Judith Krantz (59 page)

“Exactly.”

“My God.”

“Damn right. You couldn’t spend it, unless you started collecting art, in which case, depending on your tastes, you might even have to go into principal. But normally you’d reinvest some of it and your income would just get bigger and bigger.”

“So that’s how the rich get richer.”

“It is indeed.”

“Now I know why everyone said I needed a lawyer.”

“Greg Nelson said you didn’t have one. Frankly, I couldn’t believe it.”

“I can’t either, now that I’ve talked to you. Listen, Steve, what if, just for instance, I wasn’t in a hurry to have thirty million dollars a year to spend. What if I didn’t need it, didn’t want it. What if I really liked earning my own living? No, don’t look at me like that—I just said ‘for instance.’ What if I were like my father and I didn’t want to sell the ranch?”

“You could stall and stall and stall. You could bring up a number of roadblocks that couldn’t be ignored. You could get injunction after injunction. The permanent administrator would have to listen to all your arguments, you’d run up millions—and I mean
millions
—of dollars in lawyers’ fees. You’d have
teams of guys like me working full time for you, as hard as we could, and in the end you’d still have to sell. If you dragged your feet long enough, the court would
force
you to sell in order to be fair to your sisters.”

“Right. O.K., Steve, let me ask you another dumb question. What if I decided to be sensible and sell fast, but I didn’t want to turn the ranch into a state-within-a-state for the richest people in the world, an armed fortress bristling with police, a kind of maximum-security prison with everything but gunboats out in the harbor and machine guns on the roofs to keep the world safe for billionaires; what if I had another idea about the way the land should be used?”

“Whoever buys the land can do whatever they want to with it. Your ideas won’t matter. If they decide to turn it into a parking lot or a drive-in movie, the law doesn’t change. It goes to the highest bidder and it becomes his property. No whorehouses, no casinos, but otherwise the sky’s the limit.”

“Are you telling me to agree with Valerie and Fernanda and sell the land to the Chinese bankers?”

“I think you’ll end up doing just that. Your sisters own two-thirds of the land, you own one-third. You’ll be forced to come to an agreement with them sooner or later, no matter what, and they seem enthralled with the Chinese purchase. So if you hate the Monte Carlo concept, Jazz, unless you can come up with another buyer who’ll pay more, I’m afraid that’s the bad news.”

“What’s the good news?”

“You’re going to be very rich, whether you want to be or not.”

“But if I don’t?” Jazz spoke with dogged persistence in spite of the small, sympathetic but ironic smile Steve Johnson couldn’t hide.

“You can always give it away as fast as it comes in. In my experience, that doesn’t often happen. Money—well, let’s just say that most people get used to having it faster than they think they will.”

Resolutely, Jazz tried to put the conference she’d just had with Steve Johnson out of her head as she negotiated the drive out to Venice by way of the Harbor Freeway and the Santa Monica Freeway. It was a speedy, unfamiliar route that snaked cleverly from one end of the city to the other, complicated but not bewildering enough to keep her mind off the probate expert’s words. The inadmissible concept of being forced to sell repeated itself over and over in her mind, becoming more and more intolerable, drowning out everything else Steve Johnson had told her, and Jazz wished fervently that she’d had her car radio repaired so that she could tune in to one of the radio shrinks and listen to someone else’s problems.

Jazz arrived at the parking lot with a huge exhalation of relief. As she walked up the street to Dazzle, she felt her preoccupation fading away for the moment, soothed by the bizarre ambience of a world that had remained bohemian and predictably outlandish. Here, at least, nothing could turn topsy-turvy in the blink of an eye; Venice had survived every kind of ruin, fire, and devastation, constantly rebuilt and reborn for the last eighty-five years, without losing its loopy holiday charm. The day of the ten-cent camel ride and the Big Dipper roller coaster might be gone, but its spirit lived on in the looks of expectation and pleasure on everyone’s face as they hurried past her toward the boardwalk.

