The Boy Who Never Grew Up

by David Handler

  “With a married lady who lives down the beach. Rather famous one.”

  “Who?”

  “If you need to know, I’ll tell you.”

  “I need to know.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Hoagy, I’m up to my ears in this thing,” Lamp protested. “If I don’t produce some hard evidence soon m—

  “You have to handle this personally. Her husband mustn’t know.”

  “You have my word. Who is she?”

  I told him.

  He was shocked. “I thought she was happily married.”

  “She is.”

  “I don’t understand these people.”

  “And you’re a lot better off.”

  “That writer friend of yours, Cassandra Dee, claimed she was in Trancas at the time, too. Also swimming.”

  “It was a hot day.”

  “Only when we canvassed Trace’s neighbors, nobody remembers seeing her.”

  I tugged at my ear. “Interesting. I’ve always liked her for stealing Pennyroyal’s negatives. Anything to up the ante for her book. Killing Zorch would certainly qualify. As would the fire.”

  “She connect up with Shambazza at all?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Any idea where she was this evening when Homewood was getting torched?”

  “Nope.”

  “What about Pennyroyal? Pick up anything more from her this afternoon after I left?”

  “Nope.”

  He frowned at me. “Why are you suddenly giving me the Gary Cooper routine?”

  “Because I’m doing all the giving and you’re doing all the taking.”

  He thought this over. “Fair enough. You done good, Hoagy.”

  “Am I off of your you-know-what list now?”

  “Let’s say you’re on probation.” Lamp leafed through his notepad. “Mrs. Shelley Selden … Now she’s real interesting. Seems young Benjamin had a five o’clock appointment in Century City with one Robert Isaacs, child psychologist. Sarah went along. They left his office around six. Didn’t get home until after seven.”

  “Traffic again?”

  “And the market. Vicente Foods on San Vicente. Still …”

  “I understand she’s not terrible with a gun.”

  “Awesome is more like it,” he said. “The instructors at the range she goes to call her Annie Oakley. They’re trying to get her to compete nationally. She’s that good. Trouble is, she had the two kids with her. The three-year-old might not pay it much mind, but, cheese and crackers, the older one would have to notice Mommy gunning down two guys in the street. Television hasn’t numbed them that much, has it?”

  “Don’t ask me. I’m not Mister Rogers, and that’s not my neighborhood. What else have you got?”

  He beamed at me. “I was saving the best for last—potentially our most interesting candidate.”

  “Who?”

  “Bunny Wax. She had her hair done that afternoon. Place called Guillaume’s on Wilshire and Barrington. She was there from four until five.”

  “What about after that?”

  “Excellent question, Hoagy,” he exclaimed approvingly.

  “You’re making me feel worse and worse, Lieutenant.”

  “She says she was running errands. Only she’s very foggy about the details. She stopped at a drug store, but she can’t remember which one or what she purchased. She went to a ladies’ shop in Century City to shop for a blouse but she didn’t buy one and nobody at the store remembers her. None of it scans, Hoagy. Her whereabouts are a blank from five until she arrived at the Selden house at seven-thirty. What do you think? Could she be our shooter?”

  “I know she’s fiercely protective of Matthew. I know she despises Pennyroyal. Whoever leaked her negatives to the Enquirer was certainly no friend. I know that much.”

  “And I know she’s hiding something. Any idea what it could be?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Want to share it with me?”

  “Eventually.”

  Lamp narrowed his eyes at me. “Who do you like for it, Hoagy?”

  “Schlom.”

  “Because it points to him, or because you want it to?”

  “Because I want it to.”

  “It doesn’t work that way with the law.”

  “I’m not the law.”

  “I am.”

  “I know. Don’t remind me.”

  He chuckled. “No offense, but you’ve gotten a bit cranky yourself, Hoagy.”

  “Correction, Lieutenant—I was always cranky.”

  Bunny’s light was still on. Her TV glowed blue in the window. I knocked. It took her a minute to answer. She had her robe on, her glasses off. She seemed somewhat fuzzy. Clearly, she’d been dozing in front of the set.

  “Oh, it’s you, Hoagy,” she said, blinking at me.

