The Straight Man - Roger L Simon (14 page)

I was having trouble keeping my eyes open, so Chantal
drove us back to West Hollywood while I told her what had happened in
New York. It should have been a strange experience; it had been a
long time since I had shared what I did with anybody other than my
shrink. I often thought that I became a private eye because I liked
my privacy, needed it even, as if the more I exposed of myself, the
more I lost. But there I was, telling her everything, every detail
from Fouad's driving habits to my out-right terror hiding behind the
garbage cans in the alley of the Club Los Cocos, and it felt
perfectly natural.

"You're lucky you're alive," she said as we
turned up Miller Drive and pulled up in front of the apartment.

"Yeah. I suppose. But you don't think about it
at the time. You just act."

"Well, I'm really glad you're okay." She
looked at me and smiled. "Glad it wasn't any worse."

We didn't say anything for a moment. I could hear the
dusky sexuality of a Wynton Marsalis record drifting up from the
Strip.

"
Come in?" I asked.

"Moses, it's almost three. Besides, you need
some rest."

"That's for me to decide."

"Look, Moses, I'd like to, but . . . it's not
smart. The last time I slept with my boss was when I was a
photographer's assistant in Boston and I got in a horrible situation
with his wife and ended up losing my job."

"I haven't been married for ten years."

"That's not the point. It's just not
professional. How'm I going to look at you in the morning when we
have to go off and investigate something?"

"I don't know. How are you going to look at me?"

"What're you going to say if you want me to do
something and I disagree and we get into an argument?"

"I hadn't thought about that."

"Well, you'd better think about it."

"Why?"

"Because it's really a problem. This stuff
doesn't mix. I've been there. I know."

It was just as well. Twenty minutes later I was fast
asleep, a video cassette of The Best of Mike Ptak blaring brightly
from the television set at the end of my bed.

13

When you begin to suspect your shrink of being
involved in a crime, is this genuine suspicion or resistance to
therapy? I was speculating on that problem as I sat opposite
Nathanson the next afternoon.

I had just finished telling him about Chantal, about
how this French-Canadian woman had walked into my life and how I was
feeling euphoric and apprehensive at once, when I noticed a book of
matches from the Top of the Five Restaurant at the Bonaventure Hotel
on his desk.

"How's the food'?" I asked, nodding toward
the matches, which were sitting on a volume of licensing requirements
from the Board of Medical Examiners.

"What do you mean?"

"The Top of the Five at the Bonaventure. It
wasn't bad when I tried it last February. When were you there?"

"Is this part of your therapy, Moses?" "I'm
just curious, really. It's always surprising when hotel food is
better than—"

"Don't you wonder why, in the middle of
discussing what you describe as the most powerful feelings you've had
for a woman in some time, you deflect the conversation to neutral
territory?"

"Nothing is neutral. Everything has a purpose.
Didn't you say that once?"

"Yes. And do you think your purpose here might
be to avoid dealing with your emotions?"

"
I doubt it. My purpose right now is to get some
facts."

"What facts?"

"You weren't, by any chance, on the seventh
floor of the Bonaventure Hotel yesterday afternoon?"

Nathanson studied me a moment. "Why do you want
to know that?"

"Because Emily Ptak was visiting someone in Room
Seven-fifteen."

"I see .... And how do you feel about that?"

"How do I feel about that? Suspicious as all
hell. That's how I feel about that. Her husband's barely two weeks in
the ground and she's having clandestine meetings with a man in a
suite at the Bonaventure Hotel!"

"And I'm supposed to be that man?"

"It's my job to check out all possibilities."

"
Could it be that Emily Ptak left some matches
from the Bonaventure Hotel in my office? Her appointment is two hours
before yours."

"Yes, it's possible. I just want to know."

"Could it also be possible that Emily Ptak's
visit to the Bonaventure had nothing whatever to do with what you
think it did?"

"
I don't know why she went there. But when a
woman visits a man in a hotel room in the middle of the day and
neither of them acknowledges their presence, it's been my
professional experience that they weren't there studying for their
Latin test."

Nathanson straightened himself in his chair and
regarded me calmly. "Moses, remember when we discussed 'figure'
and 'ground' how your own tensions—melancholia, if you
will—sometimes prevented you from seeing what was right in front of
your eyes?"

"Are you trying to tell me something'?"

"Nothing more than I'm saying. Life can be
simpler than you make it."

"I'd like to know how."

"Well, for example, what do you want from me?
Right here. Now."

"An answer. No more shrink bullshit!"

"And if I gave you one, would you believe it?"

"I'd want to."

"
But would you?"

I didn't have an answer.

I left there ten minutes later with my head spinning.
The thought of Emily Ptak up there in that hotel room with Nathanson
was disconcerting for several reasons, not the least of which was
that he was my shrink. Also, he was a cripple. Add the fact that
Emily was lying to me. And that Emily was my client and by far the
most lucrative one I had had in some time. I was loath to lose her
and I didn't like myself for that. The whole thing was making me sick
to my stomach and that was too bad because I was headed directly for
the Rodman mansion in Bel Air for the Comedians and Chefs Benefit for
Africa, and according to that morning's Los Angeles Times, the famous
Sandor Romulus had been cooking for three days in honor of the
occasion.

It was like a German car convention as I handed my
keys to the valet and joined the men in overpriced neopunk sport
shirts and the women in unisex silk pajamas at the corner of Copa de
Oro and Braxton. From there we were transferred into mini-vans and
ferried up the private eucalyptus-lined road that led up to Matthew
Rodman's. Even in the van I got the sense of the crowd as
middle-aged, upscale entertainment industry liberals who might once
have been at the barricades, but were a long way from it now, even
beyond the easy nostalgia about Columbia and People's Park I used to
hear at similar events. Now I heard a lot of talk about deal-making,
but it didn't sound much like an old Woody Allen movie. It was more
earnest and deadly, as if there were only a certain amount of money
left on a precarious globe and only a short time left to get it.

