Loser's Town Read online

  Finally Squiers just shrugged and turned and went downstairs. Potts took a deep breath and went into the bedroom to take a few shots. Richie wanted what he called ‘establishing shots’, photos that clearly identified the place. Richie thought of everything. Potts didn’t like the miserable goombah shit anymore than he liked Squiers, but you had to hand it to him, he didn’t miss a trick.

  Squiers meanwhile was having a hell of a time getting the van backed up the hill. He’d borrowed the van from his brother-in-law, who’d told him it was reliable. Squiers imagined the weaselly little sonofabitch laughing at him and made up his mind to beat the shit out of him when he got back, sister or no sister. The gears were shit, first wasn’t enough and second was too much. After a lot of grinding and rocking, Squiers finally just pulled all the way up to the garage, then backed up quick enough so that the bumper scraped the pavement before it rose up the hill. When he got to the top, Squiers left the van in first and locked the emergency brake. It lurched a few inches downhill but it caught. Squiers waited and the thing didn’t go anywhere so he got out of the van and went back into the house.

  ‘You think you made enough fucking noise?’ Potts said to him when he walked in the door.

  ‘I think we ought to hurry. I don’t trust the brakes on that thing.’

  ‘Shit.’

  Potts went into the upstairs bedroom and pulled a duvet off the bed. He dragged it into the hallway outside the bathroom and spread it on the floor. Squiers started into the bathroom to pick the girl up but Potts pushed him aside. Squiers stood back and let Potts tend to her. Potts pulled out the syringe and laid it on the sink next to the works. He lifted her off the toilet and dragged her into the hallway and onto the blanket. The skirt had ridden up and she was naked underneath. Potts wrestled the pantyhose back up over her hips.

  ‘Why bother to do that?’ asked Squiers, who’d been watching all this appreciatively.

  ‘I don’t want anybody thinking we interfered with her.’

  ‘What difference does it make?’

  Potts didn’t bother with a reply. It made Potts sick to think of somebody finding the body and believing it had been interfered with. It was just the sort of filthy thing that the newspapers and TV loved, and it made Potts sick to imagine that somebody might think it was him, even if they had no idea who he actually was. When he’d made the girl decent he rolled her up in the blanket, like a Tootsie Roll.

  ‘What about the works?’ Squiers asked him.

  ‘Richie said leave it, it’ll give this fucker something to remind him when he comes home.’

  They held opposite ends of the rolled blanket and awkwardly carried the body down the stairs, out of the house and to the van. Squiers reached with one hand to open the back door of the van when the vehicle lurched forward half a foot. Then again.

  Panicked, Squiers let go of his end of the blanket. The end with the girl’s head struck the ground with a dull thud. Squiers was dancing alongside the van, struggling with the door, as it began rolling downhill. The van was picking up speed as Squiers jumped inside. He pushed the brake and nothing much happened. The garage was looming up fast. He stood up on the goddamn brake, trying to push it through the floor, pushing his back against the seat and pulling hard at the wheel with his hands. There was an ugly grinding noise and Squiers thought the brakes had given way completely but the van slowed with a sound like a freight train stopping and came to rest a couple of feet from the bumper of the Porsche sitting in the garage.

  Squiers slumped over the steering wheel. He got out and looked up the hill at Potts, who had sat down next to the girl, his mouth open.

  Squiers came trudging up the hill. ‘Fucking brakes, man,’ he said happily, as if he’d just stepped off some ride at Magic Mountain.

  There was nothing Potts could possibly say. They half-carried, half-dragged the girl down the hill and stuck her in the van. They were nearly to Ontario and Potts was still shaking inside and smoking another cigarette to calm himself down when Squiers said, out of the blue:

  ‘At least her ass was clean.’

  Two

  The agent’s office was nine floors above Wilshire Boulevard in a building that cost thirty million dollars and still looked like a cross between a cuckoo clock and a Forest Lawn mausoleum. It was owned by the largest and most powerful talent agency in the world, but with all that glass the air conditioning was useless and the windows didn’t open in case somebody felt tempted to jump. The bigwigs had a west-facing view of the Pacific. This particular agent had a panorama of East LA and a layer of smog that reached all the way to Redlands. Even from here, you could practically hear them wheezing in San Bernardino.

