Stars Screaming (22 page)

Burk was rereading the crisply typed memo as he stepped off the elevator. When he reached for his room key, Crumpler’s door suddenly flew open, revealing a powerfully built middle-aged man wearing a trench coat with a sprig of mistletoe pinned high on the lapel.

“I thought you were the bellman,” the man said to Burk. “I just called the front desk. I told him I wanted a new room. There’s bloodstains all over the wall by the lamp. Looks like a goddamn torture chamber.”

The man took a small bottle of pills out of his trench coat. He popped a capsule into his mouth and threw back his head and swallowed. “Percodan,” he said, pounding his chest with his fist. “Twenty milligrams. Use it to calm me down when I fly.”

Burk left the door slightly ajar as he walked inside his room. The phone was ringing. “You gonna answer that?” the man said. He was now standing just inside Burk’s doorway, pointing at the white phone ringing urgently on the night table. “Or you gonna let it ring all night?”

The telephone rang one more short ring and stopped. The man’s hand was resting on the doorknob. The belt on his trench coat had loosened, showing Burk his belly button and a triangle of pale heavy flesh. He said, “Drug sales are down all over. Especially in the Northwest, my number-one market. They fall again next quarter, I could be in big trouble. I could get fired.”

Burk made a sympathetic sound as he sank down on his bed and began to slowly untie his shoes.

“I don’t do well in LA. Never made my quota here. The fucking doctors are prima donnas. They buy all their shit from the young reps from Upjohn and Merck. They don’t like me, for some reason.” For a moment the man’s face looked deeply perplexed. “Today was bad. I got treated like shit. But tomorrow I’m driving to San Diego. San Diego’s always been a good town for me. I’ll be okay. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine as soon as they move me out of this room.”

Once more Burk’s phone began to ring.

“I would answer that,” the man said, demonstrating the action in the air. “If it was me I’d snatch it right up. How do you know it’s not an emergency, an accident of some kind, a loved one injured?” Burk stood up and the man took a step backward, into the hallway. “How do you know that?”

“I don’t,” Burk said politely. He closed and locked his door before he took off his clothes and crawled into bed.

Sometime later, in the deepest part of the night, he woke up and heard someone laughing crazily outside his door. Then, suddenly, and apparently for no reason, the laughing stopped and there was a sharp cry of terror and anguish, followed by a long, pitiful moan.

Burk got out of bed quickly and stood paralyzed for a moment in the center of the room, listening to his heart pound and the odd whimpering sounds on the other side of the wall. Sweat broke out on his neck, and his hand began to tremble, but when he finally stepped through his growing fear and jerked open the door, the hallway outside his room was mysteriously empty.

Eleven

Friday: Burk Goes to Jail and Bobby Visits Max Rheingold's House

Los Angeles Times

May 21

JOYCE HABER

Assault and battery charges were dropped against Tom Crumpler
,
the young actor who was arrested Tuesday night at the Beverly Hills Hotel. According to my sources
,
Ted Davis
,
the hotel employee and the injured party in the late-night melee
,
has accepted a monetary settlement from the hotel and Crumpler himself. Studio publicist Leo Katz denied that Paramount was involved in the settlement in any way.
"
We didn't ante up a penny
,"
he said
, "
and rumors that Davis will play a role in the film are totally false.
”

Jerome Sanford
,
studio VP
,
referred all calls to Jack Rose
,
executive producer of
Pledging My Love.
Rose said
, "
It was an unfortunate incident. I've talked with Crumpler and he knows he made a mistake. He assures us there will be no more problems.
”

My attempts to speak with Crumpler or his costars were unsuccessful. Speaking for Director Jon Warren
,
his assistant Boyd Talbott said
, "
Crumpler's performance in this film is extraordinary. That's all that's important from our standpoint.
"
We'll see.

Burk was driving east on Franklin when he saw the red light strobing on the police car tailgating his bumper. A moment later the siren came on, and he moved into the curb lane and rolled to a stop in front of Immaculate Heart High School.

On the radio James Taylor was singing “Country Road” and Burk sat very still, waiting for the cop to appear. Not far away was a bus stop where a young girl was moving her lips while she read the current issue of
Scientific American.
Resting next to her on the bench was a blood-colored case for a trumpet or a clarinet.

The clock on the dash said it was four minutes after one. Burk had been driving for three hours but remembered nothing since he'd spoken to Loretta earlier that morning. He'd called when he awoke and she'd told him she was leaving town.

“Just for a few days,” she'd said, in a strange, uninflected tone. “I'm going out to the desert to finish the script.” She was traveling with a man, her new lover; he could read it in her voice. “I'll talk to you when I get back.”

