Steven Bochco (15 page)

Then he warns Dennis about Vee. “You saw the tape of her and Ramon, you got yourself a chubby thinking about it, so you think you'll just grab a piece, see what all the excitement's about, then move on. But it doesn't work that way with Vee. She's a world-class cunt. She'll fuck you, then she'll fuck you over, just like she fucked me over.”

“I don't want to hear this,” Dennis says, his eyes going cold.

Maybe because Bobby's pissed off that Dennis wants to fuck his wife, or maybe because he doesn't realize how close Dennis is to beating him bloody, Bobby can't help but disregard the cautionary.

“All I'm saying is, Vee's long-term career aspirations don't include raising a couple of snot-nosed kids in Northridge with some blue-collar cop who's scrounging around the fringes of show business. That's not exactly the springboard to stardom she's always envisioned for herself. So I'm just saying, save yourself the grief. And if you can't, this is me saying I told you so, in advance.”

CHAPTER 28

Later that morning, Dennis calls Linda Paulson and asks her if she'd mind coming in to Hollywood Division for a quick conversation this afternoon, he's got a couple of questions he'd like to ask her about Ramon. Is it urgent, Linda probes, or can it wait? Dennis says he wouldn't characterize it as urgent, exactly, but he'd like to put this part of the case to bed, as it were, and move on, but he can't do that until he rechecks some of his facts against her statements.

There's a pause on the line, then: “Is this something I should be worrying about, Detective? Am I going to be needing an attorney?”

Dennis assures her there's nothing to worry about and that she won't be needing an attorney. Linda says she's never been in a police station before, it should be interesting. Dennis promises to give her the VIP tour, and she tells him she'll see him sometime after lunch.

A few minutes short of three o'clock, Linda arrives at Hollywood Division and, goddamnit, she's a looker. There are some women who peak in their late teens, early twenties, beauty-wise, before starting the long, slow descent to hell in a handbasket. And then there are the women like Linda Paulson, who, plastic surgery notwithstanding, get sexier and more beautiful the older they get. (I always tell my wife, If I ever get in trouble, it's not going to be with a tootsie. But that's another story.)

So even in Hollywood Division, whose cops have seen more than their share of good-looking babes, Linda Paulson is a head-turner.

Upstairs in the detective squad, Dennis introduces Linda to his partner, Lonnie, then escorts her into the TV room.

“I really appreciate you coming over on such short notice,” Dennis tells her.

“It sounded important,” Linda says, looking around at the ratty couch, the chairs, and the table sitting in the center of the room.

“The thing is,” Dennis says, getting right to it, “when I asked you did you know Ramon, you said hardly at all.”

“That's correct.”

He checks his notes. “You said, let me see here . . . you said it would be fun to take some classes, stretch out your acting muscles.”

“That's right.”

“What you didn't say was you were stretching out more than your acting muscles with Ramon.”

Suddenly Linda gets all frosty. “What are you implying, Detective?”

Dennis grabs the remote and hits the
PLAY
button. The TV screen illuminates with the image of Linda and Ramon fucking, along with the muffled sounds of their passion: the headboard banging rhythmically against the wall, like a shutter slamming against the window frame when the Santa Anas blow; her escalating moans of “oh yes, baby, oh yes, oh God”; the dull smack of their sweaty bodies as Ramon rams in and out of her.

Dennis has seen the tape enough times that he's way more interested in watching Linda than watching the tape, and he can't help but be impressed by the fact that she doesn't flinch or drop her eyes in shame. From her expression, you'd think she was watching herself on some television show she was starring in. Of course, when you think about it, that's pretty much what it is, though I doubt you'd catch this particular episode on Must See TV.

Dennis freezes the tape before Linda and Ramon get to the main event. “Where did you get that?” Linda asks quietly.

Dennis tells her Ramon was into taping his sexual adventures with a camera hidden inside the armoire facing the bed, which is not altogether a direct answer to her question but which, under the circumstances, goes unchallenged.

“Why am I not surprised?” she asks, and now that Dennis has her full attention, he hits
PLAY
again, and Linda watches as their postcoital conversation turns ugly, then escalates to violent, then murderous. When it's done, Dennis turns off the VCR.

“I thought you said I wouldn't be needing an attorney,” Linda says.

“You don't,” Dennis tells her. “At least not yet. What you need is a friend.”

“And I'm supposed to believe that's you.” Which is rhetorical in tone but which Dennis chooses to answer literally.

“I'll let you be the judge of that after you hear me out. And if you still want a lawyer after I'm through, I won't try and talk you out of it.”

