“Bravo, you young Lochinvars!” said Monty, clapping our shoulders. “But we must not ignore the sobering lesson this episode has taught us. We’ve been far too lax in the security department. Henceforth I’ll share my prize with no one.”
“And you’ll hide it really well?”
“It will, I assure you, be harder to lay hands on than the queen’s pussy. Now where may I take you boys for our victory dinner?”
Gilbert suggested Vici since the crowd was starry, the food improving, and Billy could always be relied upon for a free round. I phoned him and arranged a table, not letting on, of course, that I had just canceled his favorite show.
IT WAS, UP TO A POINT, a jolly little evening. Gilbert, still elated by his triumph, repeatedly rehashed the routing of Rex, convulsing Monty with comic embellishments I was too happy to contradict. Monty in turn regaled us with stories of the gay Hollywood demimonde of his youth, and with each drink his roster of purported conquests grew more dubiously impressive. The wine was superb and my salmon with fried leeks beyond reproach. As we perused dessert menus in search of the one sweet our figure-conscious trio could agree to share, an emotion crept over me so unfamiliar of late that it took me a moment to identify it as hope.
Was it possible, I wondered, that the worst was really behind us? It was certainly starting to look that way. The police were proving no match for so wily an adversary as Moira. The Stephen rumors seemed more of a joke every day and the one pustule who could prove them had been cowed into silence. True, Monty’s unyielding insistence that Stephen produce Amelia still posed troubling challenges, as the screenplay, in its present form, screamed “blackmail” to anyone who read it. But the script, though ailing, was surely not inoperable, and once the town’s leading surgeons had worked their magic, it might emerge as spry and refreshed as Lily herself after one of her periodic resurfacings. Perhaps when that happy day arrived I’d blow some Amelia dollars on a vacation. It seemed the least I deserved for having braved so many tempests with such pluck and fortitude.
As I sat pondering the relative merits of Paris and St. Barts, I felt a hand land heavily on my shoulder. Gazing up, I saw the mottled face of a Grimes brother peering down at me, though which I couldn’t say as the abrupt widening of my eyes had caused a lens to slip.
“Well,” observed Rusty, “you boys look like you’re having fun.”
“We were, ” sniffed Gilbert, who shares my knee-jerk impudence toward swaggering lawmen.
Blinking to right my lens, I examined Rusty’s face and did not like what I saw. I’d hoped that if I ever encountered him again he’d be wearing the sour, thwarted look of a lawman whose leads are not panning out and whose case has reduced him to a diet of bourbon and Maalox. But Rusty wasn’t scowling. His lips bloomed with the self-satisfied smile of a man about to cry, “Checkmate!” or, in Rusty’s case, “King me!”
“Hi. Rusty Grimes,” he said, nodding to Gilbert and Monty.
“We gathered,” said Monty.
Rusty pulled up a chair.
“Champagne, huh? You guys must be celebrating something. Good day?”
“Yes,” replied Monty, “and in the interest of keeping it that way —”
“I won’t be long. I just stopped in ’cause I’m celebrating myself. I thought a twelve-year-old Macallan might go down pretty nice.”
“Well, don’t keep him waiting,” said Gilbert.
Rusty just chuckled, another ominous sign.
“I can see you’re a sassy one. Kind of like this guy I met today.” He turned to Monty. “Friend of yours. Rex Bajour?”
“Oh?” said Monty.
“Don’t know him from Adam but he phones, all eager to see me. Says it’s about what he told my brother today at his place. Now I know for a fact my brother didn’t see him today ’cause he’s in Palm Springs trying to track down one of Moira’s ‘masseurs.’ But this Rex, he says he didn’t tell my brother everything. He’ll tell me though if I promise not to press charges. I figure what the heck and tell him to come on in.”
He paused here to savor our discomfort, then leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head, clearly having a ball.
“Rex shows up and he’s this weird little guy who seems to think I’m some kinda fan of his. Keeps going on about Moira’s spa and some black kid and how old he looked for his age. ’Course, by now it’s obvious he knows something and that he has—or had—some kind of proof someone scared him into giving up. So I ask him to describe his talk with my ‘brother.’ And what do you know—my ‘brother’ didn’t visit Rex alone.” He turned his flinty smile on me. “He brought you.”
