Steven Bochco (16 page)

CHAPTER 30

Every Hollywood scandal has a shelf life, and even this one—a classic by anyone's measure—eventually burns itself out. And as Linda's life settles back into some semblance of relative anonymity, her newly acquired divorce attorney very quietly negotiates a rapid dissolution of her twelve-year marriage to Marv. In her wildest dreams, Linda could never have imagined that roughly twenty-two years after leaving Ohio to seek her fame and fortune, she's achieved, if not exactly fame, then at least some measure of notoriety. As for the fortune part of the program, I think anyone would agree that 180 million bucks, give or take, qualifies big-time.

As far as Bobby's screenplay is concerned, the faucet has turned back on, his creative juices are flowing freely once again, and, happily back in the Zone, he works on his script around the clock, finally writing
FADE OUT
one night around nine o'clock.

Bobby hits the
PRINT
key on his computer, and as the pages start to spit out of the printer, the doorbell chimes.

When he opens the door, Dennis is there. “Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” Bobby says back, a little startled.

“Can I come in?”

“Oh yeah, sure, come on in. Let me get you a beer.”

In the kitchen, Bobby pops the caps off a couple of Coronas and gives one to Dennis. “You're spooky,” he says.

“How's that,” Dennis says, swigging the cold beer.

“I just literally finished the script five minutes before you showed up. It's printing as we speak. It's like you're a fucking mind reader.”

“I
am
a mind reader,” Dennis says.

“Oh yeah?” Bobby asks. “What am I thinking right now?”

“You're thinking I don't know it was you who leaked that tape of Linda and Ramon to the street.”

Bobby thinks, Fuck. This guy
is
Columbo. He tells you he's smarter than you think and you
still
forget it.

“I'm not saying I did put it out there,” Bobby says, “but you gotta admit, just when it seemed like the whole thing was fizzling out—boom—all hell breaks loose, it's the hottest story in town all over again, and her fat slob husband dumps her. It's a great story twist.”

“Yeah. You humiliated her, you busted up her marriage—”

“She hated that fat fuck.”

“—and turned her into a whore in the eyes of the whole town, just for a better ending to your screenplay.”

“Grow up, Dennis. She's not a whore. She's a divorcée with a hundred and eighty million dollars who a thousand guys would commit murder to get next to.”

Dennis wipes the sweat off his beer bottle with a paper towel before chucking it into the trash. “Are you two getting serious?” he asks.

“What, have you been spying on us?”

“You haven't exactly been sneaking around.”

“Are you fucking my wife?” Bobby asks.

“We've been spending some time together,” Dennis admits.

“I figured,” Bobby says, and it's an index of how serious he and Linda
are
getting that he's not particularly angry about it.

“How's the script?” Dennis asks.

“Walk this way,” Bobby says, and does a passable Groucho stride all the way to his office, where the last couple of pages are sliding out of the printer.

There's a special thrill writers feel when they print out that first copy of a finished script. Years ago, before word processors, you'd send your stuff to an outfit called Barbara's Place, where professional typists would format your script and print as many copies as you needed. It would take days, though, before you got the pleasure of hefting your newly finished script in your hand. But these days, with computers, script programs, spell checks, and a high-speed printer, you can do it yourself in a fraction of the time. And when it comes out of the printer, it's like bread coming out of the oven.

Bobby takes the 118-page script and raps it on the desk a few times to even up the edges, then hands it to Dennis as if he were a new parent letting him hold the baby for a minute. “Feel that,” Bobby says proudly.

“It's warm,” Dennis says.

“No, baby, it's hot. That's what a million bucks feels like. I'm calling it
Hollywood.
It's a morality tale. It's got it all—themes, melodrama, humor, sex, offbeat characters, plot twists—it's the best thing I've ever written.”

“I know the story,” Dennis says. “Tell me how it ends.”

