The Hollywood Trilogy

by Don Carpenter

  “Nice boy,” Rick said. He did not move. He felt a shiver, not at the dog, who was only doing his job, but at the remoteness of this place, this empty lonely spot, where anything could happen. Tommy Cone was the live-in caretaker and guardian of the Enrique estate. His cottage stood higher on the hill and looked down from its copse of trees over the garden and swimming pool area. Tommy had a dozen guns in his place, from .22 target pistols to a big ten-gauge double-barreled shotgun, and he had Enrique’s permission to use them. Enrique himself owned a chain of small department stores throughout the West, lived with his family in their low rambling Spanish-style mansion, and was in deathly fear of being attacked and murdered in the night.

  The dog was a Belgian shepherd, nine feet long and black as death, “The Hound of the Malibu Hills” Tommy cheerfully called him. No, he wasn’t nine feet long, he could clear a nine-foot wall, or was it twelve feet? It didn’t matter. Rick was glad enough when Tommy’s door opened, spilling light onto the gravel. “It’s okay, Tor,” he said.

  “Is it okay?” Rick asked.

  “Sure, come on in.”

  Tor was seated beside Tommy in the doorway, getting his ears scratched by the time Rick got over to them.

  “Nice warm night, huh?” Tommy said. Tommy Cone was a thin man who stooped his shoulders and had a pot belly, now much larger than the last time Rick had seen him. They moved into the house, leaving Tor to his duties, and Rick crossed to the big window overlooking the Enriques’ back garden. The pool was lit and glowed like a gigantic aquamarine gem. The cottage was dark inside, except for the amber bulbs in the entryway and one red light over in a corner. Rock ’n’ roll played softly in the background.

  Tommy sat in his favorite chair, beside the big window. There were newspapers on the rug, stacks of magazines, candybar wrappers and a general sense of sloppy but hip bachelor living. Rick continued to look out over the lit pool. There were no lights in the house. Beyond, over a couple of hills, was the Pacific Ocean. Not for the first time, Rick wondered about the kind of man who would live up here and not build his house where it could look out over the ocean. Where there was all that fire danger. Where there were all those rattlers out in the brush. Where fear could come for him every night, even if nobody else did.

  “They’re all out of town some goddamn place,” Tommy said. “We got the estate to ourselves. Want to go for a swim?”

  “No, thanks,” Rick said.

  Tommy was slowly rolling a joint, and on the table beside his chair Rick could see a mirror and a little bottle of cocaine. He watched Tommy roll and twist the joint, hold it up to scrutiny and then stick it in his mouth.

  “You want a hit?”

  “I wouldn’t mind trying the coke,” Rick said. Tommy gave him a look. Coke dealers had such strange manners. Maybe you weren’t supposed to bring it up right away, like that. Maybe you had to pretend to like the bastard before he’d get off the coke, as if you had driven up here just to see old Tommy, and not to make a deal.

  “What’s been happening, man?” Tommy wanted to know. “I ain’t been down off this mountain except to get groceries in a week. How’s Hollywood?”

  “Hollywood is terrific,” Rick said dryly. He could feel the cocaine urgency in his belly, now that it was lying there right in front of him.

  “I gotta get back into show business,” Tommy said. “This life’s killing me.” He lit up, puffed on the joint, and then handed it up to Rick, who took a polite puff and let it come out his nose immediately. Now Tommy was bending over the mirror, in the semidarkness, getting ready to cut some lines. He was incredibly slow about it. Tommy had been a lot of things in his young life, but he had always been a dealer and only a dealer as far as Rick was concerned. He had been a barber, with his own shop in Tallahassee, Florida, but his partner had run off with the money, or so he said. He had had a scuba rental business in Tarpon Springs, and he had been a “hick wrangler” for movie companies on location, rounding up and taking care of the extras, and then had come to Hollywood to get work as an assistant director. He worked on a couple of porn films, made a couple of trips to Colombia, owned part interest in a cabin cruiser, had tried to organize a rock ’n’ roll band, and half a dozen other schemes, but always at bottom he dealt. That was where the eating money came from.

