Eve's Men (22 page)

Eve shook her head. “Only that he puts in a twelve-hour day and the studio has six films in various stages of production. And that Greenwalt believes he has, quote, ‘the right formula for reversing the studio’s precipitous decline over the past few years.’”

She put down the magazine and looked over at Charley. “Tell me—is your mouth dry?”

“Like chalk.”

“Good. I was afraid I was coming down with something.”

Once they got on Bel Air Road, they had to backtrack up Brown Canyon, looking for Alana Lane. As Eve said, the area was indeed woodsy and numberless, with hidden little streets shooting off like tendrils from Bel Air, which was a narrow blacktop corkscrewing up the canyon past rustic wood fences and rows of giant eucalyptus trees that stood naked, their bark hanging in genteel tatters. There also were pepper trees and Conifers of every kind, and palms too, farther back, closer to the houses, some of which were dark and wooden, not the almost uniform Spanish stucco that reigned in Beverly Hills.

Charley was beginning to wonder if they were lost—just as they came upon Alana Lane, a tendril curving down toward Beverly Glen Boulevard, but dead-ending just this side of it. At the end of the short, curving street there was a stucco wall enclosing Greenwalt’s estate. Inside, on the highest ground, was the house, huge and white, with an orange tile roof. Though the wrought-iron front gate was standing open, Charley pulled up to it and stopped.

Eve looked at him with frightened eyes. “What now? Just what the hell do we do?”

“We go in,” he said.

“And then what?”

“Christ knows.”

Throwing the car back into gear, Charley headed up the hill to a point where the driveway forked, the right lane leading to the front entrance while the left went around to the rear of the house. Continuing on the left lane, they passed Greenwalt’s “sculpture garden,” a reflecting pool surrounded by objects that looked as if they had been placed there by a gang of practical jokers. There was an actual electric chair sitting on a slab of concrete; there was a standing twelve-foot-high wooden cigar with sly, painted eyes and flippers for arms; there was a polished steel doughnut the size of an earthmover tire; and finally, weirdest of all, a black-painted shed that looked suspiciously like a ten-hole outhouse.

Charley smiled grimly. “Well, he hasn’t struck here yet. Too bad.”

“There’s the Travel-All,” Eve said.

Pulling in next to it, Charley was disappointed to find it empty. He had hoped that the girl would be in it, waiting, a “wheelman.” Then he could have either cajoled her or forced her into his car and had Eve drive her home, getting them both out of harm’s way and leaving him free to go inside and deal with Brian alone. He knew he didn’t have much chance of talking him out of his folly, but he could try at least. And failing that, he could always hit him in the head with a baseball bat, as he’d done when they were kids—by accident, hitting the catcher instead of the ball. More likely, he would simply pick up a phone and call the police.

“You better stay here,” he said to Eve, who was already out of the car.

“No, I better not,” she said.

“Right.”

Going around a high hedge, they entered the backyard, which contained a large swimming pool and cabana as well as a tennis court. At the near end of the pool there were so many umbrella tables and other pieces of outdoor furniture that the place had the look of a hotel—an
empty
hotel. There was no one, anywhere.

But there was a back door—standing open. Charley’s legs suddenly felt like sandbags.

“I’m gonna pee in my pants,” Eve whispered.

“Then stay behind me.”

Though she gave him a wry look, she did slip behind him as they crept inside, into a rear hallway with utility rooms on one side and a huge kitchen on the other. At the end of the hallway a skinny young woman cradling a shotgun sat back in an oak kitchen chair, facing a closed door.

“Jesus Christ, Terry!” Eve said to her. “Have you gone completely mad?”

The girl looked walleyed with terror, but that didn’t keep her from swinging the gun onto them.

“Brian!” she called. “Brian, we’ve got visitors!”

“I’m Brian’s brother,” Charley told her. “It’s not too late. Why don’t you drop the gun and go home with Eve.”

The girl looked even more terrified. “
Brian!
” she called.

Charley glanced at the door she was guarding. “Who’s inside?”

