Steven Bochco (5 page)

CHAPTER 9

While Bobby watches through his telescope, Linda wipes down the bedside table, the desktop, and every other damn surface she thinks she might've touched in the last hour, before disappearing into the bathroom, reappearing moments later with her makeup kit in hand. Taking one last look around to satisfy herself that she's covered her tracks, she grabs her purse and exits the room, no longer in Bobby's view.

The writer part of Bobby's brain is screaming at her,
Come back, you dumb bitch. You forgot to wipe off the fucking murder weapon!

And as if she's telepathically heard him, she reappears in the bedroom, grabs the trophy, wipes it cleaner than her husband wipes his ass with Tucks, and splits, this time for good.

A couple of minutes go by, or, for all Bobby knows, maybe half an hour. Through the telescope, he can clearly see the guy isn't moving, or for that matter breathing, either.

“Holy shit,” Bobby says out loud. “Holy shit.”

He finally pulls back from the telescope, his head throbbing and his eyesight momentarily blurred from squinting through the eyepiece. His first thought as he moves back into the living room is to call 911, but halfway into dialing, a different thought occurs to him and he hangs up the phone.

What a great hook for a screenplay, Bobby thinks. Sort of like a contemporary
Rear Window.
A guy on his balcony, a down-and-out screenwriter spying on his neighbors through his telescope, happens upon a very sexy couple getting it on, and before you know it, they get in a beef, it gets violent, and she kills the guy with a statuette. And instead of calling the cops, the down-and-out screenwriter decides to insinuate himself into the lives of the principals so he can see how the story really unfolds, from the inside out, and then write the screenplay that'll resurrect his career.

With his brain racing and his head throbbing from too much adrenaline and an incipient hangover, Bobby quickly throws on a pair of jeans, a sweatshirt, and a pair of old sneakers.

In the kitchen now, he opens a cupboard under the sink and pulls out a box of latex gloves the maid uses when she's washing dishes. Grabbing a pair from the box, Bobby stuffs them in his pocket and goes through the laundry room to the garage, where he fires up the Boxster and drives down La Presa to the bottom of Outpost.

Parking well up the street, Bobby walks past seven or eight houses, carefully checking each one out, until he recognizes the dead guy's home. Pulling on the latex gloves, he checks to make sure the street is deserted before entering the property through the front gate. With his heart pounding louder than his sneakered feet, Bobby tiptoes along the narrow brick pathway running along the side of the house, almost jumping out of his shorts when the dog on the other side of the fence paralleling the pathway starts to bark furiously. Bobby freezes, terrified, and several moments go by before he realizes that either no one's home next door, they're home but they're deaf, or they don't give a shit that their dog is going berserk.

Bobby continues along the path until he reaches the back of the house and, finding the sliding glass door to the bedroom still open, lets himself in, relieved to hear that the dog has finally stopped barking.

Inside, wearing the gloves, careful not to disturb anything, Bobby closes the bedroom curtains before turning to face the room. He's probably written some version of what he's looking at a dozen times . . .

INT. BEDROOM — NIGHT

Through the open glass door overlooking the swimming pool, we see the victim, now nothing but a naked corpse, lying half on, half off the bed, head tilted at an odd angle, his cold, unblinking eyes staring vacantly into the camera.
PAN DOWN
to the murder weapon, a four-pound gold-plated trophy, lying in plain sight on the floor next to the bed. Bloodstains splatter the sheets of the unmade bed where the victim's head rests, etc. etc. . . .

The problem is, what Bobby's looking at now isn't something he's written. It's the real deal, and the real deal has him scared shitless, to the point where he realizes how lazy and one-dimensional his writing has always been.

For the first time in his life, he's suddenly conscious of the way in which real violence, with real consequences, can turn the ordinarily orderly mind into a screaming rat's nest of fear and confusion. He's never even seen an actual dead body up close (a murder victim, no less), let alone seen the murder itself, and Bobby stands rooted to the floor, staring at the corpse, trying to get his breathing under control,
willing
himself to calm down, to think clearly.

When he can finally hear more than just the pounding of his own heart, Bobby cautiously approaches the dead body and stares down at it, afraid to touch it, knowing it's dead, yet somehow terrified it'll suddenly move or groan or—God forbid—grab his pant leg in some horrible death grip, the torn piece of fabric becoming the fatal shred of evidence that sends him, weak-kneed and loose-boweled, to the gas chamber for a murder he didn't commit.

