Mr Toppit

by Charles Elton

  “You didn’t stay long,” she said grumpily. “Why you going?”

  “I’ve got to get back to my family.”

  She humphed. “Family won’t do you much good.”

  I laughed. “Probably not. I blotted my copybook here.”

  She looked confused. “You what?”

  “I’ve offended Laurie.”

  “What? You stole all her potato chips?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I like you,” she said.

  “I like you, too.”

  She looked away and made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “Liking people’s not going to get you anywhere.”

  Just then, I heard Travis shouting for me: “Hey, Luke! Get up here! Where are you?”

  I turned round and saw him gesturing wildly by the palm trees at the top of the bank. When I turned back, Alma had gone inside and the screen door was swinging on its hinges.

  When I got to him Travis was breathless with excitement. “What is it?” I said.

  “You’ve got to see this! It’s like a surprise. Come on!”

  He put his arm round my shoulder and practically dragged me back to the house. We went through and out to the front. In the driveway, Stan was opening the rear door of his big black BMW. Out of it, her eyes squinting in the bright sunlight, came Rachel.

  “Oh, this is so fabulous,” she said. “I’ve been itching to call you but Laurie made me promise not to say anything so it would be a big surprise for you. She’s flown me over to be on her show! First class! Free champagne all the way! And now you’re about to go home. I can’t bear it.”

  “I don’t like champagne too much,” Travis said. “It gives me gas.”

  Luke

  It’s hard to come up with the right word to describe the things that took place in the weeks after I left LA and Rachel arrived there. The family shorthand we used to refer to it afterwards—not that we did refer to it much afterwards—was to talk about “the stuff” that happened in LA even though we knew that calling it “stuff” was to underplay it in a pretty major way. Better, I suppose—more self-protective, anyway—to imply we could treat it lightly, to pretend that the fallout of those weeks might be finite. I wasn’t there, but over the years I pieced it together from what Rachel—never the most reliable source—said, and from what Graham Carter told me, and I’ve guessed some, not hard with the personalities involved.

  Like the bomb that Laurie’s father either did or didn’t help build in Los Alamos, certain events needed to take place for the required explosion to happen. In the case of the bomb, two subcritical masses of fissionable material would have to come together to form a supercritical mass. On top of that, they have to come together in a precise manner and at high speed. That’s what I learned in physics, anyway.

  In the case of Laurie, there were two simultaneous but unrelated news stories—I think even hardened conspiracy theorists would find collusion between the National Enquirer and the LA Times unlikely—that appeared just after I left and Rachel had got there. The first one was in the Enquirer: the front cover had a huge picture of Laurie with a giant headline, “Laurie Gay Scandal,” and underneath “This Woman’s Shocking Charge,” with a little inset photo of a dumpy middle-aged woman in a nurse’s uniform.

  The piece began, “Laurie Clow has become tangled in a messy gay scandal triggered by shocking allegations that she plied her vacation companion, Marge Clancy, 54, a care worker from Laurie’s hometown of Modesto, Calif., with alcohol and then forced her into sordid sexual acts on the exclusive Caribbean island of St. Barts.” Marge Clancy was described as an “angel” by her patients, and much was made of her good works with terminal-cancer sufferers, as if that somehow proved she must be the innocent party. Coworkers called them “thick as thieves,” unnamed friends had noticed “something odd” about their relationship. Marge Clancy, who had thought they were “just friends,” felt “betrayed by Laurie’s sordid actions.”

  But there was more: Laurie had recently been “linked with Dutch care worker, Erica Hauer, 43, employed by the star to tend to her mother, Alma Clow, 84, an Alzheimer’s sufferer,” and there was a blurry photograph of Erica playing tennis. Unnamed staff “in her spacious Beverly Hills mansion” were quoted as saying that Laurie and Erica were “constantly together” and that Erica seemed “to rule the household.” What they clearly considered the most damning piece of evidence was this: Erica’s “prized pedigree Persian cats, Marty and BJ, are named after lesbian tennis legends Martina Navratilova and Billie-Jean King.” There was a coda: the magazine intimated that Laurie’s championing of the “best-selling Hayseed books, with their celebration of family values” was some kind of smokescreen to mask her “unconventional lifestyle.”

