Ear to the Ground (9 page)

AND JUSTICE FOR ALL

CHARLIE WAS IN THE PREDICTION LAB, STARING INTO THE ash-gray glow of his computer screen, when word began to circulate throughout the Center for Earthquake Studies that a verdict had come down in the Simpson case. The whole beehive was abuzz: Secretaries chattered to each other animatedly, and technicians gathered in front of a small color TV, flipping back and forth between the Angels' sudden-death playoff against the Mariners and CNN. Eventually, someone in the office started collecting money for a gambling pool, noting people's predictions carefully in a ledger. The wagering had nothing to do with baseball; innocent or guilty—that was the question.

Charlie liked to think of himself as the one person in Los Angeles who couldn't have cared less. He had not watched the trial on television, nor read the stories about Marcia Clark's hairdo. He didn't give a damn about Lance Ito's hourglasses, and he wouldn't have recognized Mark Fuhrman if the detective had waved a blood-stained glove in his face.

He'd met Simpson as a kid, when Charlie's grandfather had taken him to see the Heisman Trophy winner play at USC. After the game, they'd been escorted into the locker room, and O. J. had signed young Charlie's program: “O. J. Simpson, number 32.” There had been something flat and distant in O. J.'s eyes—shark's eyes, rolling over from gray to black. Charlie had gone home and put that program in the back of his closet. Years later, he finally threw it away.

Now, from what little Charlie knew or cared, O. J. Simpson had killed his ex-wife and also the man who'd seen him do it. He had left his own blood at the crime scene and had carried the blood of his victims back to his home. What could be more scientific or empirical than that?

Still, Charlie felt a twinge of curiosity, as if his indifference had somehow unraveled and worked its way inside him like a tangle of worms. He tried to focus on the screen, but soon he pushed away from his work station and went over to where the technicians still clustered and conjectured around the TV.

“Hey, Charlie. You want a piece of this?”

Charlie pulled out a bill. “Guilty,” he said. “On both counts.”

Tuesday morning, for the first time in a long time, there were no reporters waiting on the sidewalk in front of Charlie's apartment. Navaro sat in the early mist smoking a Pall Mall on the steps, and he gave a small laugh as Charlie came outside.

“Look at you,” said the landlord, sweeping his arm across the empty lawn. “Yesterday's news.”

“Yeah,” Charlie said, stopping at the bottom of the stoop. “Too bad they won't stay away.”

Navaro took a long drag off his cigarette and exhaled a ghostlike spray of smoke into the air. “He's gonna walk. You know that?”

“I don't think so.”

“Ever heard of ‘reasonable doubt'?”

Was there nothing else to talk about? Charlie wondered. Nothing at all?

“Four
hours
,” Navaro continued. “You don't condemn a man in four hours.”

“Maybe you're right.” Charlie started walking.

“Eight million of my tax dollars, pissed away …”

“Yeah, well …”

“Justice!” Navaro spat on the pavement. “No such thing as justice with these lawyers running
wild.
That Johnnie Cochran's
got everybody so worried about a riot they forget two people got their throats cut!” The angry old man's voice got low. “All you need is money in this world. Y'got money, you can kill whoever you want.”

At nine-fifty on the morning of October 3, the city of Los Angeles drew a sharp collective breath of anticipation, then grew silent as a tomb. Television sets emerged from office desk drawers, and workers gathered before them with the reverence of the faithful. In bedrooms and living rooms and kitchens they watched, as the honorable Judge Ito welcomed the jury into the courtroom for the last time, and O. J.'s granite jaw quivered and was still. They watched while they drove the freeways, or sat down in restaurants, and on the sidewalks; they saw the images multiplied in the windows of appliance stores. They watched and they waited, until the bailiff stumbled: “In the matter of the people versus Oren … Orenthal James Simpson …”

Afterward, Charlie looked around at his colleagues. He saw the elation of some and the dismay of others. To his surprise, he found that he felt sick—and not because he'd lost five dollars. No, in the absence of another suspect, it was as if the killings had never taken place.

Later, Charlie would consider the verdict to have caused its own kind of earthquake, ripping through the soul of the city with a palpable seismic force. And for a few days afterward, as jurors made appearances on daytime talk shows, it became clear that this trial had shaken a divided nation. How ironic, Charlie thought, that in eighty-seven days, quite something else would shake and divide the ground beneath their feet.

