Bech at Bay (15 page)

As to Bech, he had a soft spot for Lanna Jerome. He and Claire Hoagland, a skittish blond love object he had romanced when his heart was relatively young and uncallused, had met to the background music of Lanna’s first hit, “Comin’ On Strong,” and had separated, four years later, while the singer’s “Don’t Send Me Back My Letters” (“Keep them in their envelopes / Holding my forsaken hopes”) dominated the airwaves. This soft spot of Bech’s, painfully touched by the tales of Ohrbach’s predatory inroads into Lanna Jerome’s sentimentally generated fortune, may have been what landed him here, in the iron grip of lawyers. Even when he wrote the word, “archgouger” seemed a touch extreme, with a bit of extra, artistic
spin. But hardly, he thought, actionable. A creeping sense of unreality enveloped him as, bit by bit, the certified letters on legal stationery piled up, and a lawyer of his own had to be obtained, and depositions were taken in an awkward atmosphere blended of jollity and menace, and various forestalling actions and moves for dismissal from his side were consumed in an inexorable munching process on the other side. Finally the legalities required Bech to make another continent-spanning visit to Los Angeles, the capital of organized unreality. The law was at home here, with its slow motion and spurious courtesy—a world of pretend where amid the plaster pillars and masked trapdoors a freakish monster of unpredictability roamed. Rantoul, having raised the spectre of race, now touched upon the hazards of regional prejudice, allowing solemnly that there was no telling how the jury might respond to Bech’s reputation as a sophisticated Easterner.

“Ohrbach is a Westerner, then? Some cowboy,” Bech said. His lawyer only slowly smiled.

“Yes, in a way, Morris is one of ours,” he conceded. His was a hybrid accent wherein Georgia still controlled the vowels.

“So are the rats in the Santa Monica dump,” Bech snapped; a long buildup of indignation lay repressed in him. “He’s the kind of vulture that’s drowning Hollywood in crassness and cocaine.” Even as he spoke, he wondered if he hadn’t, finding boyish refuge each Saturday afternoon and many a weekday evening in the hypertrophied cinema palaces of upper Broadway, idealized the old Hollywood, the Dearborn of tintype dreams.

The lawyer’s assistant spoke up. He was named Gregg Nunn, and wore a Dutch-boy haircut and thick aviator-style
glasses. His voice had an irritating timbre, a near-squeak, like the semi-musical sound produced by rubbing the rims of a glass with a wet finger. “Oh, I think he’s quite a puritan,” he said. “He works these incredibly long hours and lives quite modestly, over in Westwood, behind the university. In his own image of himself, he’s a conscientious slave to his clients’ interests.”

Irritated by this underling’s elfin shine of perverse admiration, Bech said to Rantoul, “To get back to your point: I can’t believe a jury of L.A. working men and women is going to identify that much with a ruthless Hollywood wheeler-dealer.”

“Oh, they identify,” was the drawled answer. “Everybody thinks movies out here. They’re as proud of their local product as the good folks in Iowa are of corn. The opposition is sure as shooting going to present this as an effete Eastern smart-aleck maligning a worker in the fields. What you call gouging the plaintiff will endeavor to construe as the going rate and simple honorable enterprise.”

Bech’s voice, after Rantoul’s, sounded rather anxious and hurried in his own ears—high-pitched and, he supposed, effetely Eastern. “But what about what he did to poor Lanna Jerome? He absolutely disem
bow
elled her money.” Violent gory images—buzz-saws ripping through stacks of dollar bills, vultures and hyenas tugging at the ribbed carcass of a succulent chanteuse beneath a blazing desert sun—assaulted the defendant’s head. Perhaps the lawsuit was right; he was too suggestible to be a trustworthy journalist. His father had always scoffed at Bech’s dreams of being a writer. Writing a hard-boiled exposé like “The Only Winners Left in Tinseltown” for a fly-by-night rag like
Flying Fur
had been an attempt, perhaps, to convince
the old man that he could turn a dollar when he needed it. Abraham Bech had died last year, in the subway, under the sliding filth of the East River. At least he hadn’t lived to crow over this debacle.

“Now you’re talking the local language,” the lawyer said, his eye moving from his very clean plate to Bech’s half-eaten sole. “You get Lanna Jerome up on the stand, the jury’s yours. But she’s hiding out in Palm Springs and has dodged every summons we’ve put out on her.”

