“Shelley Selden claims you stole many of those millions from him. They still haven’t seen a penny from the net proceeds of Yeti, for example.”
“Aw, you’re not falling for that old ploy, are you?” he blustered.
“Which old ploy is that?”
“All of ’em pull that shit on us—claim we cheated ’em. Then they hold a gun to our head and demand gross points, or else. They’re ruining the business. The talent is ruining this business. We’re the ones who make the movies, not them. We take the financial risk, not them. A movie flops, we’re the ones who have to eat it, not them. They never offer to give us any of their salary back. Hell no, a movie flops, that’s our problem. But when it’s a hit, suddenly we’re stealing from them. You wanna talk about Yeti? I gave Kid an unlimited budget. I never said no to him. He had to shoot in fucking Katmandu, fine. He had to have cheeseburgers and tapes of the fucking Dodgers flown in daily, fine. I gave him whatever he asked for. And I gave him a million dollars in salary. Now don’t you think that’s enough?”
“That’s not the issue.”
“What is?”
“Whether or not you cheated him out of his share of the profits.”
“I treated him like a son,” he insisted. “Invited him into my home. He never came, but I invited him. He was my ace. Why would I want to cheat him, huh? Why would I?”
“For money.”
He stared at me a second with his rat’s eyes. “Our books are always open. I told them. I’m telling you. You wanna run an audit, go ahead. You won’t find a fucking nickel.”
“Of course not. Your accountants could hide a herd of elephants in a Porta Potti. About The Three Stooges—”
“What about it?” he demanded, tensing.
“Matthew says he never wanted to direct it.”
Schlom laughed harshly. “They always say that about their flops.”
“Did you force him into it by planting cocaine in his bungalow?”
“That’s bullshit, pal. Put it in his book and I’ll sue your fucking asses.”
“I’ll rephrase it: Did you have someone plant cocaine in his bungalow?”
He reached for another sheet of notepaper. Carefully, he worked it into a small ball. “I’m gonna tell you the God’s honest truth,” he reflected, popping the paper in his mouth. “So you’ll know the real story. And why I blew the other night at Spago when you brought it up. See, I heard he was having problems. There were rumors before the picture even went before the cameras. That he was using heavy.”
“Matthew?”
“Kid,” he affirmed sadly. “Why do you think the movie sucked? He was stoned on coke the whole time. I was told he even had drugs on the set. I don’t go in for that. I run a clean studio. This is a family environment. So I said something to him. I said it to him as a friend, as a mentor, whatever I was to him. I cared about him. I wanted him to get help. I wasn’t worried about the movie—fuck the movie. I was worried about him. This was his life we’re talking about.” Schlom shook his head. “He got pissed at me. I guess he was in what they call the denial stage. That’s why he left Panorama—because I was hassling him to clean up his act. I hear he has. I hope so. I do. For his sake, and his family’s. But I’m angry and I’m hurt that he’d try to blame me for what happened. I’ve heard that story before, that I planted stuff on him. He made it up. The truth is, it was all his own fault.”
I could only stare. I was in the presence of greatness. Norbert Schlom was the most brilliant liar I’d ever come across, capable of sounding caring, benevolent and even a tiny bit bruised while in the midst of dishing out slander of the most malicious sort. They can’t teach you how to lie like that. It’s a gift you’re born with, a gift that had taken him all the way to the pinnacle of Hollywood success, and kept him there.
“Does the name Shambazza mean anything to you?” I asked.
He mulled it over. “Character in Star Wars, wasn’t he? Furry fellow who tried to shtup the princess?”
“He was a drug dealer and pimp.”
“I don’t know from pimps and drug dealers,” he growled.
“Toy knew him quite well. She lived with him. Before somebody shot him in the head, that is.”
He grinned at me crookedly. “Trying to piss me off, aren’t ya?”
“I am not.”
“Toy and me made a pact when we got together,” Schlom said easily. “No past. I don’t ask her about hers. She don’t ask me about mine. That way nobody gets upset.”
“I see. What about her and Abel Zorch?”
“What about them?”
“Were they close?”
“Ask her,” he suggested. “Nicely.”
“I always ask nicely.”
“Toy is a fine, lovely woman. I care about her more than anyone in the world. You hassle her about her background, you make her feel crummy and you’ll go back to New York pissing blood, Hoag. Is there anything else? I got people waiting.”
