A Savage Place (6 page)

I get to the door of the ladies’ room, pushed it partway open, and yelled, “Hey, Candeee.”

She came out before I stopped yelling. “For God’s sake what’s going on?” she said.

“I’ll tell you later. Go get your car. If a cop speaks to you, smile at him. Show him your press credentials. Ask what’s going on. Wiggle your ass at him if you feel that’s appropriate. Then, when you can, drive down Fairfax, toward Wilshire. I’ll be walking along. Stop and I’ll get in, and I’ll explain while we go see that agent you used to sleep with.”

She gave me a hard look but did what I told her.

I GOT my jacket back. It was right where I left it and I had it slung debonairly over one shoulder when Candy Sloan pulled up to the curb and honked her horn once. I got in.

“Any trouble?” I said.

“No. One of the police recognized me and just said I shouldn’t park there. I smiled and wiggled and off I went.”

“Good,”‘ I said, “Let’s go see your priapic agent.”

“Why don’t you let up on that,” Candy said. “I regret the remark.”

I nodded. Candy turned east on Wilshire and we went past the L.A. County Museum of Art and the La hrea Tar Pits. At La Brea Avenue Candy turned north.

“What was all the excitement about? What happened to the men who were following us?” Candy said. I told her about Troy Donahue and the fat man. I also got my shirt tucked in and the Colt stored in the glove compartment of the MG.

“Know how to use one of those?” I said.

“No.”

“I’ll show you. It might be useful knowledge.”

She took in a deep sigh and let it out. “I suppose so. Whose gun is that?”

“I took it away from Troy.”

“Isn’t it awfully small?”

“Yes.”

Straight up La Brea the Hollywood Hills rose like a clumsy flat in an amateur play. We turned left on Sunset, and drove west toward Beverly Hills. Below us Los Angeles stretched out flat and far. The modern skyscrapers downtown around Figueroa and sixth streets caught the lowering slant of the afternoon sun and glistened above the herd of low California buildings that filled the L.A. basin. I’d never seen an urban place where the contours of the natural land were still so visible, where the memory of how it was remained so insistent.

Sunset got quite flossy down toward the West Hollywood-Beverly Hills line: small stucco buildings with glass and brass and limned oak decor, restaurants with fake antique doors, boutiques, two-story bungalows with the names of production companies and agents in gold leaf on the doors, an occasional high rise.

Past Robertson, near the top of Doheny, Candy pulled into an open meter. It was only a short walk to Hamburger Hamlet. We’d lunched early. I could claim it was time for high tea. I looked at Candy. She seemed sort of grim. I figured my high tea suggestion wouldn’t seem businesslike to her. I suppressed it.

“In downtown Boston,” I said, “you can never find a parking meter open.”

“That’s true in downtown Los Angeles too,” she said. “But I’ll bet you could in the Boston equivalent of Beverly Hills.”

“The Boston equivalent of Beverly Hills is a shopping mall in Chestnut Hill,” I said. “They have a parking lot.”

We walked to a two-story white building with a small canopied entrance that looked like a funeral parlor. Across the top of the canopy it said: THE MELVIN ZEECOND AND TRUMAN FINNERTY AGENCY.

“Here,” Candy said. We went in. There was a receptionist on a switchboard just inside the door in a small hallway, behind a glass partition.

“I’m Candy Sloan,” Candy said to the receptionist. “Is Zeke in?”

The receptionist asked us to take a seat in the foyer. We did. The foyer was oval shaped. Big enough for two upholstered gray couches and four or five leather-covered wooden-armed chairs. There were copies of Daily Variety and People magazine on a coffee table in front of one of the couches. The ceiling was slightly domed and some fluorescent bulbs along the bottom of the dome behind some molding lighted the place indirectly. The place had been recently painted, and in spots along the molding the painters hadn’t scraped the previous paint adequately.

Several corridors ran off of the foyer, and I could see offices opening off of them. Everyone I could see seemed to be talking on the phone. A secretary in a green dress with the skirt slit to the thigh came out of one of the corridors and said, “Miss Sloan?”

Candy said, “Yes.”

“Zeke’s on the phone long-distance,” the secretary said. “He’ll be with you as soon as he can.”

I grinned at the dome. “How quickly they forget,” I murmured.

Candy said, “Just shut up.”

The secretary said, “I beg your pardon.”

