The Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes

by David Handler

  Lou hesitated, shooting an uneasy glance my way.

  “Hoagy’s cool,” Patrick assured him. “You’re cool, aren’t you, Hoagy? Used to be an Olympic-class wild man yourself, I hear.”

  “I don’t blab, if that’s what you mean.”

  “There, you see, Lou?”

  Satisfied, Lou unzipped his blue nylon bag, removed two unmarked prescription pill bottles and handed them over.

  Patrick smiled at him again. “I love you, brother. Grab me another brewski on your way out, will you?”

  Lou fetched a Heineken from the fridge, opened it and set it in front of Patrick. Then he adjusted his Tootsie Pop in his mouth and squeezed his way out the door, closing it behind him.

  “Lou kicks my ass in the gym for two hours every morning before I get here. And he deals the best coke on the planet.” Patrick opened one of the pill bottles and shook a generous heap of cocaine out onto that letter I’d received by messenger yesterday. He found a business card among the clutter of papers in front of him and used it to make four neat, straight lines of coke. Fished a ten-dollar bill from the pocket of his shorts, rolled it tight and snorted up two of the lines. “Ahh, that’s mo’ better . . .” He sighed gratefully. “Care for some?”

  Lulu let out a low growl. She’d been through my dark period with me and had no desire to go back.

  “I’m good, thanks.”

  “Suit yourself.” He snorted up the two remaining lines, then opened the other pill bottle and shook out two brown capsules and a yellow one. “Lou’s got me on herbal and mineral supplements,” he explained, swallowing them with a swig of beer. “Flaxseed oil, magnesium and I forget what else.”

  Me, I had a pretty good idea what else. Judging by Patrick’s sculpted, flab-free physique and sudden transformation into a turbocharged rage monkey, I figured that his fitness regimen included a designer cocktail of anabolic steroids and speed. Lou had to be taking steroids himself. Nobody became as humongous as he was just by lifting. I wondered if Lou was inclined to ’roid rage, too. I sure wouldn’t want to be around him if he was. As for the coke, Patrick probably thought it softened the speed’s jagged edge. It didn’t. It doesn’t. But once you get heavy into coke, concepts such as logical and real go right out the window.

  He stashed the pill bottles in a kitchen drawer, swiping at his nostrils with a paper napkin. “I’m stuck here fifteen hours a day. I don’t know what I’d do without Lou, especially now that I’m on my own. I’ve taken a little place up on Marmont while this mess with Queenie sorts itself out. Lou’s bunking in my spare bedroom. She thinks he’s an uncouth boor. I said to her, ‘Queenie, Lou and me grew up on the same street, played on the same Little League teams and fucked the same girls. When you look at Lou, you’re looking at me.’ You know what she said? She said, ‘I know this, Patrick. Please don’t remind me.’” He let out a laugh. “Kat invited me to move in with her in Laurel Canyon but I figured no way. The tabloid bloodsuckers would be camped outside her bungalow day and night. And her personal hygiene leaves a lot to be desired. She leaves dirty clothes all over the floor, dishes in the sink. I like things nice and tidy.” He drank down more beer. “Besides, it’s a package deal with her. Wherever she goes her loser of a big brother, Kyle, goes. She gives Kyle money to live on, tries to find him jobs to do. I can respect that. Family’s important. I just can’t stand the dude, that’s all. They’re from Atascadero, a nothing little town just outside of Paso Robles. Kyle did county time up there for selling weed and ludes. Stole some hunting rifles from a guy’s house, too. One more fall and he’ll end up in San Quentin.”

  “I’m surprised I haven’t seen his mug shot plastered all over the tabloids. They just love it when hot young stars like Kat have ex-cons for relatives.”

  “The network’s publicists have been doing a super job of keeping it under wraps. Plus Kyle’s her half-brother. Has a different last name. His is Cook.” Patrick peered across the banquette at me, his eyes narrowing shrewdly. “You’re probably wondering what I wanted to see you about.”

  “Probably.”

  “Maritza, just for starters. She do that to your cheek?”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Because she has a temper. Believe me, I know. I also know that she’s been going in and out of the pool house every ten minutes since you showed up. Mends your clothes, makes your breakfast. I’m wondering what else she’s been doing for you.”

