L.A. Success

by Lonnie Raines

  Spieldburt took off running but got his foot caught on a tree root that had grown up from under the sidewalk and went sprawling down on the grass. He immediately started pushing himself up with his hands, so I jumped on him like a luchador, wrapping my arms around his legs. He hit the ground again and started thrashing to break free of me, but I was clamped on like a pit bull. He picked up the envelope, tossed it a few feet forward, and then managed to twist around so that he could see me. He reared back and clocked me on the top of the head with his fist and then grimaced in pain.

  “Ah! I think you broke my hand! Let go of me!” he yelled, flopping around like a fish in a canoe. But still I held on.

  Then he reached down with both hands to cover my mouth and pinch my nose. I wasted a good twenty seconds of airlessness having no idea what to do. The best thing I could think of was to try to bite his hand, but I only ended up licking his salty palm. Then I started seeing lots of quick-moving paisleys everywhere, and things began to go blurry and dark. I had to let go of him and knock his hands off me or else I would have passed out.

  He sprang up to his feet. I gasped in the thick L.A. air and tried to prop myself up. Everything was swimming around me. I saw Spieldburt bend over to pick up the envelope and the pair of sunglasses that had fallen off his face during the tussle. I leaped forward, snatching the envelope out of his hand, but I landed on my side in the grass right next to him.

  Then the Sharkburt in him came out. He gave me several kicks to the stomach. I’d always thought this would hurt terribly, and for the most part, I had been right. But the most annoying thing about getting kicked in the stomach is that you can’t breathe. The pain actually goes a little numb after the first few kicks.

  I rolled over on top of the envelope. Spieldburt tried to push me off of it, and even though I had started thinking of myself as a thinner guy, I was apparently still too fat to be moved by an enraged movie director.

  My face was straight down in the grass, so I couldn’t see much. He stopped pushing me, but I didn’t want to look up for fear that he’d go after my nose and mouth again. Then I felt him grab my feet and tug. This also was unsuccessful. My god, how fat had I been before I stopped drinking so much? He let me go and my legs flopped in the grass. Then there was a pause. I was afraid to look up, but I was so freaked out by the calm that I had to know what he was preparing to do. I crooked my neck around but didn’t see him anywhere. Then I heard the jingling of keys behind me. I sat up, pressing the envelope tightly against my chest. I turned around to see that Spieldburt had picked up my keys from in front of the door. He hit the unlock button on the Mercedes’ key fob, causing the car lights to flash. I didn’t like where this was going. He had a sinister look in his eyes as he circled around me and headed toward the car.

  I had trouble catching my breath, so it took me a while to get to my feet. By the time I had staggered over to the driveway, Spieldburt was in the Mercedes and had already started the motor. I saw the car move slightly when he put it in gear.

  “What are you going to do, steal my car?”

  “No. I’m going to ram this car into your other cars, and then I’m going to get out, go into your house and break some shit. All you wanted was a miserable five grand for what you’ve got in that envelope. I’m going to make you lose a hell of a lot more if you don’t give it to me now for nothing. I’ve reached my limit with people like you. I refuse to give you a single dollar!”

  “But you asked for it!”

  “It’s all in the past, and that’s where it’s going to stay. Now toss it over!”

  I could tell by the psychotic look in his eyes that he really was willing to do what he had said. It made no sense to me. Last time I saw him, he laughed at my fee like it was nothing. Now, he was willing to destroy property to get my third act. One thing was sure: I wasn’t going to give it to him until I found out why.

  “Fine. You win. Take it. Just leave me alone,” I said, holding out the envelope.

  “Wise choice,” he said. He took a set of keys out of his pocket and hit the unlock button on the fob. The lights of a BMW parked across the street flashed. “Put the envelope in the front seat. No funny business, or the demolition derby begins.”

