Total Immunity (15 page)

“C'mon, Julie. You know that's not true. He wouldn't ever hurt you. He
loves
you. He's told me so.”

She looked down at the blanket, afraid to meet his gaze.

“I know. He can be very sweet. But there's something there that really scares me, Jack. And your work. This guy threatening to kill you. You see, it's all part of the same thing. Violence on the outside, threats, and then your wife leaving . . . you told me how upsetting that was, and now Kevin acting out all over the place. I can't . . . I can't do it, Jack, I just can't.”

She began to cry, and Jack tried to put his arm around her again, but again she pulled away.

“Julie, I love you,” Jack said.

“I know. I love you, too. But I'm not as strong as all this. I can't live in a place where violence and fear . . .”

She burst into tears, as Jack stood by helplessly.

Finally she looked up and shook her head.

“Jack, I think I'm going to go now.”

“You sure?” he said. “It's so late.”

“I'm sorry,” she said.

And then she was out of bed, grabbing her already-packed suitcase from the closet.

In a half hour, she was gone. Jack sat on the front-porch steps, looking out at the night. He tried telling himself it was going to be okay, that he could handle it, that after his marriage had cracked open and he'd nearly fallen apart, he'd been fine.

But somehow he didn't believe it anymore.

He wasn't going to be fine, and neither was Kevin.

He tried again, and then asked himself what a mature man would do in his position.

But he came up with nothing.

Then he asked himself what he'd really like to do now. That was easy. Take off , go down to Charlie's place, and tie one on.

But he couldn't leave Kevin here.

Fortunately, he had the next-best answer close at hand. Jack walked inside, went to the pantry, and cracked open a bottle of Jack Daniel's.

This was the immature and wrong thing to do. No doubt.

But the first shot went down smoothly, as did the second, and the third.

Soon he was back on the front porch looking up at the lunatic moon, feeling total immunity from all the pain.

19

JIMMY SEEMED TIRED tonight, kind of listless.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, I'm fine. Just got a cold or something.”

“Well, I've got something that's going to cheer you right up.”

They sat down in the comfortable padded chairs again and stared at the dark screen.

“Here we go,” he said.

“Wait a minute,” Jimmy said. “I think we need to talk about this.”

“No, wait . . . I've got some sensational stuff here, Jim.”

“I know . . . I'm sure you have. But I've been thinking about this. Is it really the movie we want to make?”

“Of course it is. We talked about this for years. C'mon, for God's sake.”

“Yeah, I know. But that's my point. When we were talking about it, it was like one thing. You know, a concept. But now that we're actually seeing the raw footage, is this the movie we really want to make?”

He was up out of his chair now. Feeling hot.

He knew he shouldn't lose it. Not after what they'd been through.

But what the hell? The risk he'd taken — that they'd both taken — and now Jimmy wants to back out. That wasn't right. No way.

“Look, Jimmy, if you get out there with me, if you experience the thing with me, then you'll see. That's the part of the process you're missing. If you were there . . . if you saw the looks on their faces . . .”

Jimmy shook his head.

“No, I can't . . . on this one I'm more of a conceptual guy. A producer.”

“Which is very handy for you. So you don't have to dirty your hands.”

Jimmy stood up and stared at him. It was surprising how thin he was.

“I think I've suffered plenty so far. I don't think I have to justify my position.”

That got to him. He sat back down.

“Look, we're so close to home now, and this is great stuff . Take a look at it, will you? I know you're going to like it.”

Jimmy smiled then, and it was like the room had been lit up. “Okay,” he said. “I will. It's okay. I just get a little hinky sometimes about the project.”

“Yeah, sure. I know. But we're doing this together, Jimmy. That's the important part.”

“I know,” Jimmy said softly. “Roll the tape. Let's see just what you got.”

20

FAT NICKI SADLER took a long hit off his bottle of Absolut Mandarin, then wiped his pudgy moist lips with the sleeve of his shirt. He reached into his bowl of Doritos chips and slammed six or seven of them into his mouth. Then, while grinding them down, he finished his denunciation into his office phone.