  “And I’ve been told that she’s spoken for. By you?”

  Patrick stuck his jaw out at me. “It’s my house. Everything there’s mine.”

  “So Hector’s keeping an eye on her for you, not himself.”

  “Hector’s one very helpful dude.”

  “Does Maritza have a green card?”

  “Of course not. She’s an illegal. Best kind of hired help to have. They do what they’re told. Do you do what you’re told?”

  “Not usually, no.”

  “Well, this time you’re going to. Your dick stays in your pants while you’re living there, got it? My house, my rules.”

  “You keep calling it your house. It’s not your house anymore.”

  “You couldn’t be more wrong about that. This is California, dude. Divorce is blood sport out here. I’m a warrior. Queenie isn’t. Don’t let that hard shell of hers fool you. She’s all cream puff on the inside. I guarantee you she’ll give me that Masterpiece Theatre freak palace just to get rid of me. And it’ll fetch millions on the open market, too. Plenty of people will want to live there. Not me. The whole house gives me the creeps. The only thing in it that I want is my old leopard-skin sofa in the billiard room.” A happy glow lit up his face. “You’ll never guess who I once banged on that sofa.”

  “Wait, don’t tell me. Was it Eartha Kitt?”

  “Eartha Kitt? Are you fucking crazy? She’s older than my mother. No, think current A-list movie star—although she was just a nobody then. Go ahead, take a guess.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “You sure? It wasn’t your wife if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “Ex-wife, and I’m not.”

  “Did Merilee ever tell you that we had a fling when we were on location together in Ketchum, Idaho?”

  I stared across the table at him.

  Patrick erupted in laughter. “I’m just messing with you, dude. You look like an overbred WASP limp dick, but you must be a real tiger if you bagged Merilee Nash. I hear you used to bang Queenie’s kid sister, Reggie, too. What sort of a person is she?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Because they don’t speak. Not one word in the entire eighteen years I’ve known Queenie. I’ve never met her. I’m genuinely curious.”

  “Okay, sure,” I said. “She’s wild, crazy, brilliant and beautiful.”

  Patrick considered this, nodding to himself. “That’s Queenie, too, minus the wild part. But the rest of it? Hell, yeah. Plus classy. I always wanted someone classy. Or I thought I did. But classy comes at a steep price.”

  “Which is . . . ?”

  “A man has to be able to belch and fart in his own home. Have his buds over to watch football. Kick back at the Playboy Mansion when he feels like it. I was suffocating,” he explained, clutching his throat with both hands. “See, I was way wrong. Class and trash just plain don’t belong together. And I’m trash.” He gazed around at his luxurious trailer in disgust. “I’m also fed up. I hate this stupid show. Hate the TV business. Hate this whole mindless fucking traffic jam of a city. All I want to do is get my divorce and get out. Move to Maui, just me and Lou. We’ll drink brewskis on the beach, play some golf, maybe open a restaurant together. Lou cooks amazing Italian food. His mom’s old recipes. I’m done, dude. Seriously, I don’t want to see a living soul from this town ever again.”

  “Not even your children?”

  “I guess they could visit me if they wanted to,” he conceded, thumbing his square jaw. “Although they’re both major disappointments. Joe
y’s a scrawny nerd who does nothing but mope all day. Get this, the kid’s turning seventeen on Sunday and I wanted to—”

  “Saturday.”

  He gazed at me blankly. “What’s that?”

  “He turns seventeen on Saturday. As in tomorrow.”

  “Whatever,” Patrick said with a careless wave of his hand. “I want to buy him a car, okay? I asked Queenie what kind he’d like. She told me he still hasn’t learned how to drive. What kind of sixteen-year-old kid in L.A. doesn’t want to learn how to drive? Wheels are freedom.” He shook his shaggy blond head in dismay. “Plus I think he may be a fag.”

  “Nope, don’t think so.”

  “What makes you say that? Did you try to make a pass at him?”

  Lulu let out another low growl at my feet.

  “Why is she doing that?”