“Come on over to the hotel, Loretta.”

“I have to pack.”

“I need you this morning.”

“You need to fuck me.”

“Come on.”

“No.”

“Please . . . please. . . .”

“No.”

When Burk hung up, he could hear a man laughing in the hallway outside his room. “Come on over,” he said, cruelly mimicking Burk's voice. “I need you this morning. Come on . . . please.”

The cop was wearing mirrored sunglasses and sharply tapered sideburns that were at least an inch longer than regulation. After Burk gave him his license, he turned away, saying, “Keep your hands on the steering wheel where I can see them.”

Burk exhaled slowly while he watched the cop's long frame recede in the sideview mirror. A yellow jacket buzzed against the windshield, and to the east a hawk circled in the dark sky over Griffith Park.

The police radio popped and crackled and the girl on the bus bench put down her magazine and stared at Burk with a curious, almost cryptic expression on her face. For a moment Burk's eyes went out of focus and he thought of his son. He imagined Louie in a classroom flooded with sunshine, surrounded by boys and girls eager to be his friends. His smile never seemed brighter.

“Your license has expired,” the cop said to Burk.

“What do you mean?”

“On April thirtieth, your birthday. I'm going to have to take you in,” the cop said, taking a step backward and letting his hand rest on the top of his baton.

Burk didn't move. The girl on the bus bench said, “What're you gonna do, arrest him for having an expired license?”

The cop dropped his head so he could see over the top of his shades. “Yes,” he said to the girl. “I am.”

A motorcycle cop pulled around the corner and parked behind Burk. Another patrol car was speeding west on Franklin. A city bus crossed through the intersection and the girl on the bench stood up. “What a waste of taxpayer dollars,” she said, in a snide voice. “No wonder my dad says all cops are jerks.”

The bus was double-parked next to Burk's Mustang. The driver, a black woman with a dignified face, was smiling through the open door. “I seen him,” she said to the cop, making a circle with her thumb and forefinger. “I seen him driving round and round.”

While Burk was being questioned by detectives at the Hollywood police substation on Cole Street, Bobby Sherwood and Ricky Furlong were standing in front of Max Rheingold's house on Tigertail Road. On his lawn was a For Sale sign with a red
SOLD
sticker pasted diagonally across the front.

“Twenty-two twenty-four. That's where he lives,” Bobby said, consulting a small spiral notebook he was holding.

“That's where he
used
to live,” Ricky said. “Tomorrow I'll call the realtor. I'll find out where he moved.”

“What if they won't tell you?”

“I'll find him, Bobby. Don't worry.”

“But—”

Ricky put his hand over Bobby's mouth. “Relax, sweetheart. Just relax.”

On their way back down to Sunset, they stopped in front of a hacienda-style mansion on Carolwood Drive. Parked in the driveway was a maroon Bentley convertible with its top down.

Ricky said, “Frank Sinatra lived here back in the 1950s, before he got divorced. I went to grammar school with his oldest daughter, Nancy.”

“She's cute,” Bobby said. “And she's got a cute voice, too.”

“One Saturday she invited me to a birthday party at her house. A circus tent was set up in the backyard, and there were clowns, a magician, and a real cotton candy machine. There was a pony ride, too. And that day a boy named Alex Becker fell out of the saddle and cracked his skull open on a sprinkler head. He was rushed to the hospital and stitched up, but he never came back to the party. Later on I heard that Frank gave the Becker family a ton of money not to file a lawsuit.”

Bobby turned and looked into Ricky's face. “You were popular in school, weren't you?”

“Sort of.”

“I wasn't.”

“That's okay,” Ricky said, smiling at Bobby in a motherly way, “you're popular with me.”

From the tennis court on the property next door they could hear the rhythmic
thwack
of the ball as it was stroked back and forth across the net. The court was built below the main house and was protected from the wind by a green tarp that was attached to a tall chain-link fence.

“I hated school. I was always picked on,” Bobby said, as he cut through the thick larkspur that grew from the sidewalk up to the base of the fence. Through a tear in the canvas he saw a boy and a girl—both teenagers with blond wavy hair—facing each other on opposite sides of the court. The girl was lovely looking, with large freckles on her neck and arms and long narrow legs. Zinc oxide protected her nose from the sun, even though the sky was the color of wet clay. “You have no idea what it was like, Ricky.”

“You're trespassing,” Ricky said. “Come on back.”

Bobby fastened his fingers on the fence, squeezing the crosshatched squares until the blood drained out of his knuckles. “They chased me and bullied me,” he said, beginning to hear a distant ringing inside his head, a tinkling sound, as if two champagne glasses were brought together in a toast by his ear. “They pushed me down in the schoolyard and kicked me in the side and in the back.”

