by Gwen Davis
“He hasn’t been here,” said Rodney.
“Do you by any chance know the name of a lawyer?”
“Helmut Rott,” Morgan said, naming Rodney’s attorney.
“For Christ’s sake, the man’s in an oxygen tent,” screamed Rodney.
“But maybe his office can refer her…”
“The back of this car is fairly well smashed in,” the policeman said, returning. “I better make a report.”
“Please, officer. We’ll be late for the funeral. The family’s bereaved enough, without our showing up late.” Rodney smiled at him. “Please let us just move on.”
“What about you?” he looked at Kate.
She leaned away from him as she answered, almost bending in half backward, hoping he could not smell her breath. “Well, none of us wants to hold up the service.”
“Okay. Go ahead,” the policeman said.
“Thank you,” said Rodney. “I shall write a letter to the chief of police telling him how far you men have come since the riots and O.J.”
“That would be very nice of you, Mr. Sameth,” said the cop.
“I’m not…” he started to say, then obviously thought better of it.
“I used to be in the business,” the cop said. “I was an assistant cameraman on Reverend Hate.”
“I remember you,” said Sameth, despondently. “You know how to uninflate these airbags?”
* * *
After he had helped Sameth out of the jumble and sent him on his way, the policeman went to a pay phone. As above reproach as he had been in the job that circumstance had edged him into when the lure of the lights and the grip of the Grip could not be counted on to feed a family, and as much as he had resisted anything that smacked of corruption, he still had a friend in the press. Nothing Globe or Enquirer of course, nothing he’d be paid for to ruin a man. Just an innocent local throwaway paper, where an old pal could use an item.
Thus it was that Rodney Sameth, reading Beverly Hills 213 aloud the next weekend to his lawyer, Helmut Rott, who lay in an oxygen tent, came across an item stating the elusive director (himself) was secretly back in town. There was a twenty-four-hour nurse in attendance who managed to revive Rodney.
Burning Bridges
Richie Harnoun had been telling the truth. The missing bag, or at least one exactly like the one that had been described as missing, had indeed been in his father’s closet. There had been so much tumult the night of the murder and the next morning and through all the incendiary episodes that followed, he supposed his father had just forgotten about it. To be a friend of O.J.’s at that particular time in local—and, as it turned out, national, and even worldwide—history, was to have a lot on your mind, as well as your answering machine.
Ibrahim Harnoun, Richie’s dad, had been with his friend at the funeral, along with a select group of O.J.’s colleagues, including a movie director who’d used him in a bad film. The wife of the director had been one of O.J.’s staunchest supporters in the months that followed, since she had observed him in his distraught state at the service for Nicole. “I don’t know,” she was heard to say at an open-air lunch at La Scala in Beverly Hills. “He’s such a terrible actor, I don’t see how he could have put that on.”
Richie had found the bag by accident while he was looking for someplace to hide the cash he had gotten for the sale of his CD player, since the maid cleaned everything, including the inside of his drawers and his bookshelves. He wasn’t going to have the money long. He had a date with his dealer, a boy in the grade ahead of him, for the next afternoon. But his mother usually hugged him several times daily in a distracted way to remind him and maybe herself that he was important to her, and he was afraid maybe she’d feel the money in his pockets. Several of his friends had had run-ins with the local police and been frisked for weapons and illicit drugs. Each of them reported that it was not unlike having a going-over from your mother, only not as friendly.
He was afraid to look in the bag. He felt guilty enough about his own actions as a child of such an upstanding member of the community without adding to his burden by getting the goods on his dad. Upstanding. If the knife and the bloody clothes were in there, that would mean his father was complicitous or one of the words they had used on TV about Al Cowlings. Even after Richie had spent the money he’d worried about hiding (he’d Scotch-taped it to the back of his toilet, a trick he remembered from the video of The Godfather) and gotten out of his head on the cocaine, he’d been too scared in his spaciness to check out the bag.
