Natural Causes Page 9

  “Just that he was making half a million dollars a year. Why?”

  “Sugarman said something about bad investments.”

  Jack shrugged. “You’d have to talk to Marsha or to Connie about that. Or to Quentin’s lawyer, maybe. As far as I knew, he was doing all right. Which is to say that he was only spending about twenty-five percent more than he earned. Like most of them out here, Quentin didn’t know the meaning of the word ‘enough.’”

  Jack looked up suddenly. “Here they come—Olivia and Malvolio.”

  “What does that make you?” I asked him. “Sir Toby?”

  “That was Quentin’s role,” he said dryly. “I am the Prince.”

  14

  HELEN ROSE and Walt Mack walked over to our table. The woman was wearing a red blouse and dark blue skirt. Walt Mack was dressed in red and blue, too. He had on a dark red, kid leather sportscoat, a salmon-colored shirt with a thin black tie knotted at the collar, and blue jeans.

  “I don’t think you two have met yet,” Helen said, squeezing in beside me. “Harry Stoner, this is Walt Mack—our new head writer.”

  “Congratulations,” I said, holding out a hand.

  Mack said thanks and shook with me. He was very thin and tan, medium height, moustached, nice-looking in a clean-cut, collegiate, Tony Perkins-like way. If I hadn’t already been told that he was gay, I wouldn’t have guessed. He had none of the usual mannerisms. The other surprising thing about him was his age. I’d expected a man in his late thirties—like Dover himself. But Walt Mack couldn’t have been more than twenty-six or twenty-seven.

  “Let’s order quick,” he said as he sat down. “I’m starving. And I’ve got to get back home by two.” He turned to Helen. “Did you see the scene I wrote for Carlotta, the one in the bar?”

  Helen smiled.

  “Notice what she was drinking?” Mack said. “A double martini with an olive. I put that olive in for you, sweetie.”

  The woman laughed loudly. “She’s got my booze. I wish I had her thighs. Did you see her in that bikini on the remote, Jack?”

  Moon nodded. “Did you see Hal Walker? Christ, we’ve got to keep his clothes on, Walt.”

  “His and a few others,” Helen said, raising an eyebrow.

  “It’s unattractive,” Jack said.

  “I still wish I had Carlotta’s thighs. They look like they’re made of steel. And that ass!”

  “I hear she’s been spreading it around some,” Mack said.

  “No,” Jack said, looking hurt.

  Helen nodded at him. “I’m afraid so. She’s been shtupping Paul List, and she’s six weeks pregnant. She came in last week and told me. It’s supposed to be a secret,” she said, glancing at Walt.

  He grinned.

  “Jesus,” Jack said. “What are we going to do about that?”

  “I’ll handle it in the breakdowns,” Mack said.

  “Don’t worry, Jack. It’s a blessing in disguise. We’ll just have Hal rape her, as well as beat her up.”

  “Yeah, but Carlotta’s the Bitch.” Jack looked at Helen. “Do we want a pregnant Bitch?”

  “I’m thinking about it,” Helen said. “I’m thinking I love it. But then what do we do about Hal and Cecily?”

  “Who cares about Cecily?” Walt said. “I’ve been telling you for months—she’s boring. You saw the results of the test groups. Nobody likes her. I think we should pull a Danny Meeghan.”

  They all laughed and I said, “What’s a Danny Meeghan?”

  Mack smiled at me. “Excuse us, Harry. We’re just used to talking shop. Danny Meeghan was a character on one of the soaps back in the mid-sixties and he has since become apocryphal. He was a popular young character for a while, then he started to fade—fast. The writers decided to write him out of the show. Usually that’s easy enough to do. You send the guy out of town on a business trip or something.”

  “Far out of town,” Jack said.

  “But in Danny’s case, that wasn’t possible. He’d been crippled in a car accident in the backstory—so he was housebound. He could have been sent to a hospital; but that would have meant writing a long bit about him getting sick, and then there would have had to have been bits about how the other characters reacted to his illness. It would have taken forever, and the writers wanted him to go fast. So one day they had somebody wheel Danny upstairs to his room. And he never came back down.”

  I stared at him. “He never came back down?”

  “Nope,” Mack said. “He’s been up there for the last fifteen years.”

  “Didn’t anybody miss him?”

