Getting Up With Fleas (Trace 7)

by Warren Murphy

  “That’s right. And I’m in my prime and I’m a star and you’re over the hill and you’re Grandma Puckett. You ought to be happy, Dahlia, that you’ve got any part at all.”

  The woman snapped her head back and I saw she was draining a drink, then she slapped a martini glass down onto the bar.

  “I’m going to fix you, McCue,” she said, her voice softer now, but colder and somehow more threatening. “You’re going to die in this film.”

  “I’m a star, and stars are like cats. We’re allowed to die eight times before we’re box-office poison.” He saw me and said, “What ho. It’s my keeper. Let’s make him welcome.”

  The woman turned around, looked at me for a millisecond, and growled, “Fuck him, Tony. And you too.”

  She stormed past me out of the room. When she was by me, I covered my face with my arms in mock terror and McCue laughed.

  He was wearing faded blue jeans and a white T-shirt that advertised “Free Mustache Rides.”

  He walked behind the bar and said, “Order up. I’m the bartender.”

  “Vodka rocks.”

  He put a few ice cubes in a glass for me and filled it with vodka. For himself, he crammed a glass full of cubes and then poured raw gin on top of it.

  He handed me the glass, came back around, sat on the other stool, and clicked glasses. “To friendship,” he said. “We’re good friends, aren’t we? What’s your name again?”

  “Call me Trace,” I said. “Better friends than that woman who just left.”

  “That woman? You mean you didn’t recognize Dahlia Codwell?”

  “No. Should I?”

  “Starred in a lot of movies.”

  “I guess I missed them,” I said.

  “I made twenty-seven films. You see any of them?”

  “No,” I said. It was true. I never went to see movies.

  “I take it you’re not a film fan.”

  “I only like Bergman and Buñuel,” I said.

  “They make crap,” he said.

  “I know. But if I get conned into going to the movies, I go to theirs and I can fall asleep and snore without bothering anybody because they’re all snoring too. You have to plan ahead. Why were you climbing around on the roof today?”

  McCue looked down at his drink. “This is the first time I ever had to have somebody watch over me during a film,” he said. “It really hurts.”

  He had an interesting voice, I thought to myself. It was absolutely without accent, and when he dropped that line, “It really hurts,” I thought how well he had delivered it. I also thought he was as full of shit as a Christmas goose.

  “Tony, why don’t we clear the air between us?”

  “A wonderful idea.”

  “Save all the histrionics for somebody they impress, but don’t try to con me,” I said. “You know damned well why I’m here. Your producers have taken out a six-million-dollar policy on you ’cause they think you might drown in your shower or something. Your recent history says that maybe they have a point. Now, you may not want me here, and Christ knows, I don’t want to be here, but I’ve got the job to do. We can make it easy on each other if we don’t try to jerk each other around. So why were you on the roof? Why do you dive off balconies or drink booze underwater and all that nonsense you do?”

  “What if I told you that I drink because I am an artist and I suffer for my work. That I resent being forced to work in trivial meaningless projects like this. That in me beats the heart of a Booth, a Kean, an Olivier, and the pain of trivial boredom is more than I choose to live with. What if I told you that?” His voice was eloquent as he spoke his lines, soaring, Jose Ferrer doing Cyrano, Richard Burton as Beckett. “What if I told you that?” he repeated.

  “I’d say you were trying to snow me again,” I said, “and I wish you’d stop.”

  “I can see you’re going to be a tough case,” McCue said. “That was my best shot. It took me seven years in London to do that.”

  “What do you want me to tell you? That it’s wonderful acting? Okay, it’s wonderful acting. But it’s acting. All I want to know is why do you act like an idiot and are you going to act like an idiot while I’m here? Because if you are, I’m going to get a tranquilizer gun and use it on you at night. I wasn’t here two minutes and I found out you were on the goddamn roof, playing freaking Spiderman. I don’t want to have to put up with it. And I don’t want to have to put up with a lot of playacting about it.”

