“He doesn’t talk like a black guy.”
“What do you want him to say, Yazza, boss? He might be part South American,” Chili said, “have some other kind of blood in him too, but I know he’s colored.”
They left the office talking about Catlett and the rich kid. Now they were in the car heading for Michael Weir’s house, Chili wanting to get a good look at it, maybe let Harry drop him off and he’d stroll by. Harry said, “You see anybody out strolling? Not in this part of Beverly Hills. It’s against the law to be seen on the street.”
“The one on the left,” Harry said, “that’s where Dean Martin used to live.” Chili looked at the house without saying anything. “The one coming up—see
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the gate? Kenny Rogers rented that while he was having his new home built. You know what he paid a month? Fifty thousand.”
“Jesus Christ,” Chili said.
“Okay, right around the bend on the left, the one that looks like the place they signed the Declaration of Independence, that’s Michael’s house.”
Coming up and now passing it: red brick with white trim behind a vine-covered brick wall and a closed iron gate. Through the bars Chili could see the drive curving up to the front door. He wondered if Michael Weir was in there at this moment.
“Why don’t we ring the bell, see if he’s home?”
“You don’t get to see him that way, believe me.”
“Go by again.”
Harry nosed the Mercedes into a drive, backed around and came past the house saying, “Worth around twenty million, easy.”
“It doesn’t look that big.”
“Compared to what, the Beverly Hills Hotel? It’s twelve thousand square feet plus a tennis court, pool, cabana guesthouse and orange trees on three acres.”
“Jesus Christ,” Chili said. He could see the upper windows as they crept past the wall, the top part of a satellite dish in the side yard.
“There’s no way you could sit in your car and watch the house,” Harry said, “without attracting the police inside of two minutes. If you’re thinking of waiting for him to come out.”
“What’s he do for fun?”
“His girlfriend lives with him. When he’s not here, he’s in New York. Has a place on Central Park West.”
“I’d like to find out more about him,” Chili said, “where he goes, so maybe I can run into him.”
“Then what?”
“Don’t worry about it. I got an idea.”
“There was a piece on him, a cover story,” Harry said, “fairly recently in one of the magazines. About his career, his life. I remember there’s a shot of him with his girlfriend. She was in entertainment, I think a singer with a rock-and-roll group when he met her. I wouldn’t be surprised Karen has the magazine. I know she gets the trades, has stacks of ’em she keeps—I don’t know why.”
“I have to go back there anyway,” Chili said, “pick up my car.”
For a minute or so he was quiet, catching glimpses of the big homes through the trees and manicured shrubs, all the places so clean and neat and not a soul around, nobody outside. Not like Meridian Avenue, South Miami Beach. Not anything like Bay Ridge, Jesus, you had to go all the way over past the Veterans Hospital to Dyker Beach Park to find trees of any size.
He said to Harry, “You know the one Michael Weir was in, The Cyclone? When I saw it I recognized places on Bayview, Neptune Avenue, Cropsey. That’s all close to my old neighborhood. I was in Miami then, but I heard some guys I know actually met him.”
“Sure, every picture Michael’s in,” Harry said, “he researches the part, finds out exactly how he’s supposed to play it. That’s why he’s so good. The Cyclone, he makes you believe he’s a Mafia character.”
“Well, basically, yeah, he sounded okay,” Chili said. “What I couldn’t believe, they would’ve let him in, the kind of simple asshole he was. Or let him get away after, a snitch? He would’ve ended up with his
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dick in his mouth. I don’t mean to say there aren’t assholes in those different crews, they’re full of ass-holes. I just mean the particular kind of asshole he was in the movie.”
“If he played a Mafia character,” Harry said, “then I guarantee you he talked to some of them.”
“Tommy would know,” Chili said. “Tommy Carlo. I could call him and double-check.”
“For what?”
“I’d like to know. Me and Tommy were both in Miami when they were making the movie, but he’d remember it. It was at the time we were running the club for Momo. Tommy was the one booked the different groups’d come in. Made him feel he was in the entertainment world.”
“Well, if you want,” Harry said, “call him from Karen’s.”
“What if she’s not home? We just walk in?”
“It didn’t bother you before.”
“That was different. I’m not gonna bust in.”
“If the patio door was open last night,” Harry said, “it’s still open. Karen’s never been good at locking doors, closing windows when it rains, putting her top up . . .”
“When you were living together?”
“Anytime. She’d come in, forget to shut off the alarm system. Then the company that put it in calls and you have to give them an identifying code, three digits, that’s all. But Karen could never remember the numbers. Pretty soon the cops pull up in the drive . . .”
“Harry, if Karen sets up Michael for you, what does she get?”
“She already got it.” Harry said, “Me. I made her a movie star. She wasn’t too bad, for that kind of picture. There aren’t any lines that run more than ten words. Now she’s reading for a part . . . Hasn’t worked in seven years, she wants to get back in it. I don’t know why—Michael set her up for life.”
“Beth’s Room,” Chili said.
“What?”
“Beth’s Room. That’s the name of the movie she’s gonna be in.”
Harry gave him a quick glance. Looking at the road again he said, “I’ll bet you a hundred bucks she doesn’t get the part.”
11 
Bo Catlett liked to change his clothes two or three times a day, get to wear different outfits. In less than two hours he was meeting friends at Mateo’s in Westwood, so he had dressed for dinner before driving out to the airport.
Seated now in the Delta terminal, across the aisle from the gate where the mule from Miami would arrive by way of Atlanta, Catlett had on his dove-gray double-breasted Armani with the nice long roll lapel. He had on a light-blue shirt with a pearl-gray necktie and pearl cufflinks. He had on light-blue hose and dark-brown Cole-Haan loafers, spit-shined. The loafers matched the attaché case next to him on the row of seats. Resting on the attaché case was a Delta ticket envelope, boarding pass showing—for anyone who might think he was sitting here with some other purpose in mind. Anyone who might think they recognized him from times before. Like that casual young dude wearing the plaid wool shirt over his white T-shirt, with the jeans and black Nikes.
Catlett liked to watch people going by, all the different shapes and sizes in all different kinds of clothes, wondering, when they got up in the morning if they gave two seconds to what they were going to wear, or they just got dressed, took it off a chair or reached in the closet and put it on. He could pick out the ones who had given it some thought. They weren’t necessarily the ones all dressed up, either.
The young dude in the jeans and the wool shirt hanging out, he’d given that outfit some thought. A friendly young dude, said hi to the ladies behind the airline counter and they said hi back like they knew him.