Eventually Zuckerman feels compelled to maximize as many of the man’s waning days as possible, so the two mismatched chums become fixtures down at Molly Malone’s on Fairfax. They dine on mountains of corned beef and lox at Canter’s Deli. They go to the Hollywood Wax Museum, Chinatown, and Griffith Observatory, where Allerton, in a pique of excitement, names every star in the firmament after an old Hollywood heavy: Elisha Cook Jr., Charles Napier, Sydney Greenstreet, John Vernon, Jack Elam, Dub Taylor, Vernon Dent, and on and on and on.
The two of them also take to playing golf on Sundays at Zuckerman’s Beverly Hills club, spending the lazy hours trudging the fairways, talking, getting to know each other’s deepest ruminations and regrets. In fact, it is on one of these Sundays that everything changes for Zuckerman.
“That’s a honey of a shot,” Allerton says encouragingly from the edge of the eighteenth green. Of course it’s a lie. Zuckerman’s whiffed putt has just skirted the edge of the hole and has shot off into the sand.
“Tell me something, Haywood,” Zuckerman says, retrieving his ball from the trap. “You’re so… not like the heavies you played. Did you enjoy it—the glory days I’m talking about—all the villains?”
“You want to know the truth?” the grizzled old monolith replies as he limps over to his ball. Almost skin and bones now, he’s moving slower than usual today, the pain medication fighting a losing battle stanching the tide of agony seeping up through his innards. The putter looks like a chopstick in his gigantic gnarled hands as he towers shakily over the golf ball. “I did enjoy it, being the heavy, I did. It was almost like…” He pauses, thinking, staring downward, teetering, holding himself up as though the putter were a cane. “… the guys I was playing were bad apples, sure, but they… they… I guess what I’m trying to say is, my favorite part was when they got their comeuppance… when they took their medicine. You know? They looked the good guy in the face, they always did that, and they accepted the… whattyacallit… the consequences. I don’t know why that was so important to me… I guess that’s the only part I almost kinda miss. Putting the… whattyacallit… the punctuation at the end of the picture.”
Zuckerman has no idea what the big guy is talking about but goes ahead and says, “That’s an interesting angle on things, my friend… and it brings to mind that great scene in… Haywood? Haywood?” Zuckerman drops his putter. “Haywood?! Haywood?! HAYWOOD!!”
Once in a great while, in the great Muir Woods many miles north of here, a mighty redwood, suffering from blight, tumbles over in a great, heaving plunge, shaking the earth and sending up a plume of debris. When Haywood Allerton finally succumbs to the pain and goes down, hitting the green with all his weight, the manicured, perfectly landscaped, rarified ground of the Pine Ridge Country Club trembles with similar seismic reverberations.
Zuckerman spares no expense. He has Allerton taken to the best facility money can buy—the Samuel Oschin Cancer Institute at Cedars-Sinai—not far from Zuckerman’s stately Beverly Hills mansion (which was once owned by Douglas Fairbanks, by the way).
Zuckerman demands immediate attention and puts everything on his Visa. The doctors run the unconscious behemoth through a battery of tests and conclude that Allerton is in his final hours, his immune system shutting down, malabsorption syndrome making him a candidate for a feeding tube, and the administrator at Cedars informs Zuckerman that hospice is the only answer, and it’s a miracle the big guy was still walking around, and how about this chilly autumn weather we’re having?
A widower with a lapsed Screen Actor’s Guild membership, Allerton has no insurance and no immediate family other than two estranged daughters living in the Midwest, both of whom are unable to get to L.A. for another week or two, so Zuckerman decides to have Allerton moved to Zuckerman’s sprawling Tudor mansion on Canon for home hospice care.
It is here, five days later, in the elegant parlor in the rear of the house, around which French windows look out on a lovely grove of avocado trees and the hummingbirds play in the wisteria, that Zuckerman realizes what he has to do.
“So your daughter, the older one—Nancy’s her name? She claims you never had a will,” Zuckerman says to the dying man.
Nestled in the folds of a massive orthopedic hospital bed that was brought in by four burly orderlies earlier that week, hooked to a space shuttle’s worth of equipment, Allerton drifts in and out of consciousness, his face a gaunt, gray, sunken mask of torture. The pain constantly ebbs and flows—more flowing than ebbing lately—and it is agonizing for Zuckerman to watch.
“I don’t know if you hear me anymore, but I just want you to know I got a plan.” Zuckerman sits on the edge of a chair next to the bed, his hand clutching the bed rail so tightly his knuckles whiten.
Allerton’s eyelids flutter. His lips peel away from clenched, yellow teeth. It is unclear whether this is an indication that he understands human speech or he is simply writhing in pain—or both.
It is also unclear how long the machines will keep him alive now, maybe days, weeks. God forbid, months. The former folk artist of evil, the greatest heavy ever, a man from a bygone era of analog projectors, now floating in a limbo of misery, kept alive by the same kind of advanced computer technology that replaced his cinematic archetype.
“I’m still your manager, by God,” Zuckerman says, “and I’ll manage this, if you’ll pardon the expression, like a professional.”
Very slowly, with the feeble, tentative shakiness of a wounded sparrow, Allerton’s huge hand moves to the bed rail and covers Zuckerman’s hand.
The gesture leaches tears from the jaded, cynical, heartless agent. “Why, if you’ll pardon my impertinence, did you do this to me? Why did you come into my life when I was minding my own business?” The sobbing starts. “I got… I got three ex-wives hate my guts, I got… I got four kids I barely even know, and you gotta be my friend now—maybe the best friend I ever had—you gotta tear my heart out like this… you prick!”
Marvin Zuckerman lowers his head and lets the sobs rock through him.
At length the crying passes and he looks up and says softly, “Don’t worry, Haywood, old pal o’ mine, I got a plan.”
At one of the most lavish mansions in Beverly Hills the second contractor arrives after dark. Slipping through the shadows of avocado trees—where stars of the silent screen once frolicked and strolled—he finds the rear parlor window and pauses.
He checks the small leather pouch in his black suit coat, checks the instruments tucked inside it, then pries the window glass open and stealthily climbs inside the house.
The man moves to the side of the hospital bed and looks down at its occupant. “He said to make it fast and painless,” the man says, reaching into the pouch and preparing the hypodermic. “Who am I to argue? You get all kinds in this business.”
This man is the real thing—the banality of evil incarnate. He has the face of a hairless mouse, and dead, blank, shoe-button eyes.
Those at death’s door often experience a final moment of lucidity. The big, emaciated man on the bed opens his eyes, gazes up, and looks his executioner in the face. The dying man does not look away. The needle glistens, shedding a tear of fluid.