Moving into the glow from the big Sony now, most of the room dark, he saw David Letterman talking to Paul Shaffer, his music guy, the two of them acting hip. Harry felt his bare feet in the warm carpeting. Felt himself jump and said, “Jesus Christ!” as Letterman and Paul Shaffer vanished, the screen going to black in the same moment the desk lamp came on.
A guy Harry had never seen before was sitting there, hunched over a little, his arms resting on the desk. A guy in black. Dark hair, dark eyes, that lean, hard-boned type. A guy in his forties.
He said, “Harry Zimm, how you doing?” in a quiet tone of voice. “I’m Chili Palmer.”
3
Harry pressed a hand against his chest. He said, “Jesus, if I have a heart attack I hope you know what to do,” convinced the guy was a friend of Karen’s, the way he was making himself at home, the guy staring at him out of those deep-set dark eyes but with hardly any expression.
He said, “Where you been, Harry?”
Harry let his hand slide down over his belly, taking his time, wanting to show he had it together now, not the least self-conscious, standing there without his pants on.
“Have we met? I don’t recall.”
“We just did. I told you, my name’s Chili Palmer.”
The guy speaking with some kind of East Coast accent, New York or New Jersey.
“Tell me what you been up to.”
Harry still had a mild buzz-on that made him feel, not exactly reckless, but not shy either.
“You mean what am I doing here?”
“You want, you can start with that.”
He didn’t appear upset or on the muscle. But if he had a key to get in—Harry assuming that—the guy was closer to Karen than just a friend, Karen maybe going in for rough trade now.
Harry said, “I’m visiting, that’s all. I’m up in the guest room, I hear the TV. . . . You turned it on?”
The guy, Chili, kept staring, not saying anything now. Typecast, he was a first or second lead bad guy, depending on the budget. Hispanic or Italian. Not a maniac bad guy, a cool bad guy with some kind of hustle going. But casual, black poplin jacket zipped up.
The answer came to Harry and he said, “You’re in pictures, right?”
The guy smiled. Not much but enough to show even white teeth, no doubt capped, and Harry was convinced of it. The guy was an actor friend of Karen’s and she was in on it—the reason she was so anxious to get him down here—setting him up for this bullshit audition. The guy scares hell out of you to prove he can act and you give him a part in your next picture.
“Did you stop to think what if I had a heart attack?”
The guy didn’t move, still doing the bit, no expression, very cool.
He said, “You look okay to me, Harry. Come over here and sit down. Tell me what you been up to.”
The guy wasn’t bad. Harry took one of the canvas director’s chairs by the desk, the guy watching him. He knew how to stare without giving it much. The angle was nice too: the guy lean and dark, the bottle of Scotch, the ice bucket and the glasses he and Karen had left, in the foreground. Harry raised one hand and passed it over his thinning hair. He could feel it was losing its frizz, due for another permanent and touch-up, add some body and get rid of the mousy gray trying to take over. The guy had a full head of dark hair, as that type usually did, but close-cropped so you could see the shape of his head, like a skull. It was a nice effect.
He said, “Harry, you looking at me?”
Harry brought his hand down. “I’m looking at you.”
“I want you to keep looking right here, okay?”
“That’s what I’m doing,” Harry said, going along. Why not? The guy was from Brooklyn or the Bronx, one of those. If he was putting it on he had it down cold.
“Okay, so tell me what’s up.”
He was good, but irritating.
“I don’t have a script,” Harry said, “so I don’t know what you’re talking about. Okay?”
“You don’t have a script,” Chili said. “How about, you happen to have a hunnerd and fifty big ones on you?”
Harry didn’t answer.
“You’re not saying nothing. You remember being in Vegas November twenty-sixth of last year, at Las Mesas?”
It was starting to sound real. “I go to Vegas, that’s where I stay, at Mesas,” Harry said. “Always have, for years.”
“You know Dick Allen?”
“Dick Allen’s a very dear friend of mine.” It still could be a script, something Karen put together. “How far you want to go with this?”
