Sex and Violence in Hollywood

by Ray Garton

  They were halfway across the sidewalk and the driver was opening the rear door of the limousine when the reporters noticed them. They sprang to life and rushed toward them in a flurry of footsteps and voices. Adam caught fragments of their shouted questions.

  “Mr. Julian, are you—”

  “Who’s the girl with—”

  “Are you Nick and Nora?”

  “—that you murdered your father and—”

  “Who do you think blew up the—”

  “In you go,” Horowitz said.

  Alyssa and Adam got into the limousine first, followed by Lamont. The reporters immediately aimed their questions at Horowitz, who spoke as she slowly eased into the car.

  “Excuse me, I am sorry, but we are not—no, really, I am sorry, we are not answering any questions right now,” she said pleasantly, smiling. “We would like to have a quiet dinner out this evening, and we hope you will respect that. Thank you. See you tomorrow at the press conference.” The driver closed the door solidly. She sat facing Adam and Alyssa.

  “A quiet dinner out?” Adam asked. “Were you going for a laugh, there?”

  “They like it when their targets are civil, or even friendly with them,” she replied. “So few are these days. They are such a sad lot, reporters. They have fallen so far out of touch with the people they originally were supposed to represent that they have forgotten what it is they are supposed to be doing. They are grateful to those who show them a little respect. Whether they deserve it or not. Always remember, Adam, you get more flies with honey.”

  “I hate honey.” He leaned forward and looked out the window to his right. In the last gray light of day, the reporters and cameramen scattered, most of them talking on cellphones.

  “Will they follow us?” Alyssa asked.

  “They will try,” Horowitz said. “But they are already putting the word out. Tonight, the city of Los Angeles will undergo a tabloid dragnet. Those phone calls will lead to other phone calls, which will lead to more phone calls. Alerts will be sounded. Everyone from doormen to busboys will be looking for you two, hoping to be the first with the news, worth a handsome bonus from whatever paper or columnist or infotainment show keeps them on a retainer. There are always some photographers and press types outside Chinois, but by the time we arrive, their number will have doubled at least. And there will be many more by the time we come out.”

  “Can’t we go out the back way and avoid them, or something?” Adam asked.

  Horowitz gave him a quick, harsh look of distaste. “We did not come out tonight to avoid them. I thought you were paying attention, Adam. This entire evening is for their benefit.”

  “Well, I hope they enjoy themselves,” Adam said.

  It was common to see photographers and entertainment reporters loitering in and around restaurants frequented by celebrities. Wolfgang Puck’s Chinois on Main was such a place. Its small, simple, white-and-turquoise storefront in Santa Monica was so unobtrusive, it was easy to miss on the first pass. But not tonight.

  “Let me guess,” Adam said, looking forward through the open divider and the limousine’s windshield. “That’s our welcoming committee.”

  The limousine slowed as it neared a shifting clot of people on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. Stopped just before it reached the crowd.

  “I took the precaution of assigning two of my security men to the restaurant,” Horowitz said. “I anticipate no trouble, but I believe in being prepared. You will recognize them when you see them.”

  Leo got out of the limousine and walked around to the door, opened it for them.

  “Follow me,” Horowitz said. She got out first.

  Adam squeezed Alyssa’s thigh. Put his right foot out of the car. Rose as he leaned out.

  Hands holding microphones consumed his field of vision in an instant. Faces with rapidly working mouths surged toward him. “Mr. Julian” was repeated so many times in the space of a second, it ceased to mean anything, became gibberish. Their questions fell in on him like the walls of a collapsing mine shaft, the rubble of words piling up around him, on him. They pressed in, swallowed up his air like swirling, lung-blackening coal dust.

  Adam quickly lost all self-consciousness, unaware of the slack in his jaw, the panic in his oversized eyes. Cameras whirred and flashed, urgent voices yammered on. Question after question. But he could hear none of them. His body shrank inward and he tried to press his shoulders together to keep from touching the photographers and reporters as they moved in closer, closer. He frantically looked for Horowitz, but it was as if she had disappeared. He spun around, prepared to throw himself back through the car’s open door.