  “Expecting someone else?”

  “Sometimes Charmaine looks in on me. Makes sure I go to bed. Except I can’t sleep once I do. Only when I watch the TV.” She yawned. “Did you want to come in, sweetheart?”

  “I wanted to tell you something.”

  “Tell me something?” She was more alert now. “What?”

  “I know where you were tonight. And I know where you were when Abel Zorch was shot. I know all of it.”

  Bunny’s mouth tightened. “Who told you?”

  “Matthew has to know, Bunny. If you don’t tell him, I will.”

  “You bastard,” she spat. “You no good trouble-making bastard. I knew it the second I laid eyes on you!”

  “He has to know, Bunny.”

  She grabbed me urgently by the shirt. “He can’t know. He can’t.”

  “I’m going to tell him. And you can’t stop me.”

  She couldn’t. Not without killing me. There was always that chance, of course. But I had to take it. There was no other play.

  She couldn’t stop me. All she could do was slam the door in my face—which she did. Hard enough to shake the whole bungalow.

  The Ramon Novarro bungalow was quiet. Pennyroyal had cleared out. She was an extremely neat little guest. She’d taken the empty champagne bottles and glasses with her. Caviar, candles, crumbs, she’d taken it all. She left no note behind. Nothing behind. Not even the scent of her rose water. The air conditioner got rid of that.

  It was as if she had never been there at all. Maybe she hadn’t been. Everything was possible.

  And nothing was real.

  Chapter 10

  THE OLD SURF BUM CALLED IT. MORNING dawned foggy and blessedly cool. I threw open my windows and let in the damp air. It smelled of the ocean and the charred remains of Homewood. Most of the front page of the Times was given over to a photo of the blaze, which authorities were labeling as man-made in origin. Sheldon Selden, president of Bedford Falls, stated: “A piece of movie history has been destroyed. But Homewood will live on. We will rebuild as soon as humanly possible.” Mr. Selden said it was too soon to estimate the cost of the damage. He also said he had no idea why anyone would want to do such a thing.

  Matthew Wax could not be reached for comment.

  No new developments were reported in the police investigation of the Hazen Drive shootings.

  I awoke paying for the sin of mixing champagne with high-octane bug killer. My head had a Spalding Top-Flite II caroming around inside of it. A pot of coffee and three extra-strength Excedrins managed to lodge it snugly behind my right eye but, as Robert Benchley once wrote, the only real cure for a hangover is death. I pulled on my old sweatshirt of gray cashmere and my mukluks and spent the morning at my Olympia. I worked my way through Matthew’s crush on Mona Schaffer, his brief, humiliating fling with high school hoops, his discovery of the Panorama back lot. The work went smoothly. But I wasn’t pleased. Gloomy was more like it. Part of it was all of this murder and mayhem I’d gotten myself into. I wanted it to make sense. It didn’t. Part of it was Merilee. I wanted her to call. She hadn’t. Part of it was Pennyroyal. I wanted to kiss her again. I c
ouldn’t. And part of it I couldn’t put my finger on. Whatever it was, Lulu was feeling it, too. She was sulky and restless all morning. I think she’d had it with Hollywood. I think she wanted to go home. I think I did, too.

  It was Saturday, and the lot was quiet. I strolled over to Stage One by way of Homewood. Lulu stayed behind in the bungalow. She wanted to be alone. She gets that way sometimes. From being around me, I imagine. Insurance and fire department investigators were sifting through the ashes. Sheldon Selden stood there with them, chubby hands on his chubby hips. A few studio employees had stopped by on their day off for a glimpse at movie history. One of them, an elderly woman, was taking pictures. When Shelley noticed this he wigged out.

  “What the fuck do you think this is?!” he screamed at her, veins popping from his neck. “A fucking amusement park?!” He stormed over to the frightened woman, snatched the camera from her and hurled it to the ground. Then he stomped on it until he’d destroyed it. Only then did he calm down. And become aware that everyone was watching him in horror. “Jesus,” he gasped, his chest heaving. “I—I’m sorry, Maureen. I don’t know what got into me. I’ll replace it right away. Jesus …” He rubbed his hand over his face, and spotted me there. “Whoa, I’m losing it, Hoagy,” he moaned, shaking his head. “I’m genuinely losing it.”