“Get a hold of yourself, for Christ's sake,” Bobby says aloud before finally checking to see if the guy is dead, as if he didn't already know from the color of his clammy, cold skin and his creepy, unblinking eyes.

Eyeballing the room, Bobby sees a pair of pants lying nearby on the floor. Grabbing them and feeling around for a wallet, he reaches into the front left pocket and pulls out a small wad of cash, a couple of credit cards, and a California driver's license, all held together by two pink rubber bands. The driver's license identifies the deceased as one Ramon Montevideo, and now Bobby recalls why the guy's face seemed vaguely familiar to him. He was an actor in some Latino family drama that got canceled after thirteen episodes a couple of seasons back, and Bobby remembers this because Vee took a few acting workshops from him at a small theater in West L.A. last year and had nice things to say about him.

Bobby gingerly picks up the murder weapon, which, it turns out, is an acting award called an Alma, given by this Latino organization La Raza. The thing weighs a good four pounds, and it was probably lights-out for Ramon the second Linda whacked him with it. Think Barry Bonds jacking one into the bay beyond the right-field bleachers of Pac Bell stadium and you get the idea.

Now, as Bobby starts to relax a little, his story brain kicks in, big time. What had begun as this vague feeling that, in the midst of his own terrible failures, Lady Luck had chanced to present him with this incredible gift now begins to arrange itself into a coherent structure of events, each more dramatic than the last.

What could be more dramatic than the murder itself, you ask? Well, for openers, how about this?

Bobby hears a sound from inside the armoire that faces the bed, kind of like the sound a VCR makes when the tape comes to an end and automatically rewinds itself. Opening the armoire's doors, Bobby finds, among other things, a tiny video camera that tapes, through a small hole drilled into the cabinet, Ramon having sex with (presumably) his various and sundry partners. And of course, where there's a camera, there's a recorder.

“Please, please, please,” Bobby begs under his breath, hitting the
EJECT
button.

“Thank you, God,” Bobby says as the cassette slides out.

If you've ever been to Las Vegas and pumped your last three bucks into a slot machine and watched as all four cherries come up in a row, you have some inkling as to the excitement Bobby is beginning to feel building inside him.

Pushing the tape back in, Bobby hits
PLAY
, then
REWIND
, and watches, thrilled, as the tape reveals, in absurdly comical backward sequence, first his own search of the bedroom, then Linda scurrying around cleaning up after herself, then the murder, then the argument with Ramon leading up to the murder, and finally the sex preceding their fight.

“Holy shit,” Bobby says, actually grinning now as he pops the tape out of the machine again and sets it aside.

Under the shelf on which the VCR sits are three drawers, all filled with tapes, all numerically coded and dated—the mother lode. Jesus Christ, Bobby thinks, this guy must've fucked every woman in L.A.

Leaving the armoire for a moment, Bobby goes to Ramon's desk and rifles the drawers. If I'm this guy, he thinks, and I'm a big enough shitbird to secretly videotape myself having sex with all these women, I've also gotta have some sort of written catalog to identify who's on which tape, right? I mean, when I die and leave my library to the Museum of Television and Radio, I've got to give them the accompanying paperwork.

And sure enough, in the back of the top right-hand desk drawer, under a bunch of loose papers, Bobby finds what he'd hoped for, Ramon's “little black book” with the names of all the women he's fucked, the corresponding dates and numbers that identify their various tapes, plus one-word commentaries and grades on their sexual talents: Anal. Oral. Moaner. Screamer. Doggie. Orgasms. Letter grades from F to A-plus. Bobby can't help wondering, Does this asshole send out report cards?

Bobby thumbs through the book quickly, hoping to find names of women he knows, never thinking—although in retrospect, God knows why not—that among the dozens of women's names would be his own wife's, along with the date, September 18, 2002, and this notation: Screamer. Oral. B+.

Stunned and angry, Bobby's not sure who he's madder at—Vee, for screwing this guy practically under his nose, or Ramon, for being enough of a prick to actually give her a fucking grade (literally). Vee winds up winning by default, seeing as how Ramon's already dead, which doesn't change the fact that Bobby'd still like to give this dead asshole a swift kick in the head. And suddenly, out of God knows where, an image of Marv Paulson taking a crap on Ramon's chest makes Bobby laugh out loud. The only difference between him and Marv, Bobby realizes (aside from about half a billion dollars and eighty pounds), is that if Marv knew his wife had been banging Ramon, he probably would've wanted to watch.

