The Player (19 page)

It was time to pick up June Mercator. His black tie was in the closet. There was a shower in a washroom down the hall. He took extra care to shave closely. He loved wearing the black tie, though he wouldn't admit this to anyone, but maybe that was how everyone felt. He knew he looked good.

Perhaps we'll get married and have children, Griffin thought. If there is a son, will June want to name him David? Griffin decided that if there was a boy, that was the name he would suggest. Maybe not. If he called him David, would he ever look at him without thinking about the parking lot and the smell of the air escaping from the tire? Or would calling him David bring out a kind of tenderness? Because I took a life, I have now made a life. David. Good morning, David. How was school today, David? Let's play catch, David. Why don't you ask your friends to come to Aspen with us for Christmas, David? David, I think you're in love. David, it's time we had a talk. David, I'm not without guilt. June might say that name belongs to the past. This was assuming that she loved David Kahane the night he died.

It was a little after seven. He had ordered a limousine, and the driver was waiting for him at the door. There were nights when everyone took a limousine, and this was one of them. Griffin wasn't sure that he wanted June to see him arrive in a long Cadillac; he wanted her to think of him as a regular guy for someone so important, but he measured that against how it would look to drive up to the Hilton in his own car while his opposite numbers from other studios stepped out of limousines. Would she really think that he was just one of the guys if he picked her up in his Mercedes?

The house was almost at the top of Outpost. It was set back from the street and up a small rise. The garden in front was well tended, like an old country club, or a mission-style church, a few palms, some large-leafed jungle plants, and a freshly cut lawn. The house was Spanish, with a heavy oak door and a stained-glass insert, shaped like a diamond, behind a wrought-iron grill. It was nicer than his house, he thought, more refined, better built, the kind of place people with character live in, people who know artists. He felt ashamed for all the new fixtures in his house, the expensive bathroom, the kitchen cabinets that closed so quietly. Would June approve?

The black Saab was in the driveway, the glue from the dealer's sticker still in the window.

When the door opened, June started to say hello, but he watched her stop for a second as she looked over his shoulder to the limousine at the curb and the driver standing beside it. She shook Griffin's hand and led him inside. She wore a pretty gown that combined midnight blue and a bit of black.

“You look great,” said Griffin.

“Come inside.”

“We're sort of in a rush.”

“Just let me get off the phone.” She walked quickly back to the kitchen. She was arguing with a printer about a late order. “The bank is very unhappy,” she said. “Do you understand? The bank is very unhappy. It's Wednesday or never, Ben. Deliver the brochures by Wednesday or throw them out. It's up to you.”

She came out of the kitchen, her eyes bright.

“Sounds like you were having fun,” said Griffin.

“Actually we have two weeks before we need the brochures, and Ben knows that, but he's slow. Anyway, would you like a glass of wine? No, of course not, we have to go.”

“Beautiful house.”

“It was either clean it up or find something to wear. I'll give you the tour another time.”

As they walked to the car, Griffin realized that if he slept with her in the house, he'd probably make love in David Kahane's bed. If he needed to brush his teeth, he'd be given Kahane's toothbrush. Well, not his actual toothbrush—she would have thrown it out—but unless she bought new brushes after his death, any brushes hidden in a drawer might have been chosen by the man he murdered. This was the most gruesome thought he'd had since the night in the parking lot.

June accepted the limousine driver's official servant's nod as she got into the car. She took her seat in the limousine and started talking to Griffin as though this happened to her every day, to be called to a charity ball with three hours' notice and to be driven there by a chauffeur. Griffin wanted to make a joke about the car, but he couldn't think of something that wouldn't make fun of the luxury. He didn't know whether it would be more amusing to act as though he was used to it or that it was new to him. He said nothing.

“Tell me about yourself,” she said.

“What would you like to know?”

“The usual.”

“Where I went to high school, what my major is, what dorm I live in, that sort of stuff?”

“Yes.” She really wanted to know, and she didn't want to make a joke about it. The impatience carried by her tone of voice started a faster pace in Griffin's pulse. It scared him.

“I'm from Michigan. Lansing. Have you ever met anyone from Lansing?”

“I don't think so.”

“You haven't, I know. I've never met anyone else from Lansing, Michigan, either. Anyway, my father was a judge, my mother was head of the board of education. She died three years ago. He's retired and lives in Georgia, on the coast. I went to the University of Michigan. I was an art major.”

“An
art
major.” She put the emphasis on
art;
everyone was always surprised when they found that out.

“What's the surprise, that a studio executive was an art major, or that I was, I mean, the person you see in front of you, this bland-looking kind of square guy. Can't picture him worried about paint?”

“Is that how I sounded?”

“It's all right. I'm used to it. I really was a painter. I was very good, actually, by the standards of the art department. It was sort of like cooking; I knew the recipe. I knew how to get the faculty jury to give me the prizes. Then I figured out how to get on the jury, to get on all the right committees. I always got along great with adults. I went to New York after Michigan, graduate school at NYU, and I was friendlier with film-school people than painters, and I dropped out of the painting program. Then I spent a few months in the film school and got friendly with the faculty, and one day the head of a big agency came to lecture, and I had to pick him up at the airport. I left for Los Angeles with him the next day. He put me in the mail room. I worked there for two months, I read every script I could. I decided I didn't want to be an agent, I got a job as a reader, and one thing led to another and here I am. I've always been lucky about being in the right place.”

“Do you still paint?”

“Sometimes. I was okay. I wasn't fooling anyone. I also knew that I wasn't great. I was a good academic painter. But I was stuck in abstract expressionism. When the conceptualists came long, I was
dead. I would have made an excellent teacher, but things went a different way. It's not this big from-Art-to-Hollywood story. It didn't work like that.”