“That’s ridiculous!” I protested once the coughing ft had subsided. “I was nowhere near your brother today!”
“It wasn’t my brother. Just some guy who said he was. And you were with him.”
“Really, my good man,” tutted Monty. “A little rigor, please. If, as you say, Rex was gulled by a Grimes impersonator mightn’t his accomplice merely have claimed to be Philip?”
Grimes pointed out that Rex actually knew me and would not have been fooled by a substitute.
“Nonsense. You forget this is Hollywood, a town awash in actors and skilled makeup artists. No criminal mastermind would have the slightest trouble recruiting a skilled Cavanaugh impersonator.”
Rusty, not troubling to dignify this theory with a response, said he’d told Rex he had two brothers on the force. Could he describe the one who’d questioned him? Turning now to Gilbert, he said Rex had described a slim, blond, blue-eyed man of about thirty.
“Thirty!” said Gilbert indignantly, not much helping matters.
Rex had then described the confiscated sound track and the DVD from which he’d recorded it, not skimping on a single X-rated detail. Rex said it had been screened for him by Monty, who was using it to compel Stephen to produce Amelia Flies Again!
“So let’s see,” concluded Rusty, counting off the charges on his fingers, “we’ve got extortion, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and impersonating an officer....Do you fuckers have any idea how much trouble you’re in?”
“Now really,” said Monty with a condescending laugh. “I ask you, sir—when a ludicrous gnome like Rex Bajour romps into your office spinning tales of megastars cavorting with gilded statuettes does no part of you pause to question the veracity of your witness or his fantastic account? Would any jury the foreman of which was neither Dopey, Sneezy, nor Doc find him a credible witness? No, to answer your question, we do not consider ourselves in any peril whatsoever. Not if Rex is all you’ve got.”
“He’s not all I’ve got.”
“You refer, I presume, to your other witness, Kenny the freelance proctologist?”
“Him too. But also the tape.”
“Tape?”
“Rex made a copy.”
It’s not easy to maintain an air of bland insouciance when you’ve just received a tomahawk to the forehead, but Monty kept his cool, refusing to give Grimes the satisfaction of a gasp.
“You don’t say?”
“I do.” Rusty turned to Gilbert. “When he told you he had no copies he was lying. He felt real bad about that so he came clean. I gave it a listen and it’s Stevie all right. Not to mention his wife and mom. You’re on there too, cupcake,” he said, patting my cheek. “We’ll see what a jury thinks when they hear, ‘Oh, yeah, Oscar, fuck me. Fuck me harder.’ ”
“Dessert?” asked our blushing waitress.
“Not now,” said Monty. “Our friend’s reminiscing.”
Not even that could wipe the smirk off Grimes’s face.
“Toodle-oo, boys,” he said, jauntily rising. “We’ll be talkin’ again real soon. Oh, and Monty—I’m sorry if your place is a little messed up when you get home tonight. I got a warrant and my guys are searching it right now, looking for that DVD. So feel free to dawdle over dessert.”
His cell phone rang. He answered it and as he strutted away toward the bar his voice boomed with jubilant malice.
“Stevie, my man! Thanks for gettin’ back to me. You sittin’ down, sweetie?”
GILBERT AND I SLEPT together that night though we did not, as you might suppose, seek comfort or oblivion in sex. It was now impossible for us to contemplate let alone commit a sexual act without imagining what it would be like performing the same act in prison with the three-hundred-pound skinheads to whom we’d find ourselves affianced.
On reaching home we’d found our machine predictably crowded with messages. Peppered among the expected eruptions from Stephen, Moira, and Sonia were several calls from high-powered attorneys, household names all, cursing our names and demanding we come to Diana’s the next morning to debrief them on our disastrous dealings with Rex and Rusty.
