Wag the Dog (4 page)

I work here in Los Angeles. Hollywood sometimes. Sometimes in the Valley. Even East L.A. Though not too much. We follow the money. So most of what we do, it's corporate. I've done work for Bank of America, Gulf Oil, Toshiba, Matsushita, Hitachi, Boeing, K mart, all kinds of places. Do we do divorces? Sleazy keyhole peeking? You bet we do. But if I had to figure it, I would say that the lowest amount of money someone's going to be fighting over, if they come to us, it would probably be a million-dollar divorce. Look at it this way. Say you just want to put a tail on your spouse. That's round-the-clock, usually, because screwing knows no timetable. In fact, it is frequently active outside of your usual hours. I followed a guy one time, his wife thought he was an early-morning jogger. Four-thirty in the morning, he's out there, in his Yves Saint Laurent coordinates and Asics Gel Ills. This is so early it's like a moonlight run—what's that line?—“I'm so horny the crack of dawn better watch out.” He comes home at six, six-thirty, jumps in the shower, then off to work. How far you think he runs? He runs about a quarter mile, that's how far he runs. His girlfriend, she's waiting for him on the corner. A maroon Dodge minivan, not chic at all, but functional. They do it in the van. Then she drives maybe half a mile away so he can jog back. Work up a sweat over the other sweat. Thoughtful. You'd be surprised how many divorces start with “I smelled the bitch on him.”

I'm wandering. But I think you should have a picture of the kind of work I do, the kind of place I work for. I was talking about money. For example, in a divorce, you want to watch someone round-the-clock. We bill out, to the lawyers, at $60 an hour, per man, plus expenses. That's bare minimum—$2,880 per day, $20,160 a week, $86,400 for a thirty-day month. You could double that, easy. On a simple WSW. WSW is Who's Screwing Whom. So you understand that you don't spend that kind of money investigating a divorce where there's just a couple of hundred thousand in community property. You have to be talking about real money.

What do I get? About $22 an hour is what it works out to, with vacation time and sick leave. And we have a decent
benefits package—medical, dental, and pension. I'm told it costs the company about 33 percent over our wages.

It's less than real cops make. But the working conditions are better. So is the company we keep.

The building I work in is a typical L.A. office building. A glass box with tinted windows, downtown. There's nothing to distinguish us from any other corporation. There really isn't. I used to keep a bourbon bottle full of tea in my desk drawer. As a joke, you know. So I could play it like a TV detective. I wouldn't have real booze there, in the office, even if we didn't have regular urinalysis. By the way, that's another service we offer. Complete drug screening for your entire work force, or any part thereof, blood or urine. We test for alcohol, marijuana, all opiates, cocaine, barbital, amphetamine use. Full spectrum or targeted, it's your choice.

The office space is modular. Dividers, not walls. We got standard-issue desks, chairs, phones. Fluorescent lights. Not glamorous, but not seedy. The way I see it, this is an advantage. This is something your average Joe and Jane out there, they can relate to. Its very ordinariness is something refreshingly different

Also, what I'm addressing here, right at the beginning, is the issue of credibility. Because this is an incredible story. An unbelievable story. I've been doing this ten, fifteen years. For the same company. I get photographed biannually. I'm bonded. You can take a look at our client list—top law firms, Fortune 500 companies, major studios, and record companies.

I had just finished an investigation into securities theft for one of the major brokerages. I was catching up on my paperwork, transcribing my handwritten notes to the company data base from the workstation at my desk.

Then Maggie Krebs walks in. Maggie is one of the ten most beautiful women in the world. That's official. Right out of
People
magazine. You know her as Magdalena Lazlo, movie star. I know her as Maggie Krebs, divorcée. I helped her get that divorce and keep her fortune.

Having that much high-powered glamour walk into our drab offices is not unique, but it is unusual. A lot of stars are products of their handlers—makeup people and hairdressers,
wardrobe and plastic surgeons. Products of our imagination in a way. But even offscreen and dressed down, Maggie has it. Everybody watches her, men and women, when she comes down to my office.

