Natural Causes Page 8

  “Can I help you?” he said. He was the same kid whom Jack had tipped the night before—the one who wanted to be in the movies. I thought someday he might make it. He looked a little like a young Dennis Hopper, with a touch of Mexican blood.

  “How come it’s so quiet?” I asked him.

  “House rules,” he laughed. “Didn’t I see you here last night?”

  I nodded. “You’ve got a good eye for faces.”

  “What else is there to do?” he said with a shrug. “Except stare at the cars.”

  “Do you remember a man named Quentin Dover? He was a regular here, I think.”

  The kid gave me the kind of blank look that I’d learned to read over the last fifteen years. It was like the place on the menu where they say the price varies with the season. I pulled a twenty out of my wallet, and it started to come back to him.

  “Sure, I remember him. He was the guy who croaked in 310.”

  “That’s him, all right.”

  “You a reporter?”

  I shook my head. “I’m a P.I.”

  “No shit,” he said. “I thought maybe you were with The Enquirer. Sometimes they come around after somebody in show business croaks. They give good bread.”

  “Were you working here last weekend?” I asked.

  “Every weekend,” he said. “I don’t mind. I see it as an investment in the future. Somebody might spot me, take an interest. You know?”

  From the look of him I wasn’t sure what kind of interest he meant. I supposed it didn’t matter, as long as they gave good bread.

  “Did you see Dover on the weekend?”

  “I saw him here on Friday when he checked in,” the kid said. “I got one of the rental cars for him that night.”

  “He went for a ride?”

  “I guess.”

  “Did he have anything with him when he left? A briefcase or a valise?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did you see him come back?”

  “Naw, I checked out eleven-thirty, a quarter of twelve. But the car was back in the lot on Saturday morning when I came in.”

  “Did you see any more of him that weekend?”

  The kid smiled. “Only on Monday, when Maria found the body. I took a couple of snaps, you know?”

  “Just in case The Enquirer came around?”

  He smiled. He was one sweet kid, all right.

  “Is Maria working here today?”

  “I think so. The cops hassled her some because her work permit expired. But I think the hotel fixed it up.” He gave me a speculative look and said, “She’s a good piece of ass, Maria.”

  “Where could I find her?” I heard myself say.

  He looked at his watch. “It’s ten-fifteen, so she’s probably working the south quadrangle. They may be quiet around here, but they don’t come any different than you or me. The sheets get just as stiff and sticky.”

  I guessed that was one way of saying that the rich put their pants on a leg at a time. I gave him the twenty and he slipped it into his shoe.

  “You know Maria don’t turn tricks while she’s on duty,” he said, straightening up.

  My conscience got the best of me and I said, “That’s not why I wanted to see her.”

  “Sure,” he said with a smirk. “Well, if you need anything else, just let me know.”

  I walked over the bridge to the lobby, where the prim-looking woman was sitting at the front desk.

  “Hello again,” she said cheerfully. “Are you here to see Miss Rose?”

  “I’m going to meet her for a drink.”

  “Fine.”

  “Do you happen to remember what room she’s in? I forgot to look last night.”

  “She’s in 302.”

  “That’s the south quadrangle?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I walked out the French doors into the first courtyard. The building behind it was apparently the Belle Vista’s bar and restaurant. It had picture windows set in its stucco facade. Although the glass was heavily tinted, I could see the outlines of a few tables inside.

  I followed the same pathway that Jack and I had taken the night before. In the daylight, I could see the signs that Moon had mentioned, identifying the genus and species of the exotic plants and trees. The midday heat made the smell of the flowers almost overpoweringly sweet and just the slightest bit rancid, as if the sun were burning the bougainvillea off their stalks.

  I got to the southernmost courtyard and took a look around. Helen Rose’s room was in the building on the left. The door was open and I could hear a buzz of conversation coming from inside. There was another stucco building on the right side of the court, with the gated wall running between. I walked up to the right-hand veranda and began peeking into windows. Most of the rooms were unoccupied. There is nothing quite as bleak and uninviting as an empty hotel room—even if it is in the Belle Vista Hotel. I was halfway up the walk when I heard the sound of a vacuum cleaner coming from a nearby door.