Jazz walked around Dazzle the wrong way to Pete’s studio to avoid being seen from inside the double glass doors. She was in no mood to cope with Sandy, the receptionist, or any of the other people who worked at Dazzle, except Mel and Pete, whom she’d planned to meet for lunch today.

Soon after Mike Kilkullen’s death, when Jazz had realized that she didn’t know when she’d start working again, she’d given all her studio staff an open-ended, fully paid leave of absence. The expense was well worth the security blanket of knowing that she’d still have Sis Levy, Toby and Melissa with her when she started shooting again.

As Jazz peered into the car photographer’s studio, she saw Pete and Mel, deep in conversation while they started to set a table with the lunch from the Purple Tostada Grande that they’d promised to order for her. A sharp pang of desire for stuffed quesadilla, for burritos, for guacamole, made Jazz realize how long it had been since breakfast.

“Could we eat first and talk later?” she called from the door. Mel and Pete both dropped the covered cardboard cartons on the table and rushed toward her in an exuberance of welcome.

“Just in time!” Pete exclaimed as he crushed her ribs and lifted her off her feet.

“If you hadn’t come today, we’d have come down to get you,” Mel told her fervently as he kissed her.

“You can tell me how much you’ve missed me later,” Jazz informed them, in a rush of deep affection for her two friends, “but first, feed me!”

She watched, her mouth watering, as the men slapped plates and paper napkins on the table and carefully opened the steaming cartons, her teeth so set for Mexican food that it took her a half-minute to realize that she was looking at a magnificent spread of hot dishes that had not been inspired by any place south of the border.

“Fried rice?” she faltered, disbelievingly. “Lemon chicken … sweet-and-sour pork?
Chinese!
Oh, no … no, say it isn’t so.”

“It was the best we could do at the last minute,” Mel said plaintively.

“I knew Phoebe was an evil, misbegotten bitch,” Pete exploded, “but how anyone could sink this low is beyond me!”

“But you love Chinese, don’t you, Jazz?” Mel asked anxiously.

“Normally, Mel darling, normally. But not today. Don’t ask why. What happened to the Tostada you promised me?”

Both men turned and looked at her incredulously.

“Didn’t you see?” Pete demanded.

“How could you miss what she did?” Mel asked.

“I came in from the other side … what happened?”

“It’s the last fucking straw! Phoebe tore down the Tostada over the weekend when we weren’t here,” Pete told her furiously.

“It’s gone, bulldozed into splinters, razed to the ground,” Mel mourned.

“But she promised to keep it just the way it was when she bought it!” Jazz said disbelievingly. “We all depend on the Tostada take-out, and she knew it.”

“That’s what I told her,” Pete said, enraged, “but Phoebe reminded me that she’d never made any guarantees, just given us a chance to go in on it with her, and none of us wanted to. And, unfortunately, she’s right. In fact, she even had it written in the minutes of that meeting.”

“What’s she going to do with the space?” Jazz demanded fiercely.

“I asked her that,” Mel said, “and she informed me that she hadn’t decided yet, but whatever kind of fine restaurant it became, it would never be so utterly ‘in’ that there wouldn’t be a table for me, provided I remembered to let her know before four in the afternoon. She’s lucky I’m so controlled. I almost bit her.”

“After the way she screwed Jazz about Magic’s party, I’ve been at war with the bitch,” Pete said vengefully, “not that I ever was at peace with her, but the sight of no Tostada across from Dazzle—she’s finally gone too far.”

“Pete, are we going to let her get away with this?” Mel’s normal quality of calm repose had entirely deserted him. His smoothly barbered head seemed to have grown spikes, his Buddha-like composure was laid aside.

“No, Mel, we are not. We are going to fire Phoebe, give her the boot,” Pete announced, with the satisfied and decisive tone of a man who has seen the light and is about to act on it. “No woman capable of such a heartless, selfish, hostile action can be trusted to be my rep.”

“I agree entirely,” Mel said solemnly. He and Pete shook hands over a carton of snow peas and mushrooms. “Pete, tell her that whatever you say goes double for me.”

“Me? Why should I tell her?” Pete asked. “You’re firing her too.”

