Reckless Disregard (16 page)

“They’re arranged in alphabetical order?”

“No, by client number, unfortunately.”

“Do you remember Bishop’s client number?”

“That’s why it was so important to get into the digital index. We’ll just have to look at the labels.”

She puts her hands on her head and sighs, and then says, “OK, let’s go. How about I start on one side and you take the other. And . . . could I take this side? It’s so dark in the back, and I have nightmares about rats.”

I make my way to the far side of the room and survey the rows upon rows of file folders. I use my hand to brush away the cobwebs, and when I open a file, I check for black widow spiders that might be lurking in the crevices of a Redweld expandable. On another day, I might be fascinated by ancient contracts for the services of Stanley Kubrick, Steve McQueen, and Elizabeth Taylor, but now they’re just annoyances. There are no files for
The Boatman
, no files that have anything to do with William Bishop, Parapet Media, or any of his other companies. He and his corporations were clients of the firm for years. Someone scrubbed this place clean—no, not someone, Bishop’s lackeys. I’ll have to ask Roland on the way out if he has a record of Bishop’s people being here.

Brenda’s shriek echoes off the rafters. I run back to her side of the room. I don’t know if I’ll have to kill a rodent or fight off one of Bishop’s thugs.

She’s sitting in front of the computer, her smile brighter than the ceiling lights.

“Are you OK?” I ask.

“I’m great.” She hands me a file folder.

The tag says Hilda Marie Johnson, a name that means nothing to me.

“It’s the real name of an actress named Hildy Gish,” Brenda says. “You told me that Harry Cherry mentioned her, right?”

I nod. “How did you figure this out?”

“The computer. I searched for
Hildy
, but there was nothing, but there was an entry for
Hilda
, and it’s close, so I pulled the file.”

“How did you even get into the computer?”

“Your password,
childstar
. It worked with an initial cap and a
question mark
at the end. A lot of these programs make you have capitals and a special character. So I just capitalized the first letter and tried some punctuation marks and the question mark worked and I got in right away.”

“But I was sure that I . . .” Then I remember that in the last years of the firm, the new fascistic head of the IT department forced all the lawyers to make their passwords more secure. He probably made me change mine. My case assistant is certainly resourceful.

“They wiped this place clean,” I say.

“Well, they missed this one.” She hands me the file folder.

The file shows that several times during the eighties, William Bishop hired Hildy Gish to act in his movies, all before Felicity disappeared. Gish obviously wasn’t a big-time actress, so most of the agreements are simple day-player contracts. When Brenda shows me the document at the bottom of the file, I struggle not to shout. I’m looking at Hildy Gish’s acting contract to appear in
The Boatman
. Whoever sanitized the file for Bishop obviously didn’t know Hildy Gish’s real name. What makes me want to pump my fist in triumph is that, attached to the contract, is
The Boatman
’s cast list.

William Bishop had everything to do with this film. But despite what Harry Cherry said to me, Felicity McGrath’s name isn’t listed as a member of
The Boatman
’s cast. When Brenda realizes this, she lets out a disappointed groan.

What I feel is not disappointment but another emotion entirely. Because other words on this long-forgotten piece of paper cause a frenzied jolt of electricity to surge down my spine.

“Could we get out of this place now?” Brenda says.

I tuck the Hildy Gish file under my arm and go to the door. The moment I open it, a scream comes from down the hall, the hideous falsetto of a male in agony. I close the door to a crack and look out. The only parts of big Roland’s body that are visible are his arms and lower torso, enough to see that he’s sprawled out lifeless in his chair. Two men, one tall and one short, both middle-aged muscular, draw away from him and head toward the door, not running but walking with purpose, like masters of efficient slaughter. These guys are professionals. They’ve overpowered a two-hundred-and-sixty-pound roughneck before he could get out of his chair.

“Let’s go,” I say. “Now!”

“Oh my god, oh my god,” Brenda whimpers.

Still clutching the Gish file with one hand, I grab her wrist with the other and lead her back to the so-called office with the desk and the computer, no place to hide in itself, little more than an alcove. The file room door rattles. They’ve got Roland’s keys, and they’re trying them in the lock. After only a few tries, I hear the door swing open.

A thick industrial curtain covers the entire back wall, the kind that’s suspended from a track in the ceiling and that can slide to separate the office from the rest of the file room. I take hold of the hem, lift it up, and tell Brenda to crawl behind. She looks at me as if I’m daft. The footsteps on the concrete floor are getting louder. But maybe we’ve gotten a break—the men seem to be meticulously going up and down the file stacks looking for us. She has no choice, and once she’s gone behind the curtain, I follow her under. The stench of dust and mold and decaying insect parts and rodent droppings is nauseating, and I try to hold my breath. Brenda’s breathing is so loud and labored that she’s on the verge of hyperventilating. I fear that the men will hear her gasping for air and find us. She presses her body against mine, evidently thinking that we’re going to try to avoid those men by hiding behind the curtain, but I push her away—I’m not foolish enough to think we can win a game of hide ’n’ seek behind some filthy drapery.

In the darkness, I feel along the wall, hoping that my memory of a drunken night eight years ago is still clear enough to find what I’m looking for. And there it is—the handleless door in the drywall. I push hard, and it opens inward with a scraping sound. I hope those guys are far enough away that they didn’t hear it. I pull Brenda inside and shut the door tightly. There’s a lock, but only one of those cheap sliding latches that you get in the hardware store, the kind that wouldn’t survive one blow from those guys. I lock it anyway.