The guy gestured, his hands limp, very natural.
“We’re there, Harry. You signed markers for a hunnerd and a half, you’re over sixty days past due and you haven’t told anybody what the problem is.”
It wasn’t a script.
Harry said, “Jesus Christ, what’re you, a collector? You come in here, walk in the house in the middle of the fucking night? I thought you were some actor, auditioning, for Christ sake.”
The guy raised his eyebrows. “Is that right?” He seemed about to smile. “That’s interesting. You thought I was acting, huh?”
“I don’t believe this,” Harry said. “You break in the house to tell me I owe on some markers? I know what I owe. So what? I go to Mesas I get comped, the whole shot. I got a credit line for as much as I owe—and they send you here to collect?” Harry felt an urge to move, do something. He pushed up out of the chair to look down at the guy, get an advantage on him. “We’ll see about this,” Harry said, picked up the phone and punched the 0. “Operator, how do I get Las Vegas Information?” He listened a moment and hung up.
Chili said, “Lemme give you some advice, okay?”
Harry looked up, the phone in his hand again, about to punch the number.
“You don’t want to act like a hard-on you’re standing there in your undies. You know what I’m saying? You got enough to handle. You got the markers and you got another outstanding debt if I’m not mistaken. What you wanta do, Harry, is use your head, sit down and talk to me.”
It stopped him. “What outstanding debt?”
“Put the phone down.”
“I want to know what you’re talking about,” Harry said, getting a peeved tone now, indignant, “outside of what I owe at Mesas, which they know I’m good for.”
“They know you’re good up to your last trip. After that, as they say, nobody knows nothing.” Chili waited.
Harry hung up the phone. He felt the chair against his bare legs and sat down.
“A marker’s like a check, Harry . . .”
“I know what a marker is.”
“They don’t want to deposit yours and have ’em bounce, insufficient funds, or they find out the account’s closed. That’s embarrassing. So your customer rep, your very dear friend Dick Allen’s been calling, leaving messages on your machine, but you never get back to him. So basically, you want to know why I’m here—I don’t actually work for Mesas, but Dick Allen asked me as a favor would I look you up. Okay, I come to L.A., try your apartment, your office, you’re not anywhere around. So I contact some people I know of, get a few leads—”
“What people?”
“You have high blood pressure, Harry? You oughta lose some weight.”
“What people?”
“You don’ know ’em, some people I was put in touch with. So I start calling around. I call here, Karen tells me she hasn’t seen you. So we talk, I ask her if this’s the Karen Flores used to be in the movies. Yes, it is. Well, how come I haven’t seen you? . . . I remember her in Grotesque with the long blond hair. I start to think, this is where I’d come if I was Harry Zimm and I want to stay off the street.”
“You think I’m hiding out?”
“What’re you getting excited about?”
“I don’t like the insinuation, I’m hiding.”
“Well, that’s up to you, what you like or what you don’t. I called your former wife, the one in Westwood? She goes, ‘I hope you�
��re a bill collector and you find the cheapskate.’ ”
“You have fun talking about me? Jesus,” Harry said, “that broad used to work for me. She’s supposed to know the business, but apparently has no idea what I was going through at the time.” His gaze moved to the bottle of Scotch thinking of Marlene, who liked her booze, also thinking he wouldn’t mind having one.
“You’re not looking at me, Harry.”
“Why do I have to keep looking at you?”
“I want you to.”
“You gonna get rough now, threaten me? I make good by tomorrow or get my legs broken?”
“Come on, Harry—Mesas? The worst they might do is get a judgment against you, uttering a bad check. I can’t imagine you want that to happen, man in your position.”
“I’ve won there and I’ve lost,” Harry said, staying with the peeved tone. “They carry me and I always pay what I owe. But now all of a sudden they’re worried I’m gonna stiff ’em? Why? They don’t give you a credit line of a hundred and a half unless they know you’re good for it.”