Only as his desperation for money increased did he formulate his plan. He wrote the letter to Arthur Finster, and got the tacit agreement of his friends who needed money for the same reason, whose parents also had been close to O.J., to tell their parents’ tales. Most of the stories were about gradual disillusionment with the once football hero, and eventual abandonment. Some, like the director’s wife, were now about disgust. She had been one of those who helped put up the sign near the Burlingame house decrying “The Butcher of Brentwood” before going to Parent’s Day at the high school. After Richie had written to Finster, he went to the closet.
The bag was gone.
The letter was already in the mail. Still, it wasn’t exactly a lie, what he was to tell Finster on the athletic field. As soon as they’d closed the deal, he went shopping. Luggage on Rodeo Drive was way out of line, price-wise. Besides, it had been a simple black canvas bag. They would have one in the Mart, for sure, in downtown Los Angeles. All he needed was a couple of bucks, and a friend to go along with him, one who also had an O.J. story to tell.
* * *
Perry Zemmis picked up the phone and tried to think who he should give the contract to. What was really sad, he could not help thinking, was that George Bush had been right: there had been a kinder, gentler time. There had been a time when all a betrayed wife had to do was drop in at Roy Cohn’s office, and presuming she was a good client, merely mention in passing, “I’m so sick of hearing about that woman.” And the next thing you knew, men would be asking questions at the garage where the mistress had her white Mercedes convertible fixed, and life-imperiling things would happen. And the movie of the week the mistress had sold telling her story to try and stay afloat financially after she’d been cut off was sabotaged by the head of the agency that sold it. Eventually the woman herself would be bludgeoned to death, and the confused nance who was staying with her would be blamed, convicted, and sent to jail where he would die of AIDS. Oh, it had truly been a kinder, gentler time.
But now Roy himself had died of AIDS, so if you wanted someone or something out of the way, you had to take care of it yourself. What a world, what a world, as the witch in the Wizard of Oz said.
If you wanted someone dead, you had to be practically hands-on. No Roy anymore to mention your woes to and have them disappear. If Perry wanted that Kate person to give him the Fitzgerald story, he might have to strong-arm her himself. It really burned his ass, in a nostalgic way, that Roy wasn’t around. Politics had taught Roy how to threaten without it sounding like a threat. Or maybe Roy had taught that to politics. There was much of that dead man’s skill that Perry had yet to learn, and might never. But he had at least learned from him how to help an ally. Or someone you wanted for an ally. Norman Jessup in his corner. Perry could hardly wait.
He dialed a number in New Jersey and waited for the pick-up at the other end. “Chickie?” Perry said. “You ever read a book called A Snowflake in Hell? No. I’m not kidding. I know you can read. Well, here’s your chance to become a literary figure.”
* * *
At the Mart in downtown L.A., Richie found a bag like the one that had been in the closet with no effort at all. Then he took the piece from the National Enquirer that he’d saved for more than a year and looked up the address of the Hoffritz store where O.J. had bought the knife a few weeks before the murder. The man who had sold the article to the tabloid wasn’t working there anymore. But everybody knew the kind of knife of it was. The on
e with the serrated edge.
“Give me some money,” he said to his friend Tony.
“Why should I pay for it?” he said. “It’s your chapter of the book.”
“I’ll pay you back when we get our advance.” There were still legal complications, according to Arthur Finster, since everyone involved except the kid who worked at Chin-Chin was a minor, so technically he needed parental permission for the contracts, which of course he couldn’t imagine getting. Richie thought of asking his father what the legal way was for a minor to get a valid contract without his parents’ permission, but senior Harnoun wasn’t stupid, and as little attention as he paid to his family, that might start him thinking.
“You sure we’re going to get it?”
“Of course I’m sure,” said Richie, not sure. The hookers had just gone public with the fact that Finster had stinted on their payments, and the woman who’d been the “as told to” scribe for By Hook or by Crook, translating the sexually explicit illiteracy into what passed for writing, had done several talk shows complaining about how little she’d been paid and what a hard time she had collecting.