“You sound a little defensive.”

“It's an easy thing for people to pick on.”

“Who?”

“The people who pick on Hollywood for being artless. The people who still believe in capital-A Art.”

“Now you sound cynical.”

“No, now I'm being defensive.” It was fun talking in a limousine. You could look at each other. It was like a party.

There were other limousines on Santa Monica Boulevard, a long line of them turning right to the Hilton. The great moment of the limousine is the arrival. June reached overhead to a makeup light and took a compact from her purse. How did she know the light was there? She finished putting on her makeup and then smiled at Griffin. The smile was forced. Hadn't she taken a limousine to Kahane's burial? That's where she learned about the makeup light. No. The Saab was at the funeral home. Someone else had driven the Saab. She looked away from Griffin and held the compact in her hand. He thought by the way she held it, measuring the weight, that it might have been a gift from Kahane, although he didn't think it looked like a gift, it was just a department-store compact. It was a brief glimpse into the sadness she still felt at David Kahane's death. The limousine was at the entrance. Someone was opening her door.

“Look,” she said, “there's Robin Williams.”

The driver opened Griffin's door. He had something to say.

“We were followed. From the time we left the studio. I wasn't sure until we picked up your friend, but the car that followed us drove
past her house on Outpost, and then, when we started back down the hill, he was after us again. It pulled into the public parking lot as we pulled in here. A Dodge Charger.”

“Did you see the driver?”

“I think so. Some guy with short hair and a mustache.”

“Thanks.”

“See you later.”

June waited for Griffin on the sidewalk. He came around the back of the limousine and took her arm and brought her to the center of the red carpet, where Robin Williams faced a half dozen photographers. He pretended to be Mighty Joe Young in chains, in the nightclub scene where he comes out of the pit while Terry Moore plays “Beautiful Dreamer” on the piano. Then he turned into King Kong frightened by flashbulbs and driven insane. He started to make Terry Moore into Nancy Reagan. Griffin called out to him, “Robin!”

The actor smiled. “Hello, Mr. Thalberg,” he said. Someone took their picture together.

Griffin introduced him to June. She seemed polite, not too star-struck, but not diffident, either. She seemed more impressed with Griffin for knowing Robin Williams than for actually shaking the actor's hand.

There was no one with short hair and a mustache hanging around the edge of the crowd. As they followed the red carpet to the ballroom, Griffin wondered how he looked to June. He was aware of himself the way he might be aware of his house if he walked a prospective buyer through it, noticing all the details he'd taken for granted. Did he really know so many people as he was greeting? There were fifteen hundred people in the room, and he knew their faces the way a popular senior knows his class in high school. When they greeted him, they studied June Mercator, though only for a second.
Griffin didn't make an effort to introduce her, so she didn't register. How did he look to the man with short hair?

“Why did he call you Mr. Thalberg?” asked June.

“Irving Thalberg was the boy wonder of 1933. He was Louis B. Mayer's head of production.”

“They give that award at the Oscars. What's it for?”

“Contributions to the industry. I'm not up for it.” She laughed at this in a way that suggested friendship, how a friend would tease someone without drawing blood, the issue here was professional self-respect, not an area Griffin dwelt upon too often, but it was the kind of question he could imagine worrying about when he was old—what was his life worth?—and June's laugh said she forgave him. So she was starting to like him. When he'd called David Kahane and June answered the phone, she had been impressed with him, not that he'd done anything, just the fact that he'd called, that it was really Griffin Mill on the line. Since then, even through her brief period of mourning, she'd watched him, tested him. Now he knew she was ready to have fun with him, she was ready for a thrill. He wanted to tell her it wasn't him, it was the limousine, it was Robin Williams. No, he thought, what else am I but these little pieces?

The studio's table was close to the stage. Levison was there with his wife, Andrea. Her father had been on the board of MGM in the old days, and she knew three generations of everyone. She worked for a few charities, but tonight's wasn't one of them. She'd started a mail-order business with two other wives, but nothing had come of it. Sometimes he thought she seemed trapped inside herself, or someone did, someone who hated her husband and hated California, someone who would be happier selling hooked rugs in Vermont. Griffin always asked about the children, and she was always glad to answer him. They liked each other. She understood the politics of the office, and so there was always this awareness between them; that was
all there had to be to kill the possible friendship, just an awareness of the office. Griffin introduced June to the Levisons, and then to the others at the table. Andrea greeted June with glazed good manners, never expecting to see her again. There was no reason for Andrea to know that Griffin had been talking to Bonnie Sherow again, although Andrea had liked her and, after their breakup, asked after her a few times.

Levison had also invited the head of the legal department and his wife, and a few people from Business Affairs, the television division, and his doctor, a serious and quiet man who ran marathons.

It was the doctor who found the postcard, under his dinner plate. “Look at this,” he said, holding up a picture of a naked Polynesian woman standing in a Tahitian waterfall.

“Did we all get one?” asked Andrea. Everyone looked under their plates. Griffin couldn't see if there was anything written on the back. He waited for someone to ask if there was a message.

“Maybe it's part of a door-prize drawing,” said one of the Business Affairs people.

“How so?” asked Greene.

“Maybe the person who finds it gets a trip to Tahiti.”

“No,” said the head of the legal department. “They wouldn't just hand out a trip by sticking it at the table of a big studio. It's just a busboy's idea of a practical joke.”

“Does it say anything?” asked June. Griffin felt that he had willed her to ask this.

“No,” said Greene.

No one at the table thought the mystery of the card was worth pursuing, and the doctor slipped it next to the floral centerpiece. Would normal curiosity allow Griffin to ask to see the card? The card was a long reach over June's section of the table. If she left for
the bathroom, he could get it easily. He'd wait. No, he decided, since there was no message, he should ignore it.