The Cutting Room (5 page)

How to drive, for example.

“Tell me something, Jeanine,” I said.

“Something
else
?”

“Yes.” I paused, then plunged in. “How would you feel about going to L.A.?”

PART 2

LOS ANGELES

We went as couriers, the cheapest way to fly anywhere. I put
Trivial Man
on hold, and Jeanine quit Abner’s employ. She and I waited until we were called, and then we were hired—separately—to escort goods to the western part of the U.S. Our cargo was unknown.

I arrived the day after Jeanine. It was my first time there, and Los Angeles was a revelation. I had spent so many years writing and reading about the place—or at least about the film business there—that to actually see it was like seeing a palace from a dream. I couldn’t quite believe that it existed.

And I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. As Jeanine drove me from the airport in a cheap rental car—and we passed fast-food places, run-down motels, endless strip malls, one after another—I could feel mystique and magic drop away with every mile. If I ever wanted to return to writing about Hollywood, I’d have to forget what I now knew. But once you knew something, how
could
you forget it?

“Just live in denial,” Jeanine said, watching me stare, unhappily, at a triple-X-rated video complex. “Concentrate on the movie, on
The Magnificent Ambersons
. That’s the mystery. That’s what we’re here to find. The rest is just, you know, real life.”

She had said it with indifference bordering on contempt. Her message: Suspending our study of show business to confront the real thing did not mean we had to be disillusioned. Sometimes you had to maneuver through its muck and mire to find what you wanted. Then you could go back into hiding, and erase the reality.

Jeanine had cheered me up, and I smiled at her. She smiled back, crazy cat sunglasses hiding her eyes.

“Now, let’s take a look at those names,” she said.

We stayed in West Hollywood, in the shabby apartment of Jeanine’s cousin Larry, a middle-aged man who wrote graphic novels. Currently attending a comics conference in San Francisco, he had left his black-and-white sketches—highly sexual and scatological science fiction—hanging from clotheslines in the bathroom and kitchen, as if to dry.

“I figure Annie Chin is your best bet.”

Sitting on her cousin Larry’s lumpy bed, Jeanine had opened up her laptop. She had secretly copied into it Abner Cooley’s file of movie company contacts, right before she quit, once she had broken his code.

“It had to do with character names from scripts that Preston Sturges wrote but never shot,” she said. “It took me all day. Don’t ask.”

“Who’s Annie Chin?” I sat down beside her.

“Ben Williams’s personal assistant. Ever since Ben Williams slept with her, and then acted like it never happened, she’s been a little peeved. That’s how Abner got those bad preview cards for
Cause Pain: In Da Houze.
”

“And you think that’s who Gus contacted in L.A.?”

“Possibly. There would have been no point in contacting Ben Williams’s”—she scrolled down a page—“masseuse . . . or his drug dealer . . .” She tapped a final key. “Or his mother.”

Jeanine logged off, then shut the little machine.

“So what do we do? Not—call her at work?”

“No. Or at home, either. You want to eliminate whatever stalker vibe you might give off.”

“Then maybe it should be a woman. Maybe it should be you.”

Jeanine just looked at me, her face softening, taking pity on my innocence.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she said.

Jeanine spoke as if she had once ventured out into the real world, been burned, and retreated home again. She would stay inside with the computer now, thank you.

“Okay,” I said, not wanting to push it. “But you will have to drop me off.”

The plan was for me to run into Annie Chin at her favorite breakfast place, a faux-Fifties diner called Swingers, on Beverly Boulevard. Here was where I waited the next morning, eating granola and watching beautiful but hard-looking waitresses, outfitted in little retro space-age outfits. Most of the patrons were young wannabe actors or models, each more striking than the last, each less dressed. As a trivial person, I was ignored by the staff, so I had to stand and wave down a waitress.

Finally, at a nearby booth, I noticed a kindred spirit, an odd person out. She was an Asian woman of thirty, with a mole on her cheek, wearing a black catsuit under a denim jacket, and reading a script.