  “Only his agent,” Mack said. “You can do just about anything you want on a soap, Harry. The audience has got an astonishingly short attention span. That’s why we do two or three minutes of prologue at the start of each show—to remind them of what they’re watching.”

  “He just disappeared, huh?”

  “It’s a tough world,” Walt Mack said. “They disappear all the time.”

  “About Cecily?” Helen said. “What kind of guarantee does she have?”

  Jack said, “I think she’s two a week. But she’s up for renewal at the end of September.”

  “How fast can we get rid of her?” Helen asked Walt.

  “Like that!” He snapped his fingers.

  Helen laughed. “Be serious, Walt. Is she worth renewing for another thirteen at a guaranteed two?”

  Mack groaned. “I think it’s a mistake. She’s boring; the audience hates her; and so do I. I think we should get rid of her right away. A car hits her, and that’s it!”

  “You’ve got to learn that you can’t have everything your own way, babe,” Helen said a bit sharply. “You may hate her, but I’ve got a feeling that we’re going to get a lot of mail if we give her the fast shuffle. That so-called audience sample has been wrong before.”

  Jack laughed. “We interview a few ladies every other month, Harry, to get feedback on the show.”

  “I’m still willing to take the chance on Cecily,” Mack said.

  “And I’ll remember you said that,” Helen told him. “All the mail goes to your office, Walt. Jack, make a note—Walt gets all the Cecily mail.”

  A waitress came over and took our orders. Then the three of them started talking about the show again. I was beginning to get an amusing sense of the group’s dynamics, and Walt Mack was clearly its star. He was a fast, articulate, enthusiastic talker. And while I didn’t always understand the reasons for what he said, he clearly had a reason in mind. If he had an obvious weakness, it was his reluctance to concede any of his points. He only had a few of them, which he kept coming back to, again and again, rephrasing the ideas each time, as if the objections that the other two had raised were merely matters of semantics. Next to him, Jack appeared to be a very deep thinker, indeed. He didn’t say much, and when he did speak, it was usually to a question of fact. Helen was the most changeable of the three. She was, by turns, amused, touched, irritated, and intimidated by Mack’s enthusiasms. In that respect, she was no different than she’d been the night before. But because I’d seen her at the end of an evening, I had a clearer sense of what was going on behind those changes. For all the passion he put into arguing his position, Walt Mack seemed uninterested in ‘Phoenix’ compared to Helen Rose. The only sense of involvement I got from him was with his own ideas, as if, to Walt, the whole conversation was a matter of hoarding your points and conceding as little as possible to anyone else. It made him seem his age or younger—jejune, vain, and a little stupid in the way that bright, young men seem stupid when they act as if a thought of their own, any thought, is precious because it could be their very last one.

  I wanted to jump into the conversation myself and ask Mack a few things. Like why he’d apparently been spreading the rumors about Dover that had led to me being hired. And why he’d claimed that he’d been “carrying” Quentin for the past two years. But there just didn’t seem to be any room for me to edge in.

  Helen and Walt argued
before lunch about something called a “crossover set.” And as soon as lunch ended, they started again.

  “We need it, Helen,” Mack said. “You’ve been on my back for two years about the number of sets in the breakdowns.”

  “And you know why,” she said. “We’re running fifty grand over budget as it is, Walt.”

  “All the more reason to build a crossover set. It’ll end up saving us money, Helen—that’s my whole point—by cutting down on the number of sets we have to use.”

  She laughed unhappily. “I gave you Cecily. I gave you Carlotta. What more do you want, Walt?”

  “I want it all, sweetie.” He’d meant it to sound funny, but it didn’t come out that way. Walt ducked his head and said, “Right now I want a crossover set. In town. Convenient to everyone. A place to meet. A restaurant. A bar. A gift shop. Something. Do you know what we have to go through to get people together now? Jesus, it takes two or three days to arrange a meeting and at least that many sets.”

  “I know,” Helen conceded. “Let me think about it, O.K.?”

  Walt raised his hands—palms up—as if he were surrendering. “That’s all I’m asking, Helen. Just that you think about it.”

  Moon shook his head disgustedly. “Sure,” he said under his breath.

  Mack glanced at his watch. “Christ, I’ve got to get going. It’s a quarter of two.”