  The limousine was gone. He was separated from it by more microphones and cameras and jabbering mouths. They surrounded him. Kept moving in, microphones stabbing at him.

  Look at their faces, Horowitz had said.

  Pale beneath the restaurant’s outdoor lights. Eyesockets scooped empty by black shadows.

  At their mouths. Pay attention to the way they behave.

  They were a staggering, groping band of black-and-white George Romero zombies. Filthy teeth with bloody bits of flesh stuck between them, lips moving in a frenzy over them. Their voices groaned, darkened lips formed words garbled by swollen tongues: What have you done, Adam Julian? What have you done?

  Then, Horowitz had said, remember everything I have told you. And do it.

  What had she told him? What was he supposed to do? He could not remember, could not think. His breath came faster and faster as they moved in on him even more, leaving him no space, no room to move, no way out. He turned his head in bird-like jerks, looking for Rona, Alyssa, Lamont, Leo, anyone familiar. All he saw were the cameras, the greedy faces of babbling strangers with hungry mouths eager to take bloody, jagged bites out of his life.

  A large hand gripped Adam’s right elbow. A male voice said, “This way, Mr. Julian.”

  Adam turned to the large man in a black suit who had appeared beside him and said, “Thank you, oh, Jesus Christ, thank you so much.”

  Smiling, Horowitz sang out, “If you would just let us have a peaceful dinner, I will answer all your questions tomorrow.”

  The crowd quieted down and seemed to back off a step. Cameras continued to snicker and whisper.

  The man clutching Adam’s arm said, with no warmth, “Excuse us, excuse us, please.” Pulled him past the staring faces and jackhammering jaws.

  They were inside the restaurant and the crowd was gone. Like stepping indoors out of a terrible storm. He leaned against a wall, breathless, as Alyssa took his trembling hand, stood beside him. Horowitz appeared in front of him, looked him over curiously.

  “Well?” she said. “Do you understand now why I have worked so hard to prepare you for this?”

  “I...I...” Adam gave up. He could not speak. His legs were so weak and shaky, he could barely stand. He simply nodded.

  Beside him, Alyssa hugged his arm to her. Her brow furrowed above wide eyes. “Are they always like that?”

  “Oh, no,” Horowitz replied. “In cases like this, they are typically much worse. When we leave, there will be at least three times as many, and they might not be so civilized.”

  Adam had eaten at Chinois a few times. Always at his dad’s insistence and against his own will. Not because he disliked the food, but because he disliked eating with his dad. It was always busy, lunch or dinner. Tonight was no different.

  The restaurant had been decorated by Puck’s wife, Barbara Lazaroff, in fuchsia, green, and black. Tile and brick walls, stone floors, and the oddest tables Adam had ever seen in a restaurant—turquoise and serpentine-shaped, they looked like giant squiggles of confetti.

  Adam recognized a lot of faces in the crowd. Some looked familiar but he could not give them names. Most were faces he had been seeing around all his life. Charlton Heston and his wife dining with another couple. Jerry Bruckheimer with a boisterous group. Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins. A producer here, a director ther
e, an actor from some prime time hospital soap opera. There were others, but Adam’s eyes skipped over them, a flat rock on glassy water. All of them laughing and talking and drinking.

  Until they saw Adam. The noise level dropped gradually as heads turned and eyes lifted toward him. The room did not fall silent, but all the chattering voices lowered except one. A boisterous female voice: “—guy said, ‘Well, if I put it in any deeper, your mother will, too!’” She blatted loud laughter at her own joke, then prattled on, oblivious to the shift of attention in the room. Adam recognized her as an actress, but could not recall her name. There was something else about her that danced on the periphery of his memory, but he was too humiliated at the moment to give it any thought. His face burned under the scrutiny of so many eyes. Alyssa squeezed his hand. He had forgotten for a moment that she was there and felt relieved.

  Then the moment crumbled. Eyes turned away. Voices rose again. People talked and laughed, utensils clattered, and ice chimed in glasses.

  Adam felt better once the four of them were seated at their squiggle. Horowitz sat across from him, Alyssa beside him. Most of the tables around them were occupied by celebrities of one kind or another.

