The Glitter Dome (7 page)

“Let's start at his place of business,” Al Mackey said. “Might see some movie stars!”

4

The Baby Mogul

It was nearly noon. The windy speech from Deputy Chief Francis had cost them time in addition to money. And then there were Captain Woofer's theories as to what Nigel St. Claire was doing in a bowling alley parking lot when his car was found three miles away on the Sunset Strip. Al Mackey had taken semi-elaborate notes during the theorizing and the notes were now in his coat pocket. The notes said:

1. Call Emmy about alimony payment. Ask for another ten days. Grovel if necessary.

2. Call Emmy's lawyer if Emmy says to fuck off.

3. Tell Emmy's lawyer that putting an ex-husband in jail for not paying spousal support never solved anything. Money, not vengeance, is the name of the game.

4. Call Thelma (or Thelma's lawyer) and tell her that it's very hard paying spousal support to
two
women. Plead for understanding since Thelma always had more heart than that other bitch.

5. Call Johnny and Petey when they get home from school and say that we'll go to a Dodger game
next
weekend for sure. Tell them that they might mention to their mom that their ex-stepfather could take them more places if he wasn't so broke all the time.

6. When Emmy calls to scream about using her kids as an economic weapon, tell her that the crybaby baseball players and greedy team owners have forced the price of seats right through the roof. And has she tried buying hot dogs and peanuts at Dodger Stadium these days for two teenagers with appetites like timber wolves?

Al Mackey momentarily put aside his alimony dilemma when he pulled up to the gate of the famous studio. While he flashed his badge and signed in with the gate guards, Martin Welborn studied the photographs in the case envelope. He instantly disagreed with the supposition of Schultz and Simon that Nigel St. Claire was shot first in the temple and then in the forehead.

“Look at the caboose on that one, Marty,” Al Mackey said as they passed a harried extra in the mock-buckskin garb of an Indian squaw. She was scurrying toward a gigantic sound stage marked Stage 2, and Al Mackey was disappointed to see her turn left at the next street when he had to make a right turn to find the surprisingly modest three-story building that housed the Truly Successful moguls. Al Mackey had expected something like a Playboy Mansion-on-the-back-lot.

“I think he was shot in the forehead first,” Martin Welborn said when Al Mackey stopped for a parade of extras dressed like Keystone cops.

“Reinforcements,” Al Mackey observed, but Martin Welborn never glanced up.

“Look at this, my lad,” Martin Welborn said. He could still find some electric current somewhere. It had been a long time since a police investigation had given Al Mackey a charge. It had been a long time since
anything
had given Al Mackey a charge.

Martin Welborn held a morgue photo of Nigel St. Claire in front of Al Mackey's sunken eyes. The corpse leered at him through broken dentures. The blood had not been scrubbed away, and filigreed his brow like scarlet lace. The eyes were open and staring. He died with a panic mask preserved.

“I think he saw what was coming, Aloysius, my boy.”

“I think
I
see what's coming,” Al Mackey said, watching a six-foot redhead in French designer jeans and a green tube top sashay toward a door that said Casting. Maybe he could get a job as a studio cop when he retired? Maybe he should put in an application. Just then another auburn beauty moved like a cheetah in front of the car, smiled at the cadaverous detective, and strolled toward the same doorway. Maybe he should put in his application for studio cop
today
. Who
cared
what they paid!

The inside of the building was a little less disappointing than the outside. At least there were movie posters all over the walls—some old, baroque and elaborate—some vivid, eye-catching and new. Posters from the famous films the studio had distributed for three generations. Some bore likenesses of dead movie stars Al Mackey had nearly forgotten. Some showed cinema stars of the present. But other than that, it wasn't much different from corporate offices belonging to the huge parent conglomerate. This studio was merely one of the spider's legs, though its most glamorous leg to be sure.

Another studio guard directed them to the third floor (there wasn't even an elevator. What's this shit? Even police stations have elevators!) where they found the seat of power, the offices of the late Nigel St. Claire, bachelor and
bon vivant
, president of the film division. His name had been removed from the office directory in the glass case by the stairway. He would be off the stationery by the end of the week. His name had been painted out of the parking lot twenty-six hours after his gutted corpse had been posted by the morgue pathologist and released to a mortuary. (Parking, not pussy, is at a premium around
these
parts, they said.)