  I backed away slowly and then turned and walked over to the BMW. I opened the driver’s side door and tossed in the manila envelope that I was supposed to give to Mrs. Reyes. Dennis would just have to replace whatever was inside it and deliver it himself when he got back. A delay of a couple of days couldn’t possibly matter that much.

  I walked back over to the driveway. Spieldburt stepped out of the Mercedes but didn’t stop the engine. He reached into the car, shifted it into neutral, and then gave a little push on the door frame. The car started rolling down the driveway. He took off toward his BMW. I ran over behind the car and tried to stop it, but my feet just slid backwards on the pavement. I stepped to the side, jumped in the car and put my foot on the brake. A loud honk went off behind me, and the culprit, a teenager in a car he couldn’t possibly have paid for himself, flipped me off as he changed lanes to avoid smashing into me.

  6

  Spieldburt was gone. He didn’t have what he had come for, but now I was thinking that it didn’t really matter. It was clear that he had lost his mind, so there was no way I was going to get the money he owed me anyway. All I wanted to do at this point was finish straightening up the house and get out of there before Spieldburt realized he had the wrong envelope and came back. I felt a little guilty that I’d be leaving a nasty situation for Dennis, but to each his own shit, as they say.

  I was tired and aching all over. Now that the adrenaline was fading away, I could feel every kick, every knock, and every strained muscle. And all of a sudden I was thirstier than I had ever been.

  Wine came to mind, but not because that was what I wanted to drink. When I thought of it, there was this second odor that surged forward in my memory, one that reminded me of having a plastic bottle in my hand. Gatorade—that was what I needed. My body was hinting that it wanted me to replace all the nutrients that I’d had beaten out of me.

  I went inside the house to the kitchen. I was about to open the fridge to see if Dennis had left any Gatorade when I saw that another pane of glass had been smashed out of the kitchen door, which was now standing ajar. I couldn’t remember when I had been in the kitchen the last time. Had someone broken in yesterday when we were back at my place? If so, they must have been polite burglars, because nothing looked messed up. Did it happen this morning after I took my dad back to my place? Or during my fight with Spieldburt?

  I was going to have to check all the rooms to see if anything had been stolen, but first I definitely needed something cold to drink. I opened the fridge. What I saw caused me to travel back through my memories and replace the flawed ones I had formed based on an incomprehensible act of drunken self-deception with real ones, in which my actions now seemed almost schizophrenic. There, on the shelves of Dennis’ fridge, were my dad’s chocolate sculptures. He had put them in from the top to the bottom shelf in the order he had sculpted them. There were three of them per shelf, three shelves in all. They were all of the same man. Starting from the most recent ones at the bottom, I saw sculptures of the man peeking into the courtyard, presumably pressing his face against a window, and hiding behind a shrub. On the middle shelf he was opening the gate of the backyard fence, reaching through a broken window pane to unlock the kitchen door, and climbing over the backyard fence. And on the top shelf he was trying to pick the lock of the front door, sitting in his car, and finally, in the very first sculpture my dad had done, he was talking to me in the courtyard.

  I had only talked with two people in the courtyard, not counting my dad or Dennis. One was Tommy. The other was Spieldburt, or so I had believed. The man in the sculptures was not Spieldburt, and it certainly wasn’t Tommy. The sculptures were of the Talking Man, or, more precisely, the man I had talked to when I had first started taking care of Dennis’ house, the man who had c
alled himself Mr. Stevens.

  The guy, in fact, looked nothing like Spieldburt. He had a thin nose and sunken cheeks. If my dad had got the proportions right, he was a lot taller than me. Then I noticed a detail that made me remember something: in one of the sculptures, he was wearing pants that looked like long shorts. They went down to right above his calves. I had talked with this man a second time, in Santa Monica. It was the guy who had called the big poodle by his real name. I couldn’t believe it. I had been followed this whole time.