“Anyway,” said Gregg Nunn, “there’s no telling how the jury would react. That long affair she had with the governor of Nevada didn’t sit too well with a lot of fundamentalists.”

Rantoul explained, “L.A’s a lot like Persia these days; everybody’s either a fundamentalist or a whore. And then there’s this: if we seem to have Lanna on our side, the jury may figure there’s tons of money and why not throw poor old Morris a sop of a million or so?”

My non-existent million, Bech thought. The fish he had swallowed bit the tender lining of his stomach, and he devoutly wished he were back in the twelve-table Italian restaurant he knew, just off upper Broadway on 97th, sitting solitary with a plate of spinach fettuccine and that afternoon’s
Post.
Not even in his idealistic post-war
Partisan Review
and
Accent
stage had he dreamed that words, mere words, had so much power—the power to pull him across the continent and dump him in this sumptuous restaurant with these three expensive strangers. The restaurant was wide and deep and dark, in that heavy baronial style that had possessed Hollywood at the height of its grandeur. There were carved dadoes and corbelled stones and leaded windows with Gothic arches. Errol Flynn and the sheriff of
Nottingham (played by Basil Rathbone) might stroll in at any minute.

The fourth person at the table, the “lady” of Rantoul’s jocular announcement, was a female paralegal named Rita: tightly pulled-back long black hair, carmine lips, hoop earrings, and an unsmiling Latina intensity. On a blue-lined pad beside her plate she sporadically took rapid notes.

Flying Fur
had carried some libel insurance but bankruptcy had cancelled it. If the jury found for the defense, Rantoul planned to countersue for legal expenses. In the meantime, Bech had drawn out his savings and borrowed from his publisher on a novel he felt much too distracted and put-upon to write. Four pricey days had already been spent waiting for the Los Angeles legal system to find a judge with space on his docket for this case. Ohrbach’s attorneys had asked for a jury trial and that would take more days. Biting, nibbling, churning hatred of Morris Ohrbach robbed Bech of his appetite, and he asked his lawyer if he’d like to try his sole. “Just a taste,” the big man obligingly drawled, reaching with his fork. “There was quite a to-do in the Food Section of the L.A.
Times
when they hired this chef all the way from Grenoble, France, and Ah confess Ah couldn’t much tell from my pork chop what the fuss was all about.”

The judge was really more the color of a pale briefcase, and surprisingly young, and amazingly, Bech thought as the days in court wore on, patient. The judge sat for hours without saying a word, leaning a bit to his left, as if away from the winds of justice blowing out of the slowly filling jury box. When he did speak, it was firmly and softly, with an excessive fairness, Bech felt, to the inept, time-wasting shenanigans of Ohrbach’s counsel, a short and excitable
man called Ralph Kepper. The defense team named him Sergeant Kepper. He always wore khaki pants and baggy sports jackets, which amounted to a statement: he was no fancy-Dan pinstriped Eastern-establishment cat’s-paw, he was an honest workaday legal man.

In questioning the prospective jurors, Kepper would ask them if they had ever read a magazine called
Flying Fur
(they answered, invariably, no) and if they had any prima-facie prejudice against “sophisticated, cynical, New York-style journalism.” Sometimes he would ask them if, when they heard the words “Hollywood agent,” they suffered any pejorative input. Language did strange things in Kepper’s mouth, and he frequently announced himself as having “misspoken”—“Yeronner, I misspoke myself.”

Nevertheless, this rumpled clown was regarded by the pale-brown judge with unwinking gravity, and his endless peremptory challenges caused juror after juror to leave the box, humiliated. The tactic, Bech’s team explained to him, was merely to prolong the proceedings and make the defendant all the more willing to offer a settlement as the cheapest way out.

“Well?” Bech asked. “Would it be? The cheapest way out.”

Rantoul was stunned enough to stop chewing. He swallowed and rested a thick hand on Bech’s sleeve. “Even if it were,” he said, “this team won’t let you. Now, don’t tell me that you lack team spirit.”

A spacious cafeteria occupied the top floor of the Los Angeles Courthouse, and here the defense team gathered for lunch every day, during the long recesses. Protocol dictated that, but for curt, prim nods of recognition, they ignore Kepper as he ate in morose solitude, gnawing at a sandwich that kept getting lost under sheaves of legal paper. Ohrbach, over a week into the proceedings, had not deigned to appear
yet. Rantoul thought the jury, when at last in place, would resent this show of indifference, whereas Nunn thought it might, on the contrary, signify an impressively crowded schedule and enhance his eventual appearance. “Not being here,” Nunn fancifully continued, his little hands flickering and his elfin face gleaming under the even blond bangs, “makes him the central figure of our drama, the awaited Godot, the Kafkaesque deity whose minions carry on on behalf of his obscure but majestic authority. Absence is an awesome statement, as the world’s religions testify.”