“One more thing. Now that Pennyroyal has herself a kinder, gentler lawyer, will she be changing her settlement demands? Or does she still want half of Bedford Falls?”
“She wants it and she’ll get it.”
“It bothers you that Matthew got away from you, doesn’t it? You want him back, firmly planted under your thumb. You won’t be happy until he is.”
“I told you, I don’t believe in personal,” he said impatiently. “This ain’t a vendetta. It’s business. She wants to produce her own pictures. Be a player. I’m willing to give her the shot.”
“In exchange for her half-interest in Bedford Falls,” I pointed out.
“What’s wrong with that? It’s a straightforward arrangement. Good for her, good for me.”
“What about what’s good for Bedford Falls?”
“I gotta have Bedford Falls,” he insisted. “I need it.”
“Matthew won’t ever sell you his half, Norb.”
“He’ll sell,” he said with utter certainty. “He’ll see he has no choice but to sell.”
“How?”
“I’ll make him see,” he responded darkly.
“Can you be a little more specific?”
Norbert Schlom gazed up at the blank screen in front of us, savoring his reply. “Let’s just say, it’ll be like a guy getting his dick lopped off with an ax—he’ll know it when it happens.”
I got out to Trancas around sunset. I took Topanga Canyon, which was brown and dry as chalk in the late season heat. The sun was dropping bright orange into the ocean when I hit Malibu. Trancas is another half hour or so up the coast from there. There’s not much to it. Just some houses crowded shoulder-to-shoulder on the narrow ribbon of sand between the pounding surf and Pacific Coast Highway. Many were extravagant Bauhaus sand castles of glass and bleached wood. Trace Washburn’s wasn’t one of those. The fourth house from the left was a rickety beachcomber’s shack on stilts, tar roof patched, clapboard siding warped and peeling, redwood deck rotted out. His neighbors probably wanted to nuke it. I rather liked it.
I left the Vette in the narrow alley out back. Wood steps led up to the deck. A clothesline was stretched between two of the deck posts. T-shirts, jeans and beach towels were drying on it. A surfboard was propped against the side of the house. I made my way around to the front, the entire house shuddering with each step I took. Lulu followed me, stepping gingerly around the gaps in the deck where planks were missing. Sliding glass doors faced the water. A few sailboats were out. The tide was receding. Lulu excused herself and headed down to the water’s edge to sniff at shells. I tapped on one of the doors, and went inside.
The living room, dining room, and kitchen were one large room. The decor was early dude ranch, but of an uncommonly high order—log furniture made in the 1940’s by the Shoshone Furniture Company of Cody, Wyoming, under the guiding hand of Thomas Molesworth, the Stickley of the Wild West. Two massive Molesworth wing chairs, their leather arms topped with moose antlers, were parked around a Franklin stove along with a pair of
his fringed leather armchairs. The dining table, upon which Cassandra Dee had first been formally introduced to Big Steve, was a massive slab of honey-colored fir. Six matching Molesworth dining chairs were set around it, their backs ornamented with the silhouette of a bow-legged gunfighter. Trace was not a tidy housekeeper. Empty beer bottles were everywhere. Sand crunched underfoot on the whitewashed wooden floor. Dirty dishes were piled high in the kitchen, where a chubby, sunburned teenaged girl in a T-shirt and nothing else stood aimlessly stirring a pot of chili on the stove, a look of bovine torpor on her face. It was a plain face. Her hair was stringy, her ankles thick and not particularly clean. It took her a while to notice me standing there.
When she did she gave me a sleepy, sated grin. “He’s asleep. You a friend of his?”
I said I was.
“Want me to wake him?”
I said I did.
She clumped off toward the bedroom. I heard murmuring in there, followed by some playful giggling. A slap and some more playful giggling. Then he came shambling out, yawning, big and brown and naked except for the faded blue jean cutoffs he was buttoning. His shaggy blond hair was rumpled, his deep-set eyes bleary, his two-day growth of beard flecked with gray. He was tanned and weatherbeaten all over. His hide was like old leather. Nothing but rope underneath. His shoulders were broad, his belly flat and hard. There were long, jagged surgical scars on both knees and one on his right shoulder. He moved slowly and stiffly, like the wounded. Most of his toenails were black and dead looking.
