by Al Roker
Max stared at him for a beat and suddenly broke into a laugh. As his laughter grew, the others, experiencing something of the same tension release, joined in. Even Gibby, whose soft face was still a bright red from the slaps.
Eventually, the laughter stopped. Wiping his eyes with a handkerchief the size of a tablecloth, Max said to Trey, “Go to the office and tell the talent assholes to find me a new bandleader. Also, find out what we’re paying the current band crew and see if we can’t get replacements who’ll work for scale.”
Trey was out of his chair and halfway to the door when Max stopped him. “You better reschedule the singer booked for tonight. Let’s keep the music to a minimum till we figure out what to do about it.”
“Ferguson doesn’t even have live music,” Trey said.
“It’s something to consider,” Max replied.
“We’ll need a replacement act for the singer,” Trey said.
“I got a guy,” Gibby said. “One of the great Vegas lounge acts. He’s here in town. I just saw him at Nate ’n Al.”
“Who?” Max asked warily.
“Philly Slide.”
“He still alive?”
“Philly’s … not that old,” Gibby said. “He’s younger than Rickles.”
“I got paintings by Goya younger than Rickles,” Max said. “My grandmother’s younger than Rickles. The trick is to find somebody older than Rickles.”
“Abe Vigoda,” Gibby said.
Max nodded. “Okay. Call Philly. And tell makeup to do something about your face. You look like Holyfield after Tyson head-butted him.”
It seemed as if we’d be there for a while. I cracked the cover on Dr. Dover’s new thriller.
Chapter
THIRTY-FOUR
By five, they’d somehow managed to make it through the scripted part of the show. I was occupying one of the audience seats, alternating my perusal of Dr. Dover’s convoluted tale of madness and murder with glimpses of Gibby in a dog suit playing with the trained cats, when April took the seat beside me.
“What have I missed?” She was staring at Gibby in the dog suit, lying on his back on the floor with a cat resting on his stomach. “Or shouldn’t I ask?”
“He’s hoping to see how many times he can say ‘pussy’ on network TV,” I said.
“I’ll put out a press release,” she said. “Title it ‘Pussy Galore.’ ”
“Actually, the feline fashion show is pretty amusing. I’m not sure why the big G’s wearing the dog suit except that he seems to like it.”
“It does humanize him,” she said. “But I’d better go get him to take it off. A photographer from Entertainment Weekly will be here in half an hour, and I think sport jacket and slacks would be more appropriate.”
I returned to Benjamin Dover’s book.
I’d skimmed about twenty more pages when Max arrived beside me and asked me to move over one seat.
“Damn rows are too close,” he said, squeezing into the seat I’d been using. “Need the aisle for my legs. How’s the show look?”
“The cat segment is pretty funny.”
“Gibby still lacks confidence. But I think he’s got the potential of turning into a meat-and-potatoes guy like Jay. Old school. I’ve always been partial to the real stand-ups. Johnny Carson. He was the goddamn champ of ’em all. Alan King, Buddy Hackett, Jan Murray, Jack Carter. Hell, I’m old enough to remember Myron Cohen. Those guys always delivered.”
“Letterman’s pretty good,” I said.
“The critic’s choice? Too sarcastic, too smug. Above it all. Dick Cavett without the warmth. Middle America doesn’t give a shit about him. But Middle America loved those other guys, and so did the hipsters. Seinfeld’s like that. Man, if we coulda gotten Jerry to do the show. But why would he? He’s got enough dough to buy the network. And he’s too loyal to his buddy Jay to go up against him. He even trashed Conan.”
“Des didn’t strike me as old school,” I said.
Max was silent for a few seconds. “No. If anything, he reminded me of Richard Dawson. You remember … the Brit who hosted Family Feud?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Des wasn’t even on my list, but Trey really pushed him. Got me to sit down and look at a couple of his sitcom eps. I saw he had presence, rolled right over the headliners. His reel was damned impressive, too. Held his own with Jay and Dave during guest spots. Seemed a little too angry-young-man in his early appearances. Then he mellowed a little, started making jokes about himself. But between you and me, Billy, he was not a nice man.”