The sole welcome call that night came from Monty, who informed us that the police had failed to find the DVD. They had, however, seized a sizable stash of male erotica and an address book containing a three-page addendum embarrassingly headed “Monty’s Joy Boys.” They’d also taken Lily’s memoirs and our script for Amelia, which meant that in addition to pandering and extortion I could now be charged with impersonating a screenwriter.
THE NEXT MORNING GILBERT, Monty, and I traveled to Diana’s to meet with her, Stephen, Moira, Sonia, and the august array of legal piranhas they’d retained for their defense. I’ll spare you a lengthy account of that heated conclave. You know the aggrieved parties well by now. You’ve seen them in similar circumstances and observed their grace and good humor under pressure. You can readily imagine their response to our trio’s story, especially Monty’s confession that he’d screened his prize disk for a petulant gossip with a lifelong hatred of Stephen and his own talk show.
I’d presumed going in that my many previous excoriations had inured me to their invective, but the severity of this latest crisis was such that even their most vicious past reprimands seemed by comparison like coy rebukes delivered in baby talk. They rabidly demanded that Monty surrender his disk to them, as the police knew he had it and he’d proved himself too blithering a dolt to be entrusted with its safekeeping. Monty refused, prompting such frenzied vituperation that I was relieved when we were interrupted by a call from the DA.
Stephen’s lawyer took the call. Grimes informed him that he wanted all of us who’d been at the spa that fateful day to report to his office tomorrow at noon. The lawyer naturally protested. Stephen and his family had been charged with no crime and would only answer questions in the privacy of their homes. Grimes said he understood the family’s shyness but would be most grateful if they’d attend anyway. He would show his thanks by keeping the meeting strictly “hushhush” and by doing all within his power to ensure that no one in his office leaked the contents of Rex’s tape to the media. The threat could not have been plainer; either Stephen would acquiesce or news of his tryst with Oscar would be broadcast from here to Micronesia.
This ploy prompted several thousand dollars’ worth of bluster from the attorneys, and Moira, with staggering chutzpah, decried it as “nothing short of blackmail!” There was much talk about strategy and gag orders, but judging from Stephen’s thousand-yard stare the only gag orders he was thinking of were the ones Leno and Jon Stewart would shortly be issuing to their writing staffs. His voice cracking, he said he’d do as Grimes asked, then fled before his humiliating tears could commence flowing. We were dismissed shortly thereafter, the assembled agreeing that there were no names left to call us.
There’s no more joyless way to spend a morning than to sit contemplating jail while being energetically reviled by men who’d had no trouble finding nice things to say about O. J. Simpson. By the time Gilbert and I reached home we felt like two hydrants in unfortunate proximity to a kennel, and the messages waiting on our machine did little to cheer us. The first was from Hank, offering directions to his brother’s office and advising promptness. The second was from Billy.
“If you’re there, pick up! Please, please pick up! How come Rex showed an old rerun last night? Who the hell’s Tippi Hedren? And what happened with you guys and my dad at Vici? He won’t tell me a thing! Please call me! I really want to know what’s going on.”
“Don’t we all?” came a voice behind us.
We turned, startled, and there in the doorway stood Claire, bathed in radiant sunlight, her simple white blouse perfectly setting off her newly acquired coat of bronze. Gilbert and I, like that fellow in Angels in America, were caught completely off guard by this unscheduled manifestation and could only stand dumbstruck, gaping at her effulgence.
She repeated the question, raising her voice slightly so as to be heard over the heavenly trumpets.
“What on earth is going on?”
“Claire!”
“Thank God you’re here!”
“We need you!”
“We’re in terrible terrible trouble!”
She said she’d gathered as much from the message on her machine ordering her to appear at the DA’s office tomorrow.
“He wants you too?” I said, elated. “That’s fantastic!”
“Oh, yes! Just peachy!”
I explained I was merely glad she’d be there, batting for the home team. I assured her she had nothing personally to fear and had only been summoned because she was on the sex tape.
“Yikes! Don’t tell me the DA’s gotten hold of that?! ”
“No,” said Gilbert, “but it’s almost as bad. He got an audio copy from Rex Bajour.”
“Rex Bajour?”
“Tiny fellow? Talk show host?”
