Natural Causes Page 7

  “Or pretended to have known,” Jack said.

  “You’re missing the point,” the woman said. “Of course he was a fake. In this business, that goes without saying. You’re just too damn idealistic, Jack. That’s your whole problem. You keep thinking you’re going to turn a corner and find...I don’t know, justice or something. That’s not the way it works out here. Under the tinsel is the real tinsel and under that are the lies.”

  “And dollars,” Jack said.

  “Sure, and dollars. What are you in it for? The laughs? Quentin was one of the most gracious men I’ve ever met. There was an innocence about him.”

  Jack snorted again.

  “All right, call it a corruption. What do I care? But there was something there—something that didn’t change.”

  “I’d call it greed,” Jack said.

  “Sure, that was part of it. But what was he greedy for?”

  “For money. What else?”

  “You see,” she said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “All right, then, what was he greedy for?”

  “For the life he was pretending to lead.”

  “Bullshit!” Moon said.

  “Of course it was bullshit!” Helen Rose said. “It’s all bullshit, Jack. I keep telling you that. You and Quentin were more alike than you think. You see, I’ve accepted it—that it’s bullshit. All I’ve got is the show—no family, no real friends. Just the show. And when it goes, I’ll go. Bang!” She snapped her fingers loudly.

  Both Moon and I jumped.

  “Jesus, Helen,” Jack said. “Don’t talk like that.”

  “You’re hopeless, Jack,” she said wearily. “But you’re hopeless in a different way than Quentin was. That’s why he was charming and you’re just diffident and kind. He was a romantic, for chrissake. He didn’t believe in his lies—he was obsessed by them! See, there’s the difference. You’re not obsessed, Jack. You’re not driven. You don’t know what it’s like to be that hungry. Quentin did.”

  “We’ve all been hungry, Helen,” Jack said stiffly.

  “Not like Quentin,” she said. “He told stories, all right. Especially after his heart attack. But whether they were true or not, he wanted them to be. He needed them to be. That was his weakness and his charm. There was a great well of loneliness inside that man that all the money in the world could never fill. I consider it quite a triumph that someone that unhappy could carry on with such style. And his stories were part of that style—a way of bridging the gap between what he knew he was and what he always wanted to be.”

  “And what was that?” Moon said sullenly. “What he always wanted to be?”

  “Why a star, Jack,” Helen said, cupping her face in her hands. “Isn’t that what we all want to be?”

  11

  THE WAITER came with the food, which he set up in the living room on a folding table. Between courses, I asked Helen Rose if she knew why Dover had come out to L.A. on Friday rather than on Sunday.

  She said, “No. It wasn’t for ‘Phoenix,’ though. I can tell you that much. We were in New York over the weekend—Frank, Jack, and I—meeting with those wonderful brands folks.”

  “You were in New York last weekend?” I asked Jack.

  “On Friday and Saturday. Frank and I went back to Cincinnati on Saturday afternoon.”

  “Ooh! Are we suspects?” Helen said. She’d put away an entire bottle of California’s best over dinner, and she was showing it.

  “I don’t have anything to be suspicious about,” I said honestly. “Dover told his mother that he was coming out here to meet with some people about a new project. I thought you might know what it was.”

  Helen Rose’s face darkened as if a cloud had just floated overhead. “A TV project?” she said.

  Jack waved his hands at me behind her back. But I ignored his warning. “That’s what she thought.”

  “That son-of-a-bitch!” Helen said and threw her fork down so forcefully that she cracked the plate.

  “Oh, Christ,” Jack said under his breath.

  “That little worm! That fucking little traitor! We’re in trouble because he couldn’t come up with a goddamn story line and he’s getting ready to jump ship! There’s gratitude for you.” Helen whirled around in her chair to face Moon. “Did you know about this, you bearded little bastard?”

  “Now, Helen,” he said throwing up both hands in defense.

  “Don’t ‘Now, Helen’ me, you weasel! You knew about this, didn’t you?”

  “I did not,” Jack said. “Furthermore, I think the whole thing was one of Quentin’s fabrications.”

