A Savage Place (15 page)

She raised her eyebrows at me. “I peeked in the window,” I said.

Candy turned red. “You watched?”

“Briefly,” I said.

She was very flushed now, “Did you see us… ?”

“Yeah,” I said. “For a minute.”

She was silent for a moment, “Well,” she said, “you didn’t see anything you hadn’t already seen, did you?”

“The angle was different,” I said.

Her, face got hard again, the way it had when she spoke of nailing Brewster.

“Turn you on?” she said.

I shook my head. “No. Embarrassed me. I didn’t want to lose sight of you and I didn’t want to watch. I settled for sitting in the car.”

Her face was still hard. “Disapprove?”

“I don’t know. I might,” I said. “I don’t disapprove of you screwing somebody. I might disapprove of you screwing somebody in order to nail him to the floor.”

“You make me laugh,” she said. “All of you.”

“All of me?” I drank the rest of the beer.

“Men,” she said. “It’s not women who are silly about sex. It’s men. You think it ought to be important.” She stretched the word into three spaced and portentous syllables. “Women don’t. Women know it’s useful.”

I went to the kitchen for another beer. “Sounds sexist to me,” I said from the refrigerator.

“Why? If I use what I’ve got to exploit men and further my interests, why is that sexist? They have strength, we have sex. They don’t hesitate to use strength.”

I sat back in the chair. “Okay,” I said. “Want a sip of my beer?”

She shook her head. “You haven’t got an argument, have you? So you just change the subject.”

“I’m a romantic,” I said. “Arguments are useless with romantics. You want a sip?”

“No,” she said. She stood staring at me. I drank my beer. “You still disapprove, don’t you?”

“I do the best I can to approve and disapprove only of my own behavior. I don’t always succeed, but I try. I’m trying now and I’m going to keep at it, How about a whole can for yourself?”

“I don’t like beer,” she said.

CANDY HAD TO be at work at noon. I went with her. Since she was convinced that Brewster was trying to find out what she knew, there was reason to suppose she might still need protection. Especially if he figured out that, while he was trying to find out what she knew, she was trying to find out what he knew.

We spent the first hour of the afternoon walking along Broadway, Candy walking with the wife of a Mexican-American congressional candidate, talking or pretending to while the cameras cranked. Candy asked several questions while the cameras zoomed in. I was lurking around, out of. camera range, alert in case a captain of industry lunged from the crowd and hurled Candy on a couch. The candidate’s wife didn’t bother to answer the questions. She’d done this before and she knew the real interview would take place someplace else and would then be dubbed over the pictures of them walking. Then we all drove back to KNI3S studios, where Candy taped the interview and they shot some reverses, and then a car took the candidate’s wife home.

At eight o’clock Brewster and his driver and his Caddy came by the studio and took her to a Dodger game, where they sat in his private box. Or I assumed they sat in his private box. He was the type. But I had to way to know, because I never got into the game. I sat in the MG in the parking lot listening on the radio, and at about eleven followed them back to his place and then went back to Candy’s and let myself in with her key and went to sleep. We had agreed before we started out that morning that there was no point in me hanging around in the bushes at Brewster’s house. If he was going to do her damage, I’d be no use to her there anyway. At least here she could phone me.

She didn’t come home that night at all. I felt like somebody’s worried father until she came home at seven fifteen in the morning amid the chirping birds.

That day I hung around while Candy interviewed a rape victim, talked to the chairwoman of an educational-reform group, did a stand-up in front of a new boutique that had opened in Beverly Hills, and interviewed a glossy-looking kid who had just finished shooting the pilot for a TV series that was coincidentally going to be carried locally on KNBS-TV. Then I hung around the studio while Candy did some film editing and taped some narration over some of the edited film, and spent maybe a half hour in conference with Frederics, the news director.

That evening I finished up my book on Edmund Spenser while Brewster took Candy to the revival of a Broadway musical at the Music Center.

The next day Candy covered a blood shortage at the L.A. Red Cross blood bank, a Right to Life protest outside an abortion clinic in El Monte, a benefit fashion show staged by the wives of the California Angels, and the finals of a baton-twirling contest in Pasadena.