“You’re losing me.”
Wearily seating herself, she called for strong tea and a comprehensive summary of all that had occurred in her absence, plus anything prior that we’d kept from her. She stressed that we were to omit no detail, however insignificant we deemed it.
“Right-o!” I said, thrilled to think that peerless brain would soon be exerting itself in service to our salvation. As I hastened to the kitchen to put the kettle on, I could just barely hear Gilbert’s low confidential murmur as he started in without me.
“It was all going along just fine... then Philip had this asinine idea that I dress up as a cop!”
Twenty-four
WE TOLD HER EVERYTHING. It took a while but when we’d finished there was no detail recorded in these pages of which Claire was not now cognizant. She tried at first to listen with a calm nonjudgmental expression but this soon gave way to a wince of pained astonishment such as an unworldly village priest might wear while hearing Mick Jagger’s confession.
“So?” I asked meekly when I’d reached the shaming conclusion.
“So what? ”
“What do you think?” said Gilbert.
“What does it matter what I think? The only person whose opinion counts now is the DA and he thinks you’re guilty as sin. Not that you’ve given him much cause to doubt it.”
“I know,” I groveled. “We just thought that, y’know, seeing as you’ve helped us out of jams before, you might —”
“Jams?!” she repeated incredulously. “ Jams? I have news for you, me boyo — this is not a JAM! Nor is it a scrape, a spot, or a pickle! This is doom, you idiot! This is game over! This is orange fucking jumpsuits! How could you possibly have been so stupid as to take money for the Amelia script when you knew Stephen was blackmailed into buying it?! And YOU!” she roared at Gilbert. “It wasn’t witless enough to go impersonating an officer? You had to use the DA’s brother’s actual name?!”
“It was my whole way into the character!”
“Look, we fucked up. We know that. We’re just looking for a little advice ’cause we thought—”
“I know what you thought,” snapped Claire. “You thought I was going to waltz in, wave my wand, and make everything right—and after all you’ve put me through! Well, I’m sorry —I haven’t the tiniest idea how to help you out of this mess! I’d advise you to hire the best lawyers in town but they’ve already been hired by Moira and Stephen to save their asses while no doubt selling yours
up the river. I’ll vouch for you in court, though God knows what my word will be worth once the Casablanca business comes out. And thank you, by the way, for ensuring that the word ‘plagiarist’ will be manacled to my name for the rest of my miserable life! Thank you for that!”
“I’m sorry,” I sniveled and my lower lip began to tremble, a sign that a full-blown Cowardly Lion blubberfest was mere seconds away. Seeing this, Claire rolled her eyes but softened her tone.
“Calm down, you big baby. You’re not the ones Moira and Stephen’s attack dogs will be ripping apart tomorrow.”
“We’re not?” Gilbert said hopefully.
“I doubt it. They’ll be too busy demolishing Rex. They’ll claim his tape’s a forgery. They’ll say there was no prostitution, no Oscar, and no extortion—Rex made it all up because he hates Stephen. Or for publicity. If I know Moira she’ll claim Rex tried to blackmail them with his ‘fake’ tape, then when they refused to pay he ran to the police out of spite.”
“But what if Grimes doesn’t buy it?” I asked. “What if he knows they’re lying and goes public with the tape?”
“Well,” said Claire, sighing mightily, “then all bets are off. When this thing breaks there’ll be a media circus like none you’ve ever seen. People crawling out of the woodwork to cop pleas or make a quick buck on their stories. I mean, God, think how Oscar will clean up if he can avoid jail while doing it. Do you know who he is?”
I said that according to Moira he was a young beauty named Kurt who was now, thank God, residing in Paris, having met a French banker and traded his gilded costume in for an even more impressively gilded cage.
“And you think they won’t hear about this in France?” She finished her tea and rose. “Well, isn’t this the perfect end to a lovely vacation?”
We followed her to the door like anxious toddlers fretful over Mother’s departure.
“Any thoughts?” pleaded Gilbert.
“Yes, but they all involve return flights to San Francisco.”
“But you’ll think about it?” I asked plaintively.