The Cutting Room (7 page)

“Upsadaisy,” he said.

Kneeling in that painful and vulnerable position, I watched as my companion walked around to face me. He was a handsome black man, middle-aged, dressed in an elegant two-piece suit, with the short lapels so many had worn at that year’s Oscars.

I thought that, in the play
The Bad Seed
, the child murderess gets away with her crime. In the film version, she is struck by lightning. Then, in a comic coda, the child actress is spanked, as if it had all just been a stage show. In a sense then, she survived.

For a second, I stared at the man in silence. My mind woozy, I had only one crushing need: to buy time.

“May I have a drink of water?” I asked, for my throat was burning.

“Oh, all right,” he said, annoyed.

The man left and returned with a plastic hotel cup, which he held to my lips. Some of the water that splashed out of my mouth went down my front, and some ricocheted off and went raining down on Gus.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Right.”

The man crushed the cup in what I now noticed was a huge hand. I also noticed something else: His face was familiar.

“Hey, aren’t you . . . ,” I stammered out. “Aren’t you from—”

“Shatter,”
he said, modestly. “Yeah, yeah.”

“That’s what I thought.” It was a blaxploitation movie from the early Seventies. “You were the police chief.”

“That’s right. But that was a long time ago.”

Perhaps because I recognized him, he looked at me a bit more charitably now. Then, suddenly, he tore down the front of my shirt. Pulling me around like an army drill instructor, he inspected my neck and my back. Then, seeming satisfied, he dragged me on my knees toward a chair.

He lifted me up, painfully, by my elbows, and placed me into it. Was this a perk or a punishment? I didn’t know, but I did know something else now: his name.

“You’re Dick Burke,” I said.

“That’s right,” he said grudgingly.

“You were the best one in it, in
Shatter
.”

These compliments were helping charm my companion. Yet everything I addressed to Dick Burke was also meant guilelessly. I was glad to see that he was still around and that he looked so well. But couldn’t Ben Williams cast him in a better role than his bodyguard?

“So what have you been doing? Just this?”

“Look,” he said, “you’re not making this any easier.”

“Making what?” I asked nervously.

“What the hell did you want to get mixed up with him for?”

Dick Burke pointed at the wide, water-stained body of Gus, lying faced away. Then, disgustedly, he grabbed up a magazine from a table and tossed it at the dead man’s head.

“Freak,” he said.

Slowly, some of what I was hearing began to make sense. Had Gus been killed for something
other
than being—or so Ben Williams obviously thought—Abner Cooley’s spy? Was he guilty of something
else
besides killing Alan Gilbert?

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “I really don’t know.”

“Look, if you’re lying . . .” He looked at me, threatening something unmentionable. Then Dick Burke just shrugged, sat on the hotel floor at my feet, took out a cigarette, and lit it. He sucked the smoke in and blew it out, gratefully.

“Jesus,” he said. “If I look in your face, I’ll believe you.”

“That’s because I’m telling the truth.” I felt oddly safe with Dick Burke now, the supporting actor I knew. “I wasn’t with Gus. I was only looking for him.”

“Then why did you mention the same movie he did?
Magnificent
. . . whatever.”

I was surprised that an actor as accomplished as Dick Burke had never heard of Orson Welles’s second film, but I didn’t say that.

“Well, to be honest, I wasn’t only looking for Gus; I was looking for the movie. I was trying to get Ben Williams’s attention.”

“Well, you certainly did that.” He laughed. “Mission accomplished.”

“What’s the . . . what did Gus
do
, anyway?”

Dick Burke rubbed his weary face. “It’s not so much what he did—which wasn’t great, believe me—it was what he wanted to do. But that’s all I can say.”

“Do you think . . . ,” I was comfortable enough to ask now, “you could maybe untie my hands?”

I turned my back toward him and wiggled my captured fingers. Almost casually, leaving the cigarette in his mouth, Dick Burke reached up and removed what felt like rope from my wrists. I rubbed them, relieved.

Dick Burke waited a while before continuing to speak. Had he really grown to like me? Or did he know that I wouldn’t be in the world long enough to squeal? Either way, he went on, pointing at the dead body.

“This Gus guy got to Ben through his assistant—his
former
assistant, Annie Chin.”