  “Because that was genuinely disgusting, what you just said.”

  “I’ve been in this business for almost twenty years. I haven’t met a writer yet who wasn’t a fag deep down inside.”

  “That’s interesting. I’ve had the exact same experience with actors being gay.”

  Patrick glowered at me for an instant before he threw back his head and laughed. “I’m going to like you, I can tell. We’ll have to go out some night and chase puss together.”

  “Sounds delightful. Your daughter, Danielle . . .”

  “Don’t be getting any ideas there,” he warned me. “You so much as breathe on Princess and they’ll never find your body. Think Jimmy Hoffa.”

  “I was merely going to say that she seems a bit tightly wrapped.”

  “She’s mommy’s girl,” he acknowledged. “Doesn’t know how to have any fun. Neither of my kids do. I feel bad about that.”

  “I imagine that your separation from Monette has been tough on them.”

  He didn’t respond to that. Just sat there gazing down at his big, brown hands. He seemed somewhere very far away. Somewhere gloomy. Until he shook himself and said, “How long are you here for?”

  “That’ll be up to Richard Aintree.”

  “Right, right. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” He got up and fetched another Heineken from the fridge. His third. I wondered how many six-packs he went through in a day. He opened it and took a long drink before he sat back down, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Is that letter a hoax or the real deal? And don’t bullshit me.”

  “I think it may be the real deal. His literary agent from the old days thinks so, too. It appears to have been typed on Richard’s typewriter and signed by Richard. And whoever wrote it used a nickname that he had for Monette when she was a little girl.”

  “This would be Olive Oyl?” he asked me.

  I kept my face a blank. “That’s right. So you know about it?”

  “Sure. Queenie mentioned it to me when we first started going out.”

  And yet Monette had assured me otherwise. Why? “How about Joey and Danielle? Do they know about it?”

  Patrick nodded. “When Princess was eleven years old she shot up, like, eight inches in two months. You never saw such a string bean in your life. I started calling her Olive Oyl, just like Queenie’s dad had called her, until Queenie told me to stop. She was afraid Princess would get a complex.”

  “What about Elliot Schein? Do you think he knows about it?”

  “That fat schmuck? I doubt it.” Patrick peered at me curiously. “Why, you think he could have written the letter?”

  “I don’t know. But he’s heavily invested in her TV career, which seems to be slipping rather badly. She needs a boost. And this definitely qualifies as a boost. Have you ever seen her dad’s old typewriter around the house? It’s a Hermes 3000 portable from the 1950s.”

  Patrick shook his head. “Don’t believe I have.”

  “Are you sure about that? Or is there some doubt in your mind?”

  “No, I’m sure.”

  There was another knock on the trailer door—and in breezed the hottest tabloid celebrity in town. “Hey, babe,” Kat Zachry exclaimed, flashing a great big naughty grin at Patrick.

  He grinned right back at her. “Hey, yourself. What’s up?”

  “Just wanted to say hello,” she said, somehow managing to make the word hello sound like private code for some exotic, amazing form of oral sex. She glanced at me. “Who’s he?”

  “That’s Hoagy. He’s a writer.”

  She treated me to a careful head-to-toe appraisal before she said, “I’m crushing on your old leather jacket. Can I have it?”

  “No.”

  “It would look way more bitchen on me than it does on you.”

  “I’m sure it would.”

  “So can I have it?”

  “No.”

  She stuck out her lower lip. “I think you’re a poopy head.”

  “Get in line. Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune and Boys’ Life have all called me that.”

  “Hey, you have a dog!” Kat knelt down to pet Lulu, who responded by baring her teeth at her. “Why is she doing that?”

  “She’s very protective of me.”

  Kat beamed at her. “You’re a vicious little beast, aren’t you? I just love vicious little . . . Whoa, her breath is awful.”

  “She has rather strange eating habits.”

  “What does she eat?”

  “Pretty young actresses.”

