Getting Up With Fleas (Trace 7) (6 page)

I know it’s fashionable to be late for dinner, but this was getting ridiculous. It was twenty-after-seven and the Sterno was burning low under the chafing dishes and still the only one at a table was Dahlia Codwell, who was halfway through her pitcher of martinis and probably didn’t care if she ever ate again.

I heard heels clicking on the floor behind me. Before I could turn around, a tiny platinum blonde ran by me.

“Tony darling,” she said, and threw her arms around McCue.

“Tami, my pet,” McCue said, and wrapped his arms around her. I noticed that he didn’t knead her buns. Maybe they weren’t real good friends, baby. Somehow I didn’t think she’d mind, though, because if she had had a rhino horn attached to her pubic bone, McCue would have been impaled on it. McCue disengaged his groin and gave her the arm’s-length treatment too and I had a chance to look at her.

The woman couldn’t have been older than twenty-five. Her face was unlined and had never been tanned. Her complexion was cream, made up precisely to look as if she were wearing no makeup at all, but I could see a few feathers of false eyelash and some color to show off what nature had made only the hint of cheekbones. She had large eyes of a startingly gray color that I didn’t believe existed in the real world. She was wearing a silk dress—violet-colored, I guess—that fit just well enough to let you know that the body under it was perfect.

McCue winked at me.

“Oh, Tony darling, it’s so good to see you again.”

“It’s been too long, dear,” he said. “When was it? Let me think. Right. It was while you were making
Teenybop Fantasy
,”

“I didn’t make
Teenybop Fantasy
,” the woman said. “It was at Ma Maison. How could you forget? We danced the night away.”

“Correct,” McCue said. “My groin was sore for eleven days afterward. It was just before I had them turn you down for the role in
Maid of Orleans
.”

“I don’t remember your turning me down,” she said. Her mouth said that, I thought. Her eyes showed very clearly that she not only remembered but that she would never forget.

“Trust me,” McCue said. “I did. Sort of set your career back a little too, as I remember it.”

“I was just disappointed that I didn’t have the chance to work with the man I regard as the greatest actor in cinema today,” she said. “But the producer told me the picture was a downer and I should find a happier, more contemporary movie.”

“I told him to say that,” McCue said. “The real reason was that I thought—and I told him—that your being in the film would make it a laughingstock.”

There was ice in her voice as she answered, “As it was, the only laughingstock about the film was the business it did. What did it gross, Tony? Exactly four-point-two million dollars, as I remember it. You made a film that should have gone directly to the
Late Late Show
, bypassing theaters entirely.”

“That’s true enough,” McCue said agreeably. “Everybody hated it. But no one laughed. Hey, it’s great to discuss old times, but we really have to look ahead to the future.” He turned the young woman toward me. “There’s someone here I want you to meet. This is my friend, Devlin Tracy. Friends call him Trace. Trace, this is Tami Fluff.”

I wondered if I should offer my hand. Or my pubic bone. Or my throat to bite. But my decision really didn’t matter because the platinum blonde just nodded at me curtly and started to turn back to McCue.

“Trace is a producer,” McCue said.

As if her head were on steel springs, the woman spun back toward me and let a smile light up her face. My tonsils got warm from the wattage.

“I’m so happy to meet you, Mr. Devlin,” she said.

“No, no,” McCue said. “Devlin Tracy. Call him Trace. First rule of the business, Tami. Always get a producer’s name right.”

“Trace,” she said.

“Trace is a big man in investments in New York. Handles all my big stuff. And now he’s planning to make the big move into films. We were just discussing his first project now.”

The woman was staring at me as if McCue weren’t in the room. “How exciting,” she said. “You’ll love films. Somehow it seems to be the way to hold a mirror up to America, all the joy, all the sorrow. Motion pictures explain to us how we actually feel about ourselves as a nation. Don’t you find that so?”

I found it hard to believe that anybody could actually speak such a line. I was going to tell her that McCue was talking bullshit, but it was tough after that speech. So I nodded.

“A mirror on America,” McCue said. “Exactly so. That’s what Trace is interested in, aren’t you, Trace?”

“Naturally,” Tami Fluff said. “He has the look of somebody serious who wants to make films that hold the mirror of truth up to America. The real America.”

McCue winked at me again and said, “Tami, I’m really glad you’re here to try to convince him of that because I think he’s going in exactly the wrong direction. He wants to do remakes of sixties movies. A big-budget remake, for instance, of
Beach Blanket Bingo
is in development right now. Talk him out of that.”

“There’s nothing wrong with entertainment,” Tami said seriously. “Those beach movies filled a need at the time, and perhaps America is ready for more of them.” She hesitated a second. “But better-written this time, with big budgets and real talents involved.”