I thought of the original
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
. Its downbeat vision had been softened by a hopeful prologue and epilogue, which were later removed for its reissue. Then I got the nerve to approach her.

“Are you Annie Chin?” I said, standing by her, carrying my granola.

She looked up, suddenly, surprised. In this arena of more routine beauty, she was used to being ignored—and maybe even preferred it that way.

“Yes?” she said.

“I’m a friend of Abner Cooley’s.”

I hoped that this might break the ice, grease the skids, and all the expressions that make your way easier. Instead, Annie Chin’s lips curled into an unamused smirk.

“Really. Another one.”

I had to take this as encouragement—maybe Gus
had
contacted her! So I slipped into the seat opposite her.

“I’m Roy Milano,” I said.

“And what do
you
want?” she asked.

“I want to know if you know a guy named Gus Ziegler.”

Annie laughed, with no mirth whatsoever. She closed her script, placed her elbow on it, and put her face in her palm. Then she shut her eyes, as if suffering. When she opened them, they were filled with tears.

“Can’t you leave me alone? Don’t you know that I wish I’d never heard that name?”

I nearly gasped with a feeling of success. Yet Annie’s unhappy responses were making me uneasy. So, commiserating with her, I pulled out the neck of my shirt, where Gus’s bruise on my neck still hadn’t faded.

“Me too,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”

There was a pause, then Annie relaxed a little. It had worked; in this painless environment, I was another injured individual. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve, and then on a Swingers napkin.

“That guy Gus is the reason I don’t have a goddamn job anymore,” she said, more quietly.

“Is that right?”

“Yes. He dropped Abner’s name, and who knew that I knew Abner? Well, apparently a lot of people!” She looked at me bitterly. Then she shrugged, because it no longer mattered.

“Anyway, he said he had something that would interest Ben, something about this Orson Welles thing—which at that point was still a secret.”

“He didn’t say what he had?”

“He said he would only talk to Ben about it. Well, trusting Abner, I trusted this guy Gus, even though I sensed he was a little weird, bodybuilder, or whatever. I set up the meeting, and a few days later I get a fax. Not even from Ben, from his
new
assistant! Telling me not to bother coming in, I’m fired. And later that afternoon, they messengered me over this envelope with”—tears starting again, she fumbled in her pocketbook—“this printout that I guess they got from Gus.”

Annie took out some folded pieces of paper and slid them across to me. I recognized them as pages from Abner Cooley’s contact lists, the ones that were safely hidden inside Jeanne’s laptop.

“So that’s how come he canned you? Because you were one of Abner’s sources?”

“I guess.” She blew her nose. “He’s never even . . . I mean, I haven’t heard from Ben since. It’s been a whole week.”

She blushed then, because her tone had betrayed her to be more than just an aggrieved employee. Relieved to be so exposed, she pointed to the script on the table.

“I’m reading this for him, still,” she said. “To see if he’d be right for it. Isn’t that ridiculous?”

I looked at her, with sympathy. Even though she had ratted on Ben, she still had such profoundly mixed feelings. She was a trusting person, and easily hurt. She had trusted me, but I was no Ben Williams. I reached out and touched her hand, very, very briefly.

“Not more than anything else,” I said.

Annie Chin was comforted by my tone. Instinctively, she touched the mole on her cheek. Then, fully linked to me, she asked, “So why do
you
want to kill Gus Ziegler?”

I laughed a little, as she did, sniffling. “It’s Gus who might have killed someone. After he stole something. What he gave to Ben.”

Annie nodded, with a small grunt of understanding. But she didn’t even care what it was. She just tore off a piece of her paper place setting and wrote on it, stabbed it, with her pen.

“Here,” she said. “This is the home phone and address of his new assistant. Her name is Beth Brenner. Just look for a really stupid bitch.”

Annie slid the paper over to me, laughing at the depth of her emotions. As she did, the sleeves of her denim jacket rode up and revealed small bandages on both of her wrists.