“Hi-ya, Joe,” she says. She looks me direct in the eye, gives me that smile, and that voice—you can read anything you want to into that voice—just the way she talked in
Over the Line
—and boom, you could knock me over with a toothpick. I don't let it show, but I figure she knows what that “Hi-ya, Joe,” can do. How can she not know? It's her business, making strong men weak and weak men strong.

“Hi-ya, Maggie,” I say. I speak low, slow, and level. Not because I think I'm John Wayne or something, but to keep my voice from squeaking like a fourteen-year-old's.

She looks around. Then she leans forward: “Joe, is there somewhere we can talk?”

“We got a conference room,” I say. I don't have to work so hard to talk, my voice and breathing are coming back under control.

“Hey, Joe,” she says. “You got two bits?”

“Yeah.”

“Then why don't you take me out and buy me a cup of Java?”

“Maggie, there isn't much that you could ask me that I wouldn't do.”

Now let me explain a bit about this little piece of dialogue. First of all, it is verbatim. That's a gift I have, like a photographic memory, except I don't have it for the printed word, not at all, but I do have it for the spoken word. So that when I tell you through this story that so-and-so said one thing then them-and-such said another, it's like our transcription services department typed it right off the audiotapes.

Second, in real life our patter isn't always this snappy.

Third, there is nowhere in Los Angeles, maybe in America, that I can think of that you can get a cup of coffee for twenty-five cents. It would be easier to find the five-dollar cup of coffee. Clearly, Maggie is being jovial here. In fact, I find out later, both her lines are from a script she'd been working on.
There is a certain charm in having a real-life movie star run her lines on you like you're her real-life costar. It's a memory a lot of fellows could lie down with even when they take that final rest, if you know what I mean.

Fourth and finally, there is something that I don't know if she knows, but maybe she suspects, which is that all our conference rooms are wired more thoroughly than the Nixon White House. Everything that happens in a Universal Security conference room is recorded. Audio is routine. Intermittent video and real-time video are both available. So is vocal-stress analysis.

Our personal offices and telephones are monitored, but not always recorded. The principle is “Do unto ourselves what we would have others pay us to do to their employees.” We are a shining example of life under total management supervision.

We take her Cadillac and leave my old wreck behind. It might surprise you that a star of her magnitude would drive a Caddy, but it was a gift from GM. A promotional thing. They think the new Seville can compete with Mercedes, BMW, Lexus, and Infiniti. I think it is pretty nice. It is a convertible. She drives. The top is down.

She doesn't say much in the car. Just plays the radio. Country and western. That's for me. Shows you what kind of class—and memory—the lady had. She once asked what kind of music I liked, back during her divorce action. I told her. It was Hank Williams and Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash and Ernest Tubb and Patsy Cline that got me through the war. That's the truth. All the guys in my platoon that listened to rock ‘n' roll, they died. Except for two of them. Mike Galina—he's in a veterans' hospital still—no eyes, no legs. Paul Frederic Hight also came back with pieces missing—of his body and his mind and his heart—died five years after coming home. Accidental OD or suicide. Who's to say? Who's to judge? Three of the blacks lived. They didn't listen to rock 'n' roll either. Two of them came back junkies and I lost track. But Steve Weston, he came back straight and with his body intact. We have a drink now and again. Don't say much. Just have a drink. He listened to C&W like me or soul, like his people. His favorite, though, is gospel.

Also she looks over at me, smiles, and touches my hand.

She puts the car in a lot a block off the beach in Venice. We get out and walk. She puts her arm through mine. Makes me feel six feet tall and good-looking to boot. There is a fancy espresso and cappuccino joint on the corner where you can have your refreshment al fresco and view the human comedy as it passes on the boardwalk. You don't have to be an Angelino to know that Venice Beach is the place for viewing humanity at its most comedic. That's the place they use in all the movies when they do the L.A. montage with the girls who roller-skate in G-string bikinis and Muscle Beach and everything.

