Jesus! Even the cops have fucking websites now.
After they were gone, Sammy poured himself his seventh cup of coffee and considered what the hell had gone down. It couldn’t have been Finoccio’s people. They didn’t work that fast. Besides, poisoned pizza was not at all their style. They would have had a guy in a Pizza Hut uniform come to the door with an AK.
It had to be Acme. How did they know that Diddly Shit ordered a pizza? And if he did order it, how did they intercept it and get the strychnine in it? Did they have to whack the pizza delivery guy, or was he tied up in the crapper at the ninth hole at Tahquitz Creek? And how come the African didn’t eat the pizza, but the cat did?
The only explanation was that they had bugged Diddly Shit’s phone, found out about the order, then called back Pizza Hut, canceled it, and delivered their own poisoned pizza. And for some reason, the man had thrown it out without eating it, leaving it in the garbage bin for the cat.
Sammy wasn’t the only one at Paradise Gardens who wanted to know how strychnine had gotten into an anchovy pizza from Pizza Hut. A wave of anxiety swept through the place, to the extent that Ethel Esmitz called an emergency meeting of the PGHOA for seven that night.
Everyone showed up, except the Finns, who were in mourning. There was a lot of chatter as Sammy, wearing a pair of pressed jeans that he was probably ten years too old to be wearing, entered the room. Why not? He was feeling good. One fewer cat in his life.
Various sets of eyes met his, radiating suspicion. It was no secret that Sammy Dee didn’t like the Finnish lesbians’ cats. Fuck ’em. He had an air-tight alibi—a signed contract to kill the African. There was no deal on the cat.
Across the room, Diddly Shit—alive and well and wearing one of his African dashikis—was standing with Marcy and Charlie Berns. Sammy sauntered over and said good evening.
“Isn’t it awful?” Marcy said.
Sammy nodded, trying to infuse some conviction into the nod.
“Did the police speak with you, Samee?”
“Yeah. Couple of mugs from the Palm Springs PD showed up. They looked like they were auditioning for CSI: Cucamonga.”
Nobody laughed. The mood was not jocular. The residents looked as if there had been a terrorist attack on the complex. Except for Charlie Berns, who had his usual air of detached bemusement.
“What do you think, Charlie, there a movie in this?”
“Afraid not. You can kill people, as many as you want, but you can’t kill pets. No studio will touch it.”
“Who do you think it was?” Marcy asked.
“You mean, who put the strychnine in the pizza?”
Marcy nodded, then shivered.
“Maybe it was the Helsinki mob.”
Again, nobody laughed, or even smiled. Sammy was on shaky ground here and needed to lose the sarcasm. He changed tactics, coming about quickly into the wind. “Don’t worry, Marcy, the cops’ll deal with this.”
“Well, I hope so. Klaus goes through the garbage sometimes.”
“We must install sealed trash bins, that’s it. No?” Diddly Shit suggested.
“That’s a very good idea, Didier,” Marcy said.
Fuck. Sammy was losing points by the minute. The African was not only not dead, but he was solidifying his position in the Marcy Gray sweepstakes.
Ethel Esmitz ordered them to grab one of the folding chairs against the wall and take a seat. As usual, Marcy sat between Sammy and his rival. Everyone started talking at once until the homeowners’ association president gaveled them into submission.
“Please, we need to be calm,” she said.
“Calm? There’s a murderer on the loose!” Beverly Lipner, a desiccated matron from Canoga Park, exclaimed.
“We don’t know that for sure,” Ethel Esmitz insisted.
“There was poison in the pizza. Poison!”
“Yes, but it could have been from some household product. Or from the mold people. The police are looking into it.”
The meeting lurched forward, accusations of malfeasance and negligence thrown around haphazardly.
When it was finally over, Sammy retreated to his condo, turned on a ballgame, and tried to unwind. Between the cat hit and all the coffee he had drunk, he was unable to relax. What the fuck had happened? Hours later, he drifted into a fitful sleep, the TV on, his head aching.