  “You would,” Helen said furiously. She turned back to me. “What exactly did Quentin’s mother say?”

  “That she had lunch with Quentin on Friday afternoon and that he mentioned a new project. Quentin didn’t say whether it was for television or not. That was just his mother’s guess.”

  “Well, I’ve met the bitch, and she was a damn good guesser when it came to Quentin.” She pointed a finger at Moon and jabbed him with it—hard—in the belly. “I want you to find out about this, you hear me, Jack? I won’t tolerate this sort of thing from my staff. You hear me?”

  Moon leaned forward and stared her in the face. “The man is dead,” he said between clenched teeth. “What the fuck difference does it make?”

  “It makes a difference to me,” Helen said. But she seemed shocked by Jack’s tone of voice; and when she spoke again, her own voice sounded thick and pained. “I liked him, Jack. Christ, do I have to give that up, too?”

  “Nobody made you take this job, Helen,” Moon said. “You wanted it—remember?”

  “You shouldn’t talk to me like that,” she said.

  Moon leaned back in the chair and made a contrite face. “You’re right. I’m just sick of Quentin Dover. We wouldn’t be in this mess, if it weren’t for him.”

  I hadn’t wanted to get involved in their ‘Phoenix’ problems. After signing that contract, I figured the less I knew about United’s secrets the better. But it was beginning to look like I didn’t have a choice. It was also beginning to look like there was a great deal about Quentin Dover that I hadn’t been told.

  “Perhaps you’d better fill me in on this,” I said to Jack.

  “Let Helen tell you,” he said morosely. “I haven’t got the stomach.”

  “Helen?” I said.

  “What’s to tell?” she said hollowly. “He dried up. For one year and six months he was a rock. He never had an excuse. He never needed one. He got the job done.”

  “Or Walt did,” Jack said.

  “What difference does it make? We had a long-arc story line, meaty breakdowns, and good scripts. Whether Quentin was writing the long-terms or supervising their writing or just finessing them, they were coming in on schedule. Six months ago, it all stopped.”

  “Why?”

  She laughed unhappily. “Do you think if I knew why I wouldn’t have done something about it?”

  “Well, what did Quentin say?”

  “What writers always say when they dry up. That he didn’t believe in the story. That the breakdown people weren’t cooperating. That the conferences weren’t helpful or specific enough. He always had an answer.”

  “The truth was that he was all squeezed out,” Jack said. “And he knew it. There just wasn’t any more toothpaste in the tube.”

  “Christ, that’s callous,” Helen said. “It was a lot more complicated than that. He had open heart surgery six months ago, and when he came back he just didn’t have the same resources of energy.”

  “You mean he’d run out of lies.”

  “Jack, where do you come off saying things like that?” she said. “What did the man do to you? He thought he was going to die, for chrissake. And that wife of his was throwing fits every day. The whole fabric of his life was coming apart.”

  “And all he did was smile and procrastinate graciously.”

  “What would you have had him do? He was
used to being in control, and the power was slipping through his fingers.”

  “And I’m supposed to care about that?” Moon said.

  “I don’t know what you care about, Jack,” she said. “But it’s not enough to say that he’d run out of lies or toothpaste.”

  “You were just furious at him a minute ago!” Moon shouted.

  “Oh, grow up.” She turned to me. “He was worn down, Harry. And then we pulled a switch on him. He’d written a document before the surgery and we’d accepted it. But goddamn General Hospital came out with their ‘Ice Princess’ story, pulled a 40 share, and suddenly every soap on daytime had to have a fantastic adventure of its own. We had a story conference here in L.A. three months ago, and I laid it on the line to him. He had to come up with a new document.”

  “Yeah, and he said it would be no problem,” Jack said. “That he’d have it done in two weeks.”

  Helen nodded. “We kept setting deadline after deadline, all the while vamping with material from the old document. By then the ratings had dropped. The network began to complain to United. And United began to complain to me. I hopped on Quentin’s back. And now...now he’s dead.”