* * *
“I’ll need some of your blood,” Richie said, when they were in his room with the bag and the knife and a big dark sweatsuit, size extra large, that he’d gotten on sale.
“What? You kidding me?” Tony said.
Richie had pierced his own palm with the tip of the knife, and was dripping on it and the clothes. “We’ll need more than one type.”
In the end they got four different kids, including Richie and Tony, to bleed on the knife and the sweatsuit, one more than they needed for victims and perpetrator, unless of course it had been a South American drug gang. But Richie figured if the DNA experts had so confused the jury, it would not be any easier for Arthur Finster, should he check.
* * *
“I brought the bag,” Richie said, when the door was closed to Finster’s office.
“I’ll put it somewhere safe,” Arthur said, reaching for it. There were framed posters up on the leather brass-tacked walls, blowups of the covers of the books that had leapfrogged to popular prominence on the backs of those who could not defend themselves, including the brand new one just out about a drug-addicted, alcoholic former district attorney who’d lost a big case in San Francisco, an uncorroborated account of his ménage à trois with the homosexual city councilman who’d been murdered, and the murdered mayor, who’d been straight. It was having a brisk local sale in the Bay Area.
“Not till we get our money,” said Richie.
Before he left that day, Arthur would pay him five hundred in cash, as an advance against his advance, and put him in a room with a tape recorder to tell his story. There were a lot of likes and you knows and basicallys on the tape. But deep in its recesses were words that struck ecstasy into Arthur, in addition to information about the father’s friendship with O.J. and the appearance of the black bag. And those were, “My father’s an associate in the law firm of Fletcher McCallum.”
So an associate of the esteemed Mr. McCallum, Esq., was guilty of aiding and abetting in the most notorious criminal trial in memory. Why, in the wrong hands, a story like that could bring down an entire firm. The lawyer who had been his own lawyer and fired him as a client because he disapproved of the kind of thing he was publishing. The lawyer who had instituted and was handling the action against him. Ha ha. So much for Fletcher McCallum and the class action libel suit.
* * *
For the climb into the recycling bin, Sarah Nash had gotten into sneakers, an old pair of jeans, and a thin, funky sweater. She waited until twilight just so she wouldn’t be too conspicuous. Anybody who saw her clambering up the hood of the old Buick next to the bin, gingerly leaping across the space between, jumping into the bin itself, her landing softened by the paper, might have thought her actions a little peculiar. But watching her forage carefully through the contents, those who knew New York would probably just dismiss her as a homeless person looking for soft drink cans to turn in for cash or food.
She had covered her attention-getting hairdo with a woolen ski cap that more or less did the job, although the spikes were so heavy with glue that they still sort of showed through, like five hard-ons. But freaky was pretty much run-of-the-mill now in the city. No one would bother her, out of apathy or fear she was one of the bona fide lunatics that roamed the streets since the laws had been changed so that the hospitals had to have permission from wackos to put them away.
She had brought a flashlight with her, a smart little thing she had picked up at JC Penney’s in Santa Monica, someplace she only dropped into to get a parking validation when meeting with her lawyer in the building on the corner. The pocket flashlight was blue, very neat, an oval-shaped disc with a sliding top that illuminated when opened. There was a kind of slickness about it that pleased her as she went through the cast-off letters, the junk mail.
It took her a few hours to find it. The envelope was addressed to Paulo, postmarked in Baltimore a few weeks before, the return address Johns Hopkins University. She opened it.
It was a letter of inquiry from from a Dr. Aaronson. “It has been twenty months since successful completion of your surgery,” he’d written. “We are doing a long-term study on the effects of estrogen on our patients, and would greatly appreciate your cooperation.
“Along with that, we are doing a co-study with the noted psychiatrist Dr. Harold Hoddingsworth on the long-term psychological effects of the procedure. Would you be willing to complete a questionnaire? Naturally no names will be used, and the confidentiality we promised will continue to be honored.”