  “Perhaps you’ve been under a bit of pressure,” I suggested.

  “That’s no excuse.” He forced a smile. “I was on my way over to talk to you, guy,” he said, putting his arm around me. “Would you do me a huge favor?”

  “How huge?”

  “Talk him out of it, will you?”

  “Out of what?”

  “Just try, okay?” he pleaded, gripping me tightly by the shoulder. “I’d be forever in your debt. I mean it.” Then he released me and went back to watching the fire inspectors.

  I found Matthew and Sarge having lunch in the Hayes’s living room. A cheeseburger and fries for him, a salad for her. He was talking basketball. She was writing it down.

  “I want real teams in a real gym,” he declared forcefully. “I want authentic all the way. See if Monroe will let us film one of their games. That would be great. We could use their fans, their cheerleaders—we’ll stick our people in with ’em. Ask them about their locker room, too. Maybe they’ll let us use it on the weekends. If not, I want an exact duplicate built here. Everything the same. Okay?”

  “I’ll get right on it,” she assured him briskly.

  “How’s the book coming, Meat?” he exclaimed, taking a huge, starved bite of his cheeseburger.

  “It’s coming,” I replied, surprised by how up he was.

  “Same here,” he gushed. “I was up half the night writing. Got a whole new angle on Badger, and I’ve got you to thank for it.”

  “You do?” I glanced over at Sarge. She wouldn’t look at me. She seemed very uncomfortable.

  “I’m gonna use it, Meat,” he informed me. “That whole humiliating nude scene. Just like you suggested. As a flashback to when Badger was on the Homewood High team and Debbie was head cheerleader. See, that was when he thought he’d totally blown it with her. Only it turns out that’s when she knew.”

  “Knew what, Matthew?”

  “That she loved him,” he replied earnestly. “And always would. And get this—it’s their ten-year high school reunion, okay?”

  “Okay …”

  “And each one goes, figuring the other one won’t. She’s left him, remember? So there they both are at the reunion, together, and they have to confront their feelings for each other.”

  “Which are?”

  “I don’t know that part yet,” he confessed. “It’s still unfolding.”

  I tugged at my ear. “How are you planning to film all of this?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Last I heard, Pennyroyal wasn’t planning to be in the movie. How can you do it without her?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,” he said, dismissing it airily. “Worst case scenario we can use a different actress. But it won’t even come to that. You’ll see.”

  Again I looked at Sarge, and again she looked away. Because she knew what I knew—Matthew genuinely believed that if he was excited about this, Pennyroyal would be, too. And she would want to be in it. And he would win her back. And everyone would live happily ever after again in the land of Bedford Falls.

  I crossed to the easy chair by the fireplace and sat, my head spinning.

  Matthew frowned at me. “I thought you’d be all excited, Meat.”

  “I am. I just have a strange way of showing it.” I closed my eyes a second. When I opened them things had stopped spinning. The room was back to normal. Except, of course, it wasn’t a room. It was a set. Home. I wanted to go home. “So you intend to go ahead?”

  “Oh, absolutely. The fire won’t slow me down one bit. In fact, I’m getting a crew together tomorrow to film the wreckage before they cart it away. I’m thinking it’ll serve as a great image for what’s happening in Badger’s head. You know, a burning of the bridges to his past. Nice, huh?”

  I said nothing. My head was spinning again.

  He popped a french fry in his mouth. “Everything’s cool—as long as Johnny’s fine, and he is. He’s sober, he’s feeling good. We talked this morning.”

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “We moved him into that house Sarge rented for Badger up in Laurel Canyon. He needed a place to stay. Figured we may as well put it to good use.”

  “When did he move in?” I asked her.

  “Last night,” she replied. “About nine, nine-thirty. He spent the night there.”

  “Alone?”

  “Why you asking me?” she demanded.

  Matthew’s eyes widened behind his mangled glasses. “Hey, you’re not thinking he started the fire, are you, Meat?”

  “Who do you think started it, Matthew?” I asked.