“What’s that, Harry?”
“You heard me.”
“What I heard,” Chili said, “your credit line’s an even hunnerd and they gave you the extra fifty TTO, this trip only, ’cause you had front money, that cashier’s check for two hunnerd thousand, right? Four hours later, the night’s still young, it’s all gone, the two you rode in on and the hunnerd and a half. It can happen to anybody. But now a couple months go by, Dick Allen wonders if there’s a problem here, if Harry Zimm was playing with scared money. He says you never put down more than ten on a basketball game in your life. You come in this time and drop the whole load, like you’re not doing it for fun.”
“I didn’t have to twist any arms. I told ’em what I wanted to put down and they okayed it.”
“Why not? It’s your money.”
“They tell you what game it was and the point spread? Lakers and the Pistons, in Detroit. Which happens to be where I grew up. Now I’m out here I follow the Lakers, had seats up to last year. Not down there with Jack Nicholson, but they weren’t bad seats. You don’t recall the game?”
“I mighta read about it at the time. What was the spread?”
The guy showing interest. It picked Harry up.
“The sports book line had the Pistons by three and a half. The bad boys from Motown over the glamor boys from showtown.”
“You live here,” Chili said, “but you like the Pistons. I can understand that. I don’t live in New York anymore, I’m in Miami, but I still follow the Knicks, put a few bucks on ’em now and then. Even though it’s been years.”
“I don’t happen to bet that way,” Harry said, “emotionally. I like the Pistons this time ’cause they’re at home, twenty thousand screaming fans on their ass. Also the fact they beat the Lakers four zip in the finals last year.”
He had the guy’s attention; no question about it, waiting to hear about a basketball game that was played more than two months ago.
“You know how I bet it?”
“You went with the Pistons and the Lakers won.”
“I went with the Pistons,” Harry said, “and the Pistons won.”
Right away Chili said, “The point spread.”
Harry sat back in the director’s chair. “The Pistons by three and a half. The score was one-ohtwo to ninety-nine. They won and I lost.”
Now Chili sat back. “That was close. You almost did it.”
The guy showing sympathy. Good. Harry wanted him to get up now, shake hands and leave. But the guy was staring at him again.
“So then you go through your credit line playing blackjack,” Chili said, “chasing what you lost, going double-up to catch up. But when you have to win, Harry, that’s when you lose. Everybody knows that.”
“Whatever you say,” Harry said, tired of talking about it. He yawned. Maybe the guy would take the hint.
But Chili kept at it. He said, “You know what I think? You went in the hole on some kind of deal, so you tried to bet your way out. See, I don’t know anything about your business, Harry, but I know how a guy acts when he’s facing a payment he has to make and he doesn’t have it. You get desperate. I know a guy put his wife out on the street, and she wasn’t bad looking either.”
“You don’t know anything about my business,” Harry said, showing some irritation, “but you don’t mind sticking your nose in it. Tell Dick Allen I’ll cover the markers in the next sixty days, at the most. He doesn’t like it, that’s his problem. First thing in the morning,” Harry said, “I’m gonna call him, the prick. I thought he was a friend of mine.”
Harry paused, wondering whether or not he should ask the guy how he got in the house, and decided he didn’t want to know. The guy says he broke a window—then what? Harry waited. He was tired, irritable, not feeling much of a glow. He said, “We gonna sit here all night or what? You want me to call you a cab?”
The guy, Chili, shook his head. He kept staring, but with a different kind of expression now, more thoughtful, or maybe curious.
“So you make movies, huh?”
“That’s what I do,” Harry said, relieved, not minding the question. “I produce feature motion pictures, no TV. You mentioned Grotesque, that happened to be Grotesque, Part Two Karen Flores was in. She starred in all three of my Slime Creatures releases you might’ve seen.”
The guy, Chili, was nodding as he came forward to lean on the desk.
“I think I got an idea for one, a movie.”
And Harry said, “Yeah? What’s it about?”