“Forty million,” McCue said. “He’s got forty million for this first movie. Let me freshen that up for you, Trace,” he said, and took the glass from my hands.

I wondered how I was going to extricate myself from this. Tami had moved up alongside me now and both her hands were grasping my left arm.

“How far along are you in the development process?” she asked.

“He’s already got the money committed,” McCue said.

“Well, if there’s anything I can do…” Tami told me earnestly.

She looked at me as if expecting me to say something. I seemed to have paralysis of the mouth, and if she didn’t stop massaging my left bicep, I was going to have trouble raising my arm in the morning.

I was saved by the sound of people coming into the dining room. There were three of them, a man leading the way. He was short but kind of bulky and wore a satin New York Mets warmup jacket. His eyes were squinty narrow, his lips a thin line, his nose short and turned up. All in all, it looked like the kind of face a man would get if he had had his head squashed, from skull to chin, in a vice. The man had tightly frizzed curled hair, which I guess is kind of fashionable in Hollywood, professional baseball, and in victims of electrocution.

Behind him walked a dark-haired woman with a frumpy-looking blouse, a dumpy-looking skirt, and a lumpy-looking body. She had a pencil behind her ears and was wearing sneakers. A taller man with thinning slicked-down hair and the kind of wattles you get from losing weight too fast in middle age brought up the rear.

The man had the face of a horse. He was wearing a flowered ascot around his neck, along with an open-throat silk striped shirt and brown tweed pants that looked as if they were cut from a fabric that had been used to wrap cotton bales.

Tami Fluff waved at the three of them, then confided to me, “That’s Biff Birnbaum, the producer. Hi, Biff.”

The short man in the Mets jacket scowled in our general direction.

“Oh, I guess you know him, though,” she said to me.

“No.”

“Okay. And the other man is Roddy Quine. He’s the director, and Sheila’s the girl, she’s some kind of assistant producer.” Tami was still squeezing my arm and the tone of her voice made it clear that this was not something she would ever do for a mere assistant producer.

Sheila went to sit at the table with Dahlia Codwell, who barely acknowledged her presence. Quine sat with Birnbaum at a table in the front of the room. Then Birnbaum got up and walked over to us at the bar.

“Come on, folks. Let’s all sit down so we can get this started,” he said.

He looked at me and said, “Are you the guy from the insurance company?”

Tami squeezed my arm. “This is Devlin Tracy,” she said with a giggle. “He’s a—”

“Yeah. I’m from the insurance company,” I said.

Tami dropped my arm as if it had suddenly sprouted quills. “An insurance man?” she said, wheeling toward me.

“But a rich one, a rich one,” McCue yelled. “Member of the Million Dollar Club. Want to buy a policy? He’ll get you a discount.”

“You prick,” Tami said to me.

“I’m not an insurance salesman,” I said lamely.

“What are you, then?”

“I’m an investigator,” I said.

“I don’t give a damn about that,” she said. “You’re not a movie producer.”

“No,” Birnbaum said, “I’m the movie producer.”

“I never told you I was a movie producer,” I told Tami. “He did.” I pointed to McCue.

Tami glared at him. “Why are you always trying to make my life so impossible?” she demanded.

“Because you suffer exquisitely,” McCue said. “Remember that scene in
T and A on Parade
when you got a run in your stocking and…Well, you were just wonderful. I knew then that suffering was your métier.”

“If it wouldn’t ruin the movie schedule, I’d ring your neck,” she said, and marched away.

Birnbaum said, “If there are any necks around here to be rung, I’ll ring them. Now, let’s all sit down and get started. Is everybody here?” He looked around the room. “I don’t see Harden.”

“I refuse to eat dinner without Hard-on here,” McCue said.

“Please, Tony, don’t be picking on Arden this weekend. We need him.”

“You need him,” McCue said. He told me, “Arden Harden, the screenwriter of this moronic opus, is just possibly the most detestable person in all of Hollywood.”

“The best,” Birnbaum said. “Arden’s the best writer in Hollywood.”

“I’m beginning to believe that’s like being the best epic poet in Hoboken,” McCue said.

Ramona Dedley came in and sat at an empty table, so McCue and I picked up our glasses and walked in that direction.

McCue said, “I get no thanks for fixing you up with Tami?”

“That was fixing me up?”

“Certainly. If I introduced you as my bodyguard or something, she wouldn’t even have talked to you, the hard little bitch. Now she’s talked to you. She hates you, true, but she’s talked to you and she knows who you are. So all you’ve got to do is find the right opportunity, abjectly apologize, and she’ll come crawling into your bed like a love-struck puppy. Trust me, Trace. This is the way it works.”

