The traffic on Robertson was sluggish, the cramped, aging storefronts south of Pico an ethnic jumble of Jewish, Spanish, Asian, and black. I crossed Pico, still heading north. The Porsche stayed with me. And he was with me when I crossed Olympic into Beverly Hills, where the businesses perked right up. There were trendoid art galleries here, designer showrooms, French bistros. Briefly, I considered trying to lose him. But if he was any good at all he already knew where I was going. So I let him be. Until I got stuck in some gridlock at Wilshire, and got bored. And got out and strolled back to say hello.
He lowered his window as I approached, startled but pleased by my directness. He was young and broad-shouldered. Had on a navy blue suit and one of those flowered silk ties everyone was wearing that season. Wore his hair in a perm of tight, brown curls. He used hairspray on it. A lot of hairspray.
“I’m going to the Four Seasons, in case you lose me,” I informed him.
“Why, thanks, Mr. Hoag,” he said brightly. “That’s ultranice of you to say so. May I buy you a drink when we get there?”
“You may not.”
“I really think we should talk,” he confided. “I believe you’ll find it worth your while.”
Not a threat. There was no menace in his voice. Only insistence. And ambition.
I scratched my chin. “I can give you five minutes.”
The traffic began to creep forward. So did he, until he stalled it again, cursing.
“Ease that clutch out a little slower,” I suggested.
“Thanks, I’ll try that, Mr. Hoag. Just took delivery—still haven’t got the hang of it.”
The Four Seasons is on Doheny and Burton Way. They set an excellent table there, and the staff is efficient and courteous. They happen to smile a little too much for my taste, but that’s my own problem.
I pulled the Vette into the wide, circular driveway and ran right smack into another media crush. Reporters and TV cameras everywhere. The doorman had to jog practically out to Doheny to bid me welcome.
“Sorry about all of this, sir,” he apologized, opening the Vette’s door for me.
“What’s this all about?” I asked.
“The writer who’s doing the Matthew Wax book is staying with us,” he replied. “You know how that goes.”
“It happens I do,” I said, pulling my boater down low over the eyes. “Can you slip me in the back way?”
His eyes widened. “Sure, sure. I’ll take care of it. Just stay put.”
He scampered back to the door and used the phone there. Then trotted back to me and got in. Lulu hopped into my lap. The valet parking ramp plunged us straight down to the basement garage.
A security man met me there with my room key and paperwork, and helped me carry my stuff to the elevator. “How come
you
attract such a crowd?” he asked bluntly.
“It’s like Billy Wilder once said of the big turnout at Harry Cohn’s funeral,” I replied. “ ‘Give the people what they want and they’ll come.’ ”
I rode straight up to my room, bypassing the lobby. Ah, stardom.
It was on the twelfth floor. Had a king-sized bed and a minisized fridge, a writing desk, a dressing table. Glass doors opened onto a terrace overlooking Century City, which used to be the Twentieth Century-Fox backlot, and beyond that the Pacific, where the sun had dropped, leaving a smudge of lavender on the horizon. I opened the doors wide and shut off the air conditioner, hung up my jacket, undid my bowtie. I unpacked Lulu’s bowls and put down mackerel and water for her in the bathroom. I unpacked my fifteen-year-old Glenmorangie and poured myself some. I took it out onto the terrace. I sipped it, looking out at the lights of the city. My phone rang. I answered it.
“I’m here, Mr. Hoag.” A man’s voice.
“Do I know you?”
“The fellow in the red Porsche.”
“Come on up.”
He did. When I opened the door, I discovered I’d been fooled by his big shoulders. The man was no taller than Bunny Wax. He must have been sitting on the Yellow Pages to see over the Porsche’s steering wheel.
“You’re quite some event, Mr. Hoag,” he declared briskly as he came scurrying in, the trousers of his dark blue suit scuffing along the carpet, picking up lint.
“That I am.”
He looked around at the room. “I’ll come right to the point.” He went over to the chair by the bed, sat, bounced right back up, like a rubber ball. “You’re hot, Mr. Hoag. Hotter than you’ve ever been.”
“I don’t know if I’d go that far.”
“I would,” he claimed. “I would indeed. You’re poised, Mr. Hoag. On the brink. This is your moment—if you’re smart, and I think you are.”
Lulu wandered in from the bathroom, her supper completed, and gave him the once-over. Unimpressed, she ambled out onto the terrace and flopped down.
