West of Paradise (32 page)

She was thinking that when she plowed into the back of the car in front of her.

“Oh, God,” she murmured, first to herself, then aloud. “Oh, God.” The car she had slammed into had braked for a red light she hadn't seen because she was so busy taking in the cheerfully grim paradox of the scenery. The hardest-edged predicament you could get into in Los Angeles this side of drugs was this one. She'd been drinking. She'd rear-ended somebody. They would test her breath, and then her blood. She'd be taken to jail. Who would she call? She didn't have a lawyer. Out of all the people she knew that she thought liked her a little, she could think of no one she could ask to help her. Mel would be out of the office by now, and she didn't have his home number; he hadn't yet made a deal for her, so real Hollywood intimacy hadn't been attained. Jake Alonzo would probably not be home, and she couldn't call him to come to her rescue after not returning his calls. Wendy was a brand new friend, and elevated, not one you would bring into this kind of situation. Wilton would flee the moment she said she was calling from the police station. Her insurance company would probably cancel, and in Los Angeles you were dead without a car. Maybe she was dead already. “Oh, God!” she said again, realizing she hadn't given a thought to the people in the car she'd hit.

She got out and ran towards the driver. Let him not be crushed against the steering wheel, she silently pleaded. Let the one on the passenger side not be splattered on the windshield. Let their airbags have opened. Let them sue me for a phony claim of whiplash. Let my insurance company cancel me after paying them off so I can't drive and have to live the rest of my life in the Midwest. But let them not be truly injured.

The traffic was already making an arc around the two wracked-up vehicles. People were craning their necks for a moment, to see if it was bloody, then going on their way. Kate bent down towards the driver; he opened his window. The airbag that cramped him against the seat was open, so she couldn't quite see his face. “Are you alright?” she asked, frantically.

He leaned back, pushing against the billowing bag, so he could speak. “I'm fine,” he said. She saw that it was Morgan Craig, her friend from Stanford.

“Oh, Morgan. Oh, God. I'm so sorry. Who's that with you?”

“Nobody,” Rodney Sameth mumbled, muffled by the airbag, trying to sink deeper into its recesses.

“Oh, my God,” Kate said. “Rodney Sameth! Are you alright?”

“I'm fine,” he said, “fine. But I'm not Rodney Sameth. I just sound like him.”

“You look like him, too.”

“Well, I've put on a little weight. That happens to you when you live in France. All that butter. I'm stationed there. A member of the military.”

“Are you okay?” she asked Morgan.

“I'm okay,” he said, smiling feebly.

“I was hoping to run into you again. I'm sorry it had to be so literal.” In the near distance she could hear the wail of a police siren. “I'll go get my insurance information, and you can give me yours—”

“It's okay,” cried the man claiming not to be Rodney Sameth. “Not to worry. No real harm done.”

“Don't you even want to see the back of your car?” she asked.

“Forget about it. It's a rented car. They have no personal stake—”

“What about my insurance record?” Morgan asked him, worriedly.

“I'll handle it, I'll handle it,” said not-Rodney. “Let's just get out of here.”

The motorcycle policeman pulled up to the place where the two cars sat enmeshed, and took out his report pad. “It's alright, officer,” said the man in the passenger seat. “We've worked it all out. It's our fault. We're part of a funeral cortege, and we stopped short so this young woman inadvertently tapped us a little.”

The officer walked around the car, and looked. “Jesus Christ,” Rodney muttered, low, so only Morgan could hear him. “Jesus Christ. This is all I need. People will find out I'm in town and I've been in a wreck with an unknown writer. They'll put it together. They'll know you're writing the script. Police! Next they'll bring in cameras for E.”

“Get a grip,” Morgan said.

Rodney burrowed down into his chest, his ears disappearing under his collar, turtlelike. But his eyes still showed. He closed them, as though unseeing meant invisible.

“I'm so glad you're alright,” Kate said to Morgan, waiting for the policeman to come back. What was he going to do? Check her breath? Arrest her for drunken driving? Put her in the tank, where she'd be held till morning and be set upon by lesbians? “I wondered why you didn't call.”