  “All right,” he said. “No more playacting. Why do you drink?”

  “I don’t know why,” I said.

  “Right. Exactly. And I don’t know why I do stupid things. I don’t want to die. I’m having too much fun. But I think I’m deranged. I’m like a werewolf, but I don’t need a full moon or any moon at all. I wander the world at night. The sun sets, I wander. I do dumb things and get myself into trouble. I don’t know why, I do. Why do rock stars take drugs? Because they’ve done everything else, I suppose, and they’re bored. All the things that keep the average man going, wanting to make a living, wanting to get laid, wanting to be able to afford a vacation in Monte Carlo, we don’t have any of that incentive because we can do all those things. So what do we fill our lives with?”

  “Ever try needlepoint?” I said.

  “Yeah. I could do that,” he said. “But what do I do next week when I’m bored with needlepoint? I’m looking for something and I don’t know what it is. So I get myself in trouble. You tell me. What keeps you going?”

  “Clean hands, a pure heart, and the knowledge that this is my work and that if I don’t work, I don’t eat. You asked why I drink too much, and I’ll tell you. I can drink all I want because, when I do, the only person I hurt is me. But you, when you get drunk and try to kill yourself, there are a lot of other people depending on you, and one of the people you’d hurt is my client, the insurance company, and sorry, pal, you’re just not allowed to do that. So no more on the roof, huh?”

  He seemed to think about it as he was sipping his drink. Then he nodded and said, “Okay. If I feel the urge to climb a roof again, I’ll call you first.”

  “Fine. I just don’t want you dead on my time,” I said.

  “Then you’d better keep an eye on everybody else who’s here too,” McCue said.

  “That woman’s not the only one who wants to kill you?” I said.

  “No. All of them do.”

  “Why?”

  “That calls for another drink,” he said. He tossed out all his ice cubes and loaded his glass up with fresh ones before splashing gin over the top of it. He refilled my glass too but let me keep the old ice cubes.

  “Let’s see,” he said. “Dahlia’s not the only one who hates me. By the way, it’s not just the role she’s got. She made a pass at me once and I told her I wouldn’t screw her with Rent-A-Dick. Women have a way of not forgetting things like that.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “They take sex so seriously.”

  “So the screenwriter, Hard-on. He hates me.”

  “Hard-on?” I said.

  “Arden Harden. He hates all actors because we make more money than he does. And also because we’re tall. The producers hate me because I wouldn’t give them a break on my fee for this film. They wanted to give me extra points out of profit, but I wouldn’t do it because I told them that this film is going to be crap and there won’t be any profits and that even if there were, they’d find a way to steal them. They hate me. And then we’ve got the director.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Roddy Quine, this terrible old British homo who hardly knows what end of the camera to look through. He hates me ever since I told Variety that he was the worst director in film history.”

  “If he’s so bad, why’d they hire him?” I asked.

  “He was the best Englishman they could get for the money they were paying,” he said. “Hold on, maybe there’s somebody here who doesn’t hate me.”

  “A small but significant minority,” I said.

  �
��Tami Fluff. She used to hate me because I got her axed from my last picture. But she might not hate me anymore because she’s costarring in this one with me and I didn’t do anything to stop it.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Tami Fluff? Tami Fluff?”

  “That’s her name. You never heard of her?”

  “No, praise God,” I said. “Where are all these people anyway? Are they all here?”

  “I think so. They’re in their rooms freshening up. That means they’re sticking stuff in their noses probably. Hollywood has given new meaning to the phrase ‘powder room.’ Oh, there’s somebody else here.”

  “Yeah?”

  “My shrink,” he said. “That’s where I stayed last night when I left you. She’s in her room working on her book. Travels with Tony. Don’t tell her that I know about it, though. She thinks it’s a secret.”

  He got up to make himself yet another drink, and I said, “That’s pretty shabby. I didn’t think that shrinks shrank and told.”

  “Aaaah, who cares? She figures it’ll make her shrink to the stars. That’s why she hangs out with me. She wants to be famous and be on the Phil Donahue Show so her mother in Westchester County will like her.”

