In the end I just sat there, dead center in a small but sharply fought war of conflicting emotions and mutually exclusive impulses until the combatants limped off the field with their issues unresolved, and then I got a pen and a piece of paper and began to make a list of things to do the next day.
14
The Tinkle of Doom
After the Toyota, which I’d driven for years, the big black Town Car that Louie had supplied felt wider than the Queen Mary. I kept shying away from the cars to the left and right of me, earning glares from those who passed, as though they suspected I’d had a few.
“You’re making me seasick,” Jake Whelan said from the backseat.
“Would you prefer to get out and run alongside?”
“The car is narrower than you think it is.”
“Well, if I’d had an hour in it before the rush started, I’d probably know that by now.”
In fact, Louie had shown up an hour late, at almost a quarter after four, at Musso & Frank’s, where I’d enjoyed a late lunch. He deflected my complaints by taking me on a hike to the back of the car to show me the license plate, which read chauf 90. “Took an extra hour,” he said proudly. “The real thing, I had someone bag it off a limo at LAX. The studio guys, they know these cars. You don’t got a chauffeur’s license, they’re gonna phone you in.”
“It doesn’t matter if they phone me in. The person I’m driving has an appointment. What happens if the chauffeur at LAX notices his plate is missing?”
“He won’t,” Louie said. “My guy put a fake CHAUF plate on, just painted but looks kosher. No one will notice it until they wash the car.”
“And then?”
“It’ll run like Alice’s mascara when she laughs too hard. But by then these plates will be in the city dump, so no connection.”
By the time I got to Jake’s, waited for him to finish smoothing out his tan, and then plowed into the traffic, it was after five.
From behind me he said, “So how’s that girl?”
“That girl? As crappy as you treated her, you could at least do her the honor of remembering her name. It’s Casey.”
“You don’t have get all morally correct about it,” Jake said. “That’s not even her real name.”
“How do you know?”
“When she was in the can, I went through her wallet.”
“You did not.”
“Hey, she’s in my house, I get to know what her name is. Suppose she walked out with something and I’m telling the cops to look for a hooker named Casey and that’s not even—”
“The way you say ‘hooker,’ you make it sound like a life,” I said. “She wasn’t born a hooker, she won’t die a hooker. It’s a job, kind of a rotten job, but she’s too smart to do it for long.” I veered away from a silver Rolls that was almost wide enough to serve as a garage for the Town Car.
“Wants to be an actress, like all the rest of them,” Jake said. “They come into town by the trainload, all high hopes and low IQ. Actual name is Cindi Jo, if you can imagine that. Real big-hair name. Cindi Jo Gilman, not even really from Texas. A baton twirler from Baton Rouge.”
“Right on the Mississippi,” I said, feeling like turning around and taking a bite out of him. “I’d think you’d be a little nicer about that, given your current inspiration. Girl grows up on the bank of a river, you said, ‘and that was the whole world.’ Everything that matters, remember?”
“Habits are hard to break,” Jake said. “This is really smart, this whole limo thing. The only guy in a studio no one pays attention to is the limo driver. Nice suit, by the way.”
“Three hundred forty at the Hollywood Suit Outlet this morning. You owe me.”
“For the limo, too,” he said.
“Forget it,” I said. “It’s stolen.”
“I admire flair. The gate is the next right.”
“I know where it is. It’s been there, under one name or another, since 1937.”
“They’ve got a night shoot and a couple of live-audience sitcoms on the lot tonight, so the commissary will be open. You tell the waitress to verify that you’re Arthur Rundle’s guest so they’ll let you stay there and put you on his tab. You’ll be all comfy-cozy until it’s time.”
“And time is—”
“Granger’s proud of the fact that he’s out of the studio by seven every night. He thinks people who work late, who burn the midnight oil like Selznick did, are either showboats or badly organized. Or both. You’re not gonna have any problem getting into the office. The hard part of breaking into a studio is the gate, and you’ve come up with a brilliant solution for—”
“That’s enough butter. To recap, I’m going in, finding the file on Ambient Violet—”
“Files are in his office. The active stuff is in an old wooden filing setup against the left wall as you come in, old like an antique.”
“Got it.” We were coming up on the gate, a nice piece of Streamline Moderne from the thirties, all high vertical curves and layers.
“It’ll be under A for Ambient or W—”
“For Whelan. I actually can think these things through for myself.” I pulled up behind the Rolls, which had gotten ahead of me again as Jake and I talked. “And then all I do is flip through the file, see whether there’s correspondence that suggests he’s trying to do something with it, make mental notes of whoever he’s pitched it to—”
“Coverage,” Whelan said. “Look for coverage. I need to know what it says.”
“Got it. So . . . in, out, maybe ten minutes tops.”
“Tops,” Jake said with all the confidence of someone who wasn’t going to be in the room. Then he tapped me on the shoulder and said, “That guard, I know the guy, he’s named Tino, lemme handle it.” I heard his window go down as I pulled up to the gate, and the guard looked back without even a glance at me and his face lit up like high noon as Whelan said, “Tino! Must be a hundred years. That daughter of yours married yet?”
