There were grooves for a glass partition between front and rear, but the glass was lowered out of sight, and when we’d driven down Highland and made a right turn onto Hollywood Boulevard, going past Grauman’s Chinese theater, the chauffeur suddenly said, “You a writer?”
“What? Me? No.”
“Oh,” he said. “I always try to figure out what people are. They’re fascinating, you know? People.”
“I’m in the Navy,” I said.
“That right? I did two in the Army myself.”
“Ah,” I said.
He nodded. He’d look at me in the rear-view mirror from time to time while he was talking. He said, “Then I pushed a hack around Houston for six years, but I figured the hell with it, you know? Who needs it. Come out here in sixty-seven, never went back.”
“I guess it’s all right out here.”
“No place like it,” he said.
I didn’t have an answer for that, and he didn’t seem to have anything else to say, so I opened the day clerk’s envelope and looked at the photograph he wanted me to leave in Byron Cartwright’s office.
Actually it was four photographs on one eight-by-ten sheet of glossy paper, showing the day clerk in four poses, with different clothing in each one. Four different characters, I guess. In the upper left, he was wearing a light plaid jacket and a pale turtleneck sweater and a medium-shade cloth cap, and he had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and he was squinting; looking mean and tough. In the upper right he was wearing a tuxedo, and he had a big smile on his face. His head was turned toward the camera, but his body was half twisted away and he was holding a top hat out to the side, as though he were singing a song and was about to march off-stage at the end of the music. In the bottom left, he was wearing a cowboy hat and a bandana around his neck and a plaid shirt, and he had a kind of comical-foolish expression on his face, as though somebody had just made a joke and he wasn’t sure he’d understood the point. And in the bottom right he was wearing a dark suit and white shirt and pale tie, and he was leaning forward a little and smiling in a friendly way directly at the camera. I guess that was supposed to be him in his natural state, but it actually looked less like him than any of the others.
The whole back of the photograph was filled with printing. His name was at the top (MAURY DEE) and underneath was a listing of all the movies he’d been in and all the play productions, with the character he performed in each one. Down at the bottom were three or four quotes from critics about how good he was.
The driver turned left on Fairfax and went down past Selma to Sunset Boulevard, and then turned right. Then he said, “The best thing about this job is the people.”
“Is that right?” I put Maury Dee’s photograph away and twisted the red string around the closure tabs.
“And I’ll tell you something,” said the driver. “The bigger they are, the nicer they are. You’d be amazed, some of the people been sitting right where you are right now.”
“I bet.”
“But you know who’s the best of them all? I mean, just a nice regular person, not stuck up at all.”
“Who’s that?”
“Dawn Devayne,” he said. “She’s always got a good word for you, she’ll take a joke, she’s just terrific.”
“That’s nice,” I said.
“Terrific.” He shook his head. “Always remembers your name. ‘Hi, Harry,’ she says. ‘How you doing?’ Just a terrific person.”
“I guess she must be all right,” I said.
“Terrific,” he said, and turned the car in at one of the taller buildings just before the Beverly Hills line. We drove down into the basement parking garage and the driver stopped next to a bank of elevators. He hopped out and opened my door for me, and when I got out he said, “Eleventh floor.”
“Thanks, Harry,” I said.
All you could see was artificial plants. I stepped out of the elevator and there were great pots all over the place on the green rug, all with plastic plants in them with huge dark-green leaves. Beyond them, quite a ways back, expanses of plate glass showed the white sky.
I moved forward, not sure what to do next, and then I saw the receptionist’s desk. With the white sky behind her, she was very hard to find. I went over to her and said, “Excuse me.”
She’d been writing something on a long form, and now she looked up with a friendly smile and said, “May I help you?”
“I’m supposed to see Byron Cartwright.”
“Name, please?”
“Ordo Tupikos.”
She used her telephone, sounding very chipper, and then she smiled at me again, saying, “He’ll be out in a minute. If you’ll have a seat?”
There were easy chairs in among the plastic plants. I thanked her and went off to sit down, picking up a newspaper from a white formica table beside the chair. It was called The Hollywood Reporter, and it was magazine size and printed on glossy paper. I read all the short items about people signing to do this or that, and I read a nightclub review of somebody whose name I didn’t recognize, and then a girl came along and said, “Mr Tupikos?”
“Yes?”
“I’m Mr Cartwright’s secretary. Would you come with me?”
I put the paper down and followed her away from the plants and down a long hall with tan walls and brown carpet. We passed offices on both sides of the hall; about half were occupied, and most of the people were on the phone.
I suddenly realized I’d forgotten the day clerk’s photograph. I’d left it behind in the envelope on the table with The Hollywood Reporter.
Well, that actually was what he’d asked me to do; leave it in the office. Maybe on the way back I should take it out of the envelope.
The girl stopped, gesturing at a door on the left. “Through here, Mr Tupikos.”
Byron Cartwright was standing in the middle of the room. He had a big heavy chest and brown leathery skin and yellow-white hair brushed straight back over his balding head. He was dressed in different shades of pale blue, and there was a white line of smoke rising from a long cigar in an ashtray on the desk behind him. The room was large and so was everything in it; massive desk, long black sofa, huge windows showing the white sky, with the city of Los Angeles down the slope on the flat land to the south, pastel colors glittering in the haze; pink, peach, coral.
Byron Cartwright strode toward me, hand outstretched. He was laughing, as though remembering a wonderful time we’d once shared together. Laughter made erosion lines crisscrossing all over his face. “Well, hello, Orry,” he said. “Glad to see you.” He took my hand, and patted my arm with his other hand, saying, “That’s right, isn’t it? Orry?”
“That’s right.”
“Everybody calls me By. Come in, sit down.”
I was already in. We sat together on the long sofa. He crossed one leg over the other, half turning in my direction, his arm stretched out toward me along the sofa back. He had what looked like a class ring on one finger, with a dark red stone. He said, “You know where I got it from? The name ‘Orry’? From Dawn.” There was something almost religious about the way he said the name. It reminded me of when Jehovah’s Witnesses pass out their literature; they always smile and say, “Here’s good news!”
I said, “You told her about me?”
“Phoned her the first chance I got. She’s on location now. You could’ve knocked her over with a feather, Orry, I could hear it in her voice.”
“It’s been a long time,” I said. I wasn’t sure what this conversation was about, and I was sorry to hear Dawn Devayne was “on location”. It sounded as though I might not be able to get to see her.
“Sixteen years,” Byron Cartwright said, and he had that reverential sound in his voice again, with the same happiness around his mouth and eyes. “Your little girl has come a long way, Orry.”