Eve's Men (18 page)

After dinner the three adults sat outside under oil-fed Hawaiian torches, with the electric grid of Los Angeles spread out below, as tidy as a dream of Baron Haussmann. The sunset had already faded behind the next rise, deepening the darkness in the canyon below, where Eve could hear a lone coyote yipping. With her champagne glass still firmly in hand, Stephanie was waxing enthusiastic about the subject apparently closest to her heart: her loathing of “Upper Mehico, grease trap of the Pacific,” as she called California.

“There are so many beaners on welfare now—them and their yellow brethren—that they’ve drove property taxes simply out of sight. Imagine, someone like me, who actually owns the roof over her head—and I mean owns it free and clear—and taxes are so high I can’t even afford to stay here anymore. Poor Terry has to do all the work herself—the house, the pool, the yard, you name it—and I’m still going down the toilet.”

“Maybe you ought to rent out a few rooms,” Brian said.

“Oh sure. To who? Some would-be actress or agent who’d always be promising to pay me
next
month? Or stealing me blind. No thank you.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“What can I do? I’m one of the new property-poor. I’d be better off broke. Then I could live it up on welfare. I could have Jane Fonda take care of me.”

In order not to miss a second of Brian’s newfound fame, Stephanie had brought a portable TV out to the patio with them. She had placed it on an umbrella table and kept working with it until she got a news broadcast. CNN, with the sound barely audible. Brian immediately lunged for the set and turned up the sound, for there on the screen was Charley, coming out of what appeared to be a high-rise hotel in a large city—Denver, Eve imagined. As reporters thrust their mikes at him, along with a dozen simultaneously shouted questions, he stopped and raised a protecting hand, smiling uncomfortably, as if he were being mobbed by a crowd of raucous children. When the reporters finally quieted down, Charley spoke.

“As you may know, I came out to Colorado from my home in Illinois to help my brother, mostly just to get him out of jail. And I can tell you he had nothing to do with the shooting of Damian Jolly. He was swimming in a motel pool in Colorado Springs at the time. So why’d he run? I don’t know. Simple panic maybe. And there’s one other thing I want to say. The woman traveling with him—his girlfriend, Eve Sherman—I can tell you definitely that she’s not involved in any of this, and that includes his vendetta against the movie company. She’s simply traveling with Brian, and from what I could see, trying to get him to stop the vendetta. She shouldn’t be considered his partner in any of this. More his victim, I’d say.”

The reporters let loose with another torrent of questions and Charley waited patiently for a break. Giving up, he started moving through them toward a waiting taxi.

“Home,” he told one of the reporters. “I’m just going home.”

The reporter came on then and told the viewer what the viewer had just seen and heard. Brian turned down the sound.

“Well, that sure ought to help,” Stephanie said. “With the shooting charge anyway.”

“Yeah, but why no mention of Chester Einhorn—I don’t get it,” Brian said, giving Eve a sardonic look. “But then I got the feeling I’m not the one he’s really concerned about.”

Eve let that pass.

“Nice-looking man, your brother,” Stephanie observed. “Though of course not as yummy as you.”

Brian licked a finger and ran it over his eyebrow. “Well, of courth not. Leth not be ridiculouth.”

Eve stood up and stretched. “My God, I feel like I’ve been sitting forever.” She looked at Brian. “I’m going for a walk down the road. You want to come?”

He frowned. “Jesus, I’d like to, but I’m afraid that if a car came along I’d pull a Quayle—the old bunny-in-the-headlights routine.”

Eve stared at him, wondering if he was serious. “Up here?” she said. “And on a cul-de-sac at that?”

Brian shrugged. “Just call me cautious.”

“That’ll be a first.”

As Eve turned to go, Stephanie offered a word of caution. “You better be careful. This is cougar country. And coyotes too.”

Eve smiled back at them. “That’s all right. I’ll enjoy the company.”

Brian laughed. “Ouch!” he said.

