Wag the Dog (24 page)

She struts over to her handbag. She takes out a twenty-dollar bill. “Take it,” she says.

I take it.

“Now you're my gigolo,” she says. She giggles. “That's such a funny word.” So she says, in a husky voice, trying not to laugh, “You're my kept man. I'm your whore and you're my kept man. Guess what, the names for women who take money from men are much worse. Aren't they? So no more bullshit, Joe, about where the money comes from, OK?”

“I'll try. But the first time I hear someone say I'm using you . . .”

“You'll punch 'em out and show how tough you are,” she teases me. “Joe, I need someone. My instinct says you're smart. And you're loyal. Put
Someone to Watch Over Me,
on the stereo and dance with me.”

“Maggie, I'm not doing this to get somewhere.”

“What are you afraid of? That someone will say you're fucking your way to the top? In this town that's a compliment. It should be, because everybody fucks, but damn few do it good enough to get to the top.”

“Are you sure about this?”

“Joe, if you don't want to play ‘Someone to Watch Over Me,' put on ‘Lay, Lady, Lay.' ”

“Too cute.”

“Yeah,” she says, “but it's country.”

I turn the music on. Because that's our way of saying we want to talk, for ourselves, not for the listeners. It's what she asked—Bob Dylan. Maybe it is country. Singing about laying a lady across a big brass bed. “What the hell,” I say, my throat dry as sandpaper, “dance with me.”

 

 

 

⁴⁶
Platoon
(1986), written and directed by Oliver Stone. This is the film that “made” Stone. There are three main characters: a male ingenue, played by Charlie Sheen, through whose eyes we sec the story, and two sergeants. While both sergeants are effective combat soldiers, one, Willem Dafoe, is a compassionate, fair-minded, pot-smoking killer, and the other, played by Berenger, in great scar makeup, is a vicious, murderous, dangerous-to-his-own, booze-swilling, killer. The Berenger character murders Dafoe.

⁴⁷
A casual quote from Big Daddy, Tennessee Williams's
Cat On a Hot Tin Roof.
Maggie played Maggie the Cat on stage in L.A. before she made it on film.

“H
E
'
S RIGHT.
T
OO
cute,” David Hartman said.

The tape on the table in front of him kept rolling. Music started to play. Hartman was not particularly fond of Dylan. Though he'd once pretended to be when he was trying to steal Jack Nicholson away from his agent. And sat through Laker games, watching giant black people sweat profusely while they bumped against other giant black people. It stimulated his latent racism. Which he'd overcome sufficiently to sign several of them. They made fortunes with commercial endorsements and assorted personal appearances. They were employed half of the year and in training the rest; therefore they had less time to demand unnecessary attentions, and in terms of dollars-per-agent-hour they out-performed film stars. So Hartman was still capable of pretending enthusiasm for sporting events but saw no need to do so for Dylan.

“That tape,” Sheehan said to impress the client, “is less than an hour old.” Sheehan looked far more rumpled than he liked. Too many people believed that security is a low-rent business, little but supplying semiliterate semialcoholics as security guards for supermarkets and intimidating convenience-store employees with polygraph machines to make them admit they'd eaten Hershey's kisses without paying for them. Sheehan made a point of wearing $1,800 suits just for that reason. He called them his CEO and head-of-state suits, because that's how spiffy they were.

Unfortunately, at 10:03 that morning, about when
Maggie made her first public appearance with Joe Broz, shopping, half a dozen people had vied with each other to be the first to reach David Hartman with the rumor. Although he was in a meeting and did not take any calls and was not interrupted, he apparently knew about it by the time he emerged at 10:40. At which point he called Mel Taylor and said that he wanted a full update. He turned Taylor over to his secretary, Fiona, who found the first available time slot—8:00
P.M.
that evening.

Taylor called Chicago as he had been instructed to do if anything happened in the Beagle matter. The call was directed to C. H. Bunker himself. Bunker called Sheehan into his office and said: “Go to Los Angeles. Be at the meeting. Make sure the client is a very happy person. Thank you.” Damn, C. H.'s voice always made him feel like genuflecting. The closest living thing to it was James Earl Jones in a Darth Vader echo chamber.

Sheehan called Taylor. He said, “I want a dog and pony show. I want buttoned up. Neat Labels. Typed or excellent penmanship. Organized. I want all the materials there. But nothing extraneous.” Sheehan had been taught by nuns.

He cleared his other affairs and called his wife personally to say he would not be home for dinner. The first flight he could get was at 5:00—ETA, 7:17. The only available seat was coach. Tight for a big man and hell on clothes. There was no place to hang his jacket. He folded it, neatly, and laid it carefully on top of the other stuff in the overhead rack. But something shifted or fell over, and a box of books pressed it against a paper bag of loose fruit for twelve hundred miles. There were grape stains at the shoulder and every time he moved his arm the aroma of banana rose from his sleeve. The flight arrived at LAX on time, but even with only carry-on baggage, he didn't reach the cab stand until 7:38. There was no time to change. It was a hot and smoggy day. The taxi had no air-conditioning. He arrived in time, but wrinkled. The pants of his $1,800 suit had as many lines around the crotch as the face of an AKC champion Shar-Pei.

Besides, Hartman's suit cost $3,600.

“It certainly sounds like Maggie and Joe are an item,” Hartman said. “How did we get to here?”

Mel Taylor had a written summary, a short narrative,
with the appropriate tape numbers marked alongside the actions described. “Ms. Lazlo came home early in the morning after the bar mitzvah. She was driven home by Jack Cushing.”