He limped over to the refrigerator, pulled out a six-pack of Corona longnecks, and started his heavy breathing thing. “Guess I dropped off. That there Rosie—she plum wore Big Steve out. Found her at the market this morning. Never know what you’ll find there.” He tasted his chili, poured a jolt of Wild Turkey into it, and himself. Then he looked me up and down. “Want a pair of trunks or something?”
“I’m fine.”
“Then c’mon, Buck.”
Steep, wooden stairs took us down to the sand. It was much cooler down there with the spray coming off of the water. A pair of rickety lounge chairs were half buried in the sand by the water’s edge, where Lulu was having a grand time nosing around at the assorted sea life, paws and ears all wet and sandy. She snuffled happily at our arrival and bounded over to say hello. We sat. Trace opened two Coronas and handed me one. Most of the sun had dropped into the ocean now. The sky was turning from red to purple.
“See that thin gray line out along the horizon?” he said, squinting out at it. “Heat wave’ll break tonight. Be cold and foggy in the morning. I grew up around here. Surfed these beaches for almost forty years. You get to know the signs.” He shifted in his chair, wincing. “The old aches don’t lie, neither.”
“Get kicked by a lot of horses?” I asked.
“Horses, blitzing linebackers, and crazy ladies.” He took a swig of his beer and scratched at the wiry stubble on his cheeks. “I had nothing to do with shooting Abel.”
“So you said. Can someone vouch for you?”
“That part’s a little tricky.”
“I’m not the law.”
“But you talk to them.”
“If I have to. When I do, I choose my words carefully. Have they questioned you yet?”
He nodded. “Came out this afternoon.”
“Was it Lamp?”
“He a black guy?”
“No.”
“I told him I was swimming. He talked to some of my neighbors, then split. He wasn’t satisfied, but he did split.”
“They’ll be back. You can count on it, Trace. And you can’t duck it.”
“Well, shit.” His chest rose and fell. “Maybe you can impress upon him how touchy this is.”
“Maybe.” I sipped my beer. “But I have to know who you’re protecting.”
He told me. She happened to be one of the three biggest box office names in the world. Bigger than Pennyroyal. Bigger than Merilee. Her husband ran one of the major studios. They were, without question, Hollywood’s most glittering duo.
“I thought they were happily married,” I said.
“They are,” he assured me. “She just gets a little wild sometimes, comes looking for a jab from Big Steve. Hell, better me than some guy’d try to take advantage of her. I was with her. No lie. That’s their place over there.” He pointed down the beach to one of the grander sand castles. “I’d surely hate for this to get out. It’d hurt her bad. Wouldn’t do me much good either. Angry husbands don’t go out of their way to hire me. I haven’t worked in a year. I’ll lose this place soon if I don’t. Ain’t much, but it’s all I got.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “No promises.”
He shook his head sadly. “Big Steve just gets me into one scrape after another. He can’t turn a girl down. And I can’t make him. I figure I owe it to them. They deserve something sweet to remember in their old age, something that’ll put a smile on their pretty little face. Hell, that’s what I’m here for. Dumb, I guess.”
“I wouldn’t call it smart getting mixed up with Pennyroyal. As a career move, I mean.”
“You’re right,” he admitted readily. “Smoked me with Matthew. I knew that going in, too.”
“So to speak.”
He gave me a sleepy grin, crossed his scarred, knobby legs. “She’s a nice kid, Penny. Sweet little body, great skin. Awful serious. She don’t laugh much. I like to laugh. We’re real different that way.” He was silent a moment. “She also has a future. I don’t. But I’m crazy about that little girl. She’s one worth holding onto. Wish I knew how.” He glanced over at me. “You and Merilee been together a long time.”
“Off and on,” I said.
“She’s an impressive woman.”
“Only if you’re impressed by perfection.”
“I’m impressed by you. You must be all man.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
“What’s your secret then?”
“My secret?”
“How do you manage it?”
“You wouldn’t, perchance, be yanking my frank, would you?”
“Hell, no,” he insisted. “Holding on to ’em is something I never learned how to do. I envy anyone who can. No lie.”
“There’s no real secret,” I informed him. “She just gives me plenty of room to be myself, and I give her plenty of room to be herselves.”
He scratched his stomach with a big brown hand. “And that works?”
“Not right now it doesn’t.”
“How come?”
“How about if I ask the questions?”