  “I honestly can’t imagine,” he replied. “Homewood stood for everything that’s clean and decent and good in this world. Why anyone would ever want to destroy it … They’d have to be sick.”

  “Have you spoken to Bunny today?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “Today’s her golf day. She leaves at dawn. Why?”

  The phone rang.

  Sarge grabbed it. “Sarge talking, go … Uh-huh … Hold it, lemme check my list.” She reached for her clipboard. “Okay …”

  “Do you really hate Bunny, Matthew?” I asked.

  “Hate her?” He stared at me in amazement. “How could you think something like that?”

  “Johnny told me you do.”

  “Oh, sure, I get it now,” he said, nodding. “See, Johnny hates his mother. Always has. I told him I hated mine, too, to make him feel more at ease. But I don’t. I’m crazy about Ma.”

  “Even though she treats you like a little boy?”

  “I try to be a good son,” he said defensively. “Is that so terrible?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me.”

  Sarge hung up the phone and sprang to her feet. “Okay, Hoagy, your posse’s at the front gate. I’m gonna go fetch ’em. They got a whole load of shit with ’em.”

  “Posse?” asked Matthew. “What posse?”

  “You left it up to me, Matthew, remember?” I said.

  “I left what up to you?” he asked, bewildered.

  Sarge strode off into the darkness.

  We sat there in silence.

  Matthew began to fidget. “Why this sudden interest in Ma?”

  “It’s not sudden. It’s been building for a long time.”

  “Well, just leave it alone, okay?”

  I shrugged. “It’s your life.”

  “That’s right, it is.”

  “And everybody takes care of it for you—Bunny, Sarge, Shelley. That must be nice. That must be terribly fucking nice.”

  “You got something bothering you, Meat?”

  “I do, Matthew. And I’ve just put my finger on what it is. No one
in this business has a memory. One day somebody rapes you, the next day you go into business together. A lawyer gets murdered? You just hire a new one. A town burns down? No problem. You just rewrite the movie. It’s not as if it was a real town, after all. Tired of being a thug? How would you like to be a distinguished corporate president instead? Don’t want to be a hooker anymore? How about being a society matron? No problem. Not any of it. This whole place—it’s one giant Winky Dink magic TV kit.”

  Matthew brightened. “Wow, I had one of those! It was this clear plastic overlay. And you’d place it over the TV screen and draw a picture on it. Like a ladder, if Winky needed one.”

  “Exactly. And if you wanted to draw a new picture all you had to do was lift the overlay away from the screen and the ladder would disappear. Like it was never there. Nothing leaves a mark, Matthew. No memory. No outrage. No nothing.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not true, Meat. The movies—they leave a mark.”

  “Do they?”

  “Of course,” he replied emphatically. “They make people happy. That’s what it’s all about. Gee, you sure woke up on the wrong side of the bed today.”

  “I woke up on the wrong side of the continent today.”

  “It’s gonna be okay, Meat. I know it will. Don’t ask me how—I just do. You wait and see. Things’ll turn out for the best. You have to have faith, that’s all.”

  It was a good little speech. Also a familiar one. Badger had delivered it to his dad in Badger Hayes, All-American Boy when Mr. Hayes feared he’d be ousted as chief of Homewood’s volunteer fire department for losing the doughnut money.

  Home. I wanted to go home.

  Almost as much as I wanted to go to Fiji.

  Sarge returned now with my posse. Nearly a dozen of them altogether, chattering excitedly. A stagehand yanked open one of the big stage doors. The truck with all of their stuff came rolling in with them and pulled up in front of Badger’s bedroom. Two men began unloading it.

  A man can accomplish a lot in twenty-four hours if he has taste, breeding, an unlimited budget and the Bedford Falls jet, gassed up and ready to fly. I’d had it flown over the pole to London, where it picked up Nigel of Turnbull and Asser, Jermyn Street, Mr. Tricker of Strickland’s, Savile Row—along with three of his finest tailors—and Tim of Maxwell’s, where I have my shoes made. It had stopped off in New York on the way back to pick up world-champion hair stylist Sal Fodera of the St. Regis Hotel, as well as his best manicurist, and half the staff of Leonard’s Opticians on West 55th Street.