Dennis lets Linda's perception of her suddenly altered world sink in for a few moments before making his pitch. “I'm a cop. I've seen a lot worse than that, believe me,” he says, pointing at the TV. “Plus, I understand a little something about human nature, and I make no judgments about your lifestyle. I tell you this because I want you to believe me when I say that I like you. You're smart, you're great-looking, you got a sense of humor, plus I'm guessing that being married to Marv Paulson's not the easiest ride in the amusement park, I don't care how much money he's got. So all in all, I have no interest in seeing you take a fall for a murder that could be argued was self-defense. So the only issue here is, do you exercise your right to an attorney or do you give me a statement first?”

“And how is that to my benefit?” Linda asks.

“Okay. Let's say you get an attorney in here. He's going to shut you down. Then I'm not going to have any choice but to arrest you, at which point you go into the system. You get arraigned, it's splashed all over the tabloids and the TV, and until you make bail—assuming the judge sets bail—you're in county lockup. Jail. And the reason all this happens is—don't kid yourself—that's the way your lawyer wants it. He gets to charge you a big number. He gets to go in front of the cameras. He gets to argue the case in a packed courtroom. But in the meantime, he's not the one doing prison time if the jury convicts. And he's not the one who has to live with that videotape being seen in open court.”

Suddenly Linda imagines Bobby sitting in court, watching the videotape of her and Ramon. The thought of him seeing it and walking out of the courtroom and out of her life makes her heartsick.

Dennis pours her a glass of water. “Now, here's an alternative scenario. You tell me what you and Ramon were arguing about. You tell me how things got violent. You tell me how you knew enough about Ramon to know that before he reinvented himself as a successful actor, he'd done prison time for assault and rape. You say how you were in fear for your life and were just trying to protect yourself. Then, once I have your statement, I go to the D.A. I tell him I think you're telling the truth, that you cooperated fully, and that instead of arresting and charging you, we ought to go before a grand jury, where there's a good chance they'll find no true bill. And in the meantime, after you give me your statement, you walk out of here and have your dinner at home instead of at Women's Corrections.”

“What happens to the tape in your scenario?” Linda asks.

“Grand jury evidence is sealed. If there's no true bill, the tape never comes out. If they indict, you've got bigger problems to worry about.”

Linda takes a deep breath. “Ramon was trying to extort a million dollars from me to start a production company, or he was going to tell my husband we were having an affair. I told him it wasn't going to happen. He actually picked up the phone to call Marv. That's when I slapped him. He hit me back, and when he came after me, I hit him with his own fucking trophy.”

“Because you were in fear for your life,” Dennis prompts.

“Yes.”

“And when we enhance the audio portion of the tape, is it going to corroborate what you're telling me about Ramon trying to extort you?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, Mrs. Paulson. Let's get a D.A. in here and write it up.”

Linda smiles at him for the first time since walking into the room. “Don't you think after watching that tape together, you can call me Linda?”

CHAPTER 29

In the wake of Linda's confession that she killed Ramon (in self-defense) and the D.A.'s office announcing it would present its case to the grand jury, there commences a media frenzy, which the absence of hard facts does nothing to suppress. If anything, the scarcity of information fuels a cascading mud slide of rumor, gossip, and innuendo, with all the print rags and TV gossip shows dangling serious bucks for any scraps of information.

Linda hires a top-gun criminal attorney named Arlen Gillis to spin the information that inevitably leaks out, and for two weeks it's a media circus, culminating in the main event, the secret grand jury hearing itself, which results, after due deliberation, in a finding of no true bill, just as Dennis had predicted.

Normally, that would have been the end of it. Grand jury proceedings are held in secret, the transcripts are sealed, and in a finding of no true bill, the evidence is never revealed. The problem is, this isn't normal. This is the gorgeous wife of a Hollywood billionaire, accused of murdering her Latin playboy lover in his Hollywood Hills boudoir. I mean, come on. There's no way the press lets up on this one. Would you?

And through it all Bobby keeps his head down and works on his screenplay, happily lost in the Zone.

Time, or at least the perception of it, changes profoundly when you're in the Zone. For a writer, being in the Zone means that some creative force beyond your control is driving you to work obsessively, all day, sometimes all night, with no sense of the passage of time, until exhaustion literally forces you away from the computer. And then, even after you've walked away, your brain continues to fire. You don't hear much of what people are saying to you over the din of voices in your head clamoring to be heard. You fall asleep at night, or sometimes at dawn, listening to them, only to wake up a dozen times in mid-thought, as if sleep hasn't been any impediment at all to the creative process. You come out of the shower and, soaking wet, scribble notes on the pad you keep handy, just in case. Your brain is like LAX the day before Christmas, with ideas stacked up like incoming planes, circling, waiting to land, so another one can take its place in the rotation. For sheer long-term excitement, nothing beats it.