Though there’s a light switch, I’m not about to turn it on, so it’s black in here. I feel my way to the end of the short hall and find another door, but it’s locked. I’m not about to jangle my keys trying to unlock it. This far below ground, it’s dank and cold. Or maybe it’s just the fear that’s making me shiver. Brenda presses her body against mine. I put my arm around her and hold her tightly, not for any amorous reason—mortal terror is only sexually arousing in the movies—but so those guys won’t hear her teeth chatter. Harry Cherry claimed that underground rivers run through Beverly Hills, and with a straight face, Harmon would insist that it was true. I never believed them, but now I hear the babble and whoosh of rushing water. It’s probably just the plumbing, or the blood rushing through my veins at Mach speed.

I try to keep still, to keep Brenda still, to comprehend the footsteps and the murmured words of the stalkers on the other side. As so often happens when you try to focus on one thing for too long, my mind wanders, and I recall the night I learned about this door. My late partner Deanna Poulos and I had won a major trial that day and had celebrated by hitting more than a few Beverly Hills bars for a tequila taste test. After a night of doing shot after shot, we returned to the building at about midnight and got in the elevator to retrieve our cars, though neither of us should have even thought of driving. But instead of going to the parking level, she pressed the button for the archives.

“There’s something I want you to do for me—or rather to me,” she said. Although Deanna preferred to sleep with women, we’d have these occasional trysts that she called
sport fucking
—we fooled ourselves into believing we could dismiss the act’s significance by making light of it. She was one of those people who consciously aspired to be known as wild and edgy, and the alcohol fueled that goal. She took me to the archives, opened the curtains, and showed me this door, which she’d learned about from Philip Paulsen during a document production.

“I always wanted to fuck in a cave, and this room is like a cave,” she said with a drunken logic that made sense to me only because I was also drunk. So we went inside and had sex almost fully dressed and standing up. The next morning I arrived at work with a raging hangover and had to listen to an equally hungover Deanna berate me for agreeing to go along with something so unsexy and crass.

Now the footsteps get louder. The slaps of shoe leather on concrete are arrhythmic, which means that both of them are close. There’s a scraping and tapping, no longer coming from floor level but higher up, and I’m certain that one or both of them are feeling along the curtain to see if we’re hiding behind it. Fortunately, the door has no handle. Will they feel the door seams or lift the curtain high enough to notice the door? Brenda is holding her breath and trying not to shake. Her heavy perfume seems to have saturated whatever air is left in this place, and now I worry that Bishop’s men will smell it.

The sounds stop, and there’s grumbling, and the footsteps fade, and one of the men says what sounds like, “We’d better get out of here,” and eventually there’s the heavy thud of the front door shutting. I don’t think we’ve been hiding for more than ten minutes, but I’ve lost track of time, and I make sure we stay in that dark room for twice that long. Finally, I motion for Brenda to stay put, open the door gingerly, slide out, and lift up the curtain, my heart in a race with my panting lungs. I slowly creep out and look up and down the stacks, but I don’t see anyone. I doubt they’d lie in wait, which gives me comfort. I knock on the wall twice, and Brenda opens the door, pulling so hard that the scrape of wood against concrete reverberates throughout the file room. I take her hand, and we run for the door.

When we’re sure the corridor is clear, we hurry over to the desk, where Roland’s huge body has somehow slipped to the floor. I bend down next to him, and as I reach out to feel for a pulse, there’s a loud gurgle of breath that makes me flinch.

Roland opens his eyes, shakes his head, and says, “Holy shit, those guys were good. A Taser gun and some kind of sleeper hold . . . shit, my head’s spinning.” He makes a move to stand, and when I tell him to sit he shakes me off, so I help him up as best I can, no easy task given his girth. He goes over and sits behind his desk, and then asks me to give him his cap, which for some inexplicable reason he perches on his head. I pick up the phone and dial 911, asking for both the cops and an ambulance.

“They were looking for you, Parker,” Roland says. “When I told them I hadn’t seen you, they said they’d followed you here. I told them that you’d come and gone. Guess they didn’t believe me.”

Only when the paramedics arrive do I realize that I no longer have the Hildy Gish file, and I’m about to go back inside the archives to get it when I notice that Brenda is carrying it.

“You left it on the floor of that horrible, wonderful room,” she says. “I wasn’t going to let it out of our sight.”

Roland has no record of anyone from Bishop or Parapet Media coming to look at files, though there are always work people coming in and out of the place. After talking to the police—they made clear that they didn’t take me seriously when I said William Bishop was behind the attack on Roland—I want Brenda to go home or back to The Barrista, but she refuses. “I’m part of this more than ever,” she says.

So we drive to Topanga College together. The young man at the information booth tells us that Nate Ettinger is teaching a seminar. We find the classroom and stand in the back of the room. Ettinger looks at us in surprise but doesn’t break cadence, continuing his lecture about legitimate uses of film and art as tools of political persuasion. He praises the aesthetics of Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, he believes that Oliver Stone is a great thinker, he maintains that celebrities like Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger are prototypes for future politicians. By the time his lecture is over, I want to punch him. Actually, I’ve wanted to punch him since I saw
The Boatman
cast list.

After class, he speaks informally with some students and then comes over and greets us with a big smile, though he isn’t happy to see us. He sits across from us, pats the outside of his plaid sport coat, and takes a half-bent billiard pipe out of the inside pocket. Smoking is prohibited in college classrooms, but he lights up anyway. “To what do I owe this unexpected visit?” he says.

“I was overcome with the sudden urge to ask you what it’s like to work for William Bishop,” I say.

The smile remains on his lips but leaves his eyes. “I wouldn’t know. I never worked for him. He didn’t give me the opportunity. When he took over the studio I was working at, he killed my movie in its infancy.”

“Oh, you did work for him,” I say. “On
The Boatman
. I have the list of cast and crew. And it’s interesting—the typewritten credits sheet lists you as an associate producer, but someone crossed that out with a pen and listed you as the lighting and sound man. Which was it?”