  “You take being used pretty evenly,” I said.

  “I use her too,” he said. “Better living through chemistry. Trace, I take pills to get up and I take pills to go to bed. I take pills to keep my heart moving. She’s a doctor. She travels around with me and writes my prescriptions. It saves me from having to break into drugstores in strange towns.”

  He did the ritual with the ice and gin again, then sat back down and said, “You’ll meet them all for dinner anyway. The old guy at the gate said seven o’clock we eat. So. Am I your first Hollywood star?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you like me so far?”

  “I like you fine as long as you don’t go climbing the roof anymore,” I said. “Stick to arm-wrestling.”

  “That’s good enough. Who knows? Maybe we’ll get along.”

  “Maybe,” I said. But I doubted it. I had the feeling that Tony McCue was going to turn out to be nothing but trouble. For one thing, he was just too open with a total stranger. It’s been my experience that people who seem to be willing to tell you anything on first meeting are usually people who are trying to dictate the terms of the conversation. Sure. They’ll tell you anything, just so long as it’s about subjects of their choosing. Don’t ask them about things they don’t bring up first.

  I didn’t know. Maybe McCue would turn out to be the exception. I hoped so. It was going to be hard enough to nursemaid this lunatic without him playing mind games on me.

  7

  As often happens in the lives of troubled men with artistic souls, we stayed in the bar and never quite did get to our rooms to change for dinner.

  At a few minutes to seven, Dahlia Codwell entered the room, wearing a summery white dress, walked to the bar where McCue and I were sitting, and without even acknowledging our presence, made a pitcher of martinis and carried it off to one of the dining tables.

  A minute or so later, Clyde Snapp came in wheeling a serving cart. From it, he took a lot of chafing dishes filled with food and set them up on one of the long banquet tables near the bar. He left without a word to anyone.

  McCue was jabbering about the impossibilities of making movies in Mexico—“their day consists of showing up late, taking a siesta, then going home early”—when I noticed him looking past me toward the door and I turned to see a tall woman with hair the color of polished pennies walking toward us, smiling.

  Tami Fluff, I thought. My first taste of Hollywood. She was terrific. She wore a leg-waving bright-yellow miniskirt and a halter top of matching material that showed off a wonderful trim stomach and only partially hid an equally wonderful full bustline. She had on spiked yellow high heels, the only kind of high-heel shoe I don’t like on women, because they had straps around the ankles and I always figure if a woman’s got good ankles, why hide them under straps? But on balance, I wouldn’t fight with her over any of the ensemble. The only thing wrong with it was that it seemed designed for a precocious Lolita of a sixteen-year-old, and this woman had to be in her late twenties. Still, who said that actresses had to have taste?

  The woman pushed by me without a glance and tossed herself into McCue’s arms. He hugged her with his left arm and snaked his right hand down to squeeze one of her buttocks. I figured that, in Hollywood, this had replaced “Love you, baby” as a greeting.

  Then his left hand followed suit. This, I figured, must be a real tight Hollywood friendship if it called for the full two-sided heinie squeeze. Then McCue disengaged and held her at arm’s length with his hands on her upper arms, just looking at her, and I knew it wasn’t too tight a relationship after all, because you don’t hold people at arm’s length like that unless they’re people you want to keep at arm’s length. This is a fact.

  Finally McCue managed to release the woman and said, “There’s somebody I want you to meet.”

  She turned to me then and smiled, a lot of perfect teeth in a perfect mouth. Every time I’ve met actresses in real life, I’m always impressed by how imperfect they are. People say that the camera is cruelly honest, but the fact is that the makeup artist is unfailingly kind. This woman, though, didn’t need the makeup artist. She was beautiful, all by herself, without help, and I made a mental note to take Chico to the next Tami Fluff movie we saw advertised.

  “This is my new friend, Trace,” McCue said to the woman. “Trace, this is Doctor Death.”