  I looked inside 307 and saw a black-haired girl in a white uniform bent over a Hoover. She had a Sony Walkman on her head. It must have been playing salsa, because the girl was mamboing to the beat and slapping the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner on the carpet in time to the music. I knocked at the door, and when she didn’t look up, I shouted “Hello in there!”

  The girl jerked the Walkman off her head and shoved it into the pocket of her dress. Then she patted her thick black hair down, clicked off the vacuum, and turned around. She had black eyes and a high-cheeked, pretty, Indio face.

  “Yes?” she said with a “j” instead of a “y.” “Can I help you?”

  The kid in the lot had been right about one thing—she was a sexy-looking girl. She had round hips and small, pointed breasts that were clearly visible through the thin fabric of her uniform. She gave me a quizzical look and tugged casually at her collar.

  “Can I help you,” she said again.

  “I’d like to talk to you, Maria.”

  The girl frowned. “How come you know my name? I don’ know yours.”

  “My name is Harry. I got your name from the kid in the parking lot.”

  “From Jerry, huh?” she said, as if it suddenly made sense to her. She eyed me curiously. “Wha’chu wanna talk about?” she said.

  “About what happened here on Monday.”

  “You a cop?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then wha’chu wanna know about that for?”

  “I’ve got my reasons.” I pulled another twenty out of my wallet and held it up to the light. It had worked on Jerry. And this one looked just as wised-up as he had been.

  Maria sashayed over to me.

  “What’s that for?” she said coyly.

  “For a little information.”

  “About Monday, huh?”

  She was almost on top of me—so close I could smell her. She smelled interestingly of sweat and flowers. The girl wet her top lip with the tip of her tongue.

  “I like to help you, Harry,” she said sweetly. “But I got work I gotta do. You know?” Maria’s time was apparently valuable—like everyone’s in L.A.

  I waved the twenty under her nose. “I might be able to dig up a few more of these, for a little cooperation.”

  “I tol’ the cops what I know,” she said.

  “I’d still like to talk.”

  She nodded slowly, mulling it over. “Maybe I talk to you,” she said after a time. “But it’ll cost’chu more than that.”

  “How much more?”

  “I gotta think about it.” She pivoted on one foot and eyed the twenty greedily, as if she wanted to eat it for a snack. “I gotta talk to a few people, you know? Check everythin’ out.”

  If she’d just had some trouble with the cops, I could understand her cautiousness, although Jerry the carhop was probably the only person she would check me out with.

  “You stayin’ at the Belle Vista?” she asked.

  “I’m at the Marquis.”

  “Oh, yeah? Tha
t’s some nice place, man. Maybe I call you there tonight.”

  “Ask for Harry Stoner,” I said.

  She gave me a cagey grin. “Maybe we do more than talk, huh?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  She plucked the twenty out of my hand and tucked it in her bosom, deliberately giving me a look at her breasts. “Bring some of his brothers, O.K.? We coul’ have a party.”

  Maria stuck the Walkman on her head and strolled back to the vacuum cleaner. She turned the Hoover on with her foot, bent down to lift up the nozzle, and wiggled her ass at me as she stood up.

  “Mercy,” I said to myself.

  13

  IT WAS somehow reassuring to discover that extortion and sex were alive and well on the south quadrangle of the Belle Vista Hotel. The place had seemed staid unto death, before I met Maria the maid and her pimp, Jerry. I walked back up the flowered pathway, chuckling over my secret, and went into the bar behind the lobby courtyard.

  It was dark and relatively empty at eleven in the morning. It was nothing special at any hour of the day—just a leather bar rail with chrome-spouted bottles lined up on mirrored tiers behind it. A large cocktail lounge was built around the bar, with horseshoe-shaped, tufted leather booth seats jutting out from the walls. I sat down at a booth near the door and a waitress came by to take my order.