“That part I know.”

“Ben wanted me at their meeting at his office, just to watch, as usual. They had a long talk about this movie—”

“The Magnificent—“

“Whatever. I don’t keep up on the business much, makes me a little bitter. That Samuel Jackson. Lightweight!”

“
The Magnificent Ambersons
is sixty years old.”

Dick Burke’s pause seemed unhappy and served as a warning.

“I could tell it wasn’t
real
new,” he said testily, “because this Gus handed over a bag with a couple of
cans
of film in it, not videotapes!”

Dick Burke calmed down, but suddenly I could see why he might be useful as a bodyguard, and unemployed as an actor.

“They talked money for a while, and arrived at a price. Ben paid him in cash. And then this Gus guy said something that struck me as strange. About the movie, he said, ‘I’d sure love to watch it with you sometime, with you
and
your wife.’ And he was staring at this little framed picture of Rosie and the kids Ben had on his desk. Then he got up, thanked Ben, and left with me.

“I didn’t think Ben had noticed anything. But that’s my job, you know? I was driving the guy back to the dump he was staying in, downtown, near the modern art museum. I could see him fidgeting next to me, making like little cats’ cradles with his fingers.

“ ‘Ben’s got a nice wife,’ ” I said, to draw him out.

“ ‘Very nice,’ ” he said.

“Nobody said anything then. His fingers were going even faster. Then he turned to me and blurted out, real blunt-like, “ ‘I’ll give you the money.’ ”

“ ‘What?’ ” I asked, not looking away from the road.

“ ‘I’ll give you the money he gave me,’ ” and he took the roll out of his pocket, like he was proving it.

“I stayed calm, because that’s my job, too. ‘What the hell for?’ I said.

“ ‘If you’ “—and he kind of gulped, like he was swallowing down and then burping back up what he had to say—’get me next to Rosie.’

“I kept driving, keeping cool, you know. I even laughed a little bit, to give him a chance to stop, to say it was all a joke. But from the corner of my eye, I could see he still had his hands stretched out, and the money was still in it.

“I was almost at his place, on a deserted street downtown, late at night. So I turned the wheel suddenly to the right, the tires screeching, and drove into an alley, where I stopped and killed the lights. This all happened in the space of a second.

“As fast as that, too, I turned on the little light inside, up on the roof. Then I stuck my gun right underneath this Gus guy’s chin.”

Dick Burke paused, but only to put his cigarette out in a can of Coke left on the floor.

“With my other hand, I grabbed him by the front of his shirt. He was a big man, you know, but he was shaking. I think the money fell through his fingers and into his lap.

“I told him to empty his wallet, to show me what was inside. He did, and that’s where I found that list of names and numbers, one of which was Annie Chin’s.

“And by pulling him toward me, I had yanked down his shirt far enough to see something else. A tattoo.”

I was about to say, “Herman,” but I didn’t, and I was glad.

“Herman,” Dick Burke said. “ ‘Herman?!’ I screamed at him, pulling him even closer, and tearing his shirt. ‘Herman?!’ though, of course, I had had my suspicions.”

“Who’s ‘Herman’?” I couldn’t help asking.

“It’s not a guy. It’s a group. They’re a bunch of nuts who believe in ‘outing’ people who are, well, half-guy and half-girl. ‘Her-Man,’ get it? They think Rosie is the most famous one like that. They even have their own Web site. And their own tattoos.”

I felt the breeze on my collar, where Dick Burke had ripped my shirt and inspected me.

“Jesus,” I said.

I
had
heard the rumor about Rosie, but had always discounted it, given Mrs. Williams’s undeniable female charms. Why would Gus . . . but Dick Burke gave me an early answer.

“Some people think all the ‘Her-Mans’ are a bunch of mixed-up freaks like that themselves,” he said.

I considered this. Gus having dual sex glands might explain his excessive weight lifting—overcompensation—as well as Abner Cooley’s repelled reaction to their tryst. Luckily, I thought, I’d never know.

“We’ve been bothered by them before,” Dick Burke said. “But none ever tried to get inside the house, to find out. This Gus guy thought he had a great idea. He had
The Magnificent
whatever, and Ben wanted it. But he was a rank amateur, and I could tell by the way he was whimpering next to me.