“He lets hisself get arrogant,” Rantoul allowed, shifting in his chair before engulfing a thick wedge, topped with whipped cream, of cafeteria pecan pie. “That’s come out in some of his other trials. He goes along real smooth on the stand, and then he gets cute. He stops minding the store. It’s hurt him before, and it’ll hurt him again.”

The description touched a furtive chord of sympathy in Bech. “Cute” and “not minding the store” were phrases his late father would have used for what his only son had chosen to do in life. Young Bech didn’t have his feet on the ground, he didn’t know his ass from his elbow. It was true. Just writing “arch-gouger” showed a kind of dreaminess; he should have let the facts and the percentages speak for themselves. He had been inflamed by misplaced love for Lanna Jerome, confusing her with dear lost Claire. He had tried to get her attention with the fervor of his denunciation of her despoiler. But how could Lanna Jerome care about him and what he wrote in a doomed 17th Street rag? She received three million plus some points of the unadjusted gross for a feature film, and her last album went platinum within a week of issue.

Outside the cafeteria, the roof held an open-air promenade,
from which one could see vast hazed tracts of pastel housing, glass skyscrapers, merging ribbons of freeway, and far hills dried to the gold of the southern-California winter. On a near hill perched the shiny blue stadium where the once-Brooklyn Dodgers played, and, down below, across the street, stood a gold-trimmed opera house, with a small green park around it. Though it all looked nothing like his idea of a metropolis, Bech felt at home on this roof. When he was an awkward thirteen his family moved from the Upper West Side to Brooklyn. The West Side was getting too full of blacks and spics, his father felt, and Brooklyn was where two of Abe Bech’s brothers, Ike and Joe, had lived for years. His father was a dealer in diamonds and precious metals on West 47th Street. Though the materials were precious, the competition was stiff and the profit margin ever more finely shaved. Life was a struggle. Even in Brooklyn, it turned out, it was a struggle. The kids weren’t necessarily tougher than those on the Upper West Side, but they were provincial—intolerant of outsiders, un-understanding of nuances. Henry was already a creature of nuances. For fresh air the easiest thing for him, rather than walking the eight blocks to Prospect Park and risking getting hassled by bigger teenagers, was to go up on the roof of their 9th Street brownstone. The other rooftops of Brooklyn spread out in a vast dark plain thickly planted with chimney pots; on one edge of the plain, like a rectilinear mountain hazed by carbon dioxide, Manhattan unreally rose. Now, on the opposite side of the continent, he found himself remembering those monotonous tarpaper vistas and again, as when an adolescent, yearning to fly away, to launch himself from the roof into another life, an airy, glamorous life of literature.

•  •  •

The trial finally got under way. The plaintiff’s side had exhausted all its challenges. Rantoul tried to expedite matters by challenging almost nobody: only one old dignified Chicano gardener, whose command of English appeared halting (he was insulted; he protested, “I understand good, I am citizen since twenty years!”), and a snappily dressed Bel Air matron who had once been married to a lawyer. “You never know how she might react,” Rantoul explained. “Ex-wives just aren’t rational where the law is concerned.”

The solemnly impanelled twelve jury members, with the two alternates, sat on the left of the courtroom. Bech and what spectators there might be—a stray street person; a courthouse office worker taking a break—faced the judge’s high desk across an area of chairs and tables; here the lawyers, the agonists, performed and the court stenographer, like an unspeaking Greek chorus, rippled out yards and yards of typed notes. The paper folded itself, accordion-style, into a cardboard box on the far side of his shorthand machine. The stenographer was a thin pale bald man with a yellow toothbrush mustache and an unfocused blue gaze. He dressed like the old vaudeville comedians, in checked suits and polka-dot ties. When the lawyers held a conference with the judge, he hurried with his machine to eavesdrop and kept on tapping. When the judge declared some passage of procedure off the record, his tireless long white fingers dropped to his lap and his glazed stare rested on a blank wall near the American flag. He was the only person in the room who seemed to Bech not to be wasting his time.