  Kat Zachry wasn’t the prettiest young actress I’d ever seen but she may have been the sexiest. The nineteen-year-old star of Malibu High radiated sexuality from each and every pore of her flawless, golden skin. It was right there in every glance from her big, brown bedroom eyes, in every word that came out of her pillowy lips. She was smaller than I’d realized, maybe five foot three, and very slender aside from the being-three-months-pregnant thing. She wore a sleeveless Tweetie Pie T-shirt, gym shorts and a beat-up pair of Jack Purcell tennis sneakers without socks. Her gleaming black hair was cropped in that sassy new short haircut that every teenaged girl in America was trying to imitate. Unlike Patrick, she had no makeup on. Her face was scrubbed clean, which made her look even younger than she did on camera.

  “Are you writing for our show?” she asked me as she continued to eye my jacket.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Too bad. We could use some talent,” she said, somehow managing to make the word talent sound like private code for some exotic, amazing form of oral sex. “Wanna hang for a while?” she asked Patrick.

  “Can’t. I’ve got another scene to do soon.”

  “And I’ve got nothing to do. They keep shooting around me.”

  “They have to. Your tummy’s starting to show.”

  Kat stuck out her lower lip again. She did that a lot. It worked for her. “Do I look fat?”

  “Not a chance. You look hot. Listen, me and Hoagy have to talk . . .”

  “Okay, okay. I know when I’m not wanted.”

  “You’re wanted,” he assured her. “Come here and give me a kiss.”

  Kat climbed into his lap and the two of them sucked face while I sat there trying not to watch them. Happily, there was another tap at the door. A male voice called out Kat’s name.

  Kat got up and opened the door. “Oh, hey, Kyle,” she said in a different voice than she’d just been using. Distinctly cooler. “Come on in.”

  Kyle came on in. “I’ve been looking all over for you.” His own voice was a pesky whine. “They want you in wardrobe.”

  “Fine, okay.”

  He gestured at me with his chin. “Who’s he?”

  “His name’s Hoagy. He’s a writer.”

  “For the show?”

  “He says he’s not.”

  Kyle glared at me. “You’re not a reporter, are you?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because I don’t like reporters.”

  “You say that as if what you like or don’t like is of the slightest consequence to me.”

  Kat let out a giggle. “You’re wicked, Hoagy. Relax, Kyle, will y
ou? Kyle’s my big brother. He looks out for me.”

  Kyle stood there looking shifty-eyed and resentful. A loser, Patrick had called him. I would also toss in weasel. He had sneaky written all over him. He was in his mid-twenties. Not large, maybe five foot eight, and decidedly pear shaped. The polo shirt and khaki pants he had on clung to him in all of the wrong places. His sandy-colored hair was thinning. He’d be bald in another few years.

  “Okay, I’m out of here,” Kat informed Patrick. “You going to miss me?”

  He grinned at her. “Not one bit.”

  She stuck her tongue out at him. “Liar.”

  Kyle glared at me one more time as they left, Kat twitching her tail.

  Patrick sighed contentedly. “As soon as I saw that juicy young piece, I had to have it. Because there is nothing, but nothing, on God’s green earth like tight young pussy. Need I say more?”

  “No. In fact, please don’t. Kat said that Kyle looks out for her. What does that mean?”

  “He’s her meat puppet. You know, her flunkie,” Patrick said quietly. He’d retreated back into his gloomy place again. The man was a roller-coaster ride of moods. “She wants me to marry her.”

  “Are you going to?”

  “Do I look that stupid to you? She’s strictly after my money. They’re still paying her peanuts, even though she’s our biggest draw, but she signed a shitty long-term contract back when she was a nobody and the producers won’t renegotiate. They can’t stand her. She’s a headache. Good at partying, not so good at learning her lines. And now she’s pregnant. They’d fire her if she wasn’t so damned popular. The public loves her, or at least they do right now. But they’ll get tired of her soon enough and move on to some new hottie. And when they do, Kat won’t be able to get a job in this town. She knows it, too. She’s got serious survival instincts. Figures if she latches on to me, she’ll be set for life.”

  “Except you’re not interested in being latched on to.”

  “Like I said, all I want to do is to get my divorce and get out. By this time next year I won’t even remember what Kat Zachry looks like.”

  “What about her baby? Don’t you care about it?”

  “Why should I? It’s not mine. I got a vasectomy three years ago.”