The phone woke him at nine. It wasn’t his regular phone, but the cell that the Marshals Service had provided him with. What did they want? Sammy dragged himself into the bedroom, unearthed the iPhone 3 (the cheap bastards didn’t even spring for the latest model), and growled into the phone:
“What?”
“Sammy, we need to talk.”
“Talk.”
“Kramer’s on Main, next to the Movie Colony Hotel. Noon.”
“I can’t make it.”
“Yes, you can.” Marshal Dillon hung up. He took a twenty-minute shower, put on his orange Dockers, and, looking like some retired Borscht Belt comedian, headed off to meet his contact.
The restaurant, a Jewish deli, had large booths and gravel-throated waitresses who called you sweetie and gave as good as they got.
“Best pastrami in the Coachella Valley,” the marshal said, biting into a mammoth sandwich.
“Is that like the best manicotti in Lapland?”
The air conditioning was on arctic, but you still didn’t want to order the matzo ball soup. Not in this climate. Sammy had ordered lox, eggs, and onions, and would soon regret it.
“So to what do I owe the honor of buying you lunch, Marshal?”
As usual, the marshal didn’t cut to the chase. There was always a fucking preamble. He put his pastrami sandwich down squarely in the center of the plate, as if it were a flower design.
“Sammy, you are aware that relocated witnesses have to be scrupulous in avoiding brushes with the law, aren’t you?”
“You bet.”
“It causes problems for the Marshals Service with respect to our relationship with other law enforcement agencies.”
“Okay. I’m sorry. I made a right turn on a red the other day onto 111. There was a sign, but the fucker didn’t have to write me up. I slowed down. There was no one in sight. It was eleven at night . . .”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“All right, I give up. What’d I do?”
The marshal picked up his sandwich again and chewed meticulously, as if enjoying making him wait for the punch line. Sammy had never met anyone in his entire life who ate more slowly than this guy. If there was an Olympic event for this skill, he’d win the gold medal hands down.
“It has come to our attention, Sammy, that the Palm Spring Police Department has interviewed you in their investigation of a felony.”
“You mean the dead cat?”
“The PSPD is treating it as attempted homicide.”
“What?”
“They are surmising that the perpetrator was targeting a person and that the cat ate the poison inadvertently.”
“I’m a fucking murder suspect?”
“No. You are merely a person of interest.”
“Well, that’s comforting. . . .” Sammy said. But sarcasm was out of the marshal’s radio frequency range.
What the fuck. Had the clowns in the bad sports jackets put two and two together? Were they watching Walt and Biff? Sammy clenched his stomach muscles and convinced himself that he had nothing to worry about. All they had on him was his signature on a patio deck contract.
“Anything I need to know?” Dylan asked after a moment.
“You mean, like am I trying to kill someone?”
“I should hope you’re not, because if you are, I am obliged to turn you in. Attempted murder is a federal crime, and I am a federal law enforcement officer sworn to uphold the law.”
Sammy took a deep breath and exhaled, already feeling the lox and onions doing their number.
“Look, the only reason they talked to me was because I didn’t like the c
ats. They smelled up the fucking hall. I had complained about it, and they thought maybe I was trying to get rid of them.”
“Were you?” A completely straight face. The guy could have been holding the nut flush or a pair of deuces. You couldn’t read him.
“C’mon, you think I did the cat?”
“If you did, I would prefer you didn’t tell me.”
Sammy had half a mind to confess to the cat hit, just to make Dylan squirm. One of the few pleasures he had these days was tormenting his handler.
“Let me ask you a question, Marshal. How would I have gotten strychnine into a Pizza Hut anchovy pizza and made sure the cat ate it?”
“I don’t know. But I would like to be reassured that you had nothing to do with it, nevertheless.”
“I had nothing to do with it, nevertheless.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. How about you pick up the check, for a change, as a token of your gratitude?”
By way of response, the marshal pushed his plate away, wiped his mouth, got up, and walked out of the restaurant.
The cat business went down three days before Thanksgiving. The paranoia level at Paradise Gardens abated slightly, though no one ordered anything delivered from Pizza Hut. There was a story done by the local Palm Springs ABC affiliate Eyewitness News reporter, Tracy Tohito, about the poisoned cat. She stood in front of the complex, microphone in hand, and breathlessly reported.