“He hasn't been here,” said Rodney.

“Do you by any chance know the name of a lawyer?”

“Helmut Rott,” Morgan said, naming Rodney's attorney.

“For Christ's sake, the man's in an oxygen tent,” screamed Rodney.

“But maybe his office can refer her…”

“The back of this car is fairly well smashed in,” the policeman said, returning. “I better make a report.”

“Please, officer. We'll be late for the funeral. The family's bereaved enough, without our showing up late.” Rodney smiled at him. “Please let us just move on.”

“What about you?” he looked at Kate.

She leaned away from him as she answered, almost bending in half backward, hoping he could not smell her breath. “Well, none of us wants to hold up the service.”

“Okay. Go ahead,” the policeman said.

“Thank you,” said Rodney. “I shall write a letter to the chief of police telling him how far you men have come since the riots and O.J.”

“That would be very nice of you, Mr. Sameth,” said the cop.

“I'm not…” he started to say, then obviously thought better of it.

“I used to be in the business,” the cop said. “I was an assistant cameraman on
Reverend Hate.
”

“I remember you,” said Sameth, despondently. “You know how to uninflate these airbags?”

*   *   *

After he had helped Sameth out of the jumble and sent him on his way, the policeman went to a pay phone. As above reproach as he had been in the job that circumstance had edged him into when the lure of the lights and the grip of the Grip could not be counted on to feed a family, and as much as he had resisted anything that smacked of corruption, he still had a friend in the press. Nothing
Globe
or
Enquirer
of course, nothing he'd be paid for to ruin a man. Just an innocent local throwaway paper, where an old pal could use an item.

Thus it was that Rodney Sameth, reading
Beverly Hills 213
aloud the next weekend to his lawyer, Helmut Rott, who lay in an oxygen tent, came across an item stating the elusive director (himself) was secretly back in town. There was a twenty-four-hour nurse in attendance who managed to revive Rodney.

Burning Bridges

Richie Harnoun had been telling the truth. The missing bag, or at least one exactly like the one that had been described as missing, had indeed been in his father's closet. There had been so much tumult the night of the murder and the next morning and through all the incendiary episodes that followed, he supposed his father had just forgotten about it. To be a friend of O.J.'s at that particular time in local—and, as it turned out, national, and even worldwide—history, was to have a lot on your mind, as well as your answering machine.

Ibrahim Harnoun, Richie's dad, had been with his friend at the funeral, along with a select group of O.J.'s colleagues, including a movie director who'd used him in a bad film. The wife of the director had been one of O.J.'s staunchest supporters in the months that followed, since she had observed him in his distraught state at the service for Nicole. “I don't know,” she was heard to say at an open-air lunch at La Scala in Beverly Hills. “He's such a terrible actor, I don't see how he could have put that on.”

Richie had found the bag by accident while he was looking for someplace to hide the cash he had gotten for the sale of his CD player, since the maid cleaned everything, including the inside of his drawers and his bookshelves. He wasn't going to have the money long. He had a date with his dealer, a boy in the grade ahead of him, for the next afternoon. But his mother usually hugged him several times daily in a distracted way to remind him and maybe herself that he was important to her, and he was afraid maybe she'd feel the money in his pockets. Several of his friends had had run-ins with the local police and been frisked for weapons and illicit drugs. Each of them reported that it was not unlike having a going-over from your mother, only not as friendly.

He was afraid to look in the bag. He felt guilty enough about his own actions as a child of such an upstanding member of the community without adding to his burden by getting the goods on his dad. Upstanding. If the knife and the bloody clothes were in there, that would mean his father was complicitous or one of the words they had used on TV about Al Cowlings. Even after Richie had spent the money he'd worried about hiding (he'd Scotch-taped it to the back of his toilet, a trick he remembered from the video of
The Godfather
) and gotten out of his head on the cocaine, he'd been too scared in his spaciness to check out the bag.

