Popcorn

by Ben Elton

  But the chief’s luck was in. Fate had delivered to him the perfect case in which to do, and above all be seen to do, a bit of proper policing, and by hell, Hades, glory and damnation, he was going to make the most of it.

  Unfortunately for Chief Cornell, there was another chief on the scene and he was equally excited. Brad Murray, Chief of NBC News and Current Affairs, recognized the Delamitri siege as probably the sexiest bit of news and current affairs it had ever been his extreme good fortune to preside over.

  “If this one wasn’t true,” Murray remarked to his gorgeous power PA as they stepped off their own helicopter, “I’d never have dared to invent it.”

  But it was true, and what was more the principal villain appeared to understand the central and overriding principle of news and current affairs: that the most important element in any drama is television.

  In an armoured police command vehicle the two chiefs met: an irresistible force and an immovable object. Their quarrel was over who should put the call through to Bruce Delamitri’s house and open up negotiations with the villains. Understandably, Chief Cornell felt that it was a matter for the authorities. Chief Murray, however, reminded Cornell that Wayne Hudson had called the networks, not the cops, and had been most specific that he wanted to talk to a top news man.

  A decade earlier, Cornell might have had a couple of his constables throw the NBC guy off the truck but not now. Not with elections looming, not with a city perpetually on edge. The police chief knew he had to co-operate with the media every bit as much as they had to co-operate with him, and so a compromise was reached. Having instructed AT&T to block all incoming calls to the Delamitri mansion (every acquaintance Bruce had in LA was of course trying to call him), the two chiefs agreed that they would call Wayne together, on a party line.

  As it happened, they need not have bothered arguing about it because Wayne did all the talking anyway.

  “OK, shut up and listen up,” he barked into the phone, without even bothering to enquire who was calling. “This is Wayne Hudson, the Mall Murderer. Now me and my baby are in control here, you understand? We got Bruce Delamitri, we got Brooke Daniels, who is an actress by the way — you tell your reporters that, you hear? Also we got Bruce’s wife and their daughter, Velvet, who is as cute as a button and will make very good TV, whatever I decide to do with her. Now you just give me a number right now where I can call you back when I’m ready with my demands.”

  Police Chief Cornell gave the number, and having done so began to try and negotiate. He was, after all, trained in this type of thing.

  “OK, Wayne,” he said. “I think you want to make a deal.”

  “What I want is for you to shut the fuck up, OK?” said Wayne. “I will talk to you when I’m ready, and when I do it will be me that says what’s what. Understand? You know what I’m capable of. Don’t call back now. Meantime, you have a nice day.”

  The police chief and the NBC chief put their respective phones down and looked at each other.

  “Guess we’ll have to wait, Chief,” said the cop. “Maybe this would be a good time for them to put a little make-up on me?”

  “You got it, Chief,” said the newsman.

  Inside the house, Wayne too had replaced the receiver.

  “What did you mean about me being good TV?” Velvet asked, her voice understandably rather shaky. “What are you going to do to me?”

  “It’s OK, baby,” said her mother, though it clearly wasn’t. “Are you holding us hostage?”

  Wayne poured himself another drink; he felt he’d earned it. Scout was still sipping at her first crème de menthe. She was not a big boozer.

  “In a manner of speaking, you’re hostages,” said Wayne. “Basically, what I got here is a plan.”

  “Wayne’s had a plan right from the start,” Scout said proudly.

  “What plan?” Bruce was angry. He shouted at Wayne, “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, I guess a plan to avoid being executed for murder, Bruce. I can’t think of an agenda more immediate than that for people in the position me and Scout find ourselves in.”

  Brooke was still conscious. Velvet had briefly attended the Guides during her extremely short childhood, and knew a little first aid. Showing a composure that would have surprised her classmates and teachers, she had done her best to manoeuvre Brooke into the correct position and pad her wound with cushions, so that for the time being at least Brooke was still capable of following the conversation.