Nigel St. Claire's funeral had been top drawer. His eulogy was written by an Oscar-winning screenwriter. It was delivered by an Oscar-winning actress in a brilliant move to counter complaints that Nigel St. Claire's studio seldom made women's movies. The funeral entourage was choreographed by an Oscar-winning director.

In addition to filmdom's most famous funeral-goers, the choreographer was resourceful enough to employ three SAG “weepers,” two female, one male, the kind who could turn on the waterworks the second anyone yelled “action.”

Famous mourners had come from all over the world. Nigel St. Claire was greatly loved and had been at the fore of all the humanitarian causes in the film community. He had personally organized and promoted the highly publicized Beverly Hills Banquet to Protest World Hunger, at $2,000 a plate. The black caviar was delivered to the party in a wheelbarrow by two ermine-clad starlets. The Soviet consul sent a laudatory telegram saying that such a caviar purchase went a long way toward patching things up after all those hard hats smashed the cases of vodka during the Afghan incident.

Nigel St. Claire was likewise the prime mover of the Fund to Preserve Artistic Freedom, not to mention the numerous Save the Dolphins parties. Once he held two parties simultaneously at his three-acre Bel-Air estate, during which Jacques Cousteau specials
and
famous films that promoted First Amendment guarantees were shown together. It was lots of fun tooting coke and watching Jacques Cousteau pointing toward something on camera left, causing the audience to turn to the next screen where he seemed to be looking at Linda Lovelace with her nasal drip, beating her tonsils on an eight-inch salami in the most famous and commercially successful of the Preserve Artistic Freedom movies championed by Nigel St. Claire.

So his credentials were impeccable. They talked of his accomplishments in hushed tones from Malibu Colony to St. Moritz, when they downed Quaaludes and Perrier by candlelight. It was beyond comprehension that anyone would want to kill such a decent human being. Was he not a man of compassion? He was the first publicly to espouse amnesty for the other Truly Successful studio boss who had been charged by a disgruntled soreh ead with embezzling studio funds. All the district attorney's office could prove was that he'd stolen less than $100,000. Yet he had been fired from his job! People in The Business were shocked. Furious. Ads were taken in the trade papers to vent their anger. It was absolutely outrageous that the law was persecuting a guy like this for a lousy hundred G's! This is a man who could get into The Bistro
without
a reservation.

Hollywood threw parties in the former mogul's honor. He intensified his sessions with his therapist, who promised the judge that the patient would be cured of his annoying habit within a few months. Pretty soon
all
Six Famous Restaurants were giving him tables without a reservation. French and Italian maître d's started fighting over him, calling each other frogs and wops. Everyone wanted him. They didn't give a shit if he stole the goddamn silverware! He was more famous than Clint Eastwood. He was more beloved than the Thief of Baghdad.

He was promoted to president of worldwide productions in a
bigger
studio than the one that fired him. It was a Hollywood fable come true. The stuff movies are made of. The film colony got misty in his presence. He was kissed by men and women with compassion in their eyes.

In a sense, Nigel St. Claire made it all happen the day the errant mogul was rudely jerked out of his Rolls-Royce on Sunset Boulevard by none other than Buckmore Phipps, the street monster, who heard from a girlfriend at the D.A.'s office that a felony warrant had been issued for this famous personage, and the cop that arrested him might get on television. After bail was arranged that very night, it was Nigel St. Claire who put together a quick coming-out party for the fallen colleague and started the crusade to save him from doing time in the slammer.

Nigel St. Claire had personally given the chairman of the board the solution for keeping pinkies out of the cookie jar. It was a workable plan, the chairman agreed, although he privately admitted to Nigel he'd love to set fire to the little bastard and let him drown in deep water. Which is what would happen, since both the chairman and Nigel St. Claire knew that, along with no integrity, he lacked brains, talent, loyalty, industry, and in fact had better clean up his act or his senile grandfather (the chairman's father) would disinherit the little shmuck and he could go on welfare like a nigger.