“I’m real glad you told me,” I said. “Here I had this silly notion that she didn’t like us.”

“What a dumb idea,” McCue said. “Everybody likes us. Especially me.”

People shuffled around a lot. Dahlia Codwell got up and went to the bar to make herself another pitcher of martinis. It started to settle down when Roddy Quine, the director, got up and started for the food table.

“Roddy,” Birnbaum snapped. The director turned around and Birnbaum patted the chair next to him. He mouthed the word “wait,” and Quine went back to the table and sat down, looking like a scolded schoolboy.

“There,” McCue whispered to Trace. “Now you know something about the Hollywood hierarchy. Barf Birnbaum, absolutely the worst producer in the industry, has an absolute unqualified right to boss around Quine, who also happens to be the worst director in the history of film.”

“You know,” I said, “you’ve got a lot of problems with this film. Why the hell are you doing it?”

“I couldn’t resist the chance to work with so many old friends,” McCue said.

Birnbaum got up and walked to the small wooden dance floor located between the bar and the tables. He looked around the room and smiled. Naturally, he had perfect teeth.

“Hi, gang,” he called out. He waited as if expecting a response. Finally, there was a feeble “Hi, Biff” from a table behind me. I looked around and saw Sheila, the assistant producer, looking embarrassed.

“I’m not going to make a long speech,” Birnbaum said. Codwell and McCue applauded. Roddy Quine looked startled, as if he had missed something, so he applauded too, until Birnbaum silenced him with a stare and the director went back to sulking.

“On Monday, just four days from now, Peachpit Productions is going to start filming on
Corridors of Death
right here in this hotel. Now, all us movie folk know each other and you all know me…”

“Barf Birnbaum,” McCue whispered to me. “Dumbest producer in Hollywood.”

“You said that,” I said.

“It bears repeating,” he said.

“…but some of you may not know my partner—that is, personally. All of you know him by reputation. Through the years, we’ve had a long happy partnership. I’ve been handling the West Coast movie end and my partner’s been handling the East Coast television part of the business. But this time, he’s coming out of the closet, so to speak…” Birnbaum chuckled. It was the only sound in the room. “…and he’s going to give us a hand in making our new film. Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to present my friend and partner. You know him as Mister Talk-show, Mister Television, Mister Entertainment, but to me he’s just Jack. Ladies and gentlemen, America’s most beloved television personality, the Boy Next Door, Jack Scott. And his lovely wife, Pamela.”

He waved a hand toward the door of the dining room as a couple walked in.

Jack Scott. I’d heard of him but I’d never heard anyone call him “Mister Television” before. He was the host of a late-night talk show and once in a while he had a television special, and it seemed his primary ability was pointing in the direction of the next act. He’d been doing the talk shows forever and every so often you’d read a story about how he always looked young and the Fountain of Youth and all that crap, but coming through the dining-room door, he looked like a tan prune with legs, wrinkled, sixty years old and showing every day of it. Chico would be impressed when I told her that; she loved gossip. The Boy Next Door? He looked like the Boy Next Door if you happened to live next door to an old folks’ home.

Pamela Scott was a pretty-enough, plain woman with no makeup, no flesh tones, and hair the color of mouse fur. She was a lot younger than he was, but she didn’t act younger. She walked like a woman who needed more sleep than she was getting.

Scott naturally had perfect teeth too and was showing them off. She walked behind him, looking ill-at-ease. Birnbaum was applauding their arrival.

“Let’s hear it, folks, for Jack Scott and Pamela,” he called out, clapping his little heart out. Behind me, there was a cascade of clapping. I didn’t have to turn around this time; I knew it was Sheila proving her worth as an assistant producer.

Scott led his wife to the table; she sat down next to Quine, who seemed surprised to see her. Birnbaum sat down on the other side of her and looked toward the dance floor, where Jack Scott was rocking back and forth from foot to foot waiting for the imaginary applause in his head to die down.

“You think Barf is a dork,” McCue whispered to me. “Wait until you hear this guy.”

“Gee whiz, folks,” Scott started out. “Whoever would have thought, all those years ago in Albany, that here I’d be talking to such wonderful Hollywood stars as all of you”—he waved his hand around the room, taking them all in—“and a man from the insurance company. And we’re getting ready to make a motion picture. Golly, I’ll tell you, that’s a lot of distance to come for a kid who used to sit in front of the radio and practice being a baseball announcer. ‘DiMaggio swings. Click. There’s a long high drive to left center field. Wertz goes back, back, back. No use. It’s up and in for a home run. A four-bagger for the Yankee Clipper!’”