  “Dealer to the stars,” he called himself, with a little ironic Southern grin to take the edge off it. “Always the best stuff and always the best prices, and if you don’t think so, try the competition.”

  Now he slowly and carefully chopped out six lines of rather chalky-looking stuff, and finally offered the mirror up to Rick.

  “One and one?” Rick asked. Maybe there was a girl in the bathroom.

  “Naw, that’s all for you,” Tommy said with a grin. “I just took a toot the moment you arrived. I’m high as a fuckin’ lizard.”

  The stuff seared his nostrils and he felt that wonderful first medicinal rush that comes just from knowing the cocaine is on the way. Instant elation. Rick coughed and gasped, almost spilling the last two lines. But he got control of himself, and with more coughing and gagging, he did the last pair.

  “Great stuff!” he wheezed. “Smooooth!”

  Tommy laughed. It was an old coker’s joke.

  “It’s the wash,” he said. “The stuff s coming in like that, but it’s good country dope.”

  Rick sat on the couch opposite Tommy and let the drug run through his system. Tommy sat quietly puffing on his joint (which Rick refused with a wave of his hand) and looked out the window, blackness everywhere except the glowing pool.

  “I’d like a quarter of this stuff,” Rick said, changing his mind. He had been thinking about only getting a gram. But here he was, and it was good stuff. He took out his wallet, shielding the contents from Tommy casually, and took out five one-hundred-dollar bills. Tommy got to his feet with a grunt and went into the back of the house. After a few minutes he came out and with a strange smile said, “Hey, you wanna see something?”

  Rick followed him into the back of the house, expecting to be shown a large quantity of cocaine. But instead he found himself in a denlike room with glass terrariums racked up against the walls and on tables. There seemed to be twenty or thirty of them. On a cleared space on one of the tables Rick saw the open plastic ounce bag of cocaine, the scales and other paraphernalia of the coke dealer, lit by a powerful gooseneck lamp. Some of the terrariums were lit also.

  “Not the coke,” Tommy said. “Over here.” He stood by one of the glass cages. “Look at that bastard, he’s doin’ a perfect coil.”

  Inside the cage a large rattlesnake sat bathed in its light, coiled. Its ugly broad flat head was erect, and the snake’s tongue darted in and out.

  “Crotalus atrox,” Tommy said proudly, “small for his kind, but who’d complain?”

  “Where’d you get him?” Rick asked. The coke was just hitting, the real hit, and the snake frightened Rick very much.

  “In the hills. That’s where I got all of them. All these cages have rattlers in ’em, mostly the little Coast guys, but a couple of these big timber rattlers.”

  “You’re collecting them?”

  “It’s muh new business, old boy. Rattlers for pets. Hell, people have tarantulas, pit bulls, fighting fish, why not make a fad of rattlesnakes? Shit, they’re nature’s lovely killers, wouldn’t you like to have one of your own?”

  It was Tommy’s idea that if a few celebrities would buy snakes from him (“hell, I might even give a few away, to the right people”) the resultant publicity could make Tommy’s business a going concern.

  “I could move out of this goddamn crypt and back to Beverly Hills,” he said enthusiastically.

  “How do you catch them?” Rick asked.

  “Oh, they’re easy to catch if you know what you’re doing, but don’t spread that around. Part of the price is the mystery, you know?”

  Tommy went on about his proposed snake store in Beverly Hills, with flocks of movie stars and society types roll
ing up in their limos to buy snakes, as he weighed out Rick’s quarter-ounce of cocaine.

  “I figure all I need is twenty-five thousand, to start,” he said.

  “Twenty-five thousand snakes?” Rick asked, but he knew better. The big diamondback in the terrarium slowly began to uncoil as Rick watched with fascination. Eventually, the snake went under a pile of leaves in the corner of his cage. Rick counted the rattles as they slowly disappeared. Ten. That was some fucking snake. He wondered what Elektra would do if he came home with a ten-rattler.

  Probably cook it for supper.