  “Scotch—up,” I told her. “I’m expecting somebody at eleven, so if a guy comes in and asks for Harry Stoner, point him in this direction.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The girl brought me a Scotch, and a few minutes later she brought me a paunchy, balding, gray-haired man in a blue pin-striped suit—like second prize in a raffle.

  “You Stoner?” he said in a hostile voice. He had a big walrus moustache that moved instead of his mouth when he talked.

  “I’m Stoner.”

  “Sugarman,” he said abruptly and sat down across from me. He was wearing huge square glasses with thick bifocal lenses tinted brown on the tops. His dark eyes and big-pored cheeks looked squeezed in behind them, reduced in size by the lenses so that you could see a little bit of the room on either side of his face.

  “I’ll take bourbon on the rocks,” Harris Sugarman said to the waitress. “Put it on his tab.”

  “Yes, sir,” the girl said.

  Sugarman pulled a huge cigar out of his coat pocket and bit off the end. He picked the cigar tip out of his mouth, dropped it in a glass ashtray, and wiped a few strands of loose tobacco from his tongue. “You got until this is half smoked,” he said, lighting the cigar. He puffed on it a few times, filling the booth with smoke.

  “I want to ask you a couple of questions about Quentin.”

  “It’s your dime,” he said.

  “Did you see him or talk to him this weekend?”

  Sugarman chewed on the fat cigar. “Nope.”

  “Was Quentin working on another project for television?”

  He shook his head.

  The girl came back with the bourbon. Sugarman swallowed it in one gulp and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Is that it?” he asked.

  “No. I’ve got a few more.”

  “Then, I’ll have another one of these,” he said to the waitress.

  “Quentin usually came into L.A. on Sunday. Last weekend he came in on Friday afternoon.”

  “So?” Sugarman said.

  “I had a talk with his mother and she thought he was coming in for a series of conferences about a new TV show.”

  “She thought wrong.”

  “Could he have been working with another agent?” I said. “On some special deal?”

  Sugarman laughed hoarsely. “No, sonny,” he said. “He could not have been working with anyone but Sugarman. Quentin and I go back too far—to the dawn of time.”

  “That far, huh?”

  He flicked the ash off his cigar and studied it like a watch. “You got about ten, twelve more puffs.”

  “I understand Quentin was having some trouble on ‘Phoenix.’”

  “Yeah. He was having a few problems. Nothing major.”

  “That’s not what I heard.”

  Sugarman sighed impatiently. “What did you hear?”

  “I heard that he hadn’t produced a thing in six months. And that because of him the show was in ratings trouble. I also heard that he didn’t write some of his own material, that he got his breakdown man to write it for him.”

  “You been talking to his enemies,” Sugarman said.

  “I’ve been talking to Helen Rose and Jack Moon.”

  “Let me explain a few things to you.” The girl brought him another bourbon and, this time, he took a small sip. “You don’t go talking to the producer and executive producer of a soap if you’re interested in finding out the truth. Naturally they’re going to blame the writer. It’s automatic. Like the Army, the game is cover your own ass. And with Helen Rose that goes double. Why? Because she’s a woman doing a man’s job. She practically had to suck Frank Glendora’s dick off to get the job in the first place. United does things by the book. Hell, they wrote the book. And, believe me, there ain’t a chapter in it says you hire a washed-up production assistant to run a daytime show. Glendora broke the rules when he gave Helen Rose the job. He knew it and so did she. Now the show is kaput. You wanna figure whose fault it is? Look and see who had the most to lose.”

  “A half million dollars isn’t exactly peanuts,” I said.

  “Quentin had other irons in the fire. Some real estate. A house in New Mexico. A mansion in Cincinnati. He would have done all right. He was a survivor, baby. Trust me on that.”

  “You sound like you knew him well.”