4
At first, all Karen heard was Harry’s side of whatever was going on. As soon as she came out of the bedroom she heard his voice, Harry saying, “Jesus Christ!” and it gave her goose bumps standing in her T-shirt and panties, one hand on the railing that curved around the open upstairs landing. Her eyes held on the foyer, directly below: dark except for a square of light on the floor, coming out of the study. A few minutes passed. Karen was about to step back into the bedroom to call the police when she heard Harry’s voice again, Harry saying, “What people?” and then repeating it, “What people?” With an edge this time, Harry acting tough. A good sign. He wouldn’t use that tone with a burglar. Little Harry Zimm, with his perm, his frizzed hair, loved to act tough. But then Karen began to wonder if Harry could be talking to himself. Harry into the Scotch again.
What people?
Meaning the people he wanted to get out from under, his investors, the undesirables. Harry trying to convince himself there was no problem.
What people?
As if to say, What, those guys? Seeing if he could make the mess he was in seem trivial.
It was possible. He used to talk to himself sometimes when he was loaded, or rewriting dialogue in a script, look at the line and recite it to her aloud, when they were living together. She liked the idea of Harry boozing, trying to reassure himself. She liked it a lot better than thinking someone had broken in and was still in the house. Harry talking to himself made sense.
Until his voice, raised, came out of the study again.
“You heard me.”
Karen listened, holding on to the railing.
That was it. You heard me. Then silence.
Would he say that to himself? She didn’t think so. Unless he was acting out his own kind of scene, imagining what he would like to tell his money guys. You heard me. Harry hating to be controlled, especially by outsiders, people not in the movie business. Harry called investors a necessary evil. Talking to him earlier he had sounded okay . . .
But looked awful.
In the past ten years he’d become a fat little sixty-year-old guy with frizzy hair. The same guy she once thought was a genius because he could shoot a ninety-minute feature in ten days and be looking at a workprint two weeks later . . .
Harry doing the first of the Slime Creatures in Griffith Park when she read for him in bra and panties, he said to give him an idea of her figure, and she got the par
t. Karen asked him if he did horror or T and A and Harry explained to her the philosophy of ZigZag Productions. “Zig for the maniac, escaped lunatic and dope-crazed biker pictures.” No vampires or werewolves; she would never get bitten or eaten. “Zag for the ones featuring mutations fed on nuclear waste, your slime people, your seven-foot rats, your maggots the size of submarines. But there’s nothing wrong with showing a little skin in either type picture.” She told him if he was talking about full frontal nudity, forget it, she didn’t do porn, hard or soft. If she had to go to bed with him, okay, one time only, but it would have to be an awfully good part. Harry acted insulted. He said, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, I’m old enough to be your uncle. But I like your spunk and the way you talk. Where you from, somewhere in Texas?” She told him he was close, Alamogordo, where her dad was a rocket man and her mom was in real estate. Karen told him she left to study drama at New Mexico State, but since coming here had done nothing but wait on tables. Harry said, “Let’s hear you scream.” She gave him a good one and he gave her a big smile saying, “Get ready to be a star.”
Karen was slimed to death within twenty minutes of her first appearance on the screen.
Michael, who had also read for a part and was turned down, told her she was lucky, not have to hang around the set. It was where she first met Michael, when they were casting Slime Creatures fifteen years ago, saw him a few other times after, but they didn’t seriously get it on until Michael was a star and she was living with Harry . . . tired of it, saying mean things and arguing by that time, picking at dumb lines that had never bothered her before. Like the one Harry threw at her in bed, out of nowhere . . .
“Maybe it’s only the wind.”
Knowing she’d remember it.
Instead of giving him a look, she should have said, “What’re you up to, Harry? What can I do for you?”
Make him come out and say it instead of trying to take her down memory lane. It was so obvious. Harry wanted her to use her influence with Michael to set up a meeting. But wanted it to be her idea, happy to do him this favor because she owed him, theoretically, for putting her in pictures, making her a ZigZag Productions star.
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