Candy said, “I was talking to him. We’ll wait.” The secretary and her slit skirt swished off down the corridor.

“Long-distance,” I said.

“Shut up.”

“Probably if it were a local call, he’d hang right up and be out here.”

“Shut up.”

“Probably be swirling a little white Bordeaux in a silver wine bucket.”

“Champagne,” Candy said.

We were quiet. No one else was in the waiting room.

I had the feeling everyone else called up. The waiting room was probably for deliveries.

A tall woman with prominent teeth and a three-piece gray suit hurried through the foyer and leaned her head into the open door of the office nearest us down the right-hand hallway. With the suit she was wearing a poppy shirt with a small pin-collar and a narrow black knit tie. She hurried back across the foyer. Then a man appeared in the middle corridor and said, “Candy, honey, this is terrific.”

He was tall and slim and had-snow-white hair and a youthful face with a black mustache. He was darkly tanned and-wore a glen plaid suit and vest with a black shirt open at the throat. He might have been forty or he might have been sixty. A small tangle of white hair showed at the V of his shirt. On the little finger of his left hand he wore a gold ring with a red stone.

“Hello, Zeke.”

“Come on in.”

She followed him down the corridor; I followed her. When we got to his office, she introduced me. We shook hands. He had a strong grip, but I was holding back.

He smiled at me. “A little old, I think, to be with the Rams,” he said. “Stunt man?”

“Sort of,” I said.

Candy said, “Spenser is helping me on an investigative series we’re doing.”

The office was on the first floor and had a little bay window framed with gray drapes that looked out onto Sunset and people on the sidewalk. There were several autographed pictures of actors on the wall and a bookcase liquor-cabinet-stereo set up along one side of the room. Besides a desk with two phones there were two more of the leather-and-wood sitting room chairs. Zeke was behind his desk, we sat in the chairs. The walls were pale gray, the rug was charcoal.

“Candy.” Zeke folded his hands on the desk and leaned forward slightly. “How can I help?”

“I need to know some things about Summit Pictures and Roger Hammond.”

Zeke kept his hands folded and leaned back in the chair. The movement slid his hands to the edge of the desk.

He said, “Oh?”

“I need it, Zeke. This is important to me.”

“Tell me about it.”

She did, everything, except the name of her eyewitness. Zeke sat motionless and looked right at her as she talked.

“And if you break this thing open, it will mean a lot to your career,” he said when she was through.

“Absolutely,” Candy said. “More air time, more feature stuff, more hard-news assignments, maybe a shot at the networks, who knows. I know that it’s still hard for a woman to push her way up through the men in the news business. And if I can’t handle a real story when it starts to break, it will be much harder.”

Zeke nodded. He looked at me. I had my arms crossed and was watching the occasional pedestrian go by on Sunset.

“That explains the big fella here,” Zeke said.

“He’s a bodyguard,” Candy said. “He’s not doing the investigating for me.”

“No skill-work,” I said, “just heavy lifting.”

Zeke nodded. He tucked his lower lip under the edge of his mustache and sucked down on his upper lip. “An agent doesn’t make it out here by gossiping to the press about studio heads,” he said.

“I know. It’s background. I’ll never quote you,” Candy said.

Zeke sucked on his upper lip some more.

“It’s not just the career, Zeke,” Candy said. “It’s… the fat son of a bitch beat me up. Dragged me into a van and punched and slapped me and threw me out on the Ventura Freeway like an empty Coke can.”

The tall woman with the gray suit stuck her head in the door.

She said, “Excuse me, Zeke, but we’re going to screen those clips that Universal sent over.” She talked with her teeth clenched and without moving her lips. She was like someone Central Casting had sent over to play an Ivy League executrix. I looked at Candy. She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking hard at Zeke. Zeke looked at his chronograph. He looked at Candy.

“Go ahead without me, Mary Jane, I can’t leave right now.”

One point for old Zeke.

“Want us to reschedule?” the executrix said.

Zeke shook his head and made a slight dismissal gesture with the first three fingers of his right hand.

“I’ll give you a file memo of my reaction, Zeke,” she said, and pulled her head out of the room. Zeke unclasped his hands and rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger.

“I’m ass-deep in file memos from Mary Jane,” he said.

“She got lockjaw?” I asked.

“No,” Zeke said. “She went to Smith.”