  “Pleased to meet you. Should I call you Doctor or do you prefer Death?”

  “Ignore him,” she said. She smiled and shook my hand, strong, dry, pleasant. “My name is Ramona. Ramona Dedley.”

  The shrink. This wasn’t Tami Fluff at all. This was the psychiatrist who traveled with McCue.

  “Is Trace your last name or first name?” she asked.

  “Neither. I’m Devlin Tracy. Trace is for friends.”

  “Then it’s Trace,” she said.

  “Trace is here to be my drinking buddy,” McCue said as he walked around the bar and poured a glass of sherry straight up for the woman.

  “For you, drinking under the buddy system is a good idea. Like scuba diving,” she said.

  “One should never drink alone,” McCue said. “Trace is the one who got me drunk last night and made me disgusting.” He then took the opportunity to make both of us fresh drinks.

  Ramona and I clinked glasses and sipped.

  “Doctor Death’s an alchemist,” McCue said.

  “I thought you were a psychiatrist,” I said.

  McCue answered before she could. “The same thing,” he said. “There’s no science to what Ramona does. It’s all nonsense. You ever read those stories about all the shrinks they get to come to a parole hearing to swear some guy is sane, and then they let him go and, twenty minutes later, he cannibalizes some keypunch operator eating a tuna-fish sandwich in the park? Those are shrinks. A bizarre superstition.”

  “Ignore him,” Ramona said. “He will always be a peasant with a peasant’s mind.”

  “Have her explain to you the lunacy at the last meeting of the headshrinks,” McCue told me.

  “I don’t know what he’s talking about,” Ramona Dedley said to me.

  “This is how deeply they hold their scientific principles,” he said. “A couple of years ago they decided that being a homosexual wasn’t really an aberration. It was just an alternate life-style, picked by choice. You know why? Because they were picketed by some gay-rights shrinks. That was then. Now their new achievement is deciding masochism doesn’t really exist.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “Because the feminists forced them to. According to them, if the headshrinks say that there’s a sickness called masochism, then men who beat up on women can always claim that the women wanted them to beat up on them because they were masochist sickoes. You see what I’m getting at, Trace?
These people change their scientific views every time a political breeze blows, and what the hell kind of scientific views are those? Mark my words. In the twenty-first century, people are going to realize that psychiatry was no more scientific than trying to make gold out of lead. They’re freaking alchemists.”

  I was watching Ramona while McCue was talking. She seemed to have heard it all before, because she was just listening with a bemused smile. That’s one of the things people put up with who hang out with drunks; they have heard it all before because drunks always repeat themselves.

  Or have I already said that?

  As McCue came out from behind the bar, Ramona asked, “What actually do you do besides drinking with Tony?”

  “I’m from the insurance company,” I said. “We’ve got a policy on him and I just came up to look things over.”

  “Trace is going to make sure you don’t kill me,” McCue told her. “He’s here to guarantee that you don’t strap me to some couch and stuff my head with psychobabble until it bursts. ‘Hollywood star Tony McCue died yesterday, his head exploded after being stuffed with bullshit by his psychiatrist, Doctor Death.’”

  She snapped around. “All right, Tony. That’s enough for a while. I don’t like being called Doctor Death.” She turned back to me. “Good luck in trying to keep him alive. I don’t envy you your job.” She walked away toward the entrance to the dining room.

  McCue was leaning backward, his elbows reached out behind him on the bar, looking out over the dining room, which was still empty save for Dahlia Codwell, sitting at a table, sipping martinis from the pitcher she had made.

  “Beautiful woman,” I said about Ramona. “But you have truly pissed her off.”

  “Not really,” he said.

  “You could have fooled me,” I said.

  “That’s because you’re not an actor. You’re not used to looking at how people really move,” he said. “Did you see when she walked out? Straight-up walk, hip-swishing, very elegant. If she were really angry at me, she would have marched out leaning forward from the waist. No, she wasn’t mad. She just had to tap a kidney and she wanted to make an interesting exit. It comes from hanging around with me too long.”