The Cutting Room (6 page)

“Where do you want to go?”

“To your place!”

Flipping the finger, Beth zipped the window up and increased her speed. The yuppie kept pace, still honking, in a game of romantic chicken.

The car ahead of us, blocking us from Beth, now pulled out, cut across lanes, and exited. We were right behind Beth and then, as she floored it, right beside the lovesick yuppie.

He turned and, through his expensive shades, saw two trivial misfits waving at him and blowing kisses. Then—

“Jeanine!”

Beth had suddenly taken a U-turn. To escape her paramour, she cut over double lines and flew across the boulevard, going the other way.

Jeanine, of course, followed.

As she did, a pizza delivery truck shrieked to a halt, swiveling into a skid. But Jeanine was too busy veering behind Beth to care.

“He went through a red light, anyway!” she yelled.

I gripped the door handle, my foot hitting the floor over and over, in an impotent
brake
gesture. Then Beth took an immediate right, off the boulevard, onto neighborhood roads.

Jeanine peeled after her.

She slammed on the brakes, spinning the car half around. An elderly matron stood in the road, blithely overseeing her corgi doing his business. Staring at us, screaming, the woman’s mouth was as round as a blow-up sex doll’s.

Meanwhile, Beth was disappearing, cruising left, in the near-distance. Jeanine took a fast half-circle around the woman and the dog, and kept on Beth’s behind.

“Lunatic!” the woman screamed after us.

We soared left, completing the oval that would get us all back onto the boulevard. At the end of the lane, Beth was at a stop sign, waiting to return to the action. Jeanine pulled up behind her, very innocently. When there was a secondary break in traffic, Beth zipped out, Jeanine tailing her like a small child holding her mother’s hand.

There was a symphony of swearing as the two of us dodged other drivers and sailed across four lanes of traffic, going both east and west. Avoiding at last a station wagon filled with a family, we followed Beth into a small mall, Jeanine barreling behind her into the parking lot.

Then she slowed and parked, just another patron at one of about ten tacky stores.

I wiped the sweat from my face.

“I don’t know why people from New York hate L.A.,” Jeanine said.

“Maybe they just don’t know how to enjoy it,” I replied.

Then we sat and waited as Beth fixed her hair.

Beth took forever.

“What did you tell the cop, by the way?” I used the time to ask.

“That I was lost.”

I saw a crumpled-up map, placed on the floor, for effect.

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” Jeanine asked, with sudden and surprising self-knowledge.

Before I could reply, I saw Beth finally leave her Taurus. Gripping her handbag, she entered a small drugstore. Once again, I left Jeanine behind and set after her on foot.

I followed her through electronic doors into the small, garishly lighted store. Beth walked blithely down aisles, picking up products, then putting them back. Keeping a few paces behind her, I did the same.

In
Double Indemnity
, Fred MacMurray secretly met Barbara Stanwyck in a grocery store. That film’s original last scene—which took place in the gas chamber—was cut.

Finally, I saw something that made me stop. Beth had slipped a makeup bottle into her bag.

She did not approach any cash register. She just kept walking, casually, and completed what had all along been a circle throughout the store. Then Beth—whom Ben Williams must have been paying well, who made a lot more money than I did, anyway—left as calmly as she had come in.

I left, too.

In the parking lot, she walked just as easily, did not run, certainly did not open her bag or inspect what she had shoplifted. I’m sure she thought that nobody else knew.

The bottle in her bag was my ace in the hole. I took a very deep breath.

“Excuse me?” I said. “Beth?”

She turned on her heel. Close up, I could see that her face was freckled, her eyes green. She really was pretty. She did not even need makeup, and she wasn’t wearing any.

When she heard me, Beth must have thought it was the store detective. But when she took one look, she knew that it was impossible. Besides, I had used her name.

“I called you about Orson Welles?”

Beth stared, first frightened, then shocked, then relieved, and then incredulous.

“Oh, my gawd,” she said, with a slight Valley girl accent. “Are you kidding me?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Well, maybe you didn’t get the message when I called the police on you two minutes ago! That
was
you, wasn’t it, creepo?”

“Oh, I got the message all right.”

“Would you like me to call those guys over there?”