Bobby returns his attention to the armoire where all the sex videos are neatly stacked and labeled with initials, and he scans the collection, looking for the one of his wife blowing this dead prick. Removing that tape from the collection, Bobby adds it to his little care package, which now consists of the sex-and-murder tape, Ramon's little black book, and the tape of his wife and Ramon fucking. Grabbing them up, Bobby takes one last look around, then lets himself out of the room the way he came in.

Moving swiftly back along the narrow pathway that parallels the side of the house, with the dog starting to bark again on the other side of the fence, Bobby exits to the street through the little gate, his heart pounding again, like it's going to explode out of his chest.

Scanning the street, satisfied he hasn't been seen, Bobby hurries up the street, gets into his Boxster, hangs a U-turn, and hauls ass back to his own house.

CHAPTER 10

Safely home, Bobby goes into the kitchen, pops the cork out of a bottle of wine, and pours a glassful, which he proceeds to chug down like you'd chug a bottle of beer at a frat party. A second glass likewise chugged finally gets his nerves under control and, third full glass in hand, Bobby goes into his little office to fire up the TV and VCR.

Sitting on his desk is Ramon's little black book, along with the two videocassettes—the one with the murder on it and the other with his wife on it. Sick as he knows it'll make him to see it, he figures he better get it over with. He slips the tape into the VCR, hits
PLAY
, and there on the small screen is his wife, Vee, flat on her back, her legs wrapped around Ramon's torso, hanging on for dear life, the whole time screaming, “Fuck me, oh yeah fuck me,” in Ramon's ear, then rolling him over and sliding down between his legs to give him a hummer for dessert.

Bobby bolts from behind his desk, barely making it into the little guest bathroom off the entryway, where he pukes his guts out into the toilet for the second time tonight. It's the story of Bobby's life these days that the only thing he can do twice in one night anymore is puke.

Cleaning his mouth off with a towel, he breathes deeply, trying to get his emotions under control before going back into his office, where, blessedly, the tape of Ramon and his wife has run out.

Popping the tape out of the machine, Bobby slides in the one of Linda Paulson banging Ramon, giving as good as she gets, nothing romantic here, just balls-to-the-wall hot sex, artlessly, lovelessly performed by two people who couldn't give a rat's ass about seeing to each other's emotional needs.

Bobby wonders what compels a guy to secretly tape himself having sex with all these women. Does he watch afterward and get off on it all over again? Or is it more about getting off on the sick power of knowing these women are on
Candid
-fucking-
Camera
?

When it comes to men, Bobby thinks, Linda Paulson's got her taste in her kidneys. But then,
après
sex as it were, there it is—the argument that escalates from push to shove to Linda caving in Ramon's skull with his own award trophy. Watching it again in the safety of his own little office gives Bobby a feeling of deep satisfaction, knowing that at least this prick won't ever fuck another guy's wife again.

As the wave of jealous rage engulfing him finally begins to recede, Bobby thinks, Christ, what have I done? And his writer's voice answers immediately:
For openers, you've seen a murder committed by someone you know, which makes you a material witness. You've also entered the victim's home and stolen evidence, which not only makes you a thief but could get you indicted for breaking and entering, obstruction of justice, and being an accessory after the fact to murder.

Realistically, Bobby assures himself, none of this will happen unless he was seen entering or leaving Ramon's house, which he's positive he wasn't, or unless he loses his cool, which he's equally positive won't happen. But shit happens. Everybody knows that. Bobby's written a hundred scripts about a hundred arrogant assholes who never thought they'd get caught, and they were.

Call the cops now, he tells himself. Tell them what you saw, tell them what you did, give them the tape, you're a hero, a Good Samaritan who witnessed a crime and phoned it in. No charges, lots of good ink, you'll dine out on it for years.

But then he reminds himself of the starlet who tells Mike Ovitz she wants to blow him and Ovitz saying, Okay, but what's in it for me?

And the answer is, Nothing, numb nuts. There's nothing in it at all except a lifetime of regret that you didn't grab the brass ring when you could have, because you chickened out.

And then, finally, there's this: in a weird way, Bobby feels as if what he saw tonight is the exact break he's been waiting for, better even than Ed McMahon showing up at his door with a check for ten million bucks and telling him he's won the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes.

Thusly inspired, Bobby stashes the tapes and the black book in the back of his desk drawer and boots up his computer. He's got a screenplay to write and, goddamnit, he's gonna write it.

Clicking into his Final Draft program, he settles in front of the computer and types onto the blank screen:

FADE IN.