But then, as Bobby approaches the finish line of what feels like the best thing he's ever written, two things happen: the first thing is, he forgets, at least for the time being, the Devil's pact he made with Dennis. The second thing is, he unexpectedly hits a wall. Suddenly the faucet slows to a trickle. What had been effortless is now painstaking. The process becomes labored, and time—which seemed not to exist in the Zone—now looms large and weighs heavy, and Bobby fears that the magic has deserted him.

While Bobby suddenly finds himself creatively stalled, Linda, without any ambivalence whatsoever, is letting time work its healing magic on her wounds. But just as things are beginning to settle down, the shit
really
hits the fan when a bootlegged videotape of Linda Paulson fucking Ramon Montevideo becomes the hottest item to make the Hollywood rounds since the tape of Pamela Anderson blowing her skanky husband, Tommy Lee, on that boat.

Within days, every player in town has either seen or heard about the tape of her and Ramon, and if you could rent it at Blockbuster, there'd be a line out to the sidewalk. What had practically become a dead campfire with a few barely glowing embers has now erupted once again into a roaring blaze.

Predictably, Marv Paulson (who could tolerate—hell, to a point even enjoy—the idea of his wife banging Ramon) can't abide the humiliation of knowing that every one of his cronies, every person he does business with, every woman he meets, or every whore he beats has seen the tape of his wife riding Ramon like a bare-assed bucking bronco.

So, given the givens, it doesn't come as any great shock to Bobby when Linda shows up at his house about forty-eight hours after the tape hits the street, as it were, a little shell-shocked but strangely excited.

“How are you doing?” Bobby asks.

“Aside from the fact that I'm embarrassed and angry and I don't understand why Dennis Farentino would do this to me, I'm doing okay.”

“How do you know it was Dennis?”

“No one else had access to the tape.”

“Ten other cops had access to it,” Bobby tells her. “The D.A.'s office had access to it. The clerks who handle the evidence for the grand jury had access to it. Christ, your own lawyer had access. And any one of them could've sold it to the tabloids for a hundred thousand bucks.”

“Tell me the truth,” Linda says. “Did you see it?”

“No,” Bobby says.

“Promise me you never will.”

“I promise.”

“I came over to tell you that Marv wants a divorce.”

“Are you okay with that?” Bobby asks.

“I'm more than okay,” she tells him as Bobby pours her a glass of wine. “The more important question is, are
you
okay?”

“What do you mean?”

“What I mean is, one day you're having this nice, quiet affair with a married woman and the next day you suddenly find out, along with the rest of the world, that she killed her previous lover. And if that's not enough of a scandal, the hottest ticket in town turns out to be the videotape of the last time they had sex, climaxing, if you'll pardon the expression, in the killing itself.”

“Hey.” Bobby shrugs. “Nobody's perfect.”

“And just when you're probably thinking how much better off you are with this woman out of your life, she shows up on your doorstep saying her husband kicked her out and asking if she can spend the night.”

“Yes,” Bobby says.

“Yes you're okay with it or yes I can spend the night?”

“Yes I'm okay with it, and yes you can spend the night.”

“Thank you,” Linda says, and for the first time since this whole goddamn mess exploded in her face, she starts to cry. Bobby takes her in his arms and holds her, letting her cry herself out, then takes her hand and leads her to the bedroom, where she lets him undress her.

“You're not going to kill
me,
are you?” he asks, which actually gets a smile out of her.

“Not unless you get a heart attack while I'm fucking your brains out,” she teases him, and that's the last either of them has to say for a good long while.

Bobby survives the lovemaking, and after they've shared a glass of wine, he asks her what she's going to do next. She says first she's going to get a suite at the Bel Air Hotel. Then she's going to hire a killer divorce attorney. She pretty much knows what Marv is worth, and for all his faults, he's not cheap. Besides, given his dirty little secrets, she doesn't figure Marv's up for much of a fight. When the dust settles, she tells Bobby, she should wind up with a settlement well north of a hundred million dollars, which, if she's careful, she figures she can get by on. “At least,” she says, “till I find myself another rich husband.”

“Would you consider a poor one?” Bobby asks.

“I thought you'd never ask,” Linda says, starting to cry again, this time from happiness.

Bobby couldn't have written it any better.