“They’ll be looking at you,” Harry said. “They don’t know who you are.”
“That’s right, they’re wondering, who’s this guy? You don’t tell ’em. You’re on your feet the whole time. You say, ‘Well, I’m glad you assholes stopped by, so I can set you straight.’ ”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“It’s up to you. You’re talking, relaxed, you stroll around to where you are now—all you tell ’em is the movie’s been postponed. Say, till next year, if you
want. But don’t tell ’em why or what you’re doing.”
“They won’t like it.”
“They don’t have to. Just do what I tell you,” Chili said. “Okay, now the two guys. The one in charge is Ronnie? . . .”
“Ronnie Wingate. That’s the name of the company, Wingate Motor Cars Limited, on Santa Monica.”
Harry was poking around the desk again, straightening it up. Or nervous, feeling a need to be doing something.
“Ronnie, I think of as a rich kid who never grew up. He’s from Santa Barbara, real estate money, came to Hollywood to be an actor but didn’t make it. He thinks he knows the business because his grandfather was a producer at Metro at one time. Now he’s after me to give him a part, wants to play one of the freaks.”
“Why’s he scare you?”
“I don’t trust him, he’s unstable. He’s close to forty, he acts like a burned-out teenager.”
“Maybe that’s what he is.”
“He has a gun in his office. He’ll take it out and start aiming it around the room while he’s talking to you. With one eye closed, going ‘Couuu,’ making that sound, you know, like he’s shooting.”
“What kind of gun?”
“I don’t know, an automatic.”
“And the other one, Bo Catlett?”
It was a familiar name. When Chili first heard it he thought of an all-star jazz drummer by the name of Catlett.
“He doesn’t say much,” Harry said. “The only time he opened up, I happened to mention I was raised in Detroit and started out there doing movies for the car companies. Catlett said, ‘Yeah? I went to high school in Detroit. Loved it, like home to me.’ I told him I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. He said, ‘Then you don’t know it.’ Other times he’d call me Mr. De-troit. He might be Chicano or some kind of Latin, I’m not sure, but he has that look. Ronnie mentioned once Catlett had been a farm worker, a migrant, and a lot of them I know are Chicano. He’s tall, dresses up . . . You see Ronnie, the boss, he looks like he’s going out to cut the grass, Catlett will have a suit and tie on. In fact, almost always. Dresses strictly Rodeo Drive.”
“Bo Catlett,” Chili said. The one he was thinking of was Sid Catlett. Big Sid.
“Ronnie, sometimes he’ll call him Cat. He’ll say, ‘Hey, Cat, what do you think?’ But you know Ronnie’s already made up his mind.” Harry came away from the desk. “I have to go down the hall.”
“You nervous, Harry?”
“I’m fine. I gotta go to the bathroom, that’s all.”
He walked out and Chili moved around behind the desk to sit in the creaky swivel chair and look over Harry’s office, his world, old and dusts, his shelves of books and scripts, his photos on the wall above the sofa: Harry with giant bugs, Harry shaking hands with mutants and maniacs, Harry and a much younger Karen with blond hair, Harry holding her by the arm. He didn’t look too bad in the pictures. It got Chili thinking about them in bed together. It didn’t make sense. There was no way, with her looks, she could be that hard up. This morning when he walked in the kitchen . . .
Karen was having a cup of coffee, reading the paper. Dressed up, ready to leave. Purse and a movie script on the table. She said good morning and asked if he slept okay. Karen could be one of those people who acted more polite when they were pissed off. Chili poured a cup and sat down with her, saying he woke up and forgot where he was for a minute. Karen started reading the paper again and he felt stupid, wanting to start over. She had on a neat black suit, no blouse under it, pearl stud earrings in her dark hair, some eye makeup. Her eyes were brown. She had a nice clean look and smelled good, had some kind of perfume on.
“I’m sorry about walking in your house last night,” Chili said, thinking she’d pass it off and that would be it.
But she didn’t. Karen put the paper down saying, “What do you want me to tell you, it’s okay? I’m glad you’re here?”
Giving it back to him, but sounding like she was asking a simple question. She wasn’t anything like most of the women he was used to talking to. They would’ve said it in a real sarcastic tone of voice.
“I have a hunch,” she said now, “if the patio door was locked you would’ve broken in, one way or another.”
He kept looking at her mouth, done in a light shade of lipstick. She had small white teeth, nice ones. He said, “I was never much into breaking and entering.”
Karen said, “But you’ve always been a criminal, haven’t you?” With the cool look and quiet voice, daring him. That’s what it seemed like.
So he took it to her saying he had pulled a few holdups when he was a kid and didn’t know better, hijacked freight, truckloads of merchandise and hustled it for a living, associated with alleged members of organized crime, but never dealt narcotics; telling her he’d been arrested, held over at Rikers Island, but never convicted of anything and sent to prison. “Okay, I was a loan shark up till recently and now I’m in the movie business,” Chili said. “What’re you doing these days?”
“I’m reading for a part,” Karen said.
She took her coffee cup to the sink, came back to the table and picked up her purse and the script. Chili asked if she could give him a lift down to Sunset— he’d left his car there, back of a store. Karen said come on.
It wasn’t until they were in her BMW convertible, winding down the hill past million-dollar homes, she started to come out of herself and communicate. He asked where she was going. Karen said to Tower Studios. She said she hadn’t worked in seven years, didn’t have to, but the head of production at Tower had offered her a part. Chili asked if it was a horror movie. A mistake. Karen gave him a look saying she hadn’t screamed since leaving ZigZag and was never going to scream again, even in real life. Chili had noticed the title on the cover of the script, Beth’s Room.
“What’s it about?”
This was what opened her up.
“It’s about a mother-daughter relationship,” Karen said, already with more life in her tone, “but different than the usual way it’s handled. The daughter, Beth, leaves her yuppie husband after a terrific fight and comes home to live with her mom, Peggy.”
“Which one’re you?”
“The mom. I was in high school when I had Beth and now she’s twenty-one. I did get married but the guy, the father, took off right after. So for the next twenty years I devoted my life to raising Beth, working my tail off—but that’s all in the back story, it’s referred to. The picture opens, I’m finally living my own life. I own a successful art gallery, I have a boyfriend, an artist, who’s a few years younger than I am . . . and along comes Beth, wanting to be mothered. Naturally I’m sympathetic, at first, this is my baby . . .”
“She act sick?”
“She has migraines.”
“I can hear her,” Chili said. “ ‘Mom, while you’re up, would you get me my pills off the sink in the kitchen?’ ”
Karen was staring at him. She looked back at the road and had to crank the wheel to swerve around a parked car.
“ ‘And bring me a glass of milk, please, and some cookies?’ ”