Hartman nodded. Cushing was a RepCo client.

Taylor held up tape 1, slipped it in the cassette player. It had been cued up to the action. “They started to become intimate,” Taylor said, and pushed
PLAY.
The sound was remarkably good, a testament to the quality of the microphones employed. It was possible to hear not just words, but heavy breathing and the slurp of passionate kisses. “Joseph Broz was already in the house. He appeared from wherever he'd been. They saw him.” Mel fast-forwarded the tape. Stopped it. “They both ordered Broz out. He refused. There was a fight. Broz won.” Mel pushed
PLAY.
They heard shuffles and grunts.

“There's a gap here,” Mel said, pulling tape 1 out and putting tape 2 in. “Actually, two gaps. They went outside, the front. They came back in. And then we assume they went out on the beach. If you listen, you'll hear various . . . noises. The analysts tell me that
thunk
is the front door and the lighter,
thwack
sound is the back door. Beach door.” He popped out tape 2 and put in 3. “They came back to the house and they became intimate.”

All three men did their best to pretend to be unaffected by the sounds of passion. Taylor grew erect. He was seated so it was hidden, but still it confused him and made him angry. He wondered if he had become a voyeur. A pervert. He sensed that somehow Broz was not only nailing the bitch, he was slipping out of reach, as if immersion in the golden pussy conferred invulnerability, a social kind, as the physical kind had been bestowed upon Achilles by being dipped in the river Styx.

Sheehan, who was very fair, blushed. Once the tape had played long enough that everyone was quite sure what was going on, Taylor turned it off so as not to appear to be dwelling on it. He skipped tape 4. “More of the same,” he said. He put in 5: “This was recorded in the kitchen. In the morning they sent away the housemaid, Mary Mulligan.” The three men listened to Mrs. Mulligan being given time off. “After that they continued to have . . . intimacies.” Taylor took out tapes 6 to 11 but did not play them. His gesture indicated what they were.

Hartman took tape 6 and spot-checked. The erotic mixed with the domestic. But there was a great deal more sex than housekeeping. He then played random pieces of number 9. It was also very stimulating. Sheehan, who spent a great deal of time on the road, had become a devotee of 900 numbers. This compared quite favorably, and knowing that one of the participants was a real movie star truly enhanced the effect. Although the females that he heard on the far end of the telephones had succulent voices, he always suspected that the husky and lubricious sounds were produced by hags, women who really looked like Margaret Hamilton,
⁴⁸
Roseanne Barr, or worse, his wife. He determined to get copies of the Magdalena Lazlo tapes for his personal record of the case.

Hartman stopped the tape and gathered the collection to him. “Are these the only copies?” he asked.

“Yes,” Taylor said, lying. He'd made copies for himself. So had Ray Matusow, though Taylor didn't know that. Other technicians along the line may have done so too.

“I'd hate to have tapes all over town of Magdalena Lazlo having sex. Make sure they're the only copies,” Hartman said. He knew that there were other copies. Just like he knew that techs at the motion-picture laboratories made personal copies of the better breast and beaver footage that passed their way, especially if it was brand-name breast and beaver. It was unstoppable. He didn't care very much, except that when tapes did show up, it would give him an edge with U. Sec. Hartman collected edges. He looked at the last cassette, as if he expected Joe's face to be on the outside, like an album cover. “This Broz, this happen to him a lot?”

“No.”

“Women normally fall all over him?”

“I don't think so,” Taylor said. “It's never been an issue. I wouldn't have thought so.”

“I want to give you an overview,” Frank Sheehan said. “Which is very positive. Our security around Lincoln Beagle is intact and unbroached.”

“He's your guy,” Hartman said, referring to Broz. “You
have a file on him?” Taylor gave him Joe's personnel file. Hartman opened it. “Interesting,” he said aloud. “Marine Corps. Four tours in Vietnam. Two Purple Hearts with oak leaf clusters. Recommended Silver Star . . . wonder why he didn't get it? Got two Bronze Stars. Then he went back to Nam as a civilian . . .”

“Can I see that?” Sheehan said. He reached across the conference table and snatched the papers. There were certain things in the file that outsiders shouldn't see. Taylor, he thought, had really fucked up. He should have dumped Taylor the last time they'd met. Sheehan scanned the page quickly. No, Taylor had not screwed the pooch; the files had been sanitized. “Oh, well, I see,” Sheehan said, deeply relieved. He pointed at a name on the page. “Apparently, he worked for a construction company over there. That's what this company, Oceania-Americana was, a construction company.” To cover his relief he went on.
“Peut-être le mal jaune.
That's what the French called it. Yellow fever. The combination of Western currency and
les femmes Indochinoises
was very enticing. Or it could have been just that there was a lot more money to
be
made over there than over here, for a guy like him.”

“Now, as I understand it, you chose not to tell this Joe Broz about Maggie's house being wired,” Hartman said. “Looks like a good decision.”

Taylor looked over at Sheehan. The client, unconsciously or not, had just signed off on the one decision Taylor had made that was not by the book.

Hartman was reasonably content. He had been able to distract, divert, or discourage everyone else who'd made more than casual inquiries. What the tapes said to him was that now Magdalena had a new dick to keep her body and mind occupied. “Actresses,” he sighed. Now it was just the usual, simple, bullshit problems. “Every time there's a new husband or boyfriend, they get a new hairdo, change their wardrobe, and start asking for different kinds of parts. They all think they're John Derek.
⁴⁹
Or worse, the new Jon Peters. Watch. You'll see.”