Though I couldn’t afford it, I paid for her meal, anyway.

“So,” Jeanine said later, sitting next to a new pile of magazines on her cousin Larry’s bed. “Has she called you back yet?”

She was referring to Beth Brenner, Ben’s new assistant, for whom I had left several messages.

I shook my head no. “Maybe it was a mistake to mention Orson Welles.”

“Don’t beat yourself up,” she said evenly. “You thought it would intrigue her.”

“I think it scared her off.”

“Well”—she pulled out a jangling set of rental car keys—“since you insisted, let’s go.”

It was a late Saturday afternoon. I approached the door while Jeanine waited in the car outside Beth’s two-story apartment house in West Hollywood. We had decided that confronting her at Ben Williams’s office, or, God forbid, his home—addresses Jeanine had cribbed from Abner—would be a mistake. At Beth’s home, I could try to speak my piece, make sure she got it, and run, like a man slipping a menu under an apartment door in New York. Did they do that in L.A.?

I saw none in the small vestibule, where I pressed her buzzer.

“Yes?” came a young female’s voice.

“Is this Beth?”

There was a pause. Then, “Get lost, creepo,” she said.

The buzzer clicked off, without another word. I waited for what seemed a spectacularly long time. There was only silence.

Then, through the window on the vestibule door, I saw a police car pull up outside.

I remembered that, when the original
Scarface
was released, some states showed a different ending, in which Paul Muni was hanged for his crimes. But since Muni was already working on another film, they just used a stand-in, a trapdoor, and a hangman.

Pressing my back to the wall, I peeked out and watched the cop car park behind Jeanine. The door opened, and a blond cop, in much better shape than he would have been in New York, emerged. He walked to Jeanine’s window, and they spoke.

My heart began pounding loudly. I could only imagine what Jeanine was doing—feigning ignorance of the city, or imitating flirtatiousness, or reading his palm. Whatever it was, the conversation soon ended. Jeanine turned on her motor. Then, glancing once furtively at the front of the building, she drove away. After a second, the cop got back into his car and did the same.

Left behind, I waited, swallowing very deeply. Then I exited the apartment house and walked out into the sun.

It wasn’t a warm day, by my new California standards, but I was still soaked with sweat. As I walked quickly up the little street toward the broad boulevard—Melrose? I wasn’t sure—I glanced behind me.

A young woman was leaving Beth Brenner’s building. She was in a hurry.

She didn’t fit Annie Chin’s definition, by any stretch of the imagination. She was red-haired and long-legged and—if she had called the cops to get rid of me—pretty smart, as well. But, either way, Beth Brenner was heading toward her purple Taurus parked across the street.

I started to run up the block toward Melrose. As I got there, Beth was just pulling out behind me and, making twice the time, heading the same way.

At Melrose, I took a quick right and saw Jeanine’s car parked at a mini-mall, as we had arranged. Meanwhile, Beth had stopped behind me, at the light at the corner.

“Let’s go,” I said, getting in. “There she is.”

Jeanine waited until the light changed, and Beth had taken a quick right onto the boulevard. Then she peeled out after her, into traffic.

“I can’t believe she actually called the cops,” I said.

“I told you she might. Good plan, right?” she said.

“Great plan.”

“I did our charts last night, and we make a good team.”

“I’m happy to know that. Get left.”

“Okay.” Jeanine did. “Let me ask you something else?”

“What’s that?”

“How do you know that’s even her?”

“I, uh, don’t.”

Suddenly, it was a packed boulevard, all cars speeding, heedlessly. In the same lane, Beth’s purple car had weaved ahead and was covered by a larger vehicle. Jeanine put on her turn signal and was about to get parallel. But she was suddenly cut off by a tiny white Porsche zooming in ahead.

A tanned yuppie was at the wheel. Moving at top speed, he pulled up alongside Beth. Honking his horn, he gestured for her window to come down. When it did, neither one slowing, Beth looked over, and he yelled, “Could you give me some directions?”