The institution of the studio commissary, essentially an on-the-lot restaurant, was developed to allow people who were costumed and made up for, say, a production of Madame Bovary to sip some soup or eat a burger without being stared at and where stars who were known for knocking back a few during the workday could safely be fed and watered under the eagle eye of their director and producer. Back in the unenlightened old days, it also functioned as a kind of living chessboard where the kings, queens, and pawns of the studio system could make their moves and exercise their prerogatives over breakfast and lunch. Some commissaries served as an adjunct to the casting couch: MGM, for example, was known for its “Golden Circle,” a reserved table where heavyweight directors and producers, and even the occasional writer, could be introduced to an unending parade of hopeful and often willing talent. Many a meal was cut short for a personal interview.
The commissary at Farscope, like most of them these days, was your basic proletarian cafeteria, except that the walls were thickly hung with stills from classic films. The moguls and tycoons have given way to shareholders and accountants and taken with them the onyx tables at $300 a square foot and the mahogany chairs. Three pine tables on a raised platform along the back wall, obviously for such heavyweights as still exist, were empty when I went in; it was a quarter after six, and executives all over the lot were presumably dawdling over the last of the day’s chores in order to be ready for the call telling them that Granger’s car had glided out through the gates and they were free to run for the hills.
The commissary’s only customers when I went in were twelve or fourteen actors wearing makeup and the kind of modern-day clothes seen only on television, either too cool for the street or a kind of character license plate that spelled out dweeb or hottie or some other type for those trying to follow along at home. One corner hosted a little knot of men wearing the sleek suits and narrow ties of the 1960s, actors from a show that
Ronnie liked, and I felt a little pang that I wouldn’t be able to call her up and tell her I’d just seen the only guy on TV who always made her sit forward when he appeared on the screen. He was shorter in person, but who isn’t?
Mentioning Rundle’s name got me a smile, a big cup of coffee, and a piece of coconut cake, which seemed like a good idea since I’d had a little too much of that whiskey the previous night. I had that underslept, exposed-nerves feeling that a hangover always produces in me. Coffee and sugar and carbohydrates, I thought, would get me into the performance zone. Breaking into places both requires and produces a lot of adrenaline, even when it’s a routine operation. Without that heightened alertness, it’s easy to forget to watch the details, which, as has often been remarked, is where the devil lurks, just rubbing his hands together and waiting for a lapse. Granger’s office might be easy to get into, but my primary concern is always getting out again, and that might demand internal resources that I felt I lacked.
So I had a second piece of coconut cake and refilled the coffee from the pump thermoses and listened to the actors laugh too hard at well-used jokes and watched the minutes shave themselves away in slices so thin they were transparent. All I wanted to do was move, and all I could do was wait. I’d spent hours in the morning going over the Google aerial shots of the lot that Anime had found, and I was certain, even without Jake’s directions, that I could walk unerringly to Building G—“for God,” Jake had said. Building G would have been conspicuous anywhere, a streamlined white structure in a precise half circle that resembled a giant vanilla confection, the second story set back from the first like a tier on a wedding cake. From his big office up there, Granger could look down at the entire lot.
I let the time dribble by until 7:40, and then I got up and took my little bag into the men’s room, locked the door, and changed into a pair of black jeans, a black T-shirt, and the cheap black Chinese sneakers I use for jobs because they’re as quiet as going barefoot and grip the ground when and if I have to run. The thin plastic food-service gloves were already in my pocket. Then I unlocked the door and went out through the bright commissary to the Town Car. By 7:50 the bag was in the trunk and I was hoofing it down a long alley between sound stages.
It was fully dark but still hot, and the canyon between the stages grabbed at the wind and concentrated it and sent it rocketing into my face, forcing me to squint against the dust and grit. Halfway down the alley, a startlingly attractive young woman in a 1960s cocktail dress passed me in the opposite direction, both hands shielding a Jackie Kennedy bob. When she caught my eye, she said, “Not good for the hair at all.” and gave me a grin that, pre-Ronnie, might have slowed me down and maybe even turned me around, but I returned her the kind of full, frank smile that can come only from a guy whose conscience is intact and kept on going.
And there was Building G, dazzling white and lit from all sides as befitted the wedding cake of the gods. There were only four parking spaces in front, each designated by a sign in a modified Futura typeface that harmonized with the design of the building and the studio gate: reading from closest to the door to farthest away, Mr. Granger, Mr. Kinsey, Ms. Stradlin, and Ms. Percival. Kinsey and Stradlin were executive producers, meaning they ran errands for Granger and lorded it over everybody else, and Ms. Percival was Granger’s administrative assistant. A couple of secretaries, a receptionist, and a projectionist also worked in the building, but they parked in the back of the lot with the peons. All four of the spaces in front were empty.
Three broad steps led up to a pair of frosted-glass doors with handles shaped like giant sea horses. I pushed start on my miracle watch to begin the twenty-minute countdown, took hold of a sea horse, and pulled. It yielded easily, but then the wind yanked it away from me and I had to snag it again before it could slam back against the wall. I stepped inside and closed it behind me and then leaned against the wall beside the door, hyperventilating in a cool, silent corridor. Wind.