“The suspicious death of a beloved Siamese cat has put the occupants of this Palm Springs condominium development on edge. The unfortunate cat, a six-year-old male named Lurjus, meaning ‘rascal’ in Finnish, ate a piece of anchovy pizza that pathologists later determined was laced with strychnine. The police are investigating the possibility that the lethal poison was meant for one of the occupants of the complex and not the cat . . .”
Sergeant Melendez had little to add when interviewed by the diminutive Japanese-American reporter. “Our investigation is ongoing.” Period.
Tracy Tohito did get an earful from Chris and Edie, who said that no one was sleeping well these days with a murderer on the loose.
Sammy Dee wasn’t sleeping well, but it had nothing to do with the dead cat. He was wondering when the next attempt to whack the African would go down, and whether it would be successful this time. Waiting for something to happen that you had no control over was like waiting for an earthquake.
Marcy Gray invited him, Diddly Shit, and Charlie Berns to Thanksgiving dinner. He and Charlie Berns brought wine, but the African brought a mahogany sculpture from Benin, which he claimed dated from pre-colonial times and promoted good health. To Sammy, it looked like a doorstop.
They sat around Marcy’s kitchen table, a family of convenience, eating overdone turkey and pre-fabricated stuffing. Diddly Shit consolidated his position with Klaus by slipping pieces of turkey to the dog under the table.
Charlie Berns told war stories about their days in the trenches of Hollywood.
“It’s a crapshoot masquerading as a business masquerading as an art form,” he said. “Nobody really knows what they’re doing. You roll the dice, and now and then you land on Go. Mostly then.”
“How did you survive for so long?” Sammy asked him.
“Stupidity. I was too dumb to get out.”
“Yeah, but you made a living, didn’t you?”
“Occasionally. More often than not, I was scrambling. It was always trying to find the money, and then when I had it, trying to make it through production, post-production, publicity, the whole deal, without running dry.”
“Even after you won your Oscar?” Marcy asked.
“After that I was able to skate for a year, year and a half, but then I caught a couple of bad breaks—script problems, lawsuits, stars sticking powder in their noses, deals falling apart—and pretty soon I was back in the pack of howling dogs, looking for funding with everyone else. The thing about the business now is that it’s run by MBAs. For them, it’s about stock price and exposure. Market share and risk management. There isn’t an ounce of passion anywhere. You go to a meeting and they talk about four-quadrant demographics and multiple-platform releases. They could just as easily be making lawn mowers . . .”
“You mean you really wouldn’t do another picture if you had everything tied up?” Marcy asked him.
“Of course I would. I’m still stupid.”
She laughed, and Sammy found himself laughing with her. It was a lovely laugh, a laugh that he wanted to hear more of in his life. He was falling more in love with her every day.
A few days after Thanksgiving, Sammy received a note in the mail from Acme. It was brief: TUESDAY, DECEMBER 1, 6:45 A.M., TAHQUITZ CREEK, GREENS FEES FOR THREE.
Biff had said at the car wash that they didn’t want to see him or talk to him again. Now they wanted to play golf? Maybe they were going to renegotiate. Up the price. And what was he going to say? Sorry, not interested? They had stressed that the contract was irrevocable. That if he backed out, they would do something terrible to him. With extreme prejudice.
There went another $375 into the project. Tahquitz Creek had just raised their greens fees to $125. Did they have to play at the crack of fucking dawn? And, of course, there was no way of communicating that you were not able to make it. With these guys, you showed up.
Sammy showed up. Armed with his clubs and a fleece vest for the chilly morning air. When Walt arrived on the first tee at 6:44, he was accompanied by a man Sammy had never met.
“Sammy, I want you to meet my periodontist, Ken Immelman.”
Sammy shook hands with a puffy, sixtyish man with a Tommy Hilfiger windbreaker, yellow slacks, and a grip like a wet flounder.