“What about Summit Studios, Zeke?” Candy said.

He nodded at the door. “Could you close that for me,” he said. I got up and closed it.

“And Roger Hammond,” Zeke said when the door was closed.

Candy nodded.

“I have heard,” Zeke said, “that Hammond got into a lot of fiscal difficulty about five years ago and that somebody in a West Coast Mob family bailed him out.”

“Who was the mobster?”

“I don’t know.”

“Personal or business?” Candy said.

“Business. I heard he mismanaged the studio into an economic pit. He had a lot of money out that did not return investment. He bought a lot of bad properties, packaged them wrong, and they bombed. He couldn’t get the product into the theaters after a while. So then I heard he started embezzling from the profitable releases to cover the losses on the bombs, and he started juggling books so that his bosses wouldn’t know how bad it was.”

“His bosses are who?” Candy said.

“Oceania Limited: Petroleum, Timber, Mineral Processing, and Moviemaking.” Zeke shook his head and made the kind of mouth movement you make when you’ve gotten ashes on your tongue.

“Oceania catch on?” I said. Candy looked at me and frowned. “Oops,” I said. “Am I in your space?” Candy shook her head in small annoyance looked at Zeke.

“Did they?” she said.

“Catch on?” He shrugged. “Hammond is still there.”

“Because he got money from a mobster to cover the losses?”

Zeke nodded. “That’s what I hear.”

“What did the mobster get?” Candy said.

“I don’t know,” Zeke said. “It’s not the kind of thing I want to know too much about. What I hear about mobsters they must have got something.”

“They got Hammond,” I said.

“What do you mean `got‘?” Candy said.

“Like Mephistopheles `got‘ Faust,” I said. “But they won’t wait to collect.”

“Why are you so sure?” Candy said.

“It’s too easy. They bail him out and now they own him, and they’re in the movie business and he fronts it. Dirty money goes in, clean money comes out.”

“You think the Mob controls Summit Pictures?” Candy said.

“If what Zeke hears is right, I can almost promise you,” I said.

Candy looked at Zeke. “What do you think?” she said.

He shrugged. “He’d know more about that than I would, I think.”

Candy looked back at me. “It makes sense, doesn’t it.”

I nodded.

Zeke said, “I will deny ever saying anything about this, Candy.”

“You won’t have to,” Candy said. “I’ll never mention you. You can trust me.”

He nodded. “There’s no one else I would have talked to,” he said.

“It would be nice to believe that, Zeke,” she said. ‘ They looked silently at each other for a while and I looked out the window. Then Candy said, “Thank you, Zeke,” and we got up and left.

“I WANT TO go to dinner,” Candy said, “and I want you to escort me.”

“I’ll risk that,” I said.

We went to The Palm on Santa Monica. The walls were covered with clumsy murals of show-biz celebrities in caricature. But my plate was covered with medium-rare butterflied lamb chops and asparagus with hollandaise.

I drank a little beer. “You have a plan?” I said.

“Keep talking and asking,” she said. She ate a scallop carefully. “That’s what investigative reporting is. Talking, asking; asking, talking.”

I nodded. “Who you going to ask and talk with next?”

“Somebody at Oceania.”

“Got a name?”

“No. Any suggestions?”

“Why not the president. Might as well get as close as we can to God.” I ate some lamb chop.

“I agree. We’ll do it tomorrow morning,” she said.

A man next to us-dark suit, white French cuffs, large oynx cuff links-said to the waiter, “Tell Frank I’m out here and tell him to give me that center cut he’s been saving.”

The waiter, an old man with no expression on his face, said, “Yes, sir. How you want that?”

The middle-aged man said, “How do I want it? Frank knows damn well how I want it. Barely dead.”

He raised both hands as if measuring a fish while he spoke.

The waiter said, “Rare. Very good, sir.” He went away.

The middle-aged man was with a smooth red-haired young woman in a low-necked green dress and a younger man in a gray three-piece suit and a striped tie. They were all drinking red wine.

“Wait’ll you see the piece of beef Frank’ll have for me,” the middle-aged man said. He looked around to see if I was impressed. He had a diamond pinkie ring on his right hand. “You shoulda had a piece, honey,” he said to the woman beside him. She smiled and said yes, she probably should, but she could never eat all that. The guy in the gray suit drank his wine rapidly.