And indeed another cop car was parked in the lot, with two patrolmen drinking coffee in the front seat.

“You can,” I said. “But I think they’d be very interested in what you’ve got in the bag.”

“Oh, my gawd.”

Beth seemed to live quickly or, at least, not to think very much. She immediately shifted from anger and cockiness to confusion and despair.

“I get nervous sometimes,
okay
?” she said, a choke in her voice. “Like, because I’m starting this new job now? And I just—well, I take things, okay? And you calling me wasn’t helping! Like, already people I don’t know are asking me for things! I mean, like, how did you even get my number?”

I felt sorry for Beth. But the way she was going, I didn’t think I would have time to show it.

“Don’t worry about that,” I said. “Let’s just go to that phone booth over there. Make one call, and this will all be over, okay?”

Immediately, Beth was composed again.

“Let’s use my cell phone.”

Beth sat calmly in the front seat of her car, the door open, her long legs stuck out, a tiny cell phone in her palm. I stood next to her, dictating.

“Ben?” she said, pulling down her sunglasses. “There’s a guy here who wants me to give you a message. I had nothing to do with this, okay?”

“Take it easy,” I said.

Her hand over the receiver, she mouthed, “Well, I didn’t.” Then, into the phone, “He said to tell you just,
The Magnificent Andersons
.”

“Ambersons,”
I hissed at her.

“Andersons,”
she said again, as if correcting herself. “And he wants you to call him at this number, if you’re interested.”

With my coaching, it took three times before Beth got the number right. After she did, she responded, only, “Right, sure, okay, bye,” then hung up.

Placing the little phone away, she looked up at me, her eyes now hidden by the glasses.

“Happy now?” she said.

“
Happy
is a strong word,” I said. “Enjoy your makeup.”

Immediately, Beth’s lower lip began to quiver. I stuttered out a rattled, “Sorry I said that.” Then I walked back to Jeanine’s car, dazed by Beth’s ditziness, and by my own success.

That night, on the dusty fold-out couch in cousin Larry’s living room, I lay with my eyes wide open. Finding
The Magnificent Ambersons
was turning into a test of ingenuity. I felt like a kid away at college, cooking his own meal for the first time. I just hoped I wouldn’t, as it were, set fire to the dorm.

As the sound of Jeanine’s tortured snores came from the bedroom down the hall, I repeated, to tire my excited mind:

“Nineteen fifty-eight, Burl Ives,
The Big Country
. . . nineteen fifty-nine, Hugh Griffith,
Ben Hur
. . . nineteen sixty—”

“Peter Ustinov,
Spartacus,
” someone else said.

I looked up. Jeanine was sitting on the edge of the bed.

“Best Supporting Actors, right?” she asked.

I hadn’t even realized I was speaking out loud. I also hadn’t noticed that Jeanine’s snores had stopped. Her black hair was let down very long and streaked with a surprising amount of gray. Without her glasses, she had a kind of squinty look. She wore only a T-shirt bearing a French poster for
The Seven Year Itch
, and sweatpants. I couldn’t help but notice that her breasts were free and bigger than I had ever known.

“Can’t you sleep?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I keep waiting for the phone to ring.”

“What are you going to tell him if he calls?”

“The truth. I can’t believe Ben Williams would want a movie that someone else was murdered for.”

“You think Ben Williams is such a nice guy? Do you think Gus just
gave
him Abner’s list of contacts? Just like that?”

I thought for a minute. Had Gus been offered something in return? Or hadn’t he had a choice? I shivered about that possibility, and then I became aware of my bare chest.

Jeanine had come closer.

“Are you cold?” she asked.

Her attentions seemed maternal, but not entirely. As she was in other areas, in my bed, Jeanine was a strange mixture of the old and the girlishly young.

She came close, her long hair brushing against my chest. Her perfume had been replaced by the pure smell of soap.

“Here,” she said. “I’ll warm you up.”

It was not that I didn’t want her. I had been with no other woman since Jody. Discovering Jeanine Blount’s avidity and warmth was arousing.

But Jody hadn’t been of my trivia circle, indeed in the end had disdained it. There had been a sort of lifeline in that; there had been hope of normalcy. When I considered being involved with Jeanine, I thought of how blind people like to date someone sighted so they’re both not wandering in the dark. Wouldn’t we just be trapped by each other?