“Sure, sure,” he said easily, draining his Corona. “Go on.”
“Has Pennyroyal ever talked to you about her past?”
“What past? She’s twenty-five years old.”
“Those nude shots of hers.”
He shrugged, eyes on the ocean. “These things happen. Everybody gets used.”
“She said it was Toy who did the using—back when Toy was a pro.”
“That I didn’t know,” he said, surprised. “But I reckon Toy’s boned and fileted plenty of folks. Ol’ Toy’s a hard number. People who get what they want tend to be.”
A long, lovely young redhead in a blue spandex unitard went jogging past us on the hard sand. She blew Trace a kiss. He blew one back and watched her disappear down the beach, a hungry look on his chiseled, weatherbeaten face. “Gentle now, Big Steve,” he murmured. “Gentle, boy.”
“What does Norbert Schlom have against you?” I asked.
“Ask him.”
“I did.”
He looked at me. “What did he say?”
“You drink too much, you cost too much, and you’re too old. He said you’re used up.”
He laughed. “That pretty much covers everything—except for the real reason.”
“Is Toy the real reason?”
“Aw, hell no,” he said, shaking his head. “She’s got nothing to do with it. I’ve had her, sure. But that’s t
he sort of thing Norb gets off on, knowing that someone like me is fucking his wife. He’s into pain and humiliation. They both are. Hell, Harmon Wright used to pay her to take dumps on his chest. He got off on it. Norb does, too. Or so she says.”
“Did she and Abel Zorch have any kind of relationship?”
“She used to get him girls in the old days.”
“For what?”
“His parties. Abel was very big that way. Brought politicians and money men together from all over—Washington, Japan, the Middle East. Lots of deals got struck at Abel’s parties, while the liquor and the girls were flowing.”
“Would Toy have wanted him dead?”
“I wouldn’t know about that.”
“What’s the real reason, Trace?”
“Real reason?”
“Why won’t Schlom hire you?”
He turned chilly on me. “You like all the dirty details, don’t you, Buck?”
“Not particularly.”
“You get off on this? Go home and jerk off?”
“I go home and write. Pretty much the same thing.”
“Why you do this shit?”
“Pays the bills. And helps keep me insane.”
He tossed his empty beer bottle aside and opened us both fresh ones. He took a gulp and squinted out at the surf, breathing in and out. “It happened seven, eight years ago, when we was shooting the interiors for Yeti II at Panorama. Norb was still married to his first wife, Elaine, who looked remarkably like a sheep. His kid, Toby, took to hanging around the set over summer vacation. He’d just graduated from one of them eastern prep schools. Was off to Princeton in the fall. He was a good kid, especially when you considered who his old man was. Funny, in a quiet sort of way. Liked to party, too. Snort, drink, listen to heavy metal. One day, he turns eighteen. Damned if Norb don’t give him a red Lamborghini Countach. Sucker cost more than a hundred grand. Me, I decided to get him laid. Figured it was the least I could do for the little fucker. Had him out here for a little party. Some women I knew came over. We all got ourselves ripped on coke, and into a sandwich. That kid was laughing and grabbing and groaning and sucking. You never saw a hornier kid. He fucked four different women in a half an hour. He fucked like there was no tomorrow.” Trace paused. “Which there wasn’t. He went flying out of here about four in the morning, happy as can be, and crunched his Countach on Sunset. Don’t know if he fell asleep behind the wheel or what. It was a one-car accident. No skid marks … I felt like shit … Norb went berserk when they found the coke in his body. And when they found out where Toby’d been that evening …” Trace whistled softly. “Norb kept it all out of the papers, out of respect for Toby. Didn’t send the law after me. But he made sure he nailed ol’ Trace to the barn door. No studio in town would use me after that. They all stick together, y’know. He also managed to get me audited by the IRS. They cleaned me out of every penny I owned. I didn’t work for two whole years. Matthew rescued me with the Badger pictures. He was the only guy in town who’d give me a job. Now I can’t work for him either. I’m on my ass. Norb, he just won’t let me get back up. I’ve paid, man. I surely have. But Norb is not one to forgive and forget. Neither was Abel. I begged him. You heard me beg him. That wasn’t easy for ol’ Trace. But it was no use. He wouldn’t help me. People in this business, they delight in kicking a man when he’s down.”
The Boy Who Never Grew Up Page 25