how powerful they are. Think of RepCo as the Exxon of the movie business. Big, ruthless, and connected. Everywhere. If your company knows what you’re doing, RepCo will know, within hours.”

“Our reputation for discretion, absolute discretion, is all we have. That’s the bottom line,” I say. More sales-pitch stuff.

With that she kisses me. What the hell, she’s younger than me, but she’s seen more movies and she’s maybe had more practice and she does it better than I do. Besides, I’m just a regular guy. When Magdalena Lazlo kisses me, I can’t remember that she’s Maggie Krebs, divorcée. I’m just an average Joe—my dick is twice the size of my brain. Somehow she makes it seem even more than that, more than just my lust hormone at work. Like it’s got meaning is the best I can say it.

Afterward, I reach in my pocket. I told you we expect clients to sometimes want to talk about things in strange places, far from our built-in cameras and microphones. So as standard practice we always carry a minirecorder with us. I take it out. I rewind the tape.

“Why don’t we just sit here and let the sound of the surf erase our conversation,” I say.

“We can do that, Joe,” she says. When the tape is back to the beginning, I push the record button and set the recorder down in the sand, the microphone facing the Pacific. We sit. Side by side. Maggie puts her hand in mine. She’s got me in the palm of her hand. It’s like she’s taking me inside her movie. Which is an A picture, with a top cinematographer and director, the best Hollywood has to offer.

 

 

 

5 The Representation Company, Inc.