  I pulled my head out of the fridge and shut the door. As I turned to grab a glass out of the cabinet, I saw the real Talking Man standing at the entrance to the kitchen. I felt like I had taken a lightning bolt to the heart. With my blood racing, I turned and bolted toward the kitchen door, which, because it was still ajar, greeted my head with a sonorous thwack that rang throughout my body as if I had been a church bell and the door a hammer. Everything went black.

  7

  I don’t know how long I was out. When I finally regained consciousness, I found myself lying on the kitchen floor surrounded by broken glass. As soon as I began to lift myself up, the Talking Man appeared next to me.

  “Don’t move,” he said.

  “What are you going to do to me if I do, kill me? What do you want anyway?” I asked with much difficulty, my head alternating between throbbing and stabbing.

  “You, Lonnie Herisson, have been standing between me and my happiness.”

  “How’s that? I don’t even know you.”

  “No, but you’ve been preventing me from getting something I need, and that’s going to come to an end today.”

  “I don’t know what you want!”

  “Right, of course you don’t. Two men have been guarding this house twenty-four hours a day for no reason at all,” he said. “I know why you were hired so don’t play stupid with me.”

  “You can beat me all you want, but I don’t know what you’re talking about—wait a minute, I didn’t mean that. Don’t beat me all you want.”

  “I’m not the violent one in this situation. I’m a business man, and all I want is to be left alone. Here, let me help you up, but slowly. We should get you to the hospital.”

  “Oh god no, not there. They’ll take every cent I have. Just help me over to the couch.” I felt a little better knowing that he was more worried about protecting my health than stomping it out, but I was sure that would change if he didn’t get whatever it was he wanted.

  He held out a hand and lifted me to my feet, and then stopped me as well as he could from weeble-wobbling all over the place. We made it to the couch, and I lowered myself onto it like a spaceship landing on a strange planet.

  “I imagine you’re being paid quite well for this, so I won’t even try to low-ball you. You give me those pictures, and I’ll give you more money than you’ve seen in years.”

  “What pictures?”

  “Damn it! There’s no more reason to lie about anything! I know what you’re protecting here, and you know which pictures I want! The pictures of me and my lover!” he yelled, his hands shaking as if he wanted to wrap them around someone’s neck. He got them under control and regained his composure. “The pictures you’re supposed to give to my wife.”

  “So, you’re Ignacio? Ignacio…Reyes?”

  “Yes.”

  “The pictures aren’t here anymore.”

  “I know they aren’t here. I searched everywhere while you were taking your little nap on the kitchen floor. I found and erased the files on his hard drive, but I know he printed hard copies. I imagine once you told Dennis that Raymond was still living in my West-Hollywood apartment, he had you take them someplace safer.”

  “Actually, he asked me to give them to your wife. I was going to do it this afternoon. But I never said anything about this Raymond guy. I told him I ran into a little girl named Amanda.”

  “Raymond’s daughter,” he said. I must have had a confused look on my face, because then he said “from his marriage, when he was still in the closet.”

  “So you never broke up with this guy? No wonder Dennis is angry. Why’d you go and help him become gay if you never intended to leave the other guy?”

  “Ha! I didn’t help Dennis do anything. He’s been putting me through hell ever since I brought that poodle to the animal shelter. I had to get rid of Manolete because he bit Amanda, but I was worried they would put him down if no one adopted him. Dennis assured me that someone would take him since he was just a puppy. I didn’t think anything of giving my personal information to Dennis because he worked at the shelter and seemed nice enough. He said he’d call me if there was a problem.”

  “Why was Dennis pretending to work at the shelter? Was he investigating something?”

  “What do you mean? That was his job. Well, he volunteered. He’s never worked a real job as far as I know. He’s a trust-fund baby.”

  “He’s not a private investigator? But he’s got all that equipment,” I said.

  “He bought all of that to follow me around. He called to tell me he had adopted Manolete himself, and then he kept calling every couple of days to tell me how he was doing. At first I thought he was just weird, but then I would spot him following me, or I’d see him parked on my street. He realized I was cheating on my wife and started blackmailing me. I thought he wanted money, but what he wanted was to be me. The guy is absolutely nuts. He made me promise to leave Raymond or else he was going to tell my wife everything.”