“Lemme try and fucking clarify what I'm telling you, Lansing. Here's the deal. I already gave you two extensions of the loan, and you aren't getting any more, that clear?”

On the other end, the out-of-work actor who supported himself by dealing cocaine to the studios in his ragged old Porsche began to whine:

“But Nicki, you know I'm good for it. I just got a little behind 'cause I was in Vegas, and the fucking Chiefs tanked, and then the Dolphins fucked me when they missed a goddamned fifteen-yard field goal. How often is that gonna happen? Like never. So if you could just front me, say, 10 Gs until . . .”

In his office, Nicki readjusted his big belly and opened his pants a little. He'd just eaten a massive pizza from Rainforest and nine rolls drenched in butter and garlic. Now all that dough and cheese was clogging up his pipes.

“Lemme say this again to you, Jerry. Here's the answer. N.O. spells NO. That's NO written in fucking italics. It's not like a conditional NO, which really means yes. It's a big, heavy, body rush of a NO. Maybe it would help if you would think of it as the Hollywood sign of fucking NO.”

There was a long silence, and then Jerry Lansing tried one last time.

“They say they're gonna hurt me, Nicki. I gotta get that money.”

“Pray,” Nicki said, taking another drink of the hot vodka. “Pray, and God'll give you everything that's coming to you.”

“You prick!” Lansing said. “All the dough I made you and now, when I need it, you . . .”

Nicki didn't bother listening to the rest. He slammed down the phone and laughed to himself. Fucking losers! He was sick of them all. Anytime you got into business with a skell like Lansing . . . well, what could you expect?

He pushed his chair away from the desk and, with great effort, ambled over to his mini-fridge.

He opened it and was pleased by the cone of yellow light, which came out and made a pleasant pattern on his dingy office.

Inside the fridge were bottles of beer and another ice-cold Ab- solut. Only this one was lime flavored.

He leaned down, felt a crick in his back, and then pulled out the bottle and a box of La Roca chocolates. His doctor, hip Lon Huizenga of Beverly Hills, had told him to chill out on candy and booze, but he found it difficult to heed his doctor's warnings. It was the class of people who drove him to excessive eating, he told himself as he hobbled back to his desk. So many losers, so many hustlers and creeps. It was killing him inside. And the women he knew . . . skanks, all of them skanks. Jesus Christ, the only real pleasure a guy got living in fucking L.A. was from food.

He ripped off the top of the vodka and took a hit. Cold and limey. Now that was good. After he knocked back a few and ate a few chocolates, he figured he'd get the car and head out Sunset to grab a little Thai.

In the basement of Nicki Sadler's building, Harper and Hidalgo sat in the janitor's closet equipped with headphones and digital recorder. Oscar had deep bags under his eyes; he had not slept for more than two hours a night for the last three days.

“Nicki's a warm and lovable guy, huh?” he said.

“Yeah,” Jack said. “A real sweetie. Hey, man, you all right?”

“I'm fine,” Oscar said. “Okay, I walked into a wall today, but outside of that, I'm terrific.”

“Glad to hear it, 'cause I'm not hanging out with no Mexican slackers.”

Oscar laughed and shook his head.

“'Tween you and Nicki Sadler, I'm just
surrounded
by compassion and kindness.”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “That makes you a lucky man.”

Through his headphone, Jack heard Sadler dialing again.

“Here we go again.”

After two rings, a woman picked up and said hello.

“Miss Heyward, I have those photos you contracted for.”

On the other end was Doris Heyward, a worn-out-looking blonde. She was wearing a midriff -revealing shirt, but her midriff had quit standing up about four years ago. Now it sagged over her hip-hugging pants. As she talked, she looked into a cracked mirror in her trashy bedroom and plucked her eyebrows.

“Save me another heartbreak, Nicki. Tell me about what you got.”

On Sadler's end of the phone there was a dismissive sigh.

“Hey, Miss Heyward . . .”

“Call me Doris, sweetie.”

“All right, then, Doris, listen up. I'm not some phone-sex worker, okay? I don't wish to regale you with the gory details.”