That evening she went with Brewster to a party at Marina del Rey. I stopped at a drugstore on La Brea near Melrose and bought a copy of The Great Gatsby off the paperback rack. I hadn’t read it in about five years, and it was time again. I picked up some tomatoes, lettuce, bacon, and bread at Ralph’s, along with a six-pack of Coors and a jar of mayonnaise, and went back to Candy’s apartment to an orgy of B.L.T.‘s. And elegant prose. And beer.

Candy called from the station the next morning around nine to tell me that she’d be at the station most of the day, and there was no need for me to hang around there. Station security was enough protection.

“I’ll be home this evening, though,” she said. “Brewster’s out of town until Thursday.”

I told her I’d pick her up when it was time. And she said she’d call. And I hung up. I had finished GatsUy in a sitting. With breakfast I’d read the L.A. Times. I was irritated, bored, restless, edgy, useless, frustrated, bewitched, bothered, and bewildered. I wasn’t making any money. I wasn’t solving a crime. I wasn’t saving a widow or an orphan. I was sleeping on a couch and my back was getting stiff. I thought about packing it in and going home. I could be having dinner with Susan this evening. I looked at my suitcase, tucked in between the couch and the wall. Ten minutes to pack, ten minutes to get a cab, half hour to the airport. I could make the noon flight easy. I shook my head. Not yet. There was something besides coitus happening in the Sloan-Brewster romance, and I had to stay around until I found out what.

But in the meantime I had to get rid of the feeling that my gears were grinding to a halt. I put on my running stuff and did about ten minutes of stretching and then went up to Sunset and headed west at an easy pace. You run out of sidewalk on Sunset, and the traffic is too ugly to run in the street, so I shifted down a block to Lomitas and went along amid the affluence to Whittier Drive, down Whittier to the place where it joins Wilshire by the Beverly Hilton Hotel. I went along Wilshire to Beverly Glen, up Beverly Glen, and started cruising among the neighborhoods of Westwood until I ended up on Le Conte Avenue in front of UCLA Medical Center. The sun was hot, and the sweat had soaked pleasingly through my T-shirt. The hills in Westwood were just right. You’d barely notice them in a car, but it was a good varied workout running. I took it easy, ten twelve-minute miles, sightseeing. I U-turned at Westwood Boulevard and jogged back east along Le Conte. There were orange trees, ripe with fruit in people’s front yards, and lemon trees, and now and then an olive tree with small black fruit on it. The roofs of the houses were mostly red tile, the siding often white stucco, the yards immaculate. There was no residue of sand and salt from the winter’s snow. The driveways often slanted up, without fear of ice. “He sent us this eternal spring,/Which here enamels everything.” Who had written that? Not Peter Brewster. I jogged along just fast enough to pass someone walking. Except, like everywhere else in Tinsel Town, no one was walking. Somewhere I heard two dogs barking. Probably a recording. “He hangs in shades the orange bright,/Like golden lamps in a green light.” The houses were close together. i never figured out why. There was space abounding out here at the fag end of the way west. Why did everyone huddle together? Why didn’t they ever come out on the street? How could they produce something as silly as Rodeo Drive? Would Candy elope with Peter Brewster?

It was early afternoon when I got back to Candy’s. I’d done about fifteen miles and I felt better. I spent a long time in Candy’s shower. Then I got dressed and took Candy’s car and went out for a drive. I had read that morning in the L.A. Times that traffic congestion was a leading tourist complaint in L.A. They were obviously not tourists from the East. Compared to Boston and New York, driving in L.A. was like driving in Biddeford, Maine. The freeways were bad, but I never had occasion to use them. I drove east on Hollywood Boulevard, slowly, past Vermont Avenue, where Hollywood fuses with Sunset, and on along Sunset toward downtown L.A. I got off by the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and drove around downtown a little and then headed back on Third Street. I’d been a lot of places and there were usually resemblances. Boston and San Francisco had points of comparison, and they were both not unlike New York, only smaller, and New York was not unlike London, only newer. But L.A. was like nothing I’d ever seen. I didn’t know any place like it for sprawl, for the apparently idiosyncratic mix of homes and businesses and shopping malls. There was no center, no fixed point for taking bearings. It ambled and sprawled and disarrayed all over the peculiar landscape-garish and fascinating and imprecise and silly, smelling richly of bougainvillea and engine emissions, full of trees and grass and flowers and neon and pretense. And off to the northeast, beyond the Hollywood Hills, above the smog, and far from Disneyland were the mountains with snow on their peaks. I wondered if there was a leopard frozen up there anywhere.