“Every piece of the plot fits,” Bobby says, “and since this is Hollywood, everybody lives happily ever after. The writer's ex-wife gets tried for murder and acquitted, and the publicity makes her career. The writer falls in love with the Linda Paulson character, and she divorces her fat, rich husband. The writer writes his screenplay and sells it for seven figures against five percent of adjusted gross, and his ex-wife stars in it. The movie's a huge fucking hit, the writer marries Linda Paulson, and everybody lives happily ever after.”

“What about the cop?”

“You're in it big,” Bobby says. “You break the case, and even though the writer's ex-wife gets off, you're okay with it, partly because you have a chubby for her, but mostly because you've been there too many times. You only catch 'em, you don't cook 'em. So whichever way it goes, you shrug your shoulders and move on to the next one. And after the wife gets off and she tells you she understands you were only doing your job, and since she senses there's chemistry between you, maybe now that she's free and single, you could spend some time together. And you know what you say?”

“Something like ‘I'd like that, except I'd always be thinking you killed your last lover. How do I know you won't kill me?' “

Bobby grins and shakes his head in genuine admiration. “I keep trying to be mad at you, Detective, but I can't. You're too fucking smart. Plus I like you too much.”

“So that's the ending?” Dennis asks.

“That's it. The writer marries Marv's rich ex-wife,
his
ex-wife becomes a movie star, the cop is the classic stoic hero who soldiers on alone, and the kicker is, no one ever knows that it was really the Linda Paulson character who murdered her Latin lover.”

“See,” Dennis says, “that's why you're a hack writer. You go for the bullshit ending.”

Stung, Bobby says, “Oh yeah? You're such an experienced creative genius, you tell
me
what's a better ending.”

Dennis weighs the script in his hand like the counter guy at Art's Deli in Studio City holding aloft a freshly sliced half-pound of lox on a thin piece of wax paper. “
Every
one knows Linda Paulson murdered her Latin lover,” he says. “That's no surprise. A better ending is, the cop
kills
the writer, takes the script, puts his own name on it, sells it for seven figures, then fucks the dead writer's wife in the nice cushy bed in the bedroom of the Hollywood house she inherits when her husband gets killed.”

Bobby stares at him, dumbstruck.

Dennis grins. “What do you think?”

“Shit,” Bobby says. “That
is
better.”

“Plus which,” Dennis says, “I'd change the title.”

“What's wrong with the title?”

“It's not specific enough. If it were my script, I'd call it
Death by Hollywood
so people would know it's a murder mystery.”

Bobby shakes his head. “Too obvious. But you're right about the ending. I'm gonna rewrite it and give you shared story credit.”

“Fuck shared story credit,” Dennis says, and pulls the cold .22 out of his jacket pocket he's always kept handy just in case.

CHAPTER 31

You read the newspaper every day, right? All the really horrible local stuff is in the Metro section. In the
L.A. Times,
the section is called, simply, “California.” What they
ought
to call it, simply, is “Murder.” It seems like 75 percent of the California section every day is devoted to murder. Here's a typical sampling:
DOUBLE MURDER IN LONG BEACH . . . ACTOR ALLEGEDLY OFFERED TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS TO STUNTMAN TO KILL WIFE . . . STALKER KILLS EX-GIRLFRIEND AND PARENTS . . . TWENTY PEOPLE KILLED IN THREE-WEEK PERIOD IN SOUTH CENTRAL L.A.; SLAYINGS IN L.A. COUNTY REACH 329.

I hate to admit it, but who gives a shit? Let's be honest. It's not about us. It's not about anybody we know. It's not even in our neighborhood. It's just numbers. You browse the murders like you browse the obits, scanning the names on the off chance you'll recognize one. What really gets your blood up is the fucking stock market.

IRATE AOL TIME WARNER SHAREHOLDER MURDERS BROKER.

Now,
there's
one you'd read with more than passing interest. But four Mexicans killed by the niece's lunatic estranged husband? As they say in New York, fuggedabowdit.