Luckily, I didn’t have to decide. Just as Jeanine’s hands found my shoulders, the phone rang.

I scrambled to answer it. The voice on the other end said only, “The Farmer’s Daughter Motel, on Fairfax. Room 318. Right now.”

It was 4:30 in the morning. Chivalrously, I insisted that Jeanine not drive me. Or had I wanted to be alone, free of her? I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that the cab I called pulled up outside The Farmer’s Daughter Motel twenty minutes later.

“Maybe you should wait,” I told the driver, for what if I didn’t return? But I didn’t have enough cash to make him stay.

It was across from the Farmer’s Market, hence its name. And like its name, the place was so tacky, it seemed to be aware of itself, a postmodern dump. It had Fifties-style trimmings and a neon light that—intentionally?—only worked a little.

I walked in under the drifting eye of an elderly desk clerk. The lobby said “fleabag,” as if, again, it was a decorating choice.

“Whom shall I say is calling?” he asked me, in a comical British accent, the receiver of the motel phone on his shoulder.

Before I could even answer, he clicked off. If someone was expecting someone at 4:30 in the morning, it didn’t much matter who it was.

Tensely, I rode a rickety elevator the three flights. I thought of the Bates Motel in
Psycho
. Whereas Anthony Perkins had always been the first choice to play Norman, Janet Leigh had not been the only one considered to play Marion. Many other blond actresses had been mulled over, including Eva Marie Saint (who had starred in Hitchcock’s
North by Northwest
), Martha Hyer, Hope Lange, and even Lana Turner. As for John Gavin, it might have been Stuart Whitman or Brian Keith—and maybe it should have been.

The elevator reached the third floor. I walked down the dim, grimy hallway, the overhead light flickering “atmospherically.” Although I heard nothing from inside any room—no screams or moans, as I had imagined I might—the silence was unnerving. It was as if the whole floor were waiting just for me.

I stood at 318 and knocked. All I remembered next was some heavy object, a gun butt, a blackjack, a filing cabinet, coming down on the back of my head. And then I was unconscious for a long time.

When I woke up, I saw Gus Ziegler again.

Gus was lying next to me on the floor of room 318. Both of our faces were buried in the gray carpet, which stank of cigarettes and Lysol. We were both tied with our hands behind our backs. The only difference was that I was alive, and Gus was dead.

I was getting good at recognizing dead people. There was a stiff quality to Gus’s big body, and his eyes, which were open, stared out in glassy shock. The front of his shirt was ripped down, and his
HERMAN
tattoo was visible. Gus had two encrusted dark red holes in the back of his head, and something nasty—his brains? I didn’t know—had congealed while dripping down his scalp.

With great effort, I stifled a rush of my McDonald’s dinner, coming up in my throat. I wished that Gus had had more hair, to make his death less hideous to me and less horrible and undignified for himself.

I thought of him sitting on the street in a doctor’s outfit, or yelling “Live Girls!” while handing out flyers for a lap-dancing place, or answering phones for an aromatherapist. Even the crappiest things become nostalgic when someone is dead.

Then I realized that Gus and I were not alone in the room.

I could hear the faint, steady breathing of another human being. I could also hear a television, playing a movie that I couldn’t place. Whether this was because I had been smashed on the head or the film was too obscure for even me to know, I wasn’t sure.

“I guess this is what they call true love,” a woman on the TV said huskily.

“I guess so,” a man agreed.

Music swelled for what was obviously “The End.” Then, whoever shared the room with us sighed, stood up, and pressed the TV off. As my head ached from the effort of thinking, I realized the movie voices had belonged to Rosie Bryant and her husband, Ben Williams.

The movie had been
Spirit of Love
, a romantic comedy not obscure, but simply too lousy for me to have seen. It had not broken Ben out of his—very well-paying—action-movie ghetto, and it had not established Rosie as anything more than a celebrity wife. But whoever my roommate was, muttered approvingly, “A very touching and amusing film.”

This person then grabbed me harshly by my wrists, which were crossed and tied, and pulled me to my knees. I could see out the balcony window of the hotel room, and the light on the brick wall told me it was either dusk or dawn, the time when light begins to fall or come up.