  No, make that other celebrities, Adam thought. I’m a fez-wearing, secret-handshaking member of the lodge now.

  Wolfgang Puck came to the table to say hello to Horowitz. They were old friends. She introduced Adam and Alyssa. Puck shook Adam’s hand firmly and smiled. “You’re in good hands, my friend,” he said. “You see, I am always very good to Rona when she comes to my restaurants, so when people find out I really can’t cook, she will defend me.”

  They all laughed, even Adam. But it was only a sound he made, nothing more.

  After they ordered, Johnny Cochran came to the table. More laughing and smiling and handshaking, then he chatted with Horowitz for a bit. Adam listened to their conversation for a few seconds to see if Cochran would rhyme. He did not.

  The loud actress Adam had noticed earlier was seated at the next table over, facing him, still being shrill. He watched her over Horowitz’s shoulder. A spiky-haired brunette in her mid-twenties. He had seen her before, a relatively new actress who had gotten a lot of attention for her “fierce beauty and whiskey voice,” according to Premiere magazine. And for her frequent nude scenes in second- and third-rate movies. It was also said around town that she gave spectacular head and rim jobs. Recently, while channel-surfing, Adam had caught her undressing in a women’s-prison/martial-arts movie. But something else was familiar about her. He could not pinpoint it.

  Jack Nicholson came to the table during their meal and greeted everyone.

  Alyssa raved about the food, but Adam could taste nothing. He gave some of his barbecued salmon to Alyssa so it would appear he had eaten more than he had.

  Someone at the loud actress’s table dropped a glass and it clattered against a plate. She guffawed and clapped her hands several times.

  Adam wondered if she was drunk, messed up on drugs, or just having a good time with her friends. She had been in rehab last winter, he recalled. After going crazy and doing some damage on a set, where she punched her director in the face and broke a production assistant’s finger. But that was not what he was trying to remember about her.

  Adam finished eating well before the others, with more than half his meal still on his plate. Tension had crept into his guts, squeezed soft tissues and caused them to cramp. He removed the napkin from his lap, tilted his head forward to dab his mouth. Put the napkin on the table beside his plate. Lifted his head and locked eyes with Melonie Sands, the loud actress whose name he could not remember earlier, that was it, Melonie Sands. It was her name’s significance that had eluded him until that moment.

  She was smiling, so Adam returned it, but reluctantly.

  Melonie was one of the women Adam had been hearing about who claimed to have been his dad’s lover at one time or another. Wasn’t she? There had been so many. He leaned toward Horowitz. “That woman at the table behind you,” he said, “Melonie Sands. Isn’t she the woman who claims she heard me—”

  Horowitz nodded. “Ignore her. And eat your salmon.” She pointed at his food with her fork. “I expect you to eat all of that, by the way, so return the napkin to your lap, please.”

  Adam wanted to snap at her, but thought better of it. She had told him to be extremely conscious of everything about himself, from the expression on his face to the position of his feet. “You know that private little time of the day when you are sitting on your toilet moving your bowels and breaking wind and picking your nose, when you know that no one in the whole world can see you?” Horowitz had asked him a few weeks ago. “That is when they are watching you the closest, and do not forget it.”

  Horowitz gave him a wink to remind him she was on his side. To tell him to have fun, relax. It made him smile and relax a little.

  Melonie Sands continued to stare at Adam, but her smile was gone.

  “Do you know her?” Alyssa asked.

  “No, I don’t.” Adam put the napkin back on his lap and took another bite of salmon.

  “Want some of my Cantonese duck?”

  Adam shook his head.

  Alyssa watched the actress for a moment. “I saw her in some made-for-cable titty movie.”

  Adam nodded.

  “What’s wrong with that chick, anyway?” Alyssa asked.

  All of Melonie’s facial features seemed to have pulled in toward the center of her face. The “beauty” part of her “fierce beauty” was gone, leaving only a fierce, glaring face. And she was glaring directly into Adam’s eyes.

  One of the women at Melonie’s table yelped like a kicked Chihuahua when Melonie stood clumsily and knocked her own chair over backward. She hurried around her table toward Adam, shouting, “You should be in prison, you son of a bitch! You daddy-killing son of a bitch!”