GREEN MEANS GO

GRACE GONGLEWSKI SPENT EARLY OCTOBER IN THE conference room at Tailspin Pictures, playing host to producers and associate producers and assistant producers and line producers and co-executive producers, production managers and post-production supervisors, explosives experts and special effects designers, directors of photography and camera assistants and assistant camera assistants, location scouts, location coordinators, and George Lucas.

Top brass at Warner Brothers popped in twice a day to say hello and give their full support to the most ambitious project in the studio's history: A feature film from script to theaters in seventy days. Less than three weeks into pre-production, not including core salaries, two million dollars had been spent on
Ear to the Ground,
primarily, it seemed, on doughnuts, coffee, and Wolfgang Puck gourmet pizzas.

Five separate first-units would film simultaneously, and a helicopter would shuttle the director and actors among them. Six hundred crew members and six thousand extras would be employed. A tidal wave would be enacted, freeways collapsed, and—at last count—eight high-rises would be swallowed whole. Three thousand walkie-talkies were to be rented, along with three hundred on-road and off-road vehicles. And three
million
feet of film would be exposed. Editing would begin the minute film was shot. Six
months of work would be collapsed into one, at a cost of a hundred million dollars. And rising.

When Grace's alarm went off at six-fifteen on Friday morning, her eyes and lids had fused, and it took a combination of Visine, saline, and water to separate them. Once upon a time, she had looked forward to Fridays, but the bleary-eyed reality was that she wouldn't have a day off until the new year.

Casting began today, and Grace hated nothing more than seeing three hundred people deliver the same stupid lines differently, over and over. She hated casting directors, especially the parties they threw, where empty-headed beauties were just waiting to get your card so they could call you at the office. Actors were nightmares, not to be trusted. Their
talent
was to be whoever you wanted them to be. In that regard, she thought, they were nothing.

There were a hundred pretty actresses gathered outside a soundstage near the Burton Way gate. The cavernous interior had been divided by screens, which didn't make the place seem any more intimate. Grace was well into her fourth cup of coffee when Ian walked onto the stage.

“Have you seen Henny this morning?” he asked Grace.

She shook her head.

“Have you talked to him?”

“No.”

Ian's cell phone rang.

“Hello?” he said.

Grace tried not to watch him, but she couldn't help herself. Ian seemed so fulfilled, like a butterfly that had emerged from a cocoon. She tried to remember how he used to be—pale, unkempt, eyes always looking for an angle to play. Now, he seemed possessed of a preternatural calm that radiated from his face and shoulders in exponentially increasing waves. He wasn't even rattled when Henny Rarlin stalked onto the stage and told him to get off the phone.

“The pages
suck
,” Henny bellowed. “You haven't incorporated one …”

Ian pulled half a dozen sheets of script from an expensive black-leather shoulder bag and handed them to the director. “You must've read the
old
ones,” he announced.

Henny grabbed the pages, pulled a pair of John Lennon glasses from his pocket, and wound them dramatically over his ears. Then he began to read.

When word got around that Henny Rarlin had arrived, at least ten actresses found a reason to draw near. But Henny, ever the leerer, interrupted his reading for only a second before he returned to the script. Turning a page, he smiled; he chuckled. In a gesture symbolizing his deepest concentration, he flung his arm over his head and grasped his opposite ear. A moment later, he smiled broadly to Ian.

“This sucks much less,” Henny said.

At Warner's, marketing usually met on Mondays, but this Friday, they were having a special session to figure out how they would ever be able to cover costs on
Ear to the Ground.
What had been publicized, even paraded, as a hundred-million-dollar movie was now
their
problem. Or, depending on how you looked at it, their challenge.

First, they condemned the costliness of special effects in general; then they discussed whether anybody really believed the Big One was coming. Most of them did. “Nobody's leaving, I hope,” somebody said, in an attempt at a joke.

This much they knew: The film had to open at least two weeks before December 29. If it was a stinker, and the quake came, they'd probably be rescued. If it was a hit, and the quake came, it'd be a fucking
bonanza.

But what if the quake didn't come? What if it was early, or late? What would happen to the
hype
? What they needed was a way to link the actual facts about the earthquake with the marketing campaign for
Ear to the Ground.
That was when
Meyer Stern, worldwide president of marketing, had the idea of calling Sterling Caruthers.