“No?”
“Nastiest drunk I’ve ever had to deal with.”
“How so?”
Max scanned the area to make sure nobody was within earshot and lowered his voice. “He nearly killed a pathetic creature up at my place one night.”
“An animal?”
“A human being, if you could call it that. A tranny he picked up at this stupid fucking restaurant where you eat in the dark.”
I remembered Fitz telling me about the restaurant. That had been our first night at the villa. After I’d left Stew’s party. “Des had a thing for transsexuals?” I asked.
“Hardly. This one really was special. Had me fooled, too, and usually I can spot ’em a mile away. Des had been drinking heavily, and when we hit the restaurant, he spied what we all thought was a hot blonde going in with a bunch of her girlfriends. Des did his thing, finally convinced the blonde to join us.
“So while Fitz, Trey, and myself are trying to enjoy the experience of sightless dining, Des is enjoying the experience of the blonde going down on him. But that’s not enough. He convinces the blonde to come with us to my place, where I’ve got several real bimbos waiting.
“All is fine for a while. Then there’s the big moment when it’s ‘everybody in the pool.’ The blonde says no. But Des insists. And that’s when he discovers she’s a he. Me, I would have laughed it off as a life lesson. But Des goes all Chris Brown on the blonde. I mean, really tearing into him, her, whatever.
“If it wasn’t for Fitz and Trey, he would have killed the poor son of a bitch. I really believe that. As it was, if you remember that LAPD picture of Rihanna, the tranny was much worse. It cost the budget of the show nearly thirty grand to put him back together. And until the bandages come off, we won’t know how much more.”
“I’m surprised you were able to keep it under wraps.”
“That’s April. She’s the best in the business.”
“There must have been other incidents,” I said. “I wonder who swept those under the carpet.”
“This time it was a mix of booze and the white stuff,” Max said. “Fitz told me Des usually stuck to one or the other. Hell … I shouldn’t be telling you this stuff.”
It wasn’t the first time I’d realized there was something about me that got people to open up. It had proven useful when I’d been on the con with my mentor Paul Lamont. It proved a lifesaver with the judge who went easy on my sentence after I got caught. And it comes in handy even now, interviewing celebrities who are usually on guard around the media.
“Don’t worry, Max,” I said. “I’m not a network spy, and I’m not going to go running to Perez Hilton.”
“Well, what the fuck. The dude’s dead, anyway,” he said, pushing himself up out of his seat with a grunt. “And Gibby’s a lox. And we’ll be damn lucky if the show improves enough to even make it on the bubble.”
I still had a chapter or two to go on The Barbarous Coast when Trey arrived with the doctor-author, a trim, handsome man, both aesthetic- and athletic-looking, wearing a midnight-blue blazer over a pale blue polo, faded denim pants, and white sneakers. His grip was firm but refreshingly noncombative. However, he did have a probing stare that ranged between unnerving and downright creepy.
“As I believe I mentioned,” Trey said, “Dr. Dover is a special consultant with the LAPD, as well as the author of a dozen bestselling novels based on his cases.”
“Seventeen, actually,” Dover said. “But
who’s counting?”
“Billy, these are some questions emailed to the website.” Trey handed them to me. “You and Dr. Dover can use them or not. I’d better get moving. Fitzpatrick’s officially off the show, and I’ve got to make sure there’s a replacement.” He bowed out gracelessly, bumping into a seat and nearly falling.
Onstage, they were getting a sound check on Philly Slide, a fiftysomething Vegas lounge comic with dyed mahogany-colored hair and a gray sharkskin suit that was so shiny it was causing a flare-up on camera. He would be doing some supposedly hilarious movie and TV reviews tonight. If that worked, he might become a regular guest.
Judging by the fun he was having at the sound guy’s expense—moving his lips while remaining silent, then suddenly shouting into the lavalier mike—he’d be lucky if anything he said on tonight’s show would be heard.