“Gee!” Doris Heyward said as she plucked out a vagrant brow hair and dropped it on her fake Indian rug. “I never realized how delicate you were, Nicki.”

Jack and Oscar exchanged a smile.

“Like a flower, Miss Heyward. If I have to do verbal, it'll be a hundred bucks more.”

“You fucking vampire!” Doris Heyward said. “Go.”

“Okay, Miss Heyward,” Sadler said. “You asked for it. Let's see here. The first shot we have here is a very candid picture of your husband and the woman in question. She's kneeling down in front of him and taking his engorged member into her open mouth and . . .”

“That's enough. The son of a bitch!”

Now Nicki Sadler was starting to get into his verbal shtick.

“You're still paying the hundred, Doris, so you might as well hear the second picture. In a way, it's much more charming than the first. In this one, the woman in question is leaning over a desk and your husband Brett is giving it to her up her asshole, which is causing a look of extreme pain-slash-happiness to be elicited from her very reddened face.”

“Fuck you!” Doris Heyward said. “You send me the pictures and forget the hundred. You already got your fun out of this, you sadistic bastard.”

She slammed the phone down and Nicki Sadler cackled like a madman.

In the basement Jack and Oscar did as well.

“That's the thing I love about this job,” Jack said. “We get to see the crème de la crème of society every single fucking day.”

“Yeah,” Oscar said. “Like my madre used to say, ‘The world is a beautiful place if we could just eliminate all the humans.'”

Jack fell asleep on the moldy old couch, bedbugs chewing on his arm. Oscar manned the phones, but from eight to ten there was not one call. He curled up in a battered armchair and read
The Charm of Quarks: Mysteries of Particle Physics.
At eleven there was another call, in which a voice said, “The bitch said she was gonna deliver, and since she din't, she's gonna be delivered to the fucking morgue.” The caller hung up immediately after delivering this happy bit of information, but his caller ID was blocked. A few minutes later, there was a call to Nicki in which a woman said she was “gonna shoot her sister in both her heads.” Sadler laughed out loud at that one. Oscar looked over at Jack, who snored mightily from the couch.

Oscar waded through the book, only on the edge of understanding it, but liking it, anyway. There was something clean and refreshing about science . . . just reading about string theory and the way the universe was put together made him feel better about everyday life. And the fact that men could understand it . . . well, some men, that was amazing. Maybe when he retired from the force, he would go back to school and get a master's in physics. Then again, maybe he'd go down to Baja and disappear like his favorite author, B. Traven.

Finally, at 12:10 A.M., Sadler made a call, which caught Oscar's full attention. The voice was male, muffled.

“Hello.”

“What a great pleasure it is to talk to you,” Sadler said.

“Fuck off !”

“My, you've become crude,” Sadler said.

“It's late. What the hell do you want?”

Sadler laughed and began his spiel:

“What do I want? I want Osama bin Ladin's head on a pike in front of the Pantages. I want happiness and eternal youth in a bottle. And I'd like Angelina Jolie to dump Brad Pitt for me. But I'd settle for a one-time payment of $300,000.”

In the basement, Oscar kicked Jack's foot and in a second Harper was wide awake and had on his headphones.

There was a long silence before the muffled voice spoke again. This time he was furious.

“You want to keep on living? You kinda left that out.”

But Sadler didn't seem shaken by the threat.

“Very much so,” he said. “But given my classy tastes, I want to live
well.
I'm sure you, of all people, understand.”

There was another brief pause. Then the muffled voice said, “And if I refuse to make this payment?”

Sadler gave a nasty little laugh.

“You won't. May I remind you I got you all the information, and I know what you've done with it. That makes me an accomplice, which means you didn't give me the correct job description when you employed me. By paying me, you're only acknowledging the true value of my work.”

Jack looked at Oscar and shook his head. This is what they'd been waiting for. It had to be.

“You're a clever boy, Nicki,” the other man said. “Meet me tomorrow at Musso's. Four o' clock. At the bar. I want all the information, including any copies you made. Oh, and if you ever try this kind of play again, you won't be able to talk so slick anymore, 'cause I'm gonna cut out your tongue.”