“The opportunities are out there for you, Mr. Hoag,” he plowed on. “It’s time to capitalize. It’s time to maximize. We can do that for you like no one else, and that’s no bullshit. I honestly think we—”
“Time out,” I broke in. “Who and what are you?”
“I’m with the Harmon Wright Agency, Mr. Hoag. Before you consider anyone else for representation, I hope you’ll consider us. And I hope you’ll consider me. I’m enterprising, I’m creative, I’m hungry. I’ll work my fingers to the bone for you. I never sleep. My name is Joseph Bamber, although everybody calls me—”
“Joey Bam Bam.”
His face broke into a smile of pure pleasure. “You’ve heard of me?”
“Hasn’t everyone?”
One thing you should know about Hollywood agents is that the old stereotype is absolutely, positively, one-hundred-percent true. They really
are
short, wired, desperate, and relentless. They can’t take no for an answer, can’t be insulted, can’t be knocked down, can’t be killed.
“You followed me from the airport,” I said, sipping my drink.
“I’ll do anything to get a client,” he assured me. “And to keep him happy.”
“When did you say you got your new car?”
“This morning.”
That explained why Sarge had mistaken him for a detective. She probably would have recognized him otherwise. If a detective really was tailing me, he was a lot more skillful. “You represent Johnny Forget.”
Joey Bam Bam sat back down. And stayed down this time, though his knee did begin to shake. “That’s right, Mr. Hoag. I’m helping him make the big transish. He’s going to be a major adult star. He’s poised. He’s—”
“On the brink?”
“Just like you are,” Bam Bam said confidently. “I’m telling you, you’re
the
hottest ghost in the business right now. HWA is
the
place for you. Think of all the celebrity clients we can package you with. Think of the film sale, the TV miniseries. I’m talking synergy. I’m talking total vertical integration. This House of Wax thing is a perfect example. We represent not only Pennyroyal Brim but also her writer, Cassandra Dee. We brought the two of them together.” He bounced back up again. It was only a matter of time. “You have to come up and meet our new team. I know you’ll be impressed. Sure, sure—we used to be known for divisiveness, for back-stabbing, for boning each other’s clients. Not anymore. We’re all pulling in the same direction now. We’re all out there—getting involved, making it happen. We’re coming back, Mr. Hoag.”
“You were never gone. And you can give it a rest, Bam Bam. My HWA days are behind me.”
That caught him short. “You’re a former client?”
“I am.”
“As a ghost?”
“As a novelist.”
“You write novels?”
“I do.”
He frowned. “Under your own name?”
I sighed. “That’s correct. And it’s a name which still happens to be mud around the senior levels of the Harmon Wright Agency. Which suits me just fine.”
“I don’t get it,” he said, shaking his perm. “What happened?”
“I had a slight run-in with Harmon Wright.”
His eyes widened. “You
knew
him?”
“I knew him.”
It had happened on my first ghostwriting gig, the memoirs of Sonny Day, the comic. Perhaps you read them. Or about them. That’s when I went up against Harmon Wright, the former Heshie Roth, juice man for Bugsy Siegel in Los Angeles during World War II. I came upon some skeletons. He tried to hide them. I tried to unhide them. I won. I also lost. My career was never the same after tangling with Wright. I was no longer considered a major novelist. Some of that was my doing. A lot of it was his. I’ll never know how much.
“They all say he was the best,” said Bam Bam with hushed reverence. “They say nobody could touch him as a deal maker.”
Nobody had. Under his leadership, HWA had been as big as all of the other major agencies put together. He had ruled the town, deciding which movies got made, by whom, with whom, and for whom. The studio bosses were merely his own hand-picked proteges. His favorite: none other than Norbert Schlom. Harmon Wright was dead now. Had been for three years. And no one today swung as big a dick as he had, although Schlom clearly wanted to, with an assist by Abel Zorch. I couldn’t help but feel I’d have something to say about that. I also couldn’t help but feel I was right back in the same ring, fighting Harmon Wright all over again.
“There is something you can do for me, Bam Bam,” I conceded.
“Anything, Mr. Hoag. Just name it.”
“Help me set up an interview with Johnny.”
“I’d be thrilled to.” And he honestly sounded like he would be. “I’ll call you soon as I have the particulars. In fact, you can do it at my office. You’ll come up, meet the gang, I’ll show you around the place—”
“I’ve seen it,” I said, steering him in the general direction of the door.