The top was down and the wind was warm on my face. I turned down La Brea and parked and walked along Wilshire to the La Brea Tar Pits with their huge plastic statues half sunk in the tar. There was a museum there, and I went in and looked at the relics and the dioramas and the graphics until about four. Then I went back outside. A young man wearing Frye boots and a cowboy hat who had never seen a cow was playing banjo loudly and not well. He had the banjo case open on the ground near him for contributions. It wasn’t very full. In fact what was in there was probably what he’d seeded it with. Some kids hung around while he played “Camptown Races” and then drifted off. The banjo player didn’t seem to mind.

I got back in the MG and drove back to Candy’s apartment feeling friendly toward L.A. It was a big sunny buffoon of a city; corny and ornate and disorganized but kind of fun. The last hallucination, the I dwindled fragment of-what had Fitzgerald called it? -“the last and greatest of all human dreams.” It was where we’d run out of room, where the dream had run up against the ocean, and human voices woke us. Los Angeles was the butt end, where we’d spat it out with our mouths tasting of ashes, but a genial failure of a place for all of that.

I had drunk two beers in Candy’s living room when she called and asked me to pick her up.

“Dress up,” she said. “I’m going to take you to dinner.”

“Tie?” I asked.

“It’s permitted,” she said.

WE HAD DINNER at Ma Maison, which looks like the cook tent for a Rotary barbecue and is so in that it has an unlisted phone. There were several famous people there and many young good-looking women with older out-of-shape men. The food was admirable.

“You don’t see Rudd Weatherwax in the restaurant, do you?” I said to Candy.

“I never heard of him,” she said.

“Sic transit gloria,” I said. “Is that… ?”

Candy nodded. “Somewhat more of her these days.”

“She shouldn’t swim during whaling season,” I said. Candy smiled. We finished our asparagus vinaigrette. The waiter brought us veal medallions and poured some more of the white Bordeaux we’d ordered.

“Good,” Candy said. “What kind is it?”

“Graves,” I said.

“I’ve got the goods on Peter,” Candy said.

There were pan-fried potatoes with the veal that were the best I’d ever had. I ate one. “The goods?”

Her face was bright. “Yes. I’ve got him, I think. But I need you to help.”

“Glad to,” I said. “It’ll ice my merit badge. What have you got him for?”

“One reason I’ve tried to be with him every night is I wanted to get him won over before you got bored and went home. I knew I’d need you and I had to hurry.”

“Bored? Me? I haven’t even been to Knott’s Berry Farm yet.”

“Well, last night it paid off. He got drunk and started talking about how powerful and important he was. He’s gotten blackout drunk every time I’ve been with him. I think he might have thought he was being sly, and seeing if I would talk about my interest in him. But he kept drinking and he got carried away. Every time it’s the same. We make love. Then he drinks and struts around and conducts a monologue on how important he is. Talked about his connections, with politicians, with mobsters, movie stars. How he could get anything fixed or have someone killed if he wanted to. He bragged about some of the actresses he’d slept with.”

“Mala Powers?” I said.

“No.”

“Phew.”

“But I was in good company,” she said.

“Did he get specific about other things?” I asked.

“Yes. He said, for instance, that he knew where Franco was. He used his full name.”

“Montenegro,” I said.

“Yes. He said he knew how to get Franco Montenegro. He said Franco had made a mistake, and he was going to regret it.”

“And?”

“And, well, it’s boring to do it word for word, but I found out that Franco called him and demanded money or he’d tell the police about Peter’s Mob connections. Brewster’s going to meet him tomorrow.”

“And Brewster’s going to go himself?”

“Franco insisted.”

“Where is he going to meet him?”

“I don’t know,” Candy said. “But I’m having dinner with Peter tomorrow, and if I can find out when he’s going to meet Franco, I thought we could follow him.”

“If Franco spots us behind Brewster, he’ll think he’s been sold out and might air old Peter right on the spot.”

“It’s a chance I’ll take.” Candy said.