It was a thorny problem, everyone knew, what with the L.A.
Times
running malicious articles practically every Sunday about how studios that grossed hundreds of millions in film rentals had never shown a nickel's profit. (So
what
if the studio accountants ordered red ink in ten-gallon drums?) And now the chairman's putz of a son had to get himself nailed like some wetback stealing hubcaps!

And wasn't it Nigel St. Claire, the Henry Kissinger of The Business, who devised that workable plan for the chairman? There was only one thing to do with the thieving little fuck: place him so high up in the studio he couldn't
use
those sticky mitts. He'd have to go through too many other pirates and freebooters to do much embezzling, and a lot of those old dudes were too tough to let him slash away at
their
boodle. It was a brilliant plan, actually.

So it was Nigel St. Claire, more than anyone else, who was the Starmaker of The Business. Several other studio executives began to hope that
their
embezzling might get discovered after seeing what Nigel St. Claire's diplomacy had wrought.

Nigel St. Claire publicly argued that his cousin deserved a second chance. After all, it was this cousin who had the guts to organize the first Hollywood dinner to demand the impeachment and imprisonment of that crook Richard Nixon.

But now Nigel St. Claire was not even a name on the asphalt. In fact, when Al Mackey and Martin Welborn entered his former office suite, his former secretary was standing at the window peering down into the parking lot at a lethargic studio sign painter who was painting in a new name.

She sighed and dabbed at a sparkling drop on her cheek when Al Mackey showed his badge and asked to talk with Herman St. Claire III, the new temporary president of the film division.

“I think we told those other detectives just about everything we know,” she said, returning to her desk to blow her nose in a Kleenex.

She was nubile, with an ass like a melon and eyes like an ocelot. Al Mackey was enchanted. “We've had the case turned over to us,” Al Mackey said. “Sorry, but we have to talk to everyone a second time.”

“It's such a sad, sad thing,” the secretary said. “I just haven't got any sleep for days and days. We all loved old Mister St. Claire.” Then she added quickly, “Not that we don't love the
new
Mister St. Claire as much as the old one. It's just so …
unbearable
to see his name painted right off the parking lot. That's when you realize he might just as well never have lived. Know what I mean?”

“It's tragic, all right,” Al Mackey said, noting that her name was Tiffany Charles and that her phone number was on Schultz and Simon's reports.

“Well, that's life, I guess,” said Tiffany Charles, as Martin Welborn looked around the rather plain office at the pictures of other St. Claires of the past and present who were big and little studio bosses.

Tiffany Charles took a pillbox covered with gemstones from her desk drawer, popped two Libriums, gulped them down with Diet-Rite, and said, “The only thing sadder I can think of would be if they broke your star right out of the sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard.”

The thought of it made her shudder, until she pictured two big sweating construction workers sexily banging away with jackhammers, and she recovered a bit. Then she noticed how Martin Welborn's long, sad eyes got sensual when he looked right at you. He wasn't very old, about the same as Tiffany Charles' dad, which was a turn-on in itself. And he was a pretty big guy with a good body. She wondered what his ass looked like. Tiffany Charles was a sucker for young-looking older guys like this, or else for big sweaty animals that socked it to you and no bullshitting around. Which reminded her: “What happened to those other two detectives? You know, those big,
big
ones? They didn't get shot or something, did they?”

“Detectives only get shot in movies,” Martin Welborn said, and his boyish smile made Tiffany Charles almost forget about big sweaty animals.

“Who did your teeth?” she asked. “They're beautiful.”

“God,” Martin Welborn said.

“You mean they're not capped?”

“Nope.”

“Wow!” said Tiffany Charles, breaking Al Mackey's heart.

“Back to the deceased Mister St. Claire,” Al Mackey said, all business now.

“Oh well,” Tiffany Charles said philosophically, “we can't dwell on the past, can we? Mister St. Claire wouldn't have wanted it. He always said you're only as hot as your last gig.”