But we walk right by the boardwalk, out onto the beach. She pauses a moment and slips her shoes off. Do movies make us or do we make the movies? What I'm saying is, this gesture she does, leaning on my arm, slipping off her shoes, carrying them in one hand by their straps, it's got grace, and I don't know what else to call it but femininity—when I watch her do it, I'm seeing the scene from a movie. You get what I mean—did she learn it from the same movies I saw, or is this one of those quintessential feminine moves that directors and actresses, they're aware of and they set out to capture for the silver screen?

Do a close-up of her hand on my shoulder when she leans on me.

We walk out toward where the surf is breaking. She barefoot, me in my Florsheim's. I'm wearing a suit and tie of course, which is company dress code unless you're on an assignment that specifically calls for something else. See, it's like I'm in my own movie with her. I'm daydreaming that it's going to be like a personal thing. But the professional part of me knows that it won't be. A lot of clients take you to strange and out-of-the-way places to discuss their business. Different reasons. Privacy, embarrassment, and sometimes it's just that they too are in their own movie and they want the cloak and dagger.

Out by the water, where the sand is wet and packed, she says, “Joe, I need help.”

“That's what we're here for,” I say.

“Not them. Not all of them. Just you,” she says.

“Tell me what the problem is,” I say. I'm a company
man. I have been for quite a while. We have longevity bonuses on top of the automatic annual raises, I have an investment in my pension, I'm part of the company's employee stock-option plan. Sure, I'm going to do something without the company. Sure I am.

“Promise me something,” she says.

“What?”

“That you'll listen to what I have to say. If you can't do it without telling the company, you'll forget we ever had this conversation. You'll go back and tell them it's the first anniversary of my divorce and I wanted to find a way to thank you, that we went for coffee because I'm in a twelve-step program. Something like that.”

I start to make the promise. That's what you do, then you bring them around to explaining why the company has to know. It's tedious but basic.

“No,” she says, “look me in the eye and tell me.”

So I look her in the eye. I've looked lots of people square in the eye. Con men, psychos, gamblers, corporation presidents, lawyers. Anyone who tells you the eyes are the windows to the soul, they're full of it. Except sometimes. Like when you look in the eyes of a boy who's about to die and he knows it. You can see his soul fly away. You can. That's true. And the windows close. Like someone just reaching out and shutting a pair of old-fashioned shutters. What was transparent becomes opaque. The other time is when you look in the eyes of a woman you want more than is good for you. I'm talking about more than sex wanting. I'm talking about hungry, stupid hungry. She opens those eyes to you and they say “Look right in.” Even if she is an actress and the smart part of you figures that they pay her $1.3 mil per picture plus gross points, according to the latest press releases, to do exactly that for the camera, your own eyes might open then and become the window to your soul and she sees what you are and puts her hooks in. I guess that's alright. I guess nature made us to be that way sometimes.

I tell her, “If I can't do it, I'll forget it.”

“Joe,” she says.

“Just tell me, will you?” I say, irritated.

“A year ago I signed on to do a picture. With John Lincoln Beagle directing. You know his work?”

I nod. Everyone does. Even if you don't go to the movies. Like Spielberg or Lucas or Lynch or Stone.

“We're both at RepCo.
⁵
It's their package. Director, star, writer. I read the script. I loved it. It's not fluff. It's not light-weight. It's not bounce my boobies, wiggle my butt, and act like I think that's cute. It establishes me as a serious actress. That's the picture I'm scheduled to be shooting now. Right now.

“Then the project was canceled.”

“But that happens a lot,” I say.

“Yes, it does. But this time it shouldn't have. Everything was in place. The package was intact, the studio was on board, a producer had been selected. The money was in place. Suddenly, it gets shut down.