  ‘. . . not dealing here with some used-car dealer from Reseda who wants you to get pictures of his wife fucking around, and I told them how important it was that they send somebody with a little tact, not some fucking clown who doesn’t understand a fucking thing about the business, or about dealing with talent of this caliber, someone who got a little sensitivity . . .’

  She’d been going on like this for fifteen minutes and still hadn’t told him a thing he could use. She wasn’t a bad-looking woman, really, if you like over-compensating East Coast types. Sometimes he actually did. She had short auburn hair, full red lips, pale skin, and the overall demeanor of a Gila monster. He had a fantasy of her slashing flesh all day long, then going home to bill and coo at her cats.

  ‘. . . With discretion, for fuck’s sake, and not bounding in like some steer in a rose garden . . .’

  She wore a simple black Balenciaga dress and he thought he caught a whiff of Opium as she walked behind him. She had excellent taste in clothing but the steer and rose garden analogy hit too close to home. His thumb ached and without the bandage it looked like a slightly bent eggplant.

  ‘. . . can keep their mouth shut and not go running to the tabloids with material that could . . .’

  Her office was small and the sort of cubicles they give middle-management at insurance companies, but without the family photos and the national park calendar. Anything that could give a clue to her personal life had been carefully removed. A floor-to-ceiling bookshelf full of scripts covered one entire wall. He counted six that had already won Academy Awards and four more that probably would. In Hollywood, you could easily admire such complete dedication, but he’d long ago decided he didn’t care to.

  His thumb was beginning to throb now and his back was hurting as well. He refused to take the painkillers but he badly wanted a cigarette and a hefty shot of Jack Daniel’s. At a rodeo in Salinas the week before he’d gotten thrown from a horse named Tusker and pulled a muscle in his back. Then he’d managed to dislocate his thumb while trying to rope a calf. He’d looped it between the rope and the saddle horn – a truly greenhorn mistake that had gotten him much laughter but absolutely no sympathy from his peers. The Salinas rodeo had been a disaster, but there was another one at the end of the month in Bakersfield. He was wondering if he had enough vacation days to make that one when he noticed she had stopped talking.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

  She was standing next to him with her hands on her hips and a look that made him wonder if he’d suddenly developed Tourette’s syndrome. It took him a moment to realize he’d absent-mindedly pulled out his cigarettes and had started to light one.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ she said, ‘this is a non-smoking building, just like everywhere else in this state! How fucking observant are we?’

  He put the cigarettes back into his jacket pocket. He was getting sleepy now, too. He’d driven all night from his sister’s house in Flagstaff, cutting his vacation two days short because Walter, his boss, said he’d been expressly requested for this case, and that the client was an important one. It was now late-Thursday morning and he wasn’t supposed to go back to work until Monday. He was betting that Walter, the chintzy bastard, hadn’t even put him on the clock for this. It was just the sort of crap he’d pull. Spandau made a note to get this straightened
out before Walter slipped out of the office and spent the rest of the day getting hammered somewhere.

  ‘You haven’t been listening to a fucking word I’ve said. Geary said you were supposed to be good, but frankly you don’t look to me like you could handle a street crossing, much less a case like this.’

  Paul Geary was a TV producer he’d done some work for, and was the one who’d given Spandau’s name to the Allied Talent Group, the agency that had constructed this particular air-conditioned nightmare. They in turn had foisted Spandau off on her, and now she was sweetly telling him she wasn’t happy about it. Annie Michaels was one of the best agents in the business, known for being intensely loyal and protective of her clients. She was also famous for having one of the nastiest mouths in Hollywood and Spandau was getting particularly tired of having it aimed at him.

  David Spandau stood up and carefully closed a single button of his Armani jacket. She was about five feet three inches and now he towered nearly a foot above her. She stopped talking when she had to look up at a forty-five-degree angle. As Spandau’s old mentor Beau McCaulay used to say, ‘When all else fails, just be taller.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘It’s been a pleasure meeting you.’ He held out his hand. She simply stared at it.