Ricky walked into the larkspur and stood behind Bobby. The girl on the other side of the fence was walking briskly around the perimeter of the court, gathering up the loose tennis balls, using her racket to spank them into the air.

Bobby made a disagreeable face as the ringing grew louder inside his head. But now the sound was different, like the screams of angry children. Bobby said, “They would chase me and I couldn't get away, because there was always a fence to stop me, a fence like this one. So I used to climb way up, above their hands, and I would hang there until a teacher on the yard duty would chase them off. Nobody came sometimes, and I would stay up there the whole recess, ducking away from their taunts and the rocks and sticks that were aimed at my head. They said I was mental. The girls even made up a song about me: ‘The boy on the fence without any sense.'”

Bobby closed his eyes. His temples were pounding from the sharp pain that spiraled into his ear. On the court the game had stopped, and the young players were standing by an open gate, trading swallows from a bottle of soda.

Bobby said, “I have to find Max Rheingold.”

“I know you do, Bobby.”

“I have to find him soon.”

Burk walked out of the Hollywood police station just after midnight. The air was damp and cold, the sky pitch black and starless. He'd been interrogated for more than four hours by two vice detectives and Gene's former partner, Eddie Cornell. “If you weren't his brother we would've locked you up,” Cornell told Burk privately, before he was released.

“For what? I haven't done anything.”

“You're pissin' people off. That's what you're doin'. Nobody likes to see someone driving around their neighborhood for hours on end. It makes them feel . . . paranoid.”

“I like to drive.”

“Then find someplace else,” Cornell said. “Drive around Beverly Hills. Drive up to Mulholland, down to the ocean. Just stay the fuck west of La Brea.”

“No,” Burk said, and Cornell gave him a look of unguarded anger. “I belong here.”

On his way out of the station, Burk picked up his wallet and his watch at the booking desk. “Almost forgot,” the sergeant on duty said. He handed Burk a coffee-stained copy of
Pledging My Love.

Burk said, “Where did this come from?”

“I guess they found it when they went through your car.”

One of the vice cops who had interrogated Burk was pouring coffee into a paper cup. His hair was tied in a ponytail, and a large gold medallion hung around his neck. “Good read,” he said, looking in Burk's direction but speaking to the booking sergeant. “He'll get my five bucks.”

Burk walked up Cole to Cahuenga, then followed Cahuenga north to Hollywood Boulevard. The traffic was light, and what pedestrians he saw he heard first by their amplified footsteps. At Selma, a soldier wearing a green beret stood behind a bus bench at parade rest: a silent sentry with a face that could be made out of wax. A black dog with an open wound on its neck trotted along the gutter, pausing to look back once at the soldier before skittering into an alleyway filled with packing crates and a dumpster brimming with foul-smelling garbage.

Burk glanced into the alley and saw a black man lying on a mattress, jacking off, his lengthening penis lit up by the hellish glow of a red lantern. A woman who Burk could not see said, “Come on in and play with us, darling.”

When he came to Hollywood Boulevard, Burk crossed to the north side of the street. A police car with its lights high-beamed followed him for a block, rolling slowly in the right lane. Near Cherokee he passed an empty news peddler's kiosk and thought quickly of his father, newly arrived in Los Angeles, standing inside a similar shed, shivering in the lonely lamplight.

From somewhere Burk heard the weak sound of a radio and Radio Ray's voice. He tilted his head back and raised his eyes. In an upper-story window was a woman with false-looking hair and a once-lovely face. She was leaning out, looking down, elbows propped on
the wooden ledge. Another face was at her hip, staring with wide child's eyes. From inside the darkness of this room, an unknown voice on the radio said, “I've got the air conditioner on but I'm still sweating. I don't know what to do.”

“Call a doctor,” Radio Ray suggested, coolly.

“No. I can't.”

“Why?”

“Because when the virus leaves my body, my soul will disappear too.”

“I don't believe that,” Radio Ray said.

“I can feel my spirit burning like a whip across my back. My fucking skin looks like the inside of a watermelon. But I know that this fever is God's judgment. His fingerprints are all over my body. I thought he would protect me, but I was wrong.”

Burk followed the old trolley tracks down the boulevard until he reached Gower; then he turned south. After a block he arrived in front of KMPC and peered through the locked double glass door. A tall security guard in light khaki clothes was standing in front of the elevators. He was well over six feet, with blond hair and blond eyelashes. When he saw Burk, he came forward and unlocked the doors. “What can I do for you?” he asked.