“ ‘I’m sorry,’ he was saying, over and over again. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m stupid, I’m so sorry.’ ”

Dick Burke did a blistering imitation of a weak person weeping. It didn’t sound like Gus, but it didn’t matter, he seemed to know all about people being that way.

“I heard somebody coming down the alley, some drunk or something. So I told him to turn sideways, and I tied his hands. I stuffed a rag in his mouth. Then I drove him to The Farmer’s Daughter. He never gave me any trouble, never tried to run or anything. He was like a guy on death row, or something, resigned. I thought of turning him in to the cops, but . . .” He gave me a look that meant,
I’m black, and this is L.A.
I grunted, understanding. “I knew I shouldn’t have shot him. But the guy had gotten me pretty mad.”

I tried not to look over at Gus now, but it was impossible. All that muscle, I thought, and he could not be protected from his own peculiarities.

Then I looked back at Dick Burke, whose rage had made
him
helpless, too. He had confessed to me because his guilt was stronger than his fear of being exposed. He had come a long way from featured player.

“Well, if it makes you feel any better,” I said, “I think Gus killed someone to get the movie.”

Dick Burke seemed genuinely surprised, a bit relieved, then skeptical. “You really think?”

His reaction gave me pause.
Could
Gus have killed Alan? His scheme—though creative—had been doomed to such failure from the start that it now seemed pathetic. Still, anyone who would use
The Magnificent Ambersons
in order to expose a celebrity hermaphrodite was capable of anything.

“Don’t forget the woman,” Jeanine had said.

Suddenly, I remembered Jeanine, back in the motel.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” I said, “what
about
the movie? Ben Williams should know how he came to have it. I’d like to tell him.”

I had gone a few words too far with Dick Burke. Furious, he stood up and, by my collar, pulled me out of the chair. Then he slid open the balcony window and, my feet grazing the floor, dragged me out onto the small granite terrace. There, picking me up by the belt of my pants, he leaned me far enough over the edge that the brick wall opposite seemed just an inch away.

Change fell from my pockets. We were three floors up. It was definitely dawn.

“Shut up!” he yelled. “You’re lucky you’re alive!”

“Okay, okay!” I yelled back. “I’m sorry I asked!”

Dick Burke dropped me back on my feet, on the balcony floor. Then, disgusted, he left me there, and went quickly inside the room again.

The storm seemed to have passed. Dick Burke was calmly wrapping Gus’s body up in a sheet ripped from the bed. As I re-entered the room, he intentionally turned his back so he could not see me.

I left by the front door.

“I’m glad you’re here.”

A cab had dropped me back where I’d started from. Waiting at cousin Larry’s, Jeanine had been worried, but not a great deal. After all, to my surprise, I had only been gone a few hours.

“God, that’s a shame!” she said, when I explained. “But no wonder Abner was a little displeased by Gus.”

“Yeah.”

“And Dick Burke. I always wondered what became of him.”

“Now you know.”

“Well, so what do we do?”

This was the first sound of confusion I had heard from the resourceful Jeanine. It made me think there wasn’t much left
to
do. A big movie star had
The Magnificent Ambersons
, and would probably remake it, or use it in some way to promote his misconceived biopic.

“First, I’d like to take care of my head.”

“Oh, my God, look at that. Please, let me.”

With bandages and peroxide she found in Larry’s medicine chest, Jeanine administered to my wounds, which were unsightly but not deep. She did so with her usual motherly care, capped off with a tenderly romantic touch of my face. We were very close, but I only smiled, gratefully.

“I guess we’ll never know how Alan got ahold of the movie in the first place,” she said sadly.

“I guess not.”

“Or whether Gus really killed him. Or who the woman was. Or whether it mattered.”

“No.”

“And, most importantly . . .”

She didn’t have to say it, I was way ahead of her. We’d never see
The Magnificent Ambersons
, at least not before anyone else. That hurt me more than my head, I was surprised to learn. We had come so far, just to turn back. I thought about planning my next issue of
Trivial Man
, and it paled by comparison.

We were simply stuck in L.A., until our next courier assignment. Wearied by my brush with death, I slept most of that day and all of that night. Then, the next afternoon, we went to Santa Monica to see a festival of precensorship films from the Thirties.