I suggested to Dover that we find a less distracting place to talk about what we were going to talk about. We wound up at Café International, the Worldwide commissary that, since it offered no dinner food other than self-microwaved frozen burgers and pizza, was about as empty and quiet as a church on Super Bowl Sunday.
We settled for two small bottled waters. Dover glanced at the book I’d placed on the table. “You’re reading Barbarous Coast. What do you think?”
A writer has to have a great deal of self-confidence to ask that question. I wasn’t sure my skimming gave me the right to be too judgmental, so I said, “The title seems familiar, for some reason.”
He smiled. “That’s purposeful. Tests have proven that people are more apt to embrace the familiar. It’s one of the reasons why there are so many television series and movies that remind us of shows from the past. The film people call it pre-awareness. So though I wouldn’t dream of copying another writer’s plot or characters, which would be plagiarism, I often use familiar titles, which is perfectly legal. As for The Barbarous Coast, the great Ross Macdonald coined the title several decades ago. But who remembers that, really?”
I’d have to tell Harry Paynter about that. We could call our book The Maltese Falcon. Better yet, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. “I appeared on your show Wake Up, America! once,” Dover said. “I was on tour with The Lad in the Lake, my first book.”
“I must have been on assignment,” I said.
“It was eighteen years ago,” he said. “Before your time. I suppose I was something of a success, since they’ve asked me back often. But the East Coast really doesn’t do it for me. It’s too mired in Old World tradition. Much too twentieth century, if you know what I mean. And I’m fortunate enough not to need the publicity.”
Grandma said, “If you can’t say anything nice.…” So I said nothing.
“Might I call you Billy?” He was staring at me again. I was reminded of a phrase from my comic strip–reading days: “Mandrake glared hypnotically.”
“Of course,” I said, using a sip from my water bottle as an excuse to break eye contact.
“I suppose we should talk a little about Roger Charbonnet,” he said. “An amazing character.”
“You know Roger?” I asked.
“Not personally,” Dover said. “But I’ve observed him. His narcissistic personality, his arrogance, his problems with substance abuse.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “If you don’t know him, I assume that means you haven’t examined him. How can you diagnose—”
Dover cut me off with “I’ve seen him in action. My significant other, Raven, and I eat out often, so I’ve observed him at his restaurants, strutting like a peacock. Dressing down his staff. He even had the chutzpah to ask Raven for a date, with me sitting right there. And, of course, I’ve seen the YouTube footage of him attacking you at the party and your tripping him into the pool. Very macho, Billy.”
“I was lucky,” I said.
“I think we make our own luck. In any case, a professional therapist such as myself can glean quite a bit from merely observing a subject. And from what I have observed of Charbonnet’s antisocial behavior, he exhibits all the signs of someone capable of murder.”
I wondered how much of that observation had to do with Roger hitting on his “significant other.” I said, “There’s still that boring old traditional thing about a man being innocent until proven guilty.”
“Oh, please,” Dover replied with an eye roll. “You can’t really believe this guy is innocent? My sources at the LAPD—and they are rock-solid, owing to the numerous cases I’ve helped them close—have not the slightest doubt about his guilt.”
“Would Pete Brueghel be one of those sources?”
“No. I’ve never had the pleasure of working with Detective Brueghel. Stabler and Stabler published The Manicurist, and I’m published by Nobel House. So if we were to work a case together, there’d be a conflict over the eventual book rights.”
Wow. Publishing trumps justice?
“Life gets complicated out here,” I said.
Dover was giving me that whammy-eye thing again. “Since Detective Brueghel is in charge of the investigation, you must have some idea of his feelings on the subject of Charbonnet’s guilt.”
“He believes he’s arrested the right man,” I said. “But even the experts can be wrong.”
“Not if they’re genuine experts,” he said.
“How many years were you in practice as a forensic psychologist?” I asked, blinking under his gaze.
“Actually, my practice was devoted mainly to child psychology.”
That was a surprise. “Children. Murderers. Seems like a stretch.”