Okay. Now ask yourself this. What would it be like if you opened the paper and read about a murder committed half a block from your house? Different story, right? And what if the victim was someone you knew? Suddenly it's not just newspaper blah blah blah. It's in your kitchen, so to speak. It's still not you, but it's close enough to get your attention. You can identify. Half a block away—shit, it
could've
been me. Or my kids. Or my neighbor's kids.

I remember years ago how deeply disturbed my whole street was when one of our neighbors died in a commercial-aviation disaster. That's when it gets too close. It penetrates your space. It's not just a bunch of illiterate illegals butchering each other in southeast L.A.

I raise the subject to put into some context for you a set of events you couldn't honestly imagine yourself going through, let alone contemplate the real-world emotional consequences of.

Have you ever killed anyone? Do you have any idea what it's like to physically kill another human being? Think about it. Soldiers do it in wars. Cops do it on the streets. They're trained for it, society by and large gives them permission to do it, and it
still
fucks them up unless they're psychotic, in which case they don't understand what all the fuss is about. But
you're
not psychotic, and neither am I (though my kids like to call me Psycho Dad when I yell at them to get off their cell phones before they get brain cancer).

Imagine—really try to imagine—killing someone. What would it do to you psychologically? How many nights' sleep would you lose, obsessively thinking about it? How much therapy would you need before the sheer fact of taking another human being's life stopped haunting you every day of your life?

Now, consider what it would be like if your luck was such that you not only experienced the trauma of killing someone (a lover, let's say) but then, not long after, experienced the compounding trauma of discovering someone else murdered (another lover, for instance). You may as well book a room at Bellevue right now.

Anyway, that's what happens to Linda Paulson when she shows up at Bobby's house later that night, expecting a glass of wine and a cozy hour or two of lovemaking and instead finds a horribly grim crime scene being supervised by homicide detective Dennis Farentino, who tells her that by all appearances, it looks like it was a home-invasion-type robbery, probably junkies. The house was pretty well ransacked, cash and valuables are missing, including the telescope that was out on the deck, as well as Bobby's computer. Dennis tells Linda they found a cheap .22 semi-automatic in the bushes outside the house that will probably turn out to be the murder weapon.

Dennis doesn't let Linda see the body—“You don't need that picture in your head,” he tells her.

Dennis says he's got to ask about her whereabouts this evening, even though he doesn't believe for a minute, based on the evidence, that she had anything to do with Bobby's death.

Slumping into a chair in Bobby's living room, still in shock, Linda says she was at a charity auction at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. “What do I do now?” she asks, suddenly welling up, and Dennis can't help but feel sorry for her, seeing the terrible lost look in her eyes.

There's not much Dennis can say to comfort her, but he does his best, telling her that over the last couple of months, as he and Bobby had gotten friendly, Bobby had told him how much he loved Linda.

“When that tape of me and Ramon was making the rounds,” she says, “I told Bobby I thought maybe you'd leaked it, and Bobby said no way.”

“He was right,” Dennis says.

“You were always straight with me,” she tells him. “I should've known better. Bobby did.”

“I appreciate your telling me,” Dennis says.

“He talked about you all the time,” Linda says. “He felt like the two of you were becoming really close friends.” And now she starts to cry, and Dennis takes her in his arms and soothes her.

“We
were
close,” Dennis admits. “I loved the guy. I'm going to miss him a lot.”

Finally, Linda says she'd better get going, and Dennis walks her out, past the uniforms and the crime-scene folks, to her Mercedes.

“Are you okay to drive?” Dennis asks. “I can have someone drive you.”

“No, I'm all right,” she says. “I'm a tough broad. I'll be okay.” Then she kisses Dennis on the cheek and thanks him for taking care of her. “Will you stay in touch, let me know how the investigation's going?”

Dennis promises he will.

“When all this settles down,” Linda says, “maybe we can spend a little time together. I'm not big on shrinks, and I think I'll have a lot I'll want to talk about with someone I can trust.”

“I'd like that,” Dennis says, and watches her pull away from the curb, past the black-and-whites with their blazing bright light bars, heading down toward Sunset Boulevard. Dennis figures she won't be back up this way again till hell freezes over.