To reach the gate, Eve had to walk along the inside of the stucco wall that bordered the property, a wall whose visible height varied from five feet at the front of the house to only a foot or so along the patio perimeter, though it undoubtedly was much higher at that downhill point, the major part of it being out of sight. Leaving the pool area, Eve went past the garage and headed out through the open gate, which was bracketed with burning coachlights.

On the way to Mulholland Drive, she passed the two other houses that shared the lane. Built on stilts, they both looked as if Brian and Charley could have pushed them down into the canyon without breaking a sweat. As she walked, she kept thinking about Charley’s radio interview, how he had gone so far out of his way to speak up for her, and it made her feel even worse than before, more ashamed than ever. She slaps him in the face, and what does he do? He turns the other cheek. What a lousy, unmodern, un-American thing to do, she thought, a man behaving like that, like some kind of plaster saint just to put people in your debt, just to shame them and make them feel two feet tall.

And just to make them cry, she added now, looking through tears at Stephanie’s gate, the orange-glowing coach lights. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose, and vowed again that the next morning she would begin to set things right. She would get Charley’s money and call a cab, and if anyone tried to stop her—well, they just weren’t going to. That’s all there was to it.

Back at the patio, Brian and Stephanie were right where she’d left them, anchored to their redwood lounge chairs, Brian lying back with his hands laced under his curly head, Stephanie sitting more erect, holding firmly onto her glass of champagne, which seemed to be the only beverage she stocked.

“See any cougars?” she asked.

Eve smiled. “Just their eyes glowing in the dark.”

“Well, that’s good. I figure we don’t need any more excitement around here. I think Brian has provided elegant sufficiency for one day.” Chuckling at the felicity of her words, Stephanie drained her glass and immediately started to refill it. “This is probably the most excitement we’ve had in Tinseltown since O.J. was practicing his golf swing.”

Brian thanked her for the comparison, and she laughed happily. Swinging her cigarette hand wide, she gestured toward Hollywood and Beverly Hills.

“Why, I bet they ain’t talking about anything else down there except you, kiddo. Especially the brass at Wide World Studios. I’ll bet right now them bastards are padlocking their doors and shaking in their Gucci combat boots.”

“Fat chance,” Brian said. “They’re too busy collecting bad art.”

Stephanie laughed again. “Oh, you think so, do you?”

This cryptic exchange puzzled Eve, but she didn’t care enough to ask about it. Though she still had a drink—her own glass of champagne—she barely touched it, contenting herself instead with just sitting there and smoking, saying nothing. But her hostess more than made up for her silence and abstemiousness, continuing to pour down her off-brand bubbly as she prattled on, slurring her words and giggling and sometimes misplacing an elbow, almost toppling out of her chair.

“I just bet you can’t figure me as a starlet,” she said to Eve. “But I was one, all right. Fact, I was some looker, lemme tell you. Skin like peaches and cream, and boobs out to here. Only trouble was, I kept fucking the wrong producers. Sy Wineglass! Now, who the hell ever heard of Sy Wineglass? What does he get me into?
Attack of the Lizard People!
Great stuff like that. I didn’t really give a damn, though. The flicks may have been lousy, but I looked great up there on the screen, fifty feet of primo tits and ass.” She sucked down some more champagne, then lifted her glass as if she were toasting some unseen crowd. “So what happened, right? That’s what you’re thinking, right, Eve? Well, I’ll just tell you—nothing happened except that I was a true California girl, that’s all. Why, I bet I spent half my goddamn life laying out in the sun in a fucking bikini. Probably soaked up a couple billion volts of ultraviolet by now. And probably smoked a couple billion cigarettes too. And then, this stuff—” She waggled her glass, spilling some of the champagne onto the front of her jogging suit, which she had changed into before coming outside: “It all contributes, believe me. So here I am, Stephanie Hodges, forty-eight-year-old starlet with seventy-eight-year-old skin. And in these hills there’s probably fifty thousand just like me. We ought to form a union and sue somebody, right? Maybe Sy Wineglass, huh?”