  “He told me you guys were together.”

  “We were, sort of,” he said.

  “But that’s horrible! You were gay-doing a guy you hated?”

  “Oh no. I told him he was too fat to have sex with. That kind of backfired because he lost a billion pounds in only three months. I think he went on an all-liquid diet. Then when he got pretty thin, I told him his clothes were so ridiculous that I couldn’t take him seriously as a lover. That one worked really well. He started experimenting with new styles, and then he really did look like an ass and he knew it, so he didn’t feel confident enough to stand up to me. We were supposed to have sex for the first time in Ibiza, which is why I’ve stayed away from there. My plan was to get him out of this place and then find all traces of those pictures and destroy them. Now that Dennis is probably on his way back, I’ve got to act fast. It looks like you’ve found yourself in the right place at the right time.”

  “So how much money are we talking about?” I asked, hoping that Spieldburt hadn’t already chucked the photos out the window of his car.

  “Fifty grand, in cash.” Normally, I wouldn’t have believed someone was willing to pay so much, but I knew he was going to be screwed if those photos got back to his wife, and from what Dennis had told me, this guy was loaded.

  “Double that and we’ve got a deal,” I said. He didn’t even flinch.

  “Fine. Where are they?”

  “They aren’t here. I’ll go and get them. It might take a while, but you’ve got nothing to worry about. Dennis doesn’t know where they are. He’s not getting back until Sunday, just in case you were wondering.”

  “That will give me enough time to take care of this and to get ready for him. He’s going to go nuts once he finds out he’s been had,” he said with a worried look on his face.

  He gave me his phone number and took off.

  8

  After I was able to stand again I got out of there. I didn’t bother cleaning up the broken glass, because once Dennis found out I had made a deal with Ignacio, he wasn’t going to give me the last check for the house sitting anyway.

  I returned the carpet cleaner but had to have one of the pimply faced bagboys carry it in. It was embarrassing standing there in front of everyone while a kid half my size labored to get the thing out of the trunk. While I was in the store, I picked up a slew of pain killers and ice packs, and then went home to rest up.

  Ballsack greeted me at the door. He looked all antsy, like he needed to go outside. If my dad had been in the li
ving room, I’d have made him do it, but he wasn’t there. I saw that the door to my bedroom was shut, so I figured he was sleeping. I grabbed the leash and took a walk around the neighborhood, each squirrel running by resulting in stabbing pain for me as the crazy dog tugged to go after it. What really pissed me off was that I knew the dog was dying to go to the bathroom, but he kept walking like he was looking for the ultimate spot to ruin. Some guy could make a fortune if he’d invent a spray that imitated big, angry-dog urine, so that owners could just spray a few squirts on their lawns and have Fido go crazy trying to mark his territory all over again. I found myself trying to think like the big poodle and find spots that would be better than others. I would get all excited when he started sniffing, and then desperately annoyed when whatever doggy criteria he had was too exclusive for the spot I had chosen. Who’d have thought finding a place to take a leak could be such an emotional roller coaster?

  When we finally got back, I sat down on the couch with a big glass of water and took a stomach full of pills. Then I strategically arranged the ice packs, the last one going on top of my head.

  With the pain finally becoming numb, I was able to think over everything that had happened that day. There was something that didn’t make sense to me. If I hadn’t ever talked to Spieldburt in the first place, why had he wanted more of my crappy screenplay? The guy had been willing to meet me in public and had almost been ready to pay me money—before he flipped out and kicked my ass. What did he think I knew?

  Unfortunately, that meant I now had two reasons to call Grant. I needed those photos back, and I needed to know exactly how much leverage I was going to have to get them. I suppose this also meant I was going to have to part ways with my new phone. Screw it; I hated talking on the phone anyway. I dialed my former number and prepared to grovel.