  “Plan? Fuck you,” she said. “You’re going to die, you bastards. You don’t stand a chance.”

  “Don’t talk,” said Velvet. “Your wound is real big and any physical activity at all will screw any chance of the blood starting to clot.” She turned to Wayne. “She’s got to have a doctor. Can’t we ask them to send in a doctor?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know yet,” Wayne replied.

  “But she’ll die.”

  “Miss Delamitri, I thought you might have understood by now that I don’t mind none if people get dead.”

  Bruce was still standing at the window. Media cars and trucks and police vehicles continued to pour through his gate. He had eight acres of grounds and it was all already crowded. Incredible. A veritable village had sprung up in twenty minutes. Satellite dishes, tripods, fabulous hair-dos, four-wheel-drives, a million metres of electric cable. The hum of the massed mobile generators could be heard for miles.

  Bruce struggled to get a handle on what was happening to him.

  His security guard was dead, Karl was dead. Brooke was dying. He’d just won an Oscar and the entire LA media community plus half its police force were camped out on his lawn. What was more, the man who had brought all these things about (except the Oscar, although even that was apparently connected, according to the TV) was standing in Bruce’s lounge, calmly sipping Bruce’s bourbon and covering the room with a machine-gun. How could all this have happened? And in so few short hours?

  What was going on?

  “What’s your plan, Wayne?” Bruce asked. “Please tell me your plan.”

  “OK, Bruce, I’ll tell you. As you know, Scout here and me have committed murder and mayhem across four states. We can’t deny it, ‘cos we done it and it’s true. Now I wish I could tell you that every one of those corpses we left lying all over America deserved to die. I wish I could say it was like the movies, where rapists, rednecks, bad cops, hypocrites and child-abusers get just what the fuck they deserve. But it just ain’t so.”

  Scout felt that perhaps Wayne was being a little hard on himself. Why should all the burden of proof lie with them?

  “They might have been all those things, Wayne,” she said. “We never knew any of them long enough to find out.”

  “Well, whatever, honey. The point I’m making here is that we are in deep shit. They know who we are and they’re going to get us. We’ve been caught on about one hundred security videos. On top of which, Scout could not resist sending her picture to her home-town local paper, for which I forgive her, even though it was dumb.”

  “They all said I was trash and wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans. Well, I showed them.”

  “Yes, you did, baby doll. You sure showed them. So basically what I’m saying here, Bruce, is that whatever we do we are going to get caught damn soon now, and when we do I guess we have a higher than average chance of getting fried in the chair.”

  Brooke gurgled at this from her position on the carpet. A gurgle that could be roughly translated as saying, “The sooner the better, pal.”

  Wayne ignored her. “And that, Bruce, is where you come in.”

  “What do you mean? What can I do?”

  “We need you, Bruce. You’re going to save our lives.”

  “You’re our saviour,” Scout added. “That’s why we came to you. You can make it different.”

  “Give them what they want, Bruce. Anything — just give it to them!” This was from Farrah, for whom hope continued to dawn. Was it possible that they would be abl
e to buy their way out of this? And did Bruce have insurance for hold-ups?

  “I don’t know what they want!” Bruce shouted at her. He swung back to Wayne. “What do you want? Tell me, I’ll give it to you, whatever it is.”

  “We need an excuse, Bruce.” Wayne said.

  “What we’re looking for here is someone else to take the blame.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Down on the lawn the news reporters were repeating over and over again what little information that they had on the situation: “…the Oscar-winner…the Mall Murderers…the beautiful model/actress…the cute teen…the estranged wife…”

  Their reports were punctuated on air by re-run footage from the previous night: Bruce on the red carpet…Bruce, standing on legs of fire, accepting his Oscar…Bruce dancing with Brooke at the Bosom Ball.

  Then it was ‘back to the studio’, where the anchor men and women solemnly repeated the whole thing ‘for those of you who’ve just joined us’: “…the Oscar-winner…the Mall Murderers…the beautiful model/actress…the cute teen…the estranged wife…”

  After this, the studio anchors threw back to the reporters on the ground. “And let’s go back to the Delamitri mansion, to see if there are any further developments.”