“Who do you think?” she said. “The servants. The slaves.”

“I want a word with my brother.” Ignoring the gun, he moved past her, following the hallway as it widened, circling the base of a curving stairway and leading around to the foyer, which was marble-floored and elegant, with an ornate fountain in the center: a pair of cuddling bronze cherubim pouring water from a pitcher in an endless stream. On each side of the foyer there was a wide doorway, one leading into a large, beautifully decorated living room and the other into the gallery, which appeared to be about sixty feet by thirty, a brilliantly lighted room with dozens of huge nonobjective paintings lining the walls and a row of sculptures—mostly “assemblages” and “found objects”—running down the center.

Going on into the gallery, Charley saw Brian moving feverishly along the wall of paintings with a can of aerosol paint, spraying on each of them a single huge, sweeping letter in metallic Day Glo pink.

THIS IS SHIT
, he wrote, and moved on to the next row of paintings, yelling at Charley as he worked.

“Get your ass out of here, man! This is none of your fucking business!”

“Is it Terry’s?”

“Ask
her!
”

By now Eve had come into the gallery too, and she appeared mesmerized by the scene before them, Brian’s great, gaudy letters imposing at least a semblance of order and meaning on what otherwise seemed at best a riot of color: a Jackson Pollock that looked as if it once had served as the floor of a pigeon coop; a de Kooning that could have been a self-portrait by an inebriated Charles Manson; a Motherwell that looked like an extreme close-up of a giant crushed crow, a monumental oozing of blackness. And there were others: a piece of awning ten feet square; a green carrot on a field of vomit; a door doodled by an idiot; and one painting that appeared to be nothing but a frame. Almost all of them by now bore Brian’s huge, slashing letters, which finally added up to a second message, the one that had brought him here:

NO MISS COLO FILM

Finished, he tossed the spray-paint can into one of the assemblages and ran past Charley and Eve into the foyer and down the hall, where he got the shotgun from Terry. He told her to go out to the wagon and wait for him. Then, charging back into the gallery, he yelled again at Charley and Eve.

“Will you two get the fuck out of here! What do you think you’re gonna do,
stop
me, for Christ’s sake?”

It was a reasonable question, and Charley might have laughed at himself—at the ridiculous futility of his mission—if he hadn’t been so angry and scared. He took Eve by the arm.

“He makes sense. Come on, let’s go!”

But she pulled her arm free. “No, wait.”

And she stood her ground at the gallery doorway, watching in utter fascination as Brian raised the shotgun and pointed it at the sole artwork in the huge room that didn’t appear to belong there: one of the new latex trompe l’oeil sculptures, a sitting nude so totally lifelike it had not only painted-on skin and eyes but real hair, real eyelashes, real nails. And at the moment it looked for all the world like a real person about to be killed in cold blood. Then the shot rang out and the thing exploded in a shower of plastic and hair and other junk, all of it shockingly bloodless. Moving backwards then, toward the doorway, Brian pumped four more shots into the gallery, these into paintings he had already defaced.

Charley took Eve by the arm again, half shoving her ahead of him, and this time she made no resistance, running on toward the back entrance, unaware that Charley had stopped at the door Terry had guarded, to see what condition her prisoners were in. Opening it just a crack, not ready yet to be seen and later identified, he made out one man and three women, all Asians, sitting in the dark on the floor of a large pantry, their arms, feet, and mouths duct-taped.

Satisfied that they would be all right, Charley followed the others outside, running most of the way. He jumped into the car and turned the ignition key—only to hear the starter continuing to grind, as the engine flooded. And for an eternal fifty or sixty seconds he and Eve could do nothing but sit there and wait for the thing to clear.

Meanwhile, with Terry sitting next to him, Brian backed the Travel-All around and headed for the sculpture garden. In his initial charge, he felled the towering cigar and then proceeded across the shallow reflecting pool and totaled the king-size black outhouse, carrying bits and pieces of it with him as he circled on the golf-green lawn, ripping and gouging it until the station wagon was in position for a second run at the sculptures. And this time he tore up the electric chair and smashed into the huge stainless steel doughnut, which caved in the front of the wagon at the same instant it broke loose from its base and started rolling downhill, gathering speed as it went, finally crashing through the estate wall and wobbling a bit before continuing downhill, heading through the brush for Beverly Glen Boulevard.