  ‘Where the fuck are you going?’ she asked incredulously. Hollywood agents are so used to people trying to get in to see them, they forget people can also walk out.

  ‘First,’ he said, ‘I thought I’d stand in front of your lovely new building and light a cigarette, provided nobody runs out and douses me with a fire extinguisher. Then,’ he said, ‘I thought I’d go over to Musso and Frank for the eggs and roast-beef hash. After that I don’t know. Somebody told me there was a German Expressionist exhibit at the county museum. While I adore Emil Nolde’s woodcuts, I’m not sure I could deal with all that angst on top of the roast-beef hash.’

  It’s hard to get the drop on a good agent. The trick is that they’re so used to people caring, their motor-neurons lock up when confronted with someone who simply couldn’t give a shit. She continued to give him a blank stare as she processed the fact that he was actually walking out on her. She looked him up and down, as if actually noticing him for the first time. A big, dark man with a broken nose and tired eyes. Something wrong with his thumb. Good suit, a real Armani, but what’s with those fucking cowboy boots? He looked a little like Robert Mitchum but she thought Robert Mitchum was sexy as hell so she tried to ignore that part of it. Genuinely tough, she figured. Tough enough that he could afford to downplay it. Maybe he even had a brain. Finally the program completed its loop, and she gave Spandau a nasty smile.

  ‘A real smart-ass,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s just that I’ve got better things to do for the ass-end of my vacation than to sit around and be verbally abused by some Long Island neurotic in a two-thousand-dollar potato sack.’

  ‘Look, Tex, you were hired—’

  ‘No, I wasn’t hired. Nobody’s hired anybody. Your agency asked me to come here and see if I wanted to help them out with a problem. So far this is just a freebie, a professional courtesy among supposedly civilized people. Frankly, though, I’m not all that crazy about getting shit on, even when somebody’s paying for it.’

  ‘My God, who the fuck do you think you are? Who the fuck do you think you’re dealing with? I need a fucking professional, and they send me a fucking extra from Bonanza!’

  She’s talking about the Tony Lamas, Spandau thought. Otherwise he was in Armani and impeccable. Spandau saluted her and turned toward the door.

  ‘Hey, buster, don’t you turn your back on me!’

  ‘If you’d like, I can have the agency send someone over more to your liking.’

  ‘Are you kidding?’ she cried as he opened the door. ‘Fuck you and your agency! Don’t track horse shit on the carpet as you go out, Hopalong!’

  Spandau opened the door and nearly ran into a slim, elegant middle-aged man in a pinstripe suit and a good haircut. ‘Excuse me,’ Spandau said, and started to pass him.

  ‘Would you mind waiting just a few more moments?’ he said to Spandau. His smile was a triumph of orthodontics. He graciously escorted Spandau back into the room and closed the door. ‘Hello, Annie,’ he said to her. ‘I see you’ve been honing those social skills that made you so popular at Bennington.’

  ‘This . . . asshole the detective agency sent me was just leaving.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Mister Spandau?’

  ‘David Spandau. Coren and associates, personal security and investigations.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Spandau. Annie is far too used to getting her way. Her idea of diplomacy is to scream loudly until people give in. It’s not pretty but surprisingly effective. It works with most people. I apologize for her.’

  ‘Robert,’ she said. ‘He’s an idiot. He’s all wrong for this. Just look at those shoes!’

  ‘Sweetie,’ he said, ‘for somebody who can wear Versace and still look like a Hasidic Jew, I’m not sure I’d talk.’

  ‘Robert, that’s cruel!’ she whined, but it made her laugh.

  ‘Honey, you know it’s true. You’d be wearing go-go boots with that dress if the shop hadn’t given you instructions.’ To Spandau he said, ‘Chanel refuses to sell her anything.’

  ‘That’s an outright lie!’

  ‘She’s practically a legend. They’re convinced she takes their clothes and has them altered by some little Chinese man in Reseda. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense.’

  By this time she’d collapsed into a fit of giggles. ‘Robert, you are horrible!’