Only as his desperation for money increased did he formulate his plan. He wrote the letter to Arthur Finster, and got the tacit agreement of his friends who needed money for the same reason, whose parents also had been close to O.J., to tell their parents' tales. Most of the stories were about gradual disillusionment with the once football hero, and eventual abandonment. Some, like the director's wife, were now about disgust. She had been one of those who helped put up the sign near the Burlingame house decrying “The Butcher of Brentwood” before going to Parent's Day at the high school. After Richie had written to Finster, he went to the closet.

The bag was gone.

The letter was already in the mail. Still, it wasn't exactly a lie, what he was to tell Finster on the athletic field. As soon as they'd closed the deal, he went shopping. Luggage on Rodeo Drive was way out of line, price-wise. Besides, it had been a simple black canvas bag. They would have one in the Mart, for sure, in downtown Los Angeles. All he needed was a couple of bucks, and a friend to go along with him, one who also had an O.J. story to tell.

*   *   *

Perry Zemmis picked up the phone and tried to think who he should give the contract to. What was really sad, he could not help thinking, was that George Bush had been right: there had been a kinder, gentler time. There had been a time when all a betrayed wife had to do was drop in at Roy Cohn's office, and presuming she was a good client, merely mention in passing, “I'm so sick of hearing about that woman.” And the next thing you knew, men would be asking questions at the garage where the mistress had her white Mercedes convertible fixed, and life-imperiling things would happen. And the movie of the week the mistress had sold telling her story to try and stay afloat financially after she'd been cut off was sabotaged by the head of the agency that sold it. Eventually the woman herself would be bludgeoned to death, and the confused nance who was staying with her would be blamed, convicted, and sent to jail where he would die of AIDS. Oh, it had truly been a kinder, gentler time.

But now Roy himself had died of AIDS, so if you wanted someone or something out of the way, you had to take care of it yourself. What a world, what a world, as the witch in the
Wizard of Oz
said.

If you wanted someone dead, you had to be practically hands-on. No Roy anymore to mention your woes to and have them disappear. If Perry wanted that Kate person to give him the Fitzgerald story, he might have to strong-arm her himself. It really burned his ass, in a nostalgic way, that Roy wasn't around. Politics had taught Roy how to threaten without it sounding like a threat. Or maybe Roy had taught that to politics. There was much of that dead man's skill that Perry had yet to learn, and might never. But he had at least learned from him how to help an ally. Or someone you wanted for an ally. Norman Jessup in his corner. Perry could hardly wait.

He dialed a number in New Jersey and waited for the pick-up at the other end. “Chickie?” Perry said. “You ever read a book called
A Snowflake in Hell?
No. I'm not kidding. I know you can read. Well, here's your chance to become a literary figure.”

*   *   *

At the Mart in downtown L.A., Richie found a bag like the one that had been in the closet with no effort at all. Then he took the piece from the
National Enquirer
that he'd saved for more than a year and looked up the address of the Hoffritz store where O.J. had bought the knife a few weeks before the murder. The man who had sold the article to the tabloid wasn't working there anymore. But everybody knew the kind of knife of it was. The one with the serrated edge.

“Give me some money,” he said to his friend Tony.

“Why should I pay for it?” he said. “It's your chapter of the book.”

“I'll pay you back when we get our advance.” There were still legal complications, according to Arthur Finster, since everyone involved except the kid who worked at Chin-Chin was a minor, so technically he needed parental permission for the contracts, which of course he couldn't imagine getting. Richie thought of asking his father what the legal way was for a minor to get a valid contract without his parents' permission, but senior Harnoun wasn't stupid, and as little attention as he paid to his family, that might start him thinking.

“You sure we're going to get it?”

“Of course I'm sure,” said Richie, not sure. The hookers had just gone public with the fact that Finster had stinted on their payments, and the woman who'd been the “as told to” scribe for
By Hook or by Crook,
translating the sexually explicit illiteracy into what passed for writing, had done several talk shows complaining about how little she'd been paid and what a hard time she had collecting.