He paused and looked around, and Birnbaum clapped.

“‘The next batter up is Charlie Keller.’”

“Nothing succeeds like excess,” McCue grunted to me.

He waited again for applause. Again Birnbaum didn’t disappoint him.

Ramona leaned over to me and said, “Why is that Fluff woman glaring at you?”

I glanced over and saw the platinum blonde staring through me, like an X-ray machine.

“She just found out I’m not going to star her in my next movie,” I said. “
Beach Blanket Bimbo
.”

Ramona nodded and looked back at Jack Scott, who was saying what a terrific movie
Corridors of Death
was going to be.

“And sure, I want us to make money. I want us to make the greatest darned smash in the history of movies, a movie so big that we’ll do a dozen sequels before we’re finished. But most of all I want us to have fun. We want to have a good…”

He stopped in the middle of the sentence and stared over as the sliding doors to the dining room opened.

Through the doors stepped an apparition wearing a green rubber suit painted to look like the skin of a vegetable. On top of the person’s head rose a stalk of rubber reeds with little balls on the end. I guess it was supposed to be an asparagus.

The creature, short and shapeless in the rubber costume, pushed the door shut behind him and stood there.

McCue jumped to his feet. “Don’t worry, folks,” he shouted. “Electricity will kill it.”

The creature shuffled forward into the middle of the dance floor and pointed a finger at Scott, who seemed visibly to shrink.

“Good time?” the creature said. The voice was a man’s voice, deep and gravelly and muffled by the rubber suit. “You say we’re here to have a good time. I saw what you did to my script. You raped my script.”

I touched McCue’s shoulder and the actor sat down. “Arden Harden?” I asked.

“Right,” McCue said. “Absolute jerk-off of the western world.”

“Why is he dressed up to look like an asparagus?” I asked. I noticed that Jack Scott was sputtering and the asparagus was still shaking an accusing finger at him. I thought that it looked like the ghost of Hamlet’s father. If Hamlet had been a rutabaga. Instead of a wimp.

“He’s short,” McCue said to me.

“That’s my answer? That’s why he dresses up like a finger food?”

“He likes to attract attention,” McCue said. “He comes to parties dressed like the Mad Hatter, like Porky Pig, anything to make people look.”

“Okay for parties,” I said. “But this is like the work situation. I don’t think there’s much room for asparagi in the workplace. Does he show up on the sets like this?”

“He would if he thought people were ignoring him,” McCue said. He called out again, “I told you, electricity will kill it.” He jumped up from the table, ran across the room, and yanked an extension cord from the wall. He came back and wrapped the end of the cord around the asparagus’s right leg.

“Quick, somebody. Find a socket. Plug this in,” McCue yelled, holding the end of the extension cord in his hand.

Harden swatted at it, then bent down and pulled the extension cord loose from his leg.

Jack Scott recovered, smiled, and said loudly, “As always, ladies and gentlemen, we can count on a spectacular entrance by our head writer, Arden Harden.”

He tried to lead applause. The smile on Scott’s face was strained and thin and he looked even older than he had entering the room. Nobody joined in the applause.

“Come on, folks. Let’s hear it for Hollywood’s greatest writer. Arden Harden,” Scott called again. He clapped. Biff Birnbaum chipped in with some desultory clapping and Sheila started as soon as she saw Birnbaum applaud.

Scott tried to ignore the asparagus in the room.

“Okay, ladies and gentlemen, I’ve said what I wanted to say. I’ve invited us all here this weekend so we could get to know one another, to have some fun, to become one big family, before the rest of the crew arrives on Monday. Let’s have fun and let’s make a great movie.”

Biff Birnbaum clapped wildly, jumping to his feet for a one-man standing ovation. Roddy Quine next to him looked confused.

The asparagus wheeled around, grabbed his rubberized waistband, lowered his asparagus trousers, bent over, and mooned Jack Scott.

“Mark my words,” he intoned. “This movie will be a tragedy.”

McCue was right; he
was
very short.

Tony McCue was still standing there, next to Harden. “You’d better believe it, folks,” he called out. “That’s right from the asparagus’s mouth.”

Harden shuffled down the length of the room, pulled open the sliding doors, and moved through like a fast-growing ground cover. At the same moment, Clyde Snapp, the caretaker, came into the room wheeling a large silver food cart that I suspect contained desserts. If Snapp thought there was anything unusual about meeting an asparagus in his hallway, his face didn’t register it.

“Dinner’s buffet tonight, folks,” Birnbaum said. “And let’s not run out after dinner. Let’s stay around and talk about our movie,
Corridors of Death
.”

The asparagus stuck his head in the doorway again. “It sucks,” he yelled.