“Murderers were all children once,” he said. “Actually, my work with the LAPD began with a homicide involving one of my patients. A twelve-year-old boy, suffering from a form of social anxiety. He was kidnapped from the family home in Bel Air. No ransom demand was made, and, a week later, the boy’s body was recovered from the Oneonta Slough, just this side of the California-Mexico border. The case was the basis for my debut novel, The Lad in the Lake.”
“They ever find the kidnappers?”
“No. But I’m fairly certain I know who was behind it and why. As soon as the investigating detective, Terrance Koenig, confided in me that the victim’s father was not just mournful over his son’s fate but was visibly nervous and seemed to be hiding something, I made a connection. The father was the manager of Movieland Motors, a dealership specializing in top-of-the-line classic cars. I suggested to Terry—whom I’ve accepted as a close friend, by the way, in spite of his sexual bent—that he should ask the man if he’d sold a Lightweight E-Type Jaguar within the last year.
“When the father replied that he couldn’t recall, I knew I was on the right track. I doubted he’d forget such a sale. There were only a dozen Lightweight E-types produced. Terry found the sale on the dealership’s books, and that was that.”
“That was what?” I asked. “I don’t get it.”
“Because I’ve given you an incomplete puzzle. It’s the way we authors build suspense, holding back key information until the end of the story. Here’s the thing I remembered that broke the case. I’d read an item in The New York Times a week before the kidnapping. A young man named Luis Martinez had died in a car accident in Baja. He’d been a wild kid, and probably stoned to the eyebrows, when he drove his sports car through a guardrail and wound up drowning in the Gulf of Mexico.”
“And his car was a Lightweight E-Type,” I said.
“Exactly,” Dover said. “Purchased the previous year, while he was attending UCLA.”
“I’m wondering what it was about the accident that made the Times cover it.”
“Well, that’s the thing, Billy. It became newsworthy when some smart reporter realized that Luis was the only son of Alfredo ‘Guapo’ Martinez, then the leader of the Palmador Cartel. Do you know that shortly before his arrest seven years ago, Martinez made the Forbes billionaire list?”
“I missed that one,” I said. “So Guapo had to find somebody to blame other than his son? And he picked t
he guy who sold junior the car?”
“That’s what I deduced,” Dover said. “It had not been a kidnap for money but an act that a deluded father believed to be biblical, an eye for an eye. Hence the drowning. In any case, it turned into the perfect literary property for me. My next two cases also involved youths. But when I submitted book three, my agent informed me that if I wanted to break through to the bestseller lists I’d have to expand my horizons. So I offered my consultant services on major crimes in general. I suppose you could say that my years as a child psychologist were altruistic and my forensic psychologist years have been egoistic, not to mention very remunerative.”
Well, altruist or egoist, he was my expert for the night. So we hunkered down and for the next hour and forty-five minutes tried to figure out how we would fill the segment. The questions from the website—ranging from “What did it feel like to see the British guy get blown to shit?” to “How’d the killer dude throw the bomb at the Irish dude without any of the other dudes seeing him?”—were basically useless.
Instead, we addressed the information that had been released to the media. Dover understood that I knew more than that and did his best to coax it from me. I, in turn, hoarded my secrets, keeping them from his very professional questions and searching gaze.
We developed a fairly effective give-and-take that I hoped would continue under the scrutiny of, by Trey’s approximation, somewhere between a million and a half and two million viewers. But before that could take place, we in the greenroom, like the brave viewers at home and in the studio, had to endure Quentin Utach’s very dramatic opening welcome and intro to Gibby, who then delivered a monologue chock-full of quips about drunken starlets and reality series grotesques and political scandals.
Dover, being both intelligent and something of a pretentious asshole, thought the whole thing was ghastly. Being something of a pretentious asshole myself, but also understanding the work and struggle that goes into any TV show, I was a bit more tolerant.
I sat there, watching the large flat HD screen, ignoring the doctor’s acerbic critiques, and hoping the show’s other guests-in-waiting—specifically, the Vegas comic—would do the same. Actually, Philly Slide seemed to be on his own trip and ignored us entirely.