Again she laughed. Eve, however, did not share her hilarity. There was something about her story, its eerie similarity to Eve’s own stint in Hollywood, that made her feel uncomfortable. But, trying hard to put things in perspective, she reminded herself that at least she’d never had a boob job, nor ever screwed a Sy Wineglass. And—thanks to being of a different generation—never routinely baked for hours in the sun. Still, there were the beach movies and the caveman epic, her own glorious fifty feet of tits and ass. It made her feel almost sympathetic toward Stephanie. But it didn’t make her like her.

While Stephanie had been running on, Eve at one point had glanced absently up at the house and caught sight of Terry in her bedroom, lying in the dark with her head propped on a pillow on the window sill. Eve had crooked her finger at the girl, inviting her down, but her only response was to slip out of sight, like a turtle drawing back into its shell.

And now Stephanie was getting up, squirming forward in the chair and reaching out for a Brian’s hand. On her feet finally, she tipped up the champagne bottle to make sure it was empty before abandoning it.

“Well, I’m gonna turn in. And you, mister,” she said to Brian, “I’m gonna need a real primo massage tonight. So bring them big strong mitts of yours and drop by, you hear?”

“Your wish is his command,” Eve said.

Stephanie laughed. “Don’t I wish!” Then, waving indifferently to her guests, she teetered toward the house.

When she was gone, Eve and Brian sat there for a time saying nothing, as if neither could think of a way to break through the wall that had formed between them these last days. It was Eve who spoke finally, but only to add to the wall.

“Shouldn’t you be reporting for duty? You and those ‘big strong mitts’ of yours.”

“Give it up, okay? What choice do I have?”

“You have plenty.”

“Like what—calling the FBI and saying here I am, take me?”

Eve shrugged. “Isn’t that what it comes down to in the end?”

“Well, this ain’t the end. Not yet anyway.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“Patience, Eve, that’s all I ask. A couple of days. Can’t you manage that?”

She looked at him without expression. “We’ll see.”

“Right.” Without even kissing her goodnight, he started for the house then, along the way plucking a beachball out of the pool and kicking it hard in Eve’s direction. The ball sailed over her head and fell harmlessly into the canyon below.

Alone finally, Eve remained there on the patio for a time gazing out over the parapet at the vast grid of streetlights converging somewhere beyond her sight. And she found it oddly pleasurable, looking down upon an entire metropolis, a place where millions suffered and exulted, slept and raged, in icy silence. The city looked so tidy in fact that she could imagine a space ship slipping in over the mountains and immediately hurrying off, its alien crew thoroughly intimidated by the rigidly geometric pattern of light, an obvious symbol of a highly advanced people, disciplined, unemotional, probably puritanical.

Chapter Eight

By noon of the next day Charley had contacted only one of the four names on his list, friends with whom Brian had stayed during his checkered career in Hollywood. Charley had no doubt that over the years his brother had stayed with many others too, girlfriends most likely, but these four were the only ones from whose dwellings he had written home and included a return address. In a fifth note, a postcard actually, he had mentioned that he was all right, in fact was very comfortably ensconced up on Mulholland Drive, but he hadn’t included any name or address, an understandable omission considering that that had been during the period after Kim Sanders’ death.

The first name on the list—the person Charley had just checked out—was Sally Tan, a studio makeup artist who lived in the San Fernando Valley on one of a hundred identical streets lined with small L-shaped ranchhouses so numbingly alike Charley couldn’t imagine how drunks ever found their way home. Sally Tan’s house, however, had a redwood exterior, which gave it a certain cachet in the midst of its pastel-stucco neighbors. It was also handsomely landscaped and well kept, which for some reason made Charley feel temporarily optimistic—until Sally Tan herself came to the door. A small, pretty Asian, she nervously edged out onto the porch instead of inviting Charley in. And instead of speaking, she hissed. Her “turd hosbin” was asleep inside and Brian was eight, nine year ago and she had nothing to do “wid all dis bad bizness” and anyway her hosbin would kill her if she woke him.

“So you go now,” she’d said. “You leave. Good-bye now.”