“You got gum problems, Ken’s your guy. An hour in his chair, and you could handle Dr. Mengele. You got the honors, Sammy. We’re playing tips.”
And that was that. They teed off on the 467-yard first hole, with Walt sharing a cart with his periodontist and Sammy riding alone. This arrangement precluded any conversation beyond the usual golf bullshit at the tee box and on the green. The guy was a seven handicap, and he and Walt were playing Skins at a dollar a hole.
When they got to the tenth hole, with Sammy seventeen over and getting more annoyed by the moment, he announced that he was taking a pee, hoping that Walt would follow him into the men’s room so that they could talk. But the exterminator merely took his driver out of the bag and said, “Make it quick, Sammy. We got a tail wind going for us.”
What the fuck was Sammy doing there, besides filling out a threesome? And where was Biff? The whole thing didn’t make any sense. Meanwhile, Walt and the periodontist were enjoying themselves over what could, at most, be a twenty-dollar payoff. Sammy was hitting the ball all over the place, as usual, and putting like a weightlifter.
On the eighteenth green, the two of them putted out, and Sammy finally shoveled his ball out of a steep, green-side bunker and three-putted for a double. As they took off their hats and shook hands, he said to Walt, “Can I buy you a beer, Walt?”
“Gee, I’d love to, Sammy, but I got to run. Business lunch in town. How’s the patio deck working out?”
“Fine.”
“Glad to hear it.”
Then he turned to Ken Immelman and put his hand out. “Three bucks.”
“If I hadn’t got that side-hill lie on the seventeenth . . .”
“If the queen had balls, she’d be king.”
The periodontist handed Walt three dollars. Sammy stood and watched the two of them walk toward the parking lot until he heard someone yell “Fore!” and he looked back to see a foursome waiting to hit their approach shots.
He trudged to his car, put his clubs in the trunk, and slammed the lid. You could tell the kind of day a man had on the golf course by the way he slammed the trunk of his car. Sammy banged the shit out of the Lexus’s trunk hood. He had stopped scoring at the turn, with fifty-three on his card.
It wasn’t even eleven yet, and already it was hot in his flee
ce vest. He was tired. Worse, he was confused. Not to mention pissed. He had no idea why Walt had summoned him to play golf with his periodontist. It made no sense. Was the guy fucking with his head? Did he want a free round of golf? Or was there some other weird reason that he wanted Sammy to be at Tahquitz Creek between seven and eleven that morning?
Then he suddenly realized what was going down. While they were playing golf, Biff was doing the African. Yes, of course. That was it. This would give Sammy an alibi, should it ever come to that. No trail led to Acme. No breadcrumbs of any sort. Very neat work. These guys were good.
Nonetheless, as he drove down 111 into town, he felt queasy. He wasn’t sure if he was ready to face the crime scene, police cars, reporters, crazed neighbors, a distraught Marcy Gray.
Well, the good news was that he had an air-tight alibi. He had the starter at the golf course who could put him there at 6:35 in the morning. Just to be on the safe side, he decided to stop at Vons and pick up a few things, so that he would get back even later and be seen by more potential witnesses. He needed a few things, anyway. He was out of frozen pizza and his shower drain was running sluggishly.
Sammy parked the Lexus at the Vons on Sierra Madre, got out, picked up a shopping cart. He grabbed a quart of Drano and was staring into the frozen foods freezer, trying to decide between pepperoni and mushroom, when he heard the explosion. Screams were heard. People dove for cover.
Pieces of the Lexus were found a quarter of a mile away.
V
MARCY
After getting the report from Evelyn Duboff that both of her suitors had skeletons in their closets—or worse, recently decomposed corpses—Marcy Gray lapsed into a depression. She had a history of these bouts—nothing major, no suicidal thoughts or heavy-duty pharmaceuticals involved, just your run-of-the-mill depression, treatable with therapy and whatever SSRI the SAG health insurance was currently paying for.
She drove up to LA for an appointment with Janet Costanza, sat on the sun porch of her therapist’s house in Nichols Canyon—a house that Marcy liked to think she had helped pay for—and unloaded.
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