It took me about a minute to bring myself securely back into the reality in which I’d gotten to the door before it shattered itself deafeningly into bright, gleaming smithereens all over the front steps, ending the job before I even got in. When my pulse was back under control, I looked up and down the corridor and did what I should have done the moment I came in: I listened. Breathing openmouthed, Herbie style, I gave myself a full minute to let my ears wander the building. The light was tinted a cool, slightly green color, as though it were coming through a few feet of water but which was actually a product of overhead light fixtures that had been made with thick glass that might have come from old Coca-Cola bottles. The carpet was white, the walls pearl gray, the light that chilly-water green. Except for an occasional squeak of protest from the glass doors when the wind hit them from outside, I didn’t hear anything at all.
I waited one more minute anyway, using the time to review the building’s likely floor plan. The entrance was dead center in the curved wall, and the corridor followed that curve away from me in both directions, meaning that I could see only about fifteen, twenty feet in either one of them. The way Jake had described it, the lesser deities—Kinsey and Stradlin and their secretaries and staff—occupied the lower floor to the right as you came in the door, and about two-thirds of the distance to the left was the receptionist for Granger himself, the widely disliked Ms. Miyagawa, who sorted the wheat from the chaff. On the other side of the door that she guarded were the elevator, which operated with a key that only Granger used, and a flight of stairs for the mere mortals. At the top of the stairs were Granger’s office, Ms. Percival’s office, a tiny room for a couple of typists or word processors or keyboardists or whatever the hell we call them these days, a conference room, and, at the far end, a small screening room that could hold about a dozen people.
A pretty nice step up in the world, I thought, from negotiating out of delicatessens.
Just to be completely sure I was alone, I worked my way down the corridor to the right. Doors open, offices mostly dark, all empty. Granger’s legions obviously weren’t bound by fierce loyalty to remain at their desks after hours. The bathrooms were also empty, so I turned and retraced my steps, pausing at the glass door until I was certain that no one was about to come in through it, and then I strolled across the visible area like someone with the whole night on his hands and a godlike right to be there. I followed the corridor to the barrier that was Ms. Miyagawa’s desk, which blocked all but about three feet of the width of the hall. Behind it, in the center of the wall, was a mahogany door that undoubtedly opened onto the stairway to heaven.
The door, despite my being armed with all that info from Jake Whelan, surprised me by being locked.
I stood there, not even thinking about going any farther. What was on my mind was, first, that Jake had been wrong about something, and who was to say he wouldn’t be wrong again? And second, once I got the door open—if I decided to open it—I’d be doing something I usually avoided. I’d be going into a dead end.
And third, the wind was still blowing.
One of the Unbreakable Rules taught to me by Herbie Mott, in my mind a burglar so great his face should be on Mount Rushmore, was Always know how you’re going to get out before you go in. When I went into the Slugger’s house, I had two sets of stairs and, it later turned out, a window. What I had here, if Jake was right, was a single stairway going up and an elevator that needed a key I didn’t have. If I wasn’t going break one of the rules that have kept me from getting arrested over the years, the thing to do was to turn around and get the hell out of there.
On the other hand.
I’d stiffed Jake with the picture, so I owed him for that. And while I couldn’t make a persuasive case to myself that I actually liked Jake, he’d helped me out once in a big way. I owed him for that. And despite his tough talk, he might really want to make this movie, which I supposed was a sort of act of contrition.
Not to forget that he had promised to put a hit
person on me, and it didn’t seem like something to be dismissed with a shrug. In this economic climate, hits are cheap.
And the thing about the wind . . . well, that was superstition, plain and simple. I knew a burglar once who would only hit houses where the address was an even number. He passed up treasure chest after treasure chest to keep himself safe and then got busted in the house at 2222 North Doubletree Drive.
So I added all that up and made a deal with myself. I promised myself that if beneath Ms. Miyagawa’s spacious desk there was no buzzer to pop that locked door, I’d be out of the building and into the heat and wind within about fifteen seconds. So I looked, and it was right there. But it was still windy, so I gave myself one final out: if the buzzer was loud enough to alert anyone who might be upstairs, then ta-ta, Farscope.
When I pushed the button, the noise sounded like someone snapping his fingers with his hand inside a pillow. I had to do it twice to make certain I’d heard it. The door opened at a touch, inviting me in, and in a second I was through it and into new territory.
The staircase was thickly carpeted and wide enough for three people abreast, and, in keeping with the overall design of the building, it curved. I stayed against the right wall as I went up, ears working overtime and hearing nothing but the almost inaudible whoosh of the air-conditioning. At the top of the stairs, I paused and waited another minute, just a last auditory survey before I committed myself all the way.
I heard no reason to turn around, so I stepped into the corridor. The second story, as I’ve said, was also a semicircle, so the corridor curved away from me in both directions, with a single door visible a little more than halfway down on the left. If Jake was right, it led to a rather miserly space in which the executive assistant, Ms. Percival, spent most of her waking hours and, beyond that, to Granger’s lair, which took up about half the floor.
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