"Golden parachute?" Marmelstein asked.
"It's happened to all the biggies at one time or another," Bindle moaned.
"Ovitz, Katzenberg. Remember Tartikoff? Most of them never recovered. The worst day of my life will be the day they give me that hundred-million-dollar check."
Marmelstein shuddered. "Don't worry. It'll probably never come to that."
Bindle sighed. Leaning an elbow on his gleaming desk, he looked over at his partner. "So what's the story on our little mini-sneak preview?"
"No one's made the connection yet. I think it might be because of the chaos on the set. No one's seen the reports."
"Hell, if it goes on much longer, I'll go down and tell them," Bindle said, slouching in his chair.
"That wouldn't be smart. We really shouldn't link ourselves to it. If it goes on another day, I'll leak it by e-mail to Entertainment Tonight from one of the dummy accounts."
"I don't know how one little blown-up building in New York is going to pull this turkey out of the oven," Bindle grumbled, "let alone bring it back to life."
"It probably won't," Bruce Marmelstein explained. "We take it in steps. New York first, then the really big one. With the interest we'll generate, we could have a box-office hit yet."
"Or the biggest bomb in history."
Bruce Marmelstein laughed. "That's what's going to give us the box office."
Hank Bindle nodded, bracing his forehead against his palm. "Movie promotion can be so demanding," he sighed.
Chapter 10
Pink plastic lawn flamingos lined the wall behind the hideous paisley sofa. The living-room rug sported images of cavorting blue Smurfs. The thick glass sheet that was the coffee table was held aloft by a single faux elephant foot.
A substance resembling clear gelatin filled a thirty-gallon fish tank on the shelf near the kitchenette. Suspended at various points in the tank were severed doll limbs.
Posters from films such as Surf Nazis Must Die, A Bucket of Blood and Frankenhooker adorned the walls, held in place by cheery multicolored thumbtacks.
It was a lot to take in all at once. Remo wasn't sure if he wanted to throw up or run screaming into the hallway. Settling reluctantly on a third option, he followed Quintly Tortilli inside his Seattle apartment.
"You like it?" the famous director asked as he dropped his keys near a plastic Fred Flintstone bank on the table near the door.
"Blind whores have better taste," Remo said.
Frowning, he flicked at the grass skirt on a tiny hula dancer attached to a table lamp.
"Yeah," agreed Tortilli. "They always know, like, the best yard sales. My book's in the bedroom."
Leaving Remo, he danced down a short hallway. Every inch of space in the living room was crammed with forced kitsch. From Felix the Cat wall clocks whose eyes moved back and forth with each tick of their tails to upright ashtrays fashioned to look like cowboy boots to a closet from which spilled clothes made of fabrics that had been to the moon. Anyone unfortunate enough to enter the apartment was pummeled by Quintly Tortilli's obnoxious personality.
On an oil-stained desk, which looked as if Tortilli had rescued it from an abandoned factory, lay a dozen scripts. When Remo opened one, he found that the margins were filled with notes. The others he checked were in the same condition: all loaded with crazy pencil marks. He was about to turn from the desk when one of the script covers caught his eye. Surprised, he picked it up. He was skimming through it when Tortilli returned.
"We're in business now," the director enthused, waving a mint-condition 1970s Josie and the Pussycats binder.
"What the hell is this?" Remo asked, holding up the script.
"Huh? Oh, I do script-doctor work sometimes. Blood Water, The Lockup. Strictly uncredited. Million bucks for a week's work. Those are the latest. I get 'em all the time."
Remo looked at the cover of the script in his hand. "You're doing the rewrite on a TeeVee-Fatties screenplay?"
Tortilli nodded. "Yeah, man. That's a great one. Originally it was all magic clouds and happy sunshine. In mine Tipsy gets cheesed off at Poopsy-Woopsy for using his scooter, so he beats him to death with a bag of frozen TeeVee-Fattie muffins."
"Unbelievable." Remo tossed the script back on the desk.
"Yeah," Tortilli agreed. "The violence and drugs were always, like, there in TeeVee-FattieLand, man. I just brought them to the surface." Notebook in hand, he went over to his Starship Enterprise telephone.
While the director looked up numbers and dialed, Remo leaned against the door, arms crossed.
"Do you have to try so hard all the time?" Remo asked.
"I have an image," Tortilli explained. "Unfortunately, I don't know where it ends and I begin anymore." He straightened.
"Hi, Bug?" He said into the phone. "Quint. How ya doin'?"
After a few minutes of questioning, Tortilli gave up. The director had learned nothing. The next three calls proved fruitless, as well. He got lucky on the fifth.
"Where?" Tortilli asked excitedly. He fished a Mork and Mindy pencil from his polyester pocket.
Though he was poised to jot the address on his notepad, he didn't have to. "I know the place," he said. "Yeah. Yeah, I heard about it. One of them cut off his head shaving, right? Ouch. Break out the Bactine."
Covering the receiver, Tortilli snickered softly. Pulling himself together, he returned to the phone. "I'm all set," he said, clearing his throat. "Remind me to make you a star. Later." Hanging up, he looked expectantly to Remo. "I think we've got something. The guy I called knows a guy who claims another guy was bragging he was in on the box murder. You know, the one with the torso."
"I heard," Remo said flatly.
"On the phone? You mean you can hear both sides of a phone conversation?"
"It's hard to hear anything over your suit," Remo said dryly. He pulled the door open. "Let's go."
Jogging to keep up, Quintly Tortilli hurried after Remo into the hallway. As he shut the door, he flicked off the lights, drowning the garish decor in blessed darkness.
SEATTLE'S DESPAIRING youth had early on established the Dregs as the city's premier grunge bar. For a time, the pervasive gloom and hopelessness of its clientele was money in the bank. But then disaster struck. Resurgent optimism suddenly began to sweep the nation. One morning, the bar's owners woke up to find hope and enthusiasm saturating the popular culture. The change seemed to come overnight.
The morose lyrics set to mournful tunes that had made Seattle the rage of the music scene only a few short years before were replaced by the upbeat sounds of the Backstreet Boys and Dixie Chicks.
With grunge fading and alternative poised to die a sudden death, the Dregs had become the last bulwark for the music that had made the city famous.
When Remo Williams walked through the front door, it was as if a pop-culture time machine had taken him back six years. He scanned the sea of plaid shirts, torn denim pants and goatees that filled the bar.
"Looks like a beatnik lumberjack convention," he grumbled.
A few of the nearest slackers looked his way, some suspicious of his T-shirt and chinos. But when a second figure popped in behind him, they instantly relaxed.
Quintly Tortilli. The Hollywood genius was a frequent visitor to the Dregs. Accompanied by the young director of Penny Dreadful, the stranger couldn't be all bad.
"Isn't this place great?" Tortilli yelled to Remo over the blaring sound system. Tables wobbled from the pounding bass. Ragged figures moped around the dance floor.
Remo nodded to the crowd. "Stick a two-by-four up their asses and I could get them all work scaring crows."
"Yeah," Tortilli agreed. "The ripped-jeans-and-flannel thing is still only a couple years retro. But if it holds on long enough, it'll come back into style." He sized up Remo. "Actually, if you don't mind, Remo, maybe you should think about updating your look. Don't take this as criticism-I'm saying this as a friend-but, I mean, how long have you been doing the whole T-shirt-chinos thing? Retro's one thing, but maybe you should think about keeping up with the times, man."