THE LOGIC OF NUMBERS

STERLING CARUTHERS HUNG UP THE PHONE AND SAT for a long time without moving any part of his body. This temporary paralysis, caused by a jolting stimulus to his pineal gland, was actually the result of a five-minute conversation that had netted him seven million dollars. Having not yet let go of the cradled receiver, and sitting still as a fly the instant before you take a swat at it, Caruthers realized that his schemes to capitalize on the coming earthquake had been merely the uncreative ideas of a desperate man. He had pushed when he should have relaxed. The Simpson trial had temporarily stolen his limelight. Now, he knew, the opportunities would come.

Caruthers suddenly remembered a “SALE” sign by that chateau on Mulholland; then he recalled a BMW commercial he'd seen on television that morning. Victoria M., the agent he'd met weeks ago at William Morris, was hopeful he could become the premier earthquake spokesman—that is, should the disaster strike. Already, there was money swirling around this quake, and the young agent had been particularly shocked to find how badly she wanted it. Nothing comparable had happened to her since coming to Hollywood, and Caruthers had been impressed at the way she'd adapted herself to the idea of cashing in on future pain and suffering. In the closing chapter of the second millennium, he thought, the smart money was squarely on doom.

The call from Warner Brothers had come out of the blue, but by the end of the week there would be dozens of calls. Perhaps hundreds. Turning down million-dollar offers suddenly seemed the most delightful of pursuits.

His brother had made scads of money in telecommunications, and his sister's husband's real-estate portfolio grew larger every Christmas. But this year, Sterling Caruthers would surpass them both. He'd stuff their stockings with hate, and with expensive little nuggets from Caldwell or Tiffany's. It'd be the worst Christmas of their lives.

Caruthers began to play a game people sometimes play when they're immobilized by their own thoughts: pretending for a moment the paralysis is real and that they'll never move again.

Then the phone rang, and Caruthers picked it up. “Victoria M. from William Morris,” his secretary told him. Probably wants a commission from the Warner thing, he thought. Tough luck, sweetie.

Caruthers wondered if what he was doing was legal, making a deal to sell information to a movie studio twenty-four hours before it went to the media. Then again, if William Morris didn't seem bothered by it, how bad could it be? He let Victoria M. dangle on hold for several minutes, then proceeded to beat her up over the commission. The little bitch wouldn't yield. “At the William Morris Agency,” she told him, “we're not in the practice of representing half-clients.” By the time they hung up, he'd made a verbal agreement for across-the-board representation. Then Caruthers called Charlie Richter to see if there was any information on which he could trade.

Charlie sat across from Ian in the dining room of Chaya Brasserie, eating a bowl of spicy shrimp soup. Ian had called him, hoping to pick his brain on a point of science.
Ear to the Ground,
whose script was now on its ninth draft, was scheduled to go before the cameras in two weeks, at a Current
Estimated Cost (CEC) of $135 million. Industrywide chants of “Quake Gate” increased in volume and fervor whenever the studio announced a budget increase. Sour grapes, Ian knew. But now Ian knew a lot of things. He knew enough about fault lines and plate tectonics and soil samples, but he still did
not
know the simple scientific principle by which earthquakes could be predicted.

“That can't really be easily explained,” Charlie told him.

“Try me.”

Charlie felt a twinge of discomfort ripple through him, and he put his soup spoon down. In a certain way, he felt guilty for having been the catalyst in Grace and Ian's breakup. It was funny how things worked, he thought: A rift in a relationship could go undetected for months, just something between two people that they both ignored, like a dormant seismic fault. Then, all of a sudden, it was like there was too much alkaline in the soil.

Charlie wasn't proud of it, but he knew Grace had placed Ian and him side-by-side like suspects in a police lineup. She had released Ian on his own recognizance but had held Charlie for further questioning.

Perhaps
that
was why he'd agreed to come to lunch, to talk about Grace. But soon he felt guilty and realized how inappropriate that would be. Besides, the earth was moving underneath them
right now
; it would move differently in sixty-three days. Nauseated, he pushed his bowl away. Then he took out a mechanical pencil and proceeded to give Ian his first lesson in the logic of numbers.