  “There have as yet been no further developments,” replied the reporters on the ground. “All I can tell you is…the Oscar-winner…the Mall Murderers…the beautiful model/actress…the cute teen…the estranged wife…”

  “In that case,” said the studio anchors, “let’s turn now to our panel of criminal psychologists and show-business experts.”

  In TV studios all over LA, and indeed all over the country, hastily summoned ‘experts’ were bundled into their seats, having been hurriedly powdered down, miked up and handed their cheques.

  “Exactly what in your opinion is going on in there?” the studio anchor asked the experts gravely.

  “Well, this is a classic case,” the experts chorused, “many aspects of which are discussed in my latest book, which is of course available in all good bookshops.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Wayne and Bruce stood together, staring out of the window at the instant city below. There were a hundred rifles trained on Wayne, but, unless the police could be sure of hitting Scout as well, no order to fire would be given.

  “Someone to take the blame?” Bruce asked. “What the hell do you mean, someone to take the blame? Some kind of magician, who can explain that the whole thing was an optical illusion and that actually someone else shot all those people?”

  Bruce was feigning astonishment, but in the back of his mind a terrible suspicion had dawned.

  On the floor, over by the drinks cabinet, Brooke coughed. Maybe she was trying to say something, maybe she was just coughing.

  “This woman has to have a doctor,” Velvet pleaded. “You have to let her have one.”

  Wayne swung his gun towards Velvet, suddenly angry again. “Listen, I did not ask that bitch to threaten my baby, OK? She is in this dire situation by her own choosing, on account of the fact that she pulled a piece on my girl. So shut the fuck up, because me and Bruce are talking here. Or maybe I should shut you up. Huh?”

  He advanced a step towards the girl and raised his fist. Velvet burst into tears.

  “If you hurt her,” said Bruce, “I swear that whatever you want from me you will never get.”

  “You’ll do what the fuck I tell you to, whether I bust this bitch’s head or not.” Wayne’s mood swings really were most alarming.

  “Please don’t hurt me,” Velvet sobbed.

  “There’s no need to go beating up on no little girls, Wayne,” Scout remarked. “It’s beneath you.”

  “This ain’t no little girl, precious pie. Kids’re born old in Hollywood. Why this little slut musta spent more money already in her few short years than your sweet momma woulda earned in fifty lifetimes. She deserves to get slapped around some.”

  “I’ve told you,” said Bruce, “you’ll get nothing from me if you hurt her.”

  Wayne lowered his fist slowly. “I want you to know, Bruce, that I am minding the wishes of my baby here and not yours. Because I can assure you that you will do whatever I tell you to do, whether I hurt your little girl or not.”

  Bruce seized upon the point. “And what is it you want me to do?” He was almost begging. He had to know the worst, deeply fearful of it though he was. Fearful because in truth he had already guessed.

  “I want you to plead on our behalf. I want you to speak up for us and save us from the chair.”

  “Plead on your behalf? You’re crazier than I thought. You really think my word’s going to save you from the punishment you deserve? You’re guilty as Hitler.”

  “Sure we’re guilty, if by that you mean we done all the stuff they say we done, but that ain’t the point, is it? Not these days. These days, no matter how guilty you are, you can still be innocent.”

  He had lost them. They all stared at him, all except Scout, who had hold of one of her feet and was inspecting her toenails.

  “For instance,” Wayne explained, “like that spick chick who cut off the guy’s pecker, right? She was guilty for sure, she never denied it. She cut off that of boy’s manhood and threw it out of a car window. Do you see that bitch in prison, huh? Is she breaking rocks in the hot sun? No, I don’t think so, because although she was guilty she was innocent too. In America you can be both.”

  Scout looked up from her toenails. “That’s right, she done it, but she was innocent and I agree. That bastard beat up on her and he done raped her too. He got his, and I hope she used a rusty knife.”