“I can’t stand confrontations,” Mel complained smugly. “Everybody knows that about me.”

“That doesn’t mean you don’t have to take some responsibility,” Pete said, outraged.

“You can do it for the both of us.”

“No, I can’t. Phoebe has ways … you know her ways … she’ll manage to fuck my mind somehow, unless you’re there to back me up.”

“Guys,” Jazz interrupted. “Are you both
absolutely
sure you want to change reps? I mean, without a shadow of a doubt? And without it having anything to do with me and Magic? Only for your own reasons?”

“Absolutely,” they said in unison. “Who would rep you instead of Phoebe?” she asked.

They looked at each other blankly. “We haven’t got that far, Jazz,” Pete admitted. “You have any advice?”

“I haven’t done anything about a new rep, myself,” Jazz said. “But when I do, I’m calling Trish Burlingham. She’s super-smart, she’s effective as hell, but on top of it, she’s nice, really nice. Or for a male rep, with a bigger organization, you couldn’t do better than Daniel Roebuck of Onyx.”

“We’ll call them both, check it out, right, Mel?”

“Right. But first you have to fire Phoebe,” Mel reminded Pete.

“Hold it, Mel,” Jazz said. “First we have to decide about Dazzle. Dazzle the studio, not Dazzle the organization. Do we want to keep on owning this place with Phoebe, or do we want to buy her out?”

“She probably won’t sell,” Pete said, “but, Christ, I wish she would.”

“Me too. I’d buy her out in a second if I could,” Mel said.

“Ah, but we can force her to sell,” Jazz said sweetly. “When we bought it together, one of the rules was that if any three of the partners unanimously wanted to buy out the fourth, it would be done at fair market value, to be established by three independent appraisers.”

“You sound just like a lawyer,” Pete said in admiration.

“I’ve been sitting at the feet of members of the profession, but I have a way to go before I pass the bar,” Jazz said airily.

“So, it’s settled,” Mel said in relief. “Pete tells her she’s history, I hold his hand while he does it, and then we’ll get the appraisers in. Now can we eat?”

“No,” Jazz said. “Nobody eats with unfinished business on the table.”

“Ah, have a heart, Jazz. I don’t want to tell her when I’m hungry,” Pete pleaded. “A mission like that can’t be done on an empty stomach.”

“Look, I know you two cuties are capable of handling this yourself,” Jazz said, “but if you’d like, I don’t mind being your spokesperson with Phoebe. Her cunning little ways don’t work with me.”

“It wouldn’t be asking too much?” Pete beamed.

“I’ll hold your hand too,” Mel offered.

“Follow me, guys,” Jazz said, and led the way to Phoebe’s office, where the rep was eating her favorite lunch: fake cheddar cheese made from tofu, and melba toast.

“Well, well, what brings you here, Jazz?” Phoebe asked, looking up in feigned surprise. She’d known that Jazz would come crawling back as soon as the memory of the shots of Magic’s great party had dimmed. She’d made up her mind to be gracious but firm. From now on, Jazz would have to cut down on her editorial work and spend at least two-thirds of her time shooting ads. At her fee of twenty-five thousand dollars a day plus expenses for commercial work, Jazz
couldn’t continue to blow her time on portraits that would only end up in yet another seventy-five-dollar coffee-table book. Her choice of work was costing Phoebe a fortune in commissions.

“I’m here on business, not pleasure. I’m representing Mel and Pete,” Jazz said, standing in front of Phoebe’s desk and looking down at her. “They have empowered me to dismiss you as their representative, starting immediately. In addition, the three of us are exercising our contractual right to buy out your share in Dazzle. Your unfeeling destruction of the Purple Tostada Grande has proven that you don’t have our best interests at heart. We will choose three independent appraisers of our own; you pick three others. That’s three more than the contract calls for, so we don’t have to haggle over which appraisers to use. When the appraisals come in, we’ll average them out and arrive at a fair price for your one-quarter share of this building. Unless you have a better way of establishing the proper value, I suggest that we begin the process this afternoon. Time is of the essence. We need your space as soon as possible.”