  There were a couple muted screams. A woman from Melonie’s table shouted, “What the fuck’re you doing, Mel?”

  Adam glanced around him, saw Horowitz’s two security men converging on Melonie. But she did not bother to go around Adam’s table to get to him, as the security men anticipated. Instead, she pushed Horowitz aside with her left hand while raising her right. It held a knife with a glimmering silver blade. Adam kicked frantically at the floor to slide his chair backward as Horowitz’s chair tipped over sideways with her in it. Melonie leaped onto and across the table. Dishes clattered, a couple more women screamed. Melonie swung the knife down hard as she slammed into Adam and knocked him backward.

  Adam saw a flash of the blade’s gleam, felt the knife hit his chest as he toppled over. On the way down, the back of his head hit the back of the chair behind him and he lost consciousness. He did not even have time to wonder if he would ever wake up again.

  FORTY-THREE

  Over his fussy, important-sounding opening theme music and footage of Adam getting out of the limousine in front of Chinois the night before, Larry King said, “Tonight—accused of murdering his father Michael Julian, writer of such Hollywood blockbusters as Explosion and Catastrophe, as well as his stepmother and stepsister and three crewmen on the Julian yacht Money Shot, Adam Julian makes his first public appearance since being arraigned—and an attempt is made on his life by a woman who claims to be his dead father’s former lover! We’ll have a major discussion about this bizarre turn of events in the crime story that has riveted the globe. Joining us for this weekend edition of Larry King Live, attorney for Adam Julian, and a long-time friend of this show, Rona Horowitz. Deputy District Attorney of Los Angeles, Raymond Lazar. Also joining us, celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck, whose Santa Monica restaurant, Chinois, was the site of last night’s incident. And bringing us the inside scoop from Hollywood, columnist Janet Charlton. Joining us later in the hour, the lovely actress Morgan Fairchild, who plays Rona this week in a USA Network movie based on one of Rona’s previous cases.”

  “What, no psychic?” Adam snapped. Sprawled on the sofa in his hotel suite, h
e stared at the television, remote aimed and ready to fire. “No juggling act? Couldn’t get Dame Edna Everidge to comment on the case, huh, Larry?”

  Adam’s chest was badly bruised by the butterknife with which Melonie Sands had tried to stab him, but the skin was not broken. His head, on the other hand, still hurt. He had sustained a mild concussion from hitting his head on the chair and had required a couple stitches to sew up the ugly gash.

  Two police officers had responded to the call from Chinois. Melonie Sands had resisted arrest with such fury, it had been necessary for the officers to use pepper spray. She had screamed obscenities at Adam all the way out of the restaurant.

  Max walked into the room leisurely, looked around. “Who you talking to?”

  “Larry King.”

  “I see. Upset with Larry, are you?” Max went to the bar, got a can of diet Barq’s root beer from the refrigerator. He kept the refrigerator stocked with them, his soft drink of choice.

  Adam said, “I’m disgruntled with everybody. Everything.”

  “Zat so?” Max popped open the can and took a seat. “Lemme get this straight. You’re staying in a luxury hotel suite, you gotcherself a real perty girlfriend, and you got an attorney’s gonna save your ass from God’s own woodshed. And you’re unhappy with everything?”

  Normally, Adam enjoyed Max’s company. His lazy drawl could not conceal his quick mind. But now, he made Adam angrier than he already felt.

  “You talk like she’s doing this for free, or something,” Adam said.

  “‘Course she’s not. But you get what you pay for.”

  “I don’t even know what she’s doing! I haven’t seen her since the press conference.”

  “How’d that go, by the way?”

  “Oh, it was...fine, I guess. It was my first press conference, I’ve got nothing to compare it to. Scary as hell, that’s for sure. All those people focusing their undivided attention on me. And their cameras. I didn’t even speak, but they acted like Rona wasn’t there, like I was just standing up there all by myself. She kept telling them I wasn’t going to answer any questions, and they kept shouting questions at me. Like I said, it was the only time I’ve seen Rona all day. I didn’t exchange more than two words with her. Everybody keeps talking like I should be so grateful. But for what? What is she actually doing for me?”