“You’ve seen the old place. We have brand-new offices. New offices, new regime. You had problems with the old HWA, not the new, I assure you.”
I opened the door for him. “Can’t wait to see it.”
“Say, I also happen to represent Romola, the swimsuit model. Just landed her a major speaking role over at Disney in
Ernest Goes to Tampa.
Would you care to have dinner with her some evening while you’re out here? Don’t get me wrong—I’m not suggesting she’ll give you a blow job out in the parking lot. She’s just a really fascinating lady. Maybe a group of us could attend a screening together one—”
“I’m afraid I’ll be pretty busy.”
“Sure, sure,” he said, as I politely shoved him out the door. “Oh, hey, you were right about my clutch. I was letting it out too fast.”
“You’re not going to keep following me, are you?”
“I will if you want me to,” he offered.
“Night-night, Bam Bam,” I said, closing the door on him.
I unpacked. My clothes I hung in the closet. My beloved late-fifties Olympia solid steel manual portable, the Mercedes 300SL Gull Wing of typewriters, went on the writing desk along with my notes, my notepads, my personal stereo, my Erroll Garner tapes. My reading matter I placed on the nightstand by the bed. I was working my way through a collection of autobiographical essays by M.F.K. Fisher that season, which is something I do every couple of years to remind myself what good writing is. I tend to forget if I’ve only been reading my own stuff. When I was done unpacking I stripped off my clothes and went into the bathroom. There was a deluxe dressing area in there, outfitted with a television set, telephone, and full-length three-way mirror, which I don’t recommend using if you happen to be naked and over the age of twenty-one. There was an immense tub, a stall shower. I used the shower, scrubbing myself with the Crabtree and Evelyn avocado oil soap I’d brought along to remind me of the way Merilee smelled. The phone rang while I was showering. I didn’t answer it. I was too busy thinking about the plate of chiles rellenos I was going to eat that evening at Chuy’s, a little neighborhood place on Sawtelle and National where they keep the bottles of Dos Equis in a wooden barrel of ice, and where Chuy’s ancient mother makes the soft corn tortillas by hand over an open hearth and serves them to you fresh off the griddle, hot and crisp around the edges. After I’d dried off I stropped Grandfather’s razor and shaved and doused myself with Floris. Then I threw open the bathroom door and padded naked out into the room so as to be cooled by the breeze coming in through the terrace doors. Only there was no breeze coming in. The terrace doors were closed now. And I was not alone.
S
HE WAS RIFLING THROUGH MY NOTES ON THE
desk, pausing only to scribble choice finds on the back of her left hand and wrist with my gold-tipped Waterman. There was no sign of Lulu, my fierce protector.
“You won’t find much,” I apologized, standing there in my Floris. “At least it doesn’t mean much to me.”
She gasped and jumped away from the desk, startled. Of course, Cassandra Dee always looked startled, chiefly because of her eyes, which were goggly, and her brows, which she penciled into a high, exaggerated arch. Her complexion was a vivid milk white, her lips a garish shade of red. Her abundant black hair was swept back and held that way with a black headband, worn low behind the ears, forties style. She came off looking somewhat like a mime done up as Betty Boop. She had on one of those skin-tight black unitards that they used to call catsuits back in Julie Newmar’s heyday. Maybe they still do. Whatever you call them, you have to be long and lean to wear one, and she was. She was a tall woman, willowy, about thirty. A ragged denim jacket was tied around her waist, either as an accent or to hide her hips.
“Geez, Hoagy, I—I tried calling ya—I knocked even,” she blurted out in a burst of Brooklynese. Her voice was irritatingly nasal. It sounded like a table saw whining its way through a length of knotty pine. “Ya didn’t answer, so’s I just let myself in.”
“How?”
She gaped at me. “Ya mean how did I get in? I’m kinda resourceful that way, is how. Yeah, yeah, shewa—nobody can keep me out if I want in. I’m staying here at the hotel myself, seventh floor, and …” She came up for air. “Geez, I hope ya don’t mind.”
“Would it matter if I did?”
“Yeah, yeah, shewa. But it wouldn’t stop me. I’m compulsively nosy. I know that about myself. Can’t help it.”
She continued to gape at me. My Floris does have that effect on some women. I continued to stand there.
“I thought we oughta talk,” she explained. “What with us kinda being in this together and all.”