  “Since he was a kid,” Sugarman said. He glanced at his cigar. “The meter’s running.”

  “Why do you think he stopped writing six months ago?”

  “His health. His wife. He had problems with a couple of investments. Things just piled up on him. It happens. He would have snapped out of it. He had a lot of moxie, Quentin.”

  “Moon says he was all bluff—that he had nothing left.”

  “Who the fuck is Jack Moon?” Sugarman said angrily. “How many songs has he written? How many knocks did he take? I’ve handled Quentin since he was a twenty-two-year-old kid fresh from the sticks. I watched him work his way up from nothing on sheer guts. No experience, no contacts, no looks, no excuses. Just desire, sonny. And if you think that’s easy in this town, you’re an idiot.”

  “I thought he had family money.”

  “You been drinking from a Sterno can? Who you been talking to? I’m telling you the boy had nothing but the shirt on his back. He was one step above a bum.”

  “Why’d you take him on, then?” I asked.

  “He wanted it,” Sugarman said. “That’s why. There are those who want it and those who don’t. I never met a kid who wanted it more. He’d do anything for it. And he did.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean he had to pay some heavy dues. Capiche?”

  Sugarman pulled at his cuffs. “Time’s up,” he said, swallowing the rest of the bourbon. He stubbed the cigar out, got up, and left.

  A few minutes later Jack Moon walked into the bar. He spotted me at the table, came over, and sat down.

  “Helen and Walt will be along shortly. We’ve concluded negotiations—or paid the extortion money, depending on your viewpoint—and now we have a new head writer. And a long-term document.”

  “Great.”

  “Why so glum?” he said.

  “I just met Quentin’s agent.”

  “Sugarman? He’s a character, isn’t he?”

  “He’s something more than that,” I said, but I was thinking about Connie Dover. She’d certainly given me the impression that Quentin had been born to the life he led, although everyone else seemed to think that he’d either made it up out of whole cloth or eked it out like a farmer working the soil.

  Jack Moon was thinking about Sugarman. He eyed me nervously.
“Did Harris say something about the show?”

  What he really meant was—did he say something about me? He had said something, but it wasn’t worth repeating. “No,” I said. “He just made an impression, that’s all.”

  Jack smiled with relief. “He’ll do that, all right. Sugarman’s the old-style Hollywood agent, right down to the ten-dollar cigars. He’s a dinosaur compared to the new breed. You should talk to one of them someday, if you really want a laugh. They’re so laid back they have trouble standing up. At least Sugarman’s got a sense of who and where he is. Of course, his sense of himself is a little dated—like late nineteen-thirties. But he’s a step above the space cadets of today. What did he say about Quentin?”

  “He seemed to feel that he’d been going through a phase.”

  “His blue period?” Jack said. “That’s shit. Never trust an agent, Harry.”

  I laughed. “He told me never to trust a producer.”

  “That’s typical. Most agents look on us as the enemy. They foment an adversarial relationship with management just to give themselves alibis for collecting their ten percent. It’s ridiculous. If a writer was smart, he’d deal directly with the production company and save himself a lot of money. What else did he say?”

  “That Helen was to blame for ‘Phoenix’s’ problems.”

  “Helen doesn’t write the show. She produces it. Sure she can be difficult. I told you last night—she’s got a live-in identity crisis. But, believe me, once she gets in the studio, she’s all pro. She leaned over backward to give Quentin the benefit of the doubt. She put her neck on the line—and the show, to boot—to help snap Quentin out of it.”

  “Sugarman seemed to think that he would have snapped out of it. That it was mostly his health and Marsha that were bothering him.”

  “You don’t snap out of a quadruple bypass,” Moon said. “And if you don’t believe me, ask his doctor. Or his druggist. You don’t snap out of a rotten marriage, either. I don’t think Quentin had any intention of dumping on Marsha. He was dried up, I’m telling you. There was nothing left inside.”

  “No inner resources,” I said to myself. “What do you know about Dover’s financial situation?”