Mel answered: “It’ll take a day or two to draw up the contract, then we’ll have them messengered over to your hotel and you can have the signed copies sent back here.”
Marissa kept at it. “And you have no issue with a lawyer looking the contracts over?”
“None at all,” said Spiegelman. “Contracts are meant to protect both parties. For now, Harry, go home and enjoy yourself a little. It’s going to be tough work once we get rolling.” He stood and offered his hand to Harry and Marissa. “Mel and I have to get things started on our end, so please excuse us. I think this is going to work out very nicely. Very nicely indeed.”
In the elevator on the way back down, Harry Garson peeled off five crisp hundred-dollar bills and handed them to his new agent. “You should give up the drag queen routine, kid. You’re a natural as an agent.”
“Harry, I can’t take this.”
“Take it. Take it!” he insisted, shoving the money through the low-buttoned chiffon blouse and into Marissa’s thickly foamed bra. “You earned it. Besides, you heard Spiegelman. I’m looking at home-run city here.”
“About that, I—”
“Forget it. When the contracts come, we’ll worry about it.”
“But—”
“No buts. Come on, I’m treating for a cab.”
Paul Spiegelman and Mel Abbott stood silently, watching out their office window as Harry Garson and his drag queen agent stood on Sunset trying to flag down a cab. It was almost as if they wouldn’t speak until the oddest of odd couples was completely out of sight. Of course they understood that no one, not even people in the hallway outside their door, could hear their conversation. Still, they waited. When a cab finally pulled to the curb out front, gobbled up the two riders, and sped off, Spiegelman and Abbott sighed with relief. The older of the two began whistling “We’re in the Money,” but all Mel could do was pace.
“Why the fuck did he have to bring that fucking African queen with him? He— She’s gonna fuck everything up.”
“Mel, will you calm down, for goodness sakes? You’re going to give yourself a stroke.”
“‘Calm down,’ he says. How can I calm down? You know what’s at stake here?”
“I know, Mel. I know.”
“I told you we should have sent a car to pick him up. I told you.”
“If we sent a car for him, he would have gotten suspicious. Harry’s dumb and hungry, but he’s not stupid. He knows the business. He knows that someone who hasn’t worked in nearly fifteen years doesn’t get picked up in a limo for an audition. That would have queered the deal right there.”
“Stooping to puns now, Paul?”
Spiegelman thought about that for a second, snickered quietly, and said, “I didn’t realize.”
“Never mind. So what are we gonna do about Sheena, Queen of the Jungle?”
“Go round up Joey Potholes for me. Tell him I need to see him here. In the meantime, I’ve got Harry Garson’s contract to write up.”
At 4:27 a.m. the next morning, Marissa LaTerre stumbled out of Midnight Cruiser, an after-hours club frequented by freaks, geeks, and beautiful people alike. She’d had a hell of a night, giving head in a back room to a pretty-boy British film star and having the favor returned by the guy’s fifteen-year-old date. She’d also managed to spend every dime of her agent’s fee and then some.
A tall, elegantly thin man with pocked skin and fish eyes leaned against the front fender of a Lincoln Town Car. He watched Marissa come out of the club and turn in his direction. He’d made sure to shoot out the streetlamp under which he’d parked the stolen Lincoln. When Marissa got close to the back bumper of the car, the thin man pulled open the rear passenger side door.
“For you, Miss LaTerre,” he said. “Compliments of Harry Garson.”
If she hadn’t had so much coke and Dom in her system, Marissa might have listened to the alarm bells her street-smart former self, Morris Terry, was ringing as loudly as he could. But even then, it wouldn’t have mattered. It was already half past too late. She couldn’t have known that every stitch of clothing, every piece of jewelry, every wig and false eyelash, everything she owned was in the trunk of the stolen car and that she would soon be keeping her possessions company. She couldn’t have known that the desk clerk at the hotel had been paid off to check her out and box up all of her worldly goods. It was only when she felt the ring of cold metal press against the back of her skull as she entered the car that Marissa finally heard Morris’s alarm bells. With a flash, a snap, and a wisp of smoke, Marissa collapsed in a heap across the backseat.
Harry Garson loved Tucson. He’d shot on location in Arizona about thirty times, but being here on his own and getting to step outside his own persona was a revelation. After the first few days wearing the Nagra recorder taped to his body, he’d learned to forget about it, and since he never knew where the film crew was, it was as if they weren’t there at all. Somehow he felt, for the first time in his life, at home. In the past, on movie shoots, he’d always been a part of the crew and his exploration of the area tended to be of the local bars and brothels. Sure, there were a few times he and some of the other actors had taken their horses out into the surrounding mountains and desert when the day’s shoot didn’t involve Indian or battle sequences, but that too wound up being about someone having a few bottles and getting shickered. That’s what Irv said the Yiddish word was for getting drunk.
Irv. These days, Harry found himself thinking a lot about his old agent. It was only with Irv that he had ever spoken about his Indian roots and his puzzlement over how he’d come to be raised by the sweet but clueless Garson family in northern Wisconsin. He knew his adoptive parents had been Lutheran missionaries, but they never spoke too much about it. They never spoke much about anything. What he remembered most about his childhood was the silence of it.
“I never felt a part of the life there,” he’d confided to Irv.
“Look, we’re all members of a tribe.”
“Yeah, Irv, but what tribe?”
Irv had just shrugged his shoulders. In Harry’s seventy-five-plus years, it had been his one and only conversation on the subject. Now when Irv crossed his mind, Harry’s thoughts inevitably turned to Marissa LaTerre. He was still pretty pissed at the fruitcake for abandoning him like she had and without a word. He tried figuring out why she’d done it and turned her back on the 10 percent he would have given her, but it was a waste of time and energy. Who could figure out someone like that? They couldn’t even figure themselves out, Harry reasoned. Besides, the contracts had been signed; Harry having paid a C-note to a disbarred lawyer from the hotel to give the documents the once over to make sure they were in order. He’d done his studying up on Tucson and the Pima. For instance, he knew that Ira Hayes, one of the guys who held up the American flag at Iwo Jima, was a Pima Indian. That the name Tucson was taken from a Spanish bastardization of the O’odham name Cuk Son, meaning at the base of the black hill. He’d been an apt pupil and the second five-grand installment had been paid in full in cash.
They’d flown him down to Tucson first class and set him up in a neat little adobe bungalow in the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains. When the cab dropped him off, Harry found a 1980 Ford F150 pickup in the driveway with the keys in the ignition. It had been ten years since he’d driven, but with a little practice it all came right back to him. It was wonderful to be behind the wheel again, to feel in control of something other than his bodily functions. Driving, he thought, was like humping: it felt great no matter how rusty you were. He’d been supplied with property department ID of the best quality in the name of Ben Hart.