The questionnaire that accompanied the letter contained, among other inquiries, a request to know the frequency of intercourse, if there was any pain, and whether there was tenderness in the breasts. Sarah could hardly breathe. That she would have to wait until morning to call the doctor’s office to verify her suspicions seemed truly a torture. In spite of what Jerry Falwell said, God must have loved homosexuals, or she wouldn’t have had to spend such a difficult night.
* * *
“And what, specifically, is Dr. Aaronson’s field?” she asked his nurse on the phone.
“May I ask what this is for?”
“Well, he was recommended to my husband by our doctor. So I’m just double-checking that this is the right Dr. Aaronson.”
“What is your husband’s problem?”
“He’s having a lot of trouble with his pee-pee,” Sarah said, chancing it.
“Then you’re calling the right man,” the nurse said, pride of profession and allegiance coming through on the phone. “His field is urology.”
“I see,” said Sarah.
“Actually, he’s a specialist in two fields. Urology and plastic surgery.”
“Well, as Bette Davis would say, how very convenient.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Thank you for your help,” Sarah said.
“Do you want to schedule an appointment?”
“I’ll call you back,” Sarah said, and hung up. “How very convenient,” she said again, aloud, to herself, giving it the haughty diva’s inflection. Urology and plastic surgery. He could change Paulo’s penis and his face at the same time.
Everything but the eyes.
* * *
The lovely Carina. Jessup hadn’t killed Paulo at all, just had him altered. Made into a fashion model. The wonders of modern medicine. It was juicier than if he’d actually murdered him. Holy shit.
So when she’d said at Drayco’s wake that Norman would have to turn Carina around to pretend she was a boy, Sarah had hit the nail right on the head. No wonder he’d shoved her in the guacamole.
“Oh, have I got a follow-up book for you,” she said over lunch with her agent. They were eating at Michael’s, a restaurant on East Fifty-fifth Street that had become fashionable for the book set, convenient as it was to the office of ex-publishing wives who’d gotten better jobs than the husbands who’d f
ired and divorced them, not necessarily in that order.
“What?” said the brightly blue-eyed brunette, who seemed a little soft, till she started talking business. “Tell, tell.”
“No, no. Write, write.”
“You’re not going to let me in on it?”
“Not even you. It’s so hot it could cook rock cocaine.”
“I hope you’re not doing that anymore,” Lori said. She had changed the spelling of her name from Laurie, on the advice of a numerologist, and signed her letters now with a heart over the i.
“I’m not. I’m high on—”
“If you say life, I’ll puke,” said Lori. “I had to go to an AA meeting with … well, you know how you can’t name who you’ve been to AA with, otherwise the Alcoholics are no longer Anonymous. Suffice it to say he’s a well-known singer-actor and I’m selling his bio for landmark dollars. He’ll confess himself in the book that he went through the entire production of … I can’t tell you what musical it was or you’ll know who I’m talking about … loaded. We went to an AA meeting in the Hamptons. Everyone there was so fucking positive, I needed a drink.”
“I am not high on life,” said Sarah, eyes sparkling. “I am high on revenge.”
“It has to be about Norman Jessup,” said Lori.
“Don’t guess,” said Sarah. “You’ll find out soon enough. I’ve got an exposé that will make every scandal book about the Clinton White House read like the Bobbsey Twins.”
“There’s a rumor that that’s who they are,” Lori said.
* * *
Sarah could hardly wait to get to her computer and write it. She booked her reservation back to the coast direct through the airline, not even calling her travel agent, she was so excited. Not one extra step. Just packed, took Tel Aviv taxi to the airport, buying a jewel from Carmen the driver on the way to Kennedy as a reward to herself, in advance, for the splash she would surely make with this one, and literally flew.
* * *
“I suppose you think I was too easy,” Wendy said, as she lay on her canopied bed.