  “And we’ve got to meet the network,” Helen said dismally.

  Jack looked at me. “Jesus, Harry, I’m sorry. You didn’t get a chance to ask Walt any questions.”

  Mack smiled graciously. “If you want to talk to me, Harry, you’re welcome to come over to my place. It’s only a few miles from here. I’ve got a call to make, but after that I’m free for the afternoon.”

  “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble,” I said. “I’ll take you up on it.”

  “No trouble at all,” he said. “Tell you what, I’ll go collect the car and you can meet me in the lot. I’ve got a blue Porsche 928.”

  Mack got up, kissed Helen on the cheek, and left.

  “What a pain in the ass!” Jack said once he’d walked out the door. “It’s going to be like this from now on, Helen. The Walt Mack Hour.”

  “Maybe he’ll change,” she said without conviction. “I gotta go, too. Are you coming, Jack?”

  “Just a minute. I’ll pick up the tab.”

  Helen left and Jack went up to the register to pay the bill. As we were walking out of the bar, I asked him, “How come I got invited home?”

  He smiled. “Well, Harry, either Walt’s got an interest in you or he wants to appear cooperative to the right people. That boy knows which side his butt is buttered on, and it wouldn’t do to upset the United brass. Jesus, to hear him in there you would have thought he was Quentin Dover reborn.”

  “Dover was like that?”

  “A little slower, a little more considerate, a little more adept at hiding his ego. But he always had an answer—just like young Walt. Hell, they worked together for two years. I guess it would be surprising if he didn’t show a family resemblance.”

  “See you tonight?” I said.

  “Yeah. After six at the Marquis.”

  Jack veered off to the left, down the pathway that led to the south quadrangle, and I continued on through the lobby and out to the lot.

  15

  IT TOOK Walt Mack about fifteen minutes to get to his house by the beach. We drove down Sunset Boulevard to the Coast highway, then due south for a few miles to Pacific Palisades. Mack parked the Porsche in a little turnoff above a cove, then we walked up a flight of railed, salt-whitened stairs to a fenced compound. Walt unlocked the gate and said, “Watch your step. It’s slick.”

  I stepped through the gate onto a plank court fronting a row of two-story bungalows. Each bungalow had its own entryway, running off the common court and up to the front door. Mack’s house was the third in a series of five. They were all built in the same beach-house style—cedar shakes on the outer walls, flat shingled roofs, windowless first floors with redwood spilings underneath them, and huge sliding glass doors and balconies on the second floors, where the houses peeked over the fence and looked out on the ocean.

  “Nice,” I said.

  Mack shrugged. “I want one in Malibu—right down on the beach. Maybe I’ll get one now. It’s been a dream of mine.”

  He opened the door and I followed him into a narrow tiled hall. There was a decorative mirror on one wall and a brass clothes tree on the other. Mack stripped off his jacket, draped it on the tree, then pulled off his tie and unbuttoned his shirt.

  “Jesus, I hate wearing ties,” he said, studying himself in the mirror. “Why don’t you go upstairs and make yourself comfortable, Harry, and I’ll get this phone call out of the way.”

  He pointed to a circular staircase off the hall. I walked up to the second floor. There was another hall at the top of the stairs with a doorway on either side of it—the right-hand door led to a room at the back of the house, the left to the room with the balcony. I turned left—into a small den with white, stippled plaster walls and a glossy hardwood floor. There were only a few pieces of furniture in the room—a gray silk davenport; a low, candy red Parsons table in front of the couch; and a black Barcelona chair to the left of the table. The sliding glass door dominated the room. Through it I could see the cove on the other side of Highway One and, beyond the cove, the huge expanse of the Pacific Ocean, breaking on the beach in white, even, sunlit waves. It was the first time I’d seen the Pacific since I’d come home from ‘Nam. I stared at it, listening to the rush and boom of the breakers.

  Beneath me, on the first floor, Walt Mack was talking softly on the phone. The sounds of the ocean covered his voice, but now and then I caught a word. And once I heard him distinctly.

  “Fine, Mother,” he said. “Everything’s fine.”

  I sat down on the Barcelona chair and waited for him to finish with Mom. There was only one picture hanging on the white walls—a huge lithograph called “Telephone.” It was by Richard Lindner, