Hidden Bodies (35 page)

Love nods. “I’m so sorry. I know I’m being a royal fucking bitch. I don’t know how to control it and I hate myself for not having figured out how to control it yet.
Thirty-five fucking years.”

I kiss the top of her perfect head. “Life is long,” I tell her. “You’re gonna be fine. I’m going to find him and sober him up, whatever it takes, I’m gonna be
with him. And then we’re gonna come back here and he’s gonna be with us and I’m gonna take care of him so I can take care of you.”

“I love you, be safe,” she calls as I leave the house.

The person she should worry about is her brother. He’s hit my last nerve and if he isn’t calling to apologize for stealing my scripts, fucking me over, and torturing his family, then
he is going to be roadkill on the fucking 101.

I
drive fast and when I get to the 101 Diner from
Swingers
, Forty’s already in a booth, red-faced and high, feet up, dirty toes in old
huaraches and he’s flirting with a waitress and nursing a beer. My least favorite song in the world comes on, the song that was playing in LAX when I arrived, that stupid fucking Tom Tom Club
song, and as I walk to Forty’s table, the song feels like an omen. Just the same, I am a fair person. I give Forty the benefit of the doubt. Surely he’s been squirreled away, wracked
with guilt over what he’s done to his family, to me. Surely this is the scene in his sad life when he comes to Jesus, when he begs for forgiveness.

“Forty,” I say as I sit down in the booth. “We’re all having a nervous breakdown looking for you. What the fuck?”

“Whoa,” he says. “I sense a little hostility.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Call your sister.”

“You look a little piquant, Old Sport.”

Only assholes say
piquant
and I know that this is not the moment where he sees the light, where he becomes a human and cops to his horrible behavior. He called me here because
he’s full of cocaine and he hums along to the frothy, bratty pop as he peruses the menu. I order a blackened chicken sandwich and he orders a
BBB
—
bacon, bacon, and
bacon
sandwich—and puts down his menu.

“Joe,” he begins. “I have to say that I’m hurt.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I say. “But do me a favor. Before we get into anything, call your sister.”

He shakes his head. “I know you think I screwed you over somehow, but you need to remember that I’ve been working on these scripts for
years
.”

“Let’s not get into that now,” I say. “I just want your family to know you’re okay.”

“Well, I’m not okay,” he snaps. “You couldn’t even
congratulate
me properly. I get the news of my life and you turn into a jealous little bitch.”

“Forty, we had a deal . . .” I stop, I take a deep breath. This is not why I came here. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is call your sister.”

But he’s exasperated. “A deal? Do you
know
how many people have pitched in on these projects over the years? That’s what this business is. We read each other’s
shit. There was no
deal.
A deal is what I have with Megan.”

Every time he says
Megan
my aspirations flare. I won’t let them do me in and distract me. I’m here for one reason: He either gets to call his family and have one more shot
at life or he gets to abuse his family and suffer the consequences.

The music is too loud and he goes off on how the scripts are his. He paints a picture, wherein I am the shady one, the one who didn’t even want to tell Love that we were
talking about
maybe doing something together.

“You know, I’m actually kind of impressed. Separation of church and state.” He winks. “My dad would have told my mom in a fucking
heartbeat
. But you didn’t
let your dick get in the way of your brain.” He smacks my shoulder.

“Whoa,” I say. I want to bash his face in and set him straight. I count to three. “Love has nothing to do with the deal we made.”

And I should have told Love; I regret not telling her. I want a time machine. Secrets erode trust and that’s how I got into this mess. Had I told Love about Forty’s proposal she
would have lifted her little hand to her chest and said
ooh, Joe, I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.
But you can’t go back in time; I know this from the mug of fucking
piss.

“Old Sport, can you fucking just
believe it
?” Forty says. “How cool is it, right? Megan Fucking Ellison! I still can’t believe it. But at the same time, I can,
you know how that is? How unlike the lottery it is, meaning that there’s nothing random about the good fortune. You do the work. Eventually, you get paid. Then you get laid!” He
twiddles his thumbs and looks at me so directly, like a bear facing a human in a backyard in New Hampshire.

“You maybe want to call your sister?” I ask him.

“I never use my phone during a meal,” he says.

Forty whistles at the waitress and asks her for a bottle of their
worst
champagne and she laughs, as if he’s so funny and comes back to us with two small bottles of white wine.
“What are we toasting?” she asks.

“My career,” he says. “I’m blowing up.”

She says the drinks are on her and she winks. “I would eat that ass,” Forty says. “And I generally don’t do that.”

I slam the table. “
Forty
.”

He looks at me and moans. “Old Sport, I did not invite you here to be lame,” he says. “Now, you should be thanking me. You did some beautiful tweaks on my work. You’re
well on your way to a great career.”

“I didn’t
tweak
anything,” I snarl.

He slumps, like I’m so boring, like I’m stupid. “
When Harry Met Sally. Jaws.
Do you know what these movies have in common?”

“Fuck off,” I snap. I know where he’s going.

“I’ll tell you what they have in common,” he says. And he tells me what I already know: The famous lines about orgasms and big boats were improvised. “But do the actors
get credit? Hell, no. Do they get cowriting accolades? Fuck, no. Are they earning royalties on that gold? Hell, no.”

“That’s different and you know it.”

He shakes his head. “You just don’t get it,” he says. “You waltz into this town and you think it
owes
you something because what? Because you fuck my sister and
you have a flair for dialogue?”

The waitress brings beers. “These are for you guys to keep up the celebration.”

Forty grins. “You are a doll. Porcelain doll.”

She smiles. “No,” she says. “I’m slightly more flexible.”

She leaves and his eyes are gone. “Wouldn’t it be aces if the waitresses in here were on Rollerblades?” He squirts ketchup on a napkin for seemingly no reason
.
“You should work that into something. Roller skates are killer on film.
Boogie Nights
meets I dunno, you know.”

The waitress returns with a shake
.
“On the house,” she says. “The chef read about you in the
Hollywood Reporter
.”

Hollywood, where the rich don’t have to pay for anything and Forty thanks her and lowers his chin and nods. He pulls his straw out of the case and sips his shake. “I drink my
milkshake,” he says. “Get it? Like, you think I’m drinking
your
milkshake but see, the chef knows, the waitress knows. They know what’s up.”

“Fuck you,” I snap.

He shakes his head and tells me I need to watch out for my
ego.
He says I didn’t kiss Barry Stein’s ass the right way. He preaches about my lack of respect. I don’t
know what it is to pitch and pitch and hear the word
no
and go back and try again.

“Fifteen years I’ve been at this,” he says. “For fifteen years I have been developing my brand. Getting my name out there. Generating buzz. Fifteen years of driving to
studios and telling my stories to executives and producers who have told me they
love me
and they
love it
and they
want it
and then a week, two weeks later,
nothing.” He’s fuming now. Give a miserable person an ice cream cone and the miserable person will nosh, digest, and go back to being miserable. “I just can’t wait to see
the look on Milo’s face. Right?”

“You should really call Love,” I say. “She’s literally worried sick.”

He’s brittle, pissed. “She’s fine,” he says. “They’re all fine.”

The food comes. He’s happy again. He plows into his bacon sandwich and I don’t touch mine. He’s failed his test, and I tried, I really did. But this codependent twin saga
existed before I got here, Forty fucking with Love, Love forgiving him, no matter what. My job is to end it. I see that. I will do that, for Love, as an apology for the mess I made, the way I
enabled this selfish louse.

I can’t decide how I’m going to kill him but I do know that when rich people die, the cops actually care. The first thing they try to figure out is the motivation. I can’t risk
those e-mails we exchanged biting me in the ass. “Forty,” I say. “You should delete all of our e-mails, you know, about the scripts. Just in case someone were to hack into your
account. You want to make sure that there’s nothing, well, you know what I mean.”

He laughs and chokes and sips beer. “See, only someone fresh off the boat would say something like that,” he says. “You can go to a lawyer right now. Have fun. Good luck paying
the retainer. Oh, and good luck finding anyone who wants to work with a guy who lawyers up like a fucking baby when his girlfriend’s brother gets a sweet deal.” He burps. “You can
be litigious or you can be creative but you can’t be litigious
and
creative. Nobody wants to get in the sandbox with the guy who
sues
people.”

I tell him I’m just looking out for him. “I know a reporter who tries to hack into shit all the time,” I explain. “You don’t want a paper trail.”

He nods. “I do see your point,” he says.

Now he’s in his phone, swiping. The waitress comes back with a platter of sweet potato fries
just because
. Forty is sobering up. “That was good advice,” he says.
“But it’s also a bummer. This is the kind of shit you learn from a lawyer, not a writer. We
could
get something going together but then I’m not bringing a litigious prick
anywhere. I don’t like litigious pricks. You need to tell me that you’re not going to be a litigious prick.”

At the counter, a different waitress flirts with an
aspiring
writer who’s probably been trying to fuck her and finish his screenplay for months. He asks for a side of
guac
and she tells him that it’s two dollars extra. That’s how it works here. The guy who deserves free
guac
doesn’t get free
guac
.

Forty wipes his mouth and pushes his plate away. “You know,” he says. And now he reaches for the big guns. “My sister loves me very, very much.”

“I know that, Forty,” I say. “I do.”

He runs his hands through his greasy hair. “You got Love,” he says. “Don’t be a pig. Stop looking for money. It doesn’t make you happy. All the money and all the
fame, it’s nothing without love.”

I remind him of his family hunkered down at Love’s house. His eyes are empty. He is the boy named Forty, the hapless, hopeless brother of Love. “Yeah,” he says.
“There’s nothing Ray and Dot love more than a party, even a search party. My fam-damn-ily, they’re something, right?”

He’s an outsider and he knows it and he’ll never stop punishing them. When I tell him they love him, I sound like I’m lying. Lies sound like lies and it’s impossible to
know which came first, the selfish, repugnant nature of this man or the missteps of his nurturers. What I do know: If he stays around, he will destroy everything between me and Love. His family is
right. He is self-destructive. But he is also outwardly destructive. Killing him will be the greatest risk of my life—I could lose Love—but it will, of course, yield the greatest
reward. I will have Love without Forty.

I pick up the check. I pay cash; I’ve learned.

Outside, Forty picks at his teeth with a toothpick
.
“Well, I’m off to Vegas to bang out another script.” His car pulls up, big and black.

“Forty,” I say. “I know you’re not going to write.”

He laughs. “Oh right. Ha. But it’s good, you know, good practice for the talk shows and shit,” he says. Fucking asshole.

“Hey,” I say. “What do you want me to tell your family?”

That vacant stare again. He knows they love Love more than they love him. I’m sure that’s true in most families, and some kids shrug it off. But other kids, kids like Forty, I bet he
made this same face at every birthday party when Love got just a
few
more presents than he did and when her mom hugged her and just held on for a
teensy
bit longer. Forty did not
get enough love. A lot of people don’t. But the thing is, he’s
twinned
with someone who got so much love that she
is
Love. And that’s got to be hard.

He shrugs. “Let my mom stress out and starve for a few more days,” he says. “She’s been starting to pork up, Old Sport. We don’t want that, right?”

My sympathy evaporates. “So you don’t want me to tell them you’re okay?”

“They need to back off,” he says. “I’m not in fucking high school.” Reverse psychology 101 and his eyes pop. “You know what I
do
want though,”
he begins. “Old Sport, you should come to Vegas. We can bang out a new script,
Hangover
meets
Hangover
!”

The
Hangover
can’t meet the
Hangover
because the
Hangover
is the
Hangover
and I tell him no, maybe next time,
definitely
next time.

He shrugs. I see a
bag of drugs
in his car, literally, a bag of drugs. He raises his hand for a high five and the next time I touch him, it will be different. I will be strangling
him.

SEVEN
thousand hours later, I am getting close to Vegas and the lights of the city twinkle in the distance the way they did in
Swingers
. I
made it. And it wasn’t easy. When I told Love that I had a “hunch” that Forty was in Vegas she was befuddled.