  ‘I love you, that’s why I can tell you these things. You do look good in that black thing, though. Is it DK?’

  ‘God, no. Balenciaga, honey. You think it looks okay?’

  ‘It looks great. Just the style for you. The lines suit you.’

  ‘You think so?’ she pleaded.

  ‘Am I not the most honest man you know? Now be nice and quit picking on this poor guy.’ He held out his hand and we shook. ‘I’m Robert Aronson, by the way. I’m Bobby Dye’s attorney.’

  He motioned for Spandau to sit down again, then sat down himself, after adjusting the knees of his suit.

  ‘Now let’s see if we can get this sorted out. I’ve been on the phone all afternoon about you, Mr Spandau, and in spite of Annie’s impression, it seems you are highly regarded in your profession.’

  ‘I—’ began Annie.

  ‘Shut up, Annie. You remember the lunatic who was stalking Marcie du Pont last year? This is the gentleman responsible for putting him away. It seems Mr Spandau specializes in people like us. Tell me, Mr Spandau, are you really as good as all that?’

  ‘Better,’ Spandau said. ‘I’m a genuine asset to any organization.’

  Aronson laughed. It would have been a pleasant laugh if Spandau thought he meant it.

  ‘He’s not going to work,’ Annie insisted.

  ‘The bottom line, dear, is that no one gives a shit what you or I think. I was just on the phone with Gil – Gil White,’ he said to me, ‘the head of Allied Talent – and Gil wants Bobby to see him. The rest is up to Bobby.’

  Annie Michaels shrugged and gave a frustrated sigh. She sat down behind her desk, picked up the phone and pushed a button. Spandau heard a buzz on the assistant’s desk outside. ‘Millie, check and see when the Wildfire shoot is breaking for lunch.’ She hung up the phone. ‘And when this whole fucking thing blows up, it’ll be my ass, as usual,’ she said to no one in particular. Her phone buzzed. She picked it up, listened, then asked, ‘Is he on the set or in the trailer?’ then hung up again. She picked the phone up yet once again and quickly dialed a number. ‘Hello, sweetie, it’s me. The detective is here. Are you in the mood to see him? When? In about half an hour? Bye.’ She replaced the phone with the tips of her fingers, as if it were a piece of bad fruit. ‘Okay, let’s try it.’

  ‘That’s all we can ask for,’ said Aronson. ‘That is, if Mr Spandau s
till wants the case, after being subjected to your charms.’

  ‘I’d like to talk to him,’ Spandau said.

  ‘They’re breaking in half an hour,’ she said. ‘They’re shooting on 36 at Fox.’

  She picked up her purse and marched out the door. Aronson looked at Spandau and rolled his eyes.

  ‘We’re going to the Wildfire set at Fox,’ she told her assistant. ‘Call and have passes for us at the gate. I’ll be back after lunch. Transfer anything important to the cellphone. Everything else can wait until I get back. Are you clear on the difference between important and not important?’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said the assistant, embarrassed and turning crimson.

  ‘Are you listening to me?’

  ‘Yes, Annie.’

  ‘I don’t want to be bombarded by calls from people who just want to chat.’

  ‘Annie, how am I supposed to know if they want to chat or not?’

  ‘Because, honey, it’s part of your fucking job to know who’s important and who’s not, and important people don’t have time to chat. Is this clear now?’

  ‘Yes, Annie.’

  ‘Why does everybody act as if they’ve just had a goddamned lobotomy? Robert, you come with me. Hopalong, you can follow us on your horse.’

  ‘I’ll just meet you there,’ Spandau told her. ‘I know where it is.’

  She grunted and strode to the elevator and assaulted a button. Apparently the elevator was as frightened of her as everybody else, because it opened right up. ‘Robert, are you coming?’

  ‘Of course, Annie.’

  Spandau followed him. Aronson purposely took his time about getting to the elevator. Annie had to jam her purse between the doors to keep them from closing. Walking away, Spandau distinctly heard the assistant mutter ‘miserable bitch’ under her breath. As the elevator doors closed and Annie Michaels began another stream of invective, Spandau made a mental note to send the assistant a bouquet of flowers and his deepest sympathy.