  “Well?” Tommy said, after the deal was done and they were back in the living room.

  “Well, what?” said Rick, but he knew what.

  “Can you front me the twenty-five thousand?”

  Rick laughed. “I can wish you luck,” he said. He edged toward the door. “Listen, I got to go, Elektra’s got dinner on.”

  Tommy said meanly, “You won’t eat for days.” He made no move toward the door, so, with some hesitation, Rick opened it himself.

  “You going to take care of the dog?” Rick said after a while.

  “Tor’s all right,” Tommy said. He was in his favorite chair again, staring out the window.

  Well, shit. It was about twenty feet to the car. Rick said goodbye and left the front door open, crunching over the gravel, alert for the dog to rush him, fear high in his chest. Here it came! Rushing and growling low, across the patch of light toward Rick, who froze.

  “Tor!” came Tommy’s command from the darkness, and the dog stopped, a few feet from Rick. Slowly Rick got into his car.

  “Thanks a lot, motherfucker,” he said to Tommy, but only after he had driven up to the gate, opened and shut it, and was on the road back down out of the hills.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ALEXANDER TRIED TO keep busy in spite of his longing for Teresa di Veccio. At the same time he had to guard against lassitude, something he had never been troubled with before, and which frightened him by its insidious ways. He would wake up late and skip his laps in the pool, instead sitting up in bed with the papers, reading bad news and drinking coffee. Usually he waited until he got to the office to have coffee, but now he needed it just to get out of bed. Breakfast became a distasteful chore and so he skipped it in favor of more coffee and more bad news.

  Of course he telephoned her almost every day, and if he didn’t reach her, she would reach him. The only time they missed was when she went to Katmandu to attend a party (or was it several parties?), all for charity, all in a good cause, but still, halfway around the world to talk to the same people. It did not make sense to Alexander, especially since the time confusion left him without his daily contact. When she called the next day, the connection hadn’t been all that good, and Alexander had been grumpy and sarcastic. By the end of the call, kiss-me’s and I-love-you’s to the contrary notwithstanding, he honestly did not know where they stood.

  But soon she would be back on the West Coast, staying at the Lake Tahoe cabin of a friend, and Alexander would take time off from his work to run up and visit her. It would be fun, the two of them in a cozy mountain cabin. And then he hoped (but only hoped) to get her to come south for a while.

  By eleven in the morning he was hungry and tired, coffeed out, impatient with the constant stream of ideas flowing past his office, just putting in the time until he could make his lunch appointment, wherever it was and whomever it was with, order impatiently, swill his drink, gobble his food, nod and agree, laugh and smile, and get back to the office in time to cancel a couple of appointments and take a short snooze. From this he would awaken in a furious temper, and until he began to realize things weren’t quite right, those post-nap appointments were pretty hair-raising for all hands. It turned out better for everyone when he started scheduling screening-room time for right after his nap. He could sit there in the darkness, sipping Coca-Colas, and watch dailies or competition-product without biting anybody’s head off.

  It was getting harder and harder to see Alexander Hellstrom, which was probably a relief to all but those pitching projects.

  Fortunately, by this time of day, New York had closed up and gone home. Conversations with Marrow or any of his people usually took place between nine and ten in the morning, although Marrow was capable of calling any time.

  But even so, work was the best part of his life. In work he was the aggressor, the predator, no matter how it looked from the outside. Ideas for movies floated all around him, launched by a variety of agencies, coming from all directions in every possible form, from carefully worked out and expensive story boards, developed at producer’s expense, which showed every key scene in cartoon form, to one-page outlines submitted by the studio’s story department and culled from the hundreds of newly published books, and from the galley proofs of books the publishers thought were going to be hot.

  There were all these ideas in the stream, and Alexander’s job was to find among them the successful pictures of tomorrow. He was not alone in this. Every studio in town was looking at the same projects with the same idea in mind. And so it became, on a few projects, a matter of bidding. Once an agent knew he had a property that two or more studios wanted, the agent would spring into life, doing everything possible to stir up the competitive juices. Sometimes this resulted in extraordinary prices being paid for properties that weren’t worth a nickel. Every studio had a backlog of expensive items they were slowly and carefully throwing more money into, hiring writers and directors to salvage the cold porridge of what had once been a hotly promising breakfast.