Rodman, a homosexual who had made his fortune in
shopping centers, lived in a cool modern castle of seemingly endless
baronial rooms with white Carrara marble floors and tiny seashells
inlaid in the rough-hewn concrete walls. All this austerity was
counteracted only by a large collection of Indian miniatures and,
today, by hundreds of salami-shaped salmon and gray helium balloons
that were dangling from the ceiling with the words "Cosmic Aid"
printed on them in elegant black Deco. Two streets signs of the same
colors stood in the living room pointing TO THE COMEDIANS and TO THE
CHEFS. I stood between them, wondering which way to go, when Emily,
in a sixtiesish paisley damask and Chinese rubber flats, came up and
clasped my hand firmly between hers.

"I don't know how to thank you for what you've
done for us. It would have been such an embarrassment without Otis,
and whatever differences we may have had, I know you've done him a
service too. He's such a talented man and he shouldn't be doomed by
his own self-destructiveness. And next you're going to find out why
Mike died. Have you had something to eat? Sandor made the most
astonishing soufflé of chanterelles on radicchio."

"Maybe later. I'm feeling a little queasy."

"Then you must come and meet Eddy. You know,
Eddy Sandollar—the guy behind all this. They call him the Rock 'n'
Roll Saint." She took me by the arm and led me across the room
to where a slightly overweight man in his early thirties was holding
forth to a group of admirers. He wore his long blond hair almost
shoulder length in late Beatles style, classic Wayfarer Ray-Bans, and
an original Hawaiian shirt that would've made Randy Newman jealous.

"So I told them," he was saying, "don't
give me your bureaucratic bullshit. We're talking human survival
here. We've got an earthquake in Mexico. Little children are buried
alive. Now either give me those medicines or get off the phone and
stop wasting my time."

"Excuse me a moment, Eddy," said Emily.
"I'd just like you to meet someone—Moses Wine."

"Hey, brother," he turned to me, grabbing
my hand in a soul shake. "You're the Fearless Fosdick who
brought Otis back to us!" He pulled me in closer to him and
whispered, "I know it sounds corny, man, but you saved a soul.
Back in the old days we all wanted to 'save the world'—remember the
song? But if you help just one man as long as you live, you've saved
yourself. That's why I quit the record business. I was getting into
such a heavy ego trip I had to get out before it got me."

"Eddy organized the Heavy Metal Hunger Concerto
at the Hollywood Bowl last year," said Emily. "They made a
fortune."

"I know. I saw the MTV," I said. "That
was some all-star lineup you put together, everything from doo-wop to
bebop."

"Hey, that wasn't me. I was only the conduit. It
only passed through me, as Satchidananda used to say. Besides, it's
easy. You put the word out and the managers are climbing all over
each other just to get the exposure. So, a private eye, huh?" He
studied me for an instant with a kind of weird intensity that was
visible even through the Ray-Bans. Then his gaze shifted away almost
as quickly. "You've got to meet my wife," he said, taking
the hand of a surprisingly plain Oriental woman of about twenty-five
in an airbrushed Cosmic Aid T-shirt. "This is Kim. She rescued
me when I was stone broke. You know the trip, driving a Rolls and
filing Chapter Eleven. Kim transformed me spiritually. Like most of
us, I was born in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, but I had to branch
out. Then I could stop negating."

Kim didn't say anything.

"Negating what?" I asked.

"The whole thing. The spurious glamour of the
music scene—sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. I was hooked on
ambition. Now I'm hooked on giving. And you know what? It works."

"It does, Moses," said Emily. "It's
saved me since Mike died."

"It doesn't make you walk on water, but it helps
you sleep nights," said Sandollar. "Hey, have you tried the
eats? Sandor Romulus is the next thing in California cuisine, man.
And everything's low-cal—we made sure of that. No cholesterol,
lipids, or any of those carcinogens except the air we breathe."
He tossed his head back to get the blond hair out of his eyes. "Look,
man, I'd love to rap with you all day, a private dick doing your kind
of charity work turns me on, but I gotta shake the pockets of these
characters over here." He gestured toward a couple of older gays
in crew-neck sweaters. "They run the Au Pair Gallery and we're
planning a round of benefits with the art world. Rauschenberg and
Johns have already promised posters. Check you later."

He grasped my hand and shook it firmly before moving
on to the gallery owners. For the first time I was starting to feel
hungry, as if my duty to the world's starving were to go tank up on
the latest cuisine. I followed the T0 THE CHEFS sign to a buffet
table laden with everything from mesquite-grilled Santa Barbara
shrimp to pizza topped with cabernet grapes and goat cheese. And
despite what Sandollar had said, there were also enough brioches,
croissants, and bagels to distend the stomach of any California
bulimic whose binge cycle ran to outré restaurants and whose purge
cycle ran to self-flagellating exercise classes.

I was filling my plate and watching Sandor Romulus, a
short, trim man in white pants and a black T-shirt, hold court behind
the table like Le Roi Soleil himself while a couple of forlorn movie
stars languished nearby in uncomfortable anonymity when Chantal came
up beside me. She looked terrific in a silver camisole with a cameo
just above her right breast.

"My shrink says I can't distinguish between
'figure' and 'ground', " I told her. "Which one are you?"

"Both." She smiled.

"Well, I can see the figure, but how about the
ground?"

"All things come to those who wait—even a
smartass." She slipped her arm in mine. "Come on. You're
missing Otis."

"Have you seen Bannister?" I asked as she
led me out the building in the direction of a temporary stage that
had been erected on the tennis court in front of a large video
screen.