  “Helen,” Jack said gently.

  She’d begun to cry. Real tears, this time. “I killed him,” she said. “I hounded him to his death—the poor, sweet bastard. I made his last months a living hell. Christ, how we fuck with other people’s lives.”

  Jack put Helen Rose to bed. I’d wanted to ask her a few more questions, but she’d had it for the night. Frankly, I didn’t see how she would possibly make it through the next day—she seemed that raw and depleted.

  But when I said something about it to Jack, he didn’t seem concerned. “Don’t worry about Helen, Harry. She’s used to living on the ragged edge. She’s a helluva lot tougher and more cagey than she looks. Don’t believe for a minute that she meant everything she said tonight about Dover, by the way.”

  “She was lying about him?” I said.

  “Not exactly. She’s a schmoozer, not a liar. She believes in what she’s saying while she’s saying it, but the belief doesn’t go very deep or last very long. Look at the way she behaved tonight. One minute she’s screaming about how Quentin betrayed her and the next she’s crying because he’s dead. Her feelings don’t make any sense until you remember that she’s playing the part of a producer—a man’s role. With Helen, you learn to listen through the bullshit—the ‘darlings’ and the ‘babys’ and all the melodramatic, self-congratulatory scenes. You sift through it and try to figure out what’s really bothering her, because that’s who she’s always talking about. Herself. I mean her real self—the part that she thinks she has to hide. In this case, she’s just gone through a hellish three months with a troubled show. So dying has been on her mind a lot. That’s what she was really crying about. The show, not Quentin.”

  I could accept that the woman had been talking about herself most of the time, that the innocence and screwball integrity she’d read into Quentin’s life were apologies for the compromises that she’d had to make in order to survive in a world where even the cops and the bellboys would do anything to become stars. But I wasn’t completely willing to accept, with Jack, that she hadn’t meant what she’d said. She’d seen Dover from the top down; Jack had seen him from the bottom up. And she had enjoyed him for putting up the front that disgusted Moon. It made me realize that Jack had had a much tougher time adapting to Quentin Dover’s world than he’d wanted me to believe. I’d already seen him have a tough time adapting to Helen Rose.

  He must have been thinking about the same things, as we wandered back down the flower-scented paths of the Belle Vista gardens to the lobby. There weren’t any lights along the paths, which surprised me a little; it was so dark that I could scarcely see him, even though he was standing beside me.

  “Wouldn’t you think?” he said softly, “that you could find a job that you actually enjoyed doing? That doesn’t seem like much to ask for, does it? Just good, interesting work? And I don’t mean something cushy or purposeless. I mean a normal, nine-to-five job that you were suited for, that fit what little talent you had. That doesn’t seem like much to ask for, does it?”

  “In one way, it doesn’t,” I said. “In another, it’s asking a lot.” I thought of what Helen Rose had said about Jack expecting to turn a corner and find justice.

  “Frank Glendora’s got it,” Jack mused. “So does Helen. And so did Quentin Dover. He just changed the rules some and lied his way into a suitable position. He was a good liar—I can’t take that away from him. And I’m not.”

  He said it sadly, as if he were pronouncing a sentence of doom on himself.

  “Would you like to have a nightcap, Jack?” I asked.

  I could see his teeth glimmer in a smile. “Yes. I think I could use one. I’ve been wondering, though.”

  “Wondering what?”

  “Wondering how you ever became a detective.”

  I laughed. “I wonder about that, too.”

  12

  IT WAS three-thirty A.M., Cincinnati time, when we got back to the Marquis. Jack was pretty stewed and so was I. But mostly I was tired.

  “You’re a good guy, Harry,” Jack said, clapping me on the back. “A good guy. I used to be a good guy, too, until I joined this goddamn circus.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Jack,” I said. “You’re still a good guy, and you know it.”

  He threw his hand at me. “That’s what you think. I’m a rat. A rat in a tinsel maze. And what I don’t understand is how come what you do doesn’t make a rat out of you. How is that?”

  “Let’s talk about it tomorrow,” I said with a yawn.

  “You think it’s a flaw in my character? A fatal flaw?” He began to laugh. “You know what the worst sin is?”

  “Keeping somebody up past his bedtime?”

  “Naw. That’s venial. It’s sloth, Harry. You know, sloth? Acedia? Going along with it when you know it isn’t right? Going along with it because you’re too scared not to, because you need the security of a job, of a few measly bucks.”

  “Then we’re all sinners, Jack. And I’m going to sleep.”

  I left him berating himself in the hotel lobby and took the elevator up to my room. There was an envelope marked “Message” under the door. Frank Glendora had phoned at eight P.M. to check up on me. I was glad I hadn’t been there to take the call. I had nothing to report, except that Quentin Dover was still safely dead. I chucked the envelope in a wastebasket, lay down on one of the king-sized beds, and fell asleep.

  ******

  There was another message envelope on the floor when I woke up at nine the next morning. This one was from Jack Moon, telling me that he’d already gone to the Belle Vista for a meeting with Walt Mack and Helen and that I should join them there for lunch around noon. After what I’d heard about him the night before, I was looking forward to meeting Mack. As far as I was concerned, the Dover case was a subculture freak show and, by all reports, Mack was one of the main attractions. I didn’t want to leave Los Angeles without taking him in—it would have been like going to Coney Island and skipping the rollercoaster ride.

  I had a crate of California produce for breakfast—Jack hadn’t been wrong about that—and after showering and shaving I phoned Harris Sugarman, Quentin’s agent. The fact that Dover had come to L.A. two days earlier than usual was just about the only thing I had to go on. And what I’d heard the night before—about Quentin’s problems on ‘Phoenix’—made it that much more interesting. I got through to Sugarman’s secretary and managed to talk her into letting me speak with her boss. The man had a soft, weary, vaguely dissatisfied voice that made him sound as if he’d just got done talking to someone he didn’t like.

  “What exactly do you want to see me about?” he said after I’d told him who I was and why I was in L.A.

  “About Dover,” I said.

  “And what do you expect me to tell you? That the man was a saint?”

  “I have s
ome specific questions.”

  “Yeah, sure you do,” he said grumpily. “All right. I’ll have a drink with you. But I’m not doing it for Frank Glendora or for United. I’m doing it for a dead friend.”

  The way he talked, I had the feeling that most of his friends were dead. I arranged to meet him at the Belle Vista at eleven, then dressed and went down to the Marquis lobby.

  Outside it was a bright, cloudless, beautiful August Thursday, without any of the Cincinnati stickiness that turns a summer day into a rite of passage between air conditioners. I caught a cab to the Belle Vista and instead of going straight to the bar, I spent ten minutes walking up Green Canyon Road—the street I’d seen through the gate in the hotel wall. Unless Dover had spent all day Saturday fasting in his room, he must have come out sometime, just to get a bite to eat. I thought, perhaps, he might have slipped out through the gate. But there weren’t any restaurants on Green Canyon. It was a residential street, full of tall oak trees and private drives, circling up into the green walls of the canyon. I followed it for about half a mile, and when my ambition gave out, I walked back down to the Belle Vista.

  On the way back I stopped at the gate and peered through it into the courtyard. At that time of the morning, the oak trees didn’t shade the lawn, and the whole court was drenched in white sunlight. The smell of the flowers drifted through the gate like the aroma of spices from a kitchen cabinet. There wasn’t a person in sight—on the street or in the court. And the only sound was the hammering of woodpeckers high in the oaks. The place couldn’t have been more deserted if it were in the middle of Montana.

  I followed the wall around to the parking lot in front of the hotel. It was a large lot, full of Porsches, BMW’s, and several Rolls Corniches. Given all the cars, I was surprised again at how tranquil and unpeopled the place seemed to be. The very rich were also apparently the very demure. The only person in sight was the parking lot attendant—a slick-looking kid in a white shirt and black pants, who was leaning against one of the struts of the canopy above the bridge. I walked over to him and he straightened up and smiled.