  I imagined the house to be like an ants’ nest that had been disturbed—suddenly they were swarming all over the place, particularly at the Friday program meeting. I should think the driveway was jammed with cars that day, with extra PR people drafted in to sort out the crisis.

  They tried to spin the story in the most positive way possible: nobody believed anything in the National Enquirer anyway—the story might just as well have been “Chat Show Star Abducted By Flying Saucer.” Whether the story was true or not, there was nothing illegal about being gay. The show tended to skew towards a more liberal demographic, it attracted a sizeable gay audience, and so on.

  In the end, they came up with something for Laurie to say on the show. She did a piece to camera right at the end, like the one she’d done about her father on the Los Alamos show: lights dimmed, one to one, direct but intimate. “I’m as interested in gossip as the next person. But I didn’t realize I’d be the next person. If I were gay, you could rely on me not to be quiet about it. I’d be so proud I’d be shouting it—proud of the battles gay people have fought in this country, proud of the fight to push through changes in legislation, the fight for the dignity of expressing your sexuality with no fear. But sometimes you realize that the upward climb still has a way to go. Magazine covers are a great attention-grabber. Why waste one on some untrue story that they think is ‘scandalous’? You want a scandalous cover story? I’ll give you one: health care in this country. You want sleazy? The treatment of immigrant labor in this country. You want sordid? This government’s arms program. You want downright disgusting? The homophobia that still exists all over this country.” Et cetera, et cetera.

  Back at the house, Laurie’s liberal credentials were not enough to stop her doing a cull of staff. Somebody inside must have leaked the Erica bit of the story and taken that blurry photograph of her playing tennis. Consuela and Lupe, Jesus and Ronnie were exonerated because it was felt they didn’t speak enough English to be able to leak a story. Anyway, I think even Laurie would have balked at sacking Mexican labor.

  The general consensus was that the leaker was probably Angie, the cat person. Being English didn’t quite count as immigrant labor, and Erica had never liked her much. She thought that Angie skimped on the arduous process of combing out the cats’ long hair and left too many knots. The evidence against her was circumstantial but damning: she knew the cats’ full names, she had been seen with a camera at the house the day she asked Lupe to take a picture of her and me together, and she needed the money the magazine was presumed to have paid—there was no better definition of “desperate” than an unknown English actress trying to get work in LA with no green card.

  They must have slept easier once they thought they had contained the National Enquirer story but, like the second bomb on Nagasaki a few days after Hiroshima, there was more to come. The story wasn’t a big one in the LA Times, only second page, small picture, but it hit them where it really hurt because it was about the show.

  The Paul Schiller who had been calling Laurie after he had seen the Los Alamos show had obviously got sick of never being put through to her and had contacted the Times. In a previous life he had been Paully, the little boy who had played with Laurie, the son of “the Jews next door,”
and what he told them was essentially what Alma had told me: far from being a fellow traveler who had had security problems in Los Alamos because of his political beliefs, Laurie’s father had been kicked out for stealing money.

  The lucky thing for Laurie was that it had all happened a long time ago and was so small-scale compared to everything else going on in Los Alamos that the records of her father’s life there appeared to have been destroyed, if they had ever existed. After Los Alamos, the trail was cold. Who knows what had happened to him? He might have changed his name and been run over by a concrete truck. In the absence of any paper trail it was essentially Paul Schiller’s word against Laurie’s.

  At the several crisis meetings the production team had, they went through the various denial scenarios that might play. According to Erica, who told Graham later, it was she who came up with the Alma defense. On Laurie’s part, it required a certain amount of lateral thinking to regard her mother as any kind of trump card but it was all they had.