  Wayne winced. “Now, Scout, you know that you and me disagree on this issue. Personally, I don’t see as how no woman can get raped by her husband, on account of the fact that he is only taking what’s his anyway. What’s more, I think that any Mexican bitch who cuts the dick off an ex-United States Marine who has served his country should rot in a hole.”

  “She was abused.”

  “If you think a man’s abusing you, honey, you leave him. You do not cut his dick off.”

  “The court agreed with her.”

  “The court was a bunch of lesbians and faggots.”

  Scout made a sulky face and returned to her toenails.

  “Yeah, well, whatever,” Wayne said, “we’re getting off the point here. What I’m saying is, right or wrong, the greaseball bitch walked free. She done it, she said she done it, she was glad she done it, but she walked. Guilty but innocent, you see. You can be both in the Land of the Free, always assuming, that is, that you got an excuse.”

  “Are you suggesting” — Bruce tried to sound firm and intelligent — “that there is any excuse for mass murder?”

  “Bruce, there is an excuse for anything and everything in the USA! What about them cops who beat up on the nigger and started a damn riot? They was videoed! You see them doing time? No sir you do not. Remember O.J.? They said he killed his wife. Turned out they’d got the wrong victim. The dead chick wasn’t the victim at all. No way, O.J. was the victim. He was the victim of a racist cop, who incidentally also walked. Nobody gets blamed for anything in this country, nothing is anybody’s fault. So why the Hell should we take the rap for what we done, huh?”

  In his mind’s eye, Bruce suddenly saw again the beautiful idiot he had harangued at the Bosom Ball. When had that been? The previous evening? The previous lifetime, more like. Bruce heard once more his own voice rising above the banality and the hypocrisy he’d thought he heard around him: “Nothing is anybody’s fault.”

  He’d said it himself.

  Could Wayne actually be right? Could the bastard get away with it?

  “Wayne, be serious. You have killed so many people — there can be no excuse for that.”

  Wayne smiled, picked up the phone and began to dial. “Bruce, you just won the ‘Best Director’ Oscar. I ain’t flattering you when I say that you are currently the most celebrated movie-maker in the world. It ain’t no mor
e than you deserve, mind. You worked hard and you have reaped the rewards…Excuse me.” He turned to the phone.

  On the other end of the line Chiefs Cornell and Murray grabbed their respective receivers and began simultaneously to announce their credentials.

  “Shut up and listen to me,” they heard Wayne say. “We gonna make a statement, y’hear? We gon’ announce our intentions and tell it like it is, OK? Now what we want is a small ENG crew in here, jus’ as soon you can get it together.”

  “Yes, yes, an electronic news-gathering crew, OK,” said the head of NBC, pleased to be able to answer the questioning look on the police chief’s face.

  “I know what ENG is, else I wouldna asked for it!” Wayne shouted down the line.

  “Yes, I was just explaining it to—”

  “Shut the fuck up! I am talking here. One more interruption and that’s it, we do our talking with guns, OK? Now, this crew has to be hooked up to all the other stations, you understand? Cable too. We ain’t giving no exclusive here, everybody gets the story. One more thing. The recordist must have a direct feed to the ratings computer. I want to know just how big a TV star I am, minute by minute. Now, if you do this, I give you my word as a freeborn American that, whoever else I decide to kill, the TV people get safe passage. I guarantee they will not be harmed, on account of you are observers, man, we are the action.”

  With that Wayne put the phone down and turned to his hostages. “Now we wait,” he said. “How ‘bout we all have us a drink?”

  “You seem to know an awful lot about the workings of TV,” Bruce said, and for one insane moment it crossed his mind that perhaps in some weird way or other this whole thing was a hoax. Maybe Wayne and Scout were not what they seemed, not mass murderers at all, but journalists or students or something, out to prove a point. Was it all an illusion? Brooke had tricked him before. Maybe she hadn’t really been shot. Maybe this whole thing was a set-up…?