Charley tried the ignition again, and this time the engine fired, almost drowning out Eve, who was pleading with him to get moving.

“Come on, Charley! Come on, for God’s sake!”

Heading down the driveway, Charley had to slow down because of the Travel-All ahead, limping along, spouting steam from its damaged radiator. But once they reached the street, the narrow, curving Alana Lane, Charley floored the accelerator and they went shooting past the wagon.

“Shouldn’t we wait for them?” Eve asked. “What if they don’t make it?”

Charley glanced over at her. “How could they not? God still looks out for children and idiots, doesn’t he?”

“Then why isn’t he looking out for us?” she asked.

The last thing Charley wanted to do was go straight back to Stephanie’s and wait there for the triumphant return of Brian and his new sidekick. He would have preferred cruising into Hollywood and finding a quiet little bar where he and Eve could have spent the afternoon with some cool vodka tonics. But she rightly pointed out that his car and license place might have been seen by a neighbor of Greenwalt’s or someone passing through the area, so he headed back up Beverly Glen toward Mulholland. And almost immediately they came upon an accident scene: a white Rolls Royce sitting askew in the middle of the road, its rear half squashed flat and its doors and hood gaping open, as if the vehicle were bellowing in pain. Beyond the wreck, a narrow path of vegetative blight led straight up the lawn of a luxurious hillside home to the engine of destruction itself: Greenwalt’s silver doughnut, lying on its side in the grass, looking not unlike one of the worn-out tractor tires farm women painted white and put to use as planters. All it lacked was a hub of daisies.

After punching through Greenwalt’s wall, the doughnut evidently had continued hurtling downhill until it reached bottom in the backseat of the Rolls, then bounced on across the road and started uphill. Miraculously, no one seemed to have been hurt. The car’s apparent occupants—a runtish, sunbaked bald man and a well-preserved blonde, both in tennis whites—were outside the car, the man whooping and hollering at anyone who would listen while the woman merely stood by the side of the road, calmly smoking a cigarette. Other cars had stopped and their drivers had gotten out to gawk, but as yet no police were on the scene. So Charley simply drove around it all and kept going.

When they arrived at Stephanie’s, taking the side stairs down to the patio, she came out of the game room carrying a bottle of champagne and almost fell over one of the pool chairs. Charley caught her and helped her back inside.

“Terry’s all right,” he assured her. “They should be home soon, mission accomplished.”

Stephanie’s mouth fell open. “Then, he did it? He
actually
did it?”

“Oh, you bet he did,” Charley said. “He was in rare form. Hollywood will never be the same.”

“We got there too late to do anything but watch,” Eve told her.

“And Terry helped?” Suddenly Stephanie had the look of a stage mother, her terror of a few moments before giving way to pride.

“I’m afraid so,” Charley said. “She was his accomplice in every sense of the word. He even had her toting a shotgun.”

At that, Stephanie had to feel her way down into a chair. “Oh no. Please, tell me the truth.”

“That
is
the truth. But there’s no reason to panic. Chances are, she’ll be pulling in here any second now. Home free.”

“You think so?”

No, Charley did not think so, at least not the
home free
part. Until now, he really hadn’t given it much thought, why Brian and Terry had taken both cars. But the more he considered it now, the more he became convinced that Brian had taken the Porsche along with them as their
getaway
car. Which meant they probably had left it somewhere near Greenwalt’s, some out-of-the-way place where they could later abandon the Travel-All, transfer to the Porsche, and take off—but for where? Charley had no idea, except that it would not likely be Stephanie’s, since the police would surely find the Travel-All before the day was out, and it in turn—its license plate, pink slip, whatever—would soon lead them to Stephanie’s.