  The first pass at how they would play the Alma card was that she and Laurie should appear at a press conference to deny Paul Schiller’s story. Old person, wheelchair, maybe a few tears, how could it not work? Alma had been an adult when the Clows left Los Alamos; Paul Schiller, like Laurie, had been five or six. How accurate could his memory be?

  There were two problems with this, one of which only Laurie knew about: Alma had simply turned her face to the wall and refused point-blank to discuss her father. The other, pointed out by a junior PR assistant as they were practically fixing the time and location of the press conference, was that either Alma had Alzheimer’s or she didn’t. The Alzheimer’s show had aired six months before and it was still fresh in everyone’s mind, particularly Laurie’s “personal” ending with the mute Alma being wheeled on stage. If Alma was produced, like a rabbit out of a hat, articulate enough to corroborate Laurie’s story, it would cast doubt on the validity of the earlier show and might make people think Laurie had no qualms about using her mother and father in ways that came perilously close to dishonest to make her show more sensational. The girl didn’t put it that bluntly, but everyone knew what she meant and the press conference was canned.

  The TV news picked up the Times story and it flowed into other newspapers, not headline stuff but enough to be very uncomfortable indeed. It was a difficult one to handle and, I imagine, brought forth even more ants to scurry around at crisis meetings. Stories about people’s private lives were one thing, but this entered the arena of broadcasting standards and ethics: the implication of the story was that Laurie had lied about her father on a national television show that traveled on the integrity ticket.

  The strand in the story I’ve left out, in order to keep the Laurie side of the narrative relatively clear, is Rachel. Now she has to be factored into the mix. All the events I’ve described happened in the week after she arrived in Los Angeles and the atmosphere must have been critically different to when I was there. While I didn’t see much of Laurie because of her show schedule, we often ate together in the evenings and sometimes went places on weekends until it all went wrong. While the crisis—at that point, anyway—had nothing to do with Rachel, I know that she couldn’t be in a house, let alone a room, without being affected by the flow of ions. It was not in her personality to be detached, simply to watch. That was me. There was panic everywhere, and the people who would, under any other circumstances, have made a great deal of fuss over Rachel had their minds on other things. That didn’t play to Rachel’s strengths.

  The show Rachel was going to be on was scheduled for the week after she arrived. Not a high priority for the program team: they were used to doing a catch-up Hayseed show a couple of times a year—it was like Laurie’s signature tune—and this time they had the footage that had been shot in England so they had only half the slot to fill. Rachel spent most of a day with the researchers, going over the questions they had prepared for Laurie to ask her, then saw the costume and makeup people, who worked out what she would wear and how they would do her hair. That was it. The rest of the time was hers.

  Although a stranger wouldn’t necessarily have known it, Rachel had been going through her own kind of crisis—that was obvious from the night I’d spent with her and Claude before flying to Los Angeles—and in a crisis Rachel had a way of drawing in everyone around her. She had to be right at the center, to elbow the crowd out of the way to get there. Because of what was happening she wasn’t going to get to the center of Laurie’s world so she had to look elsewhere—and elsewhere, in this context, was Travis.

  He was kind to me and he liked me, but I wasn’t exotic like she was: in fact, because he knew the books I was probably something of a disappointment to him. But Rachel: with her cut-glass accent and charmingly grand manner must have been fascinating for him. Anyway, she was a girl. Though she was naturally inquisitive, I don’t suppose he really held the same kind of fascination for her, but she was always good at working with what she had, with the materials at hand.

  How much Merry was around I don’t know, but she must have been there for some of it because she was certainly implicated in the fallout, certainly apportioned some of the blame. I know that she and Rachel would not have made a great combination. I don’t suppose there was too much skinny-dipping for the three of them at Paradise Cove.

  Although, in our own way, Rachel and I were close, we were very different characters, and nothing shows up that difference more than the one crucial fact of what happened in LA: she got to meet Wade, and I have no idea how she managed it. I was mildly intrigued by Merry and Travis’s stories about him, but I didn’t care one way or the other about him, and given their resistance to producing him, I would have had to find a compelling reason to persuade them to do so.

  Now, if Rachel knew that he was rather more than someone who was just giving Merry lessons in chakra healing, I know what her reason might have been. For Rachel, meeting a drug dealer with healing powers would have been like a double jackpot, but my guess is that she knew none of it at that point. After all, the revelations about Wade had come piecemeal to me over the six weeks I was there. She had been there only a matter of days before he came into play.

  The three or four days before the Hayseed show was scheduled to be shot were Laurie’s firestorm. That was when the second story—the LA Times one—was published, so her concentration on what Rachel was up to must have been nonexistent. It was then that Rachel—somehow—got included in a trip to see Wade.

  I know Rachel. During that meeting, something must have passed between her and Wade, a signal, some Freemasons’ handshake, some acknowledgment of something shared: a secret deal that, from now on, was going to exclude Travis and Merry. Rachel had a credit card and a driving license, and at some point after that first meeting she rented a car. I know this because there was endless hassle from Hertz later on, which we had to sort out when the car was found, weeks later, abandoned in the San Fernando Valley with the windows smashed and the tires stolen. With the comings and goings around the house, nobody would have noticed, or cared, about another car in the driveway. Now Rachel had no encumbrances. She was free.

  Here it gets murky. I imagine that Rachel was never around much and nobody, except Travis, noticed. But he wasn’t her keeper and, anyway, there was no reason for him to think that anything untoward was going on. Did anyone notice her bed hadn’t been slept in? Maybe Consuela and Lupe did but they didn’t speak much English and, for all they knew, she might have been using Laurie’s house as a base while she traveled around. Travis must eventually have realized that she wasn’t just not around much, she wasn’t there at all. What was he meant to do? Maybe he guessed she was with Wade. Maybe not. I think he just kept quiet.

  Now Graham Carter joins the story. He was in New York on a business trip and he had planned to come to LA while Rachel was there and stay with Wally. He was keen to see Laurie, too. He normally saw her whenever he was in the States: he had a lot to thank her for, after all. Maybe he began tele
phoning and leaving messages about when he might be coming. Maybe he spoke to Laurie because Rachel wasn’t returning his calls. Perhaps, anyway, Laurie needed to see Rachel to talk about the show, which was now only a day or two away. I think there must have been a moment when everybody converged, when everyone swapped notes, and realized that no one had seen Rachel for days.

  I think by this time Travis would have guessed that Rachel might be with Wade, but he still probably didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to implicate himself or Merry. I know that at some point he drove up to Wade’s place in Topanga, found Rachel’s car there and the house empty—not just empty but seemingly abandoned. Maybe after that he came clean with Laurie, but tried to play down the drugs angle. But, of course, Erica was there. She would have got it out of him, no problem, with or without electrodes to his genitals.

  Now, in a normal situation the police would have been called, but this was not a normal situation. Imagine: in a week when the two news stories are published and while they’re still working out how to deflect them, a girl—not famous in herself, but related enough to fame for it to be another gift of a story—staying in Laurie’s house goes missing under circumstances that almost certainly relate to drugs. Would you have called the police?

  So: it’s the evening and they’re all at the house—Laurie, Erica, an ashen-faced Travis, fiddling with his long hair as he always did when he was nervous, Merry in tears, Rick and Jerrilee, who had been ordered by Erica to bring their golden creature over to the house. Laurie’s publicist and a couple of press people from the show are there as well. They go through the possibilities: the police are out, at least for the time being. No question. They decide not to call Martha. She’s in England—what can she do? Maybe they even consider calling me to get me to fly back, but the consensus is that I’m probably too young to handle it. The only solution is Graham, who is in New York. If he takes the early flight the next morning, he’ll be there by lunchtime. That will sort out another problem: the Hayseed show is the day after tomorrow and their guest has just gone AWOL. If she doesn’t turn up, he can do it. Not the world’s most exciting solution, but he is, after all, the man who discovered the books. Anyway, they weren’t going to get Robin Williams to do his hilarious riff on Mr. Toppit’s voice on such short notice.