  Alexander’s pride was that most of what he bought got made, and most of what he made made money, and some of it, one or two pictures a year, made lots and lots of money.

  It was all very well to use the computers and test-market situations and polls, but finally, the man who made the deals had to have a nose for it, and that was that.

  Alexander was such a man, and he took great pride in it. His judgment launched the projects, employed thousands and brought in the steadily mounting tide of money that seemed the only way for the corporation to stay even.

  He was not solely responsible for everything. He could go to picture on low- and medium-budget projects, but for the blockbusters he had to have the approval of New York, the approval of Donald Marrow.

  On the Rick Heidelberg project Marrow was casual. Alexander outlined the project as a musical love story, a starring vehicle for some young singing star and a mature star (he did not use Rick’s shorthand, but later suggested that Paul Newman and John Travolta would “give you an idea” of what they had in mind).

  “I like it,” Marrow said.

  So that was approval, and Alexander didn’t even have to go into the overhead angle or the lucrative possibilities of having Heidelberg’s company on the lot.

  “Everybody thinks you’re doing a swell job,” Marrow said over the telephone. As well he might. They had a picture out flogging the markets called Hamadryad! about an eighteen-foot king cobra, that was scaring millions out of the public, with a negative cost of five million dollars. It had been on the top of Variety’s list of top-grossing films for six weeks now, and would stay there all summer. New York hadn’t anything to do with the launching of this epic, it was all Alexander’s baby, and so could do no wrong for at least a few weeks more. Which was a relief, because Alexander did not want to have to deal with a lot of meaningless pressure from the East for a while.

  His social life was as fully planned as his days, a round of dinners, parties, screenings, charity board meetings, public affairs and openings. It went with the job. Alexander himself did not give a damn about charities and allowed his tax lawyers and public relations firm to decide what he would join, attend, give money to or represent as a board member. They came up with what his main tax lawyer called “an acceptable social services package,” and Alexander signed the checks or attended the functions as he was told by his secretary.

  But lately it had galled him. Until Teresa
he had been able to carry out all these functions with ease, slipping his lady friends either into or between functions, carrying on like a pirate captain and still jumping out of bed at dawn full of piss and vinegar. Pirate captain. He liked that image for what he did, implying as it did that he bore down on the treasure ships and carried off his prizes with a high hand. But lately he had been thinking the metaphor was wrong. It was more like going to the butcher shop, poking the meat, counting your pennies and distrusting the butcher.

  But that was not what was on his mind as he sat in the dark screening room behind his office watching a picture another studio was going to release in a week. It was a story with a good deal of flash—brief nudity—and every time a cute rear end or a pair of tits went by, Alexander would feel a flush of desire followed by something almost like revulsion.

  At first he had not wanted any other woman. This was a rare feeling for him, and for several weeks he cherished it, remaining silently celibate with something like pride, but then at a party in Pacific Palisades a very young girl, a model who hoped to become an actress and who was very fashionable, made a play for him that he could hardly turn down. And so they went to his place, leaving behind the press agent who had brought her to the party. She was hip and funny and full of promise, but she was fresh from the New York modeling scene, and chattered about what was going on in New York until Alexander could think only of Teresa, and when they started fooling around in his den, he could not get an erection. Or did not want to get an erection. They had been watching late-night television and drinking brandy, and all he wanted to do was brush his teeth and go to bed.

  “I’m exhausted,” he admitted to the girl, and she said in a low purring voice, “I can take care of that,” and started to give him a blow job, but he had to say, finally, “No.”

  “I understand,” she said, and she did, for she kissed him lightly goodnight and called a taxi for herself. They parted friends, and if ever her name came up on the list, Alexander would hire her in a minute. Except the trouble with those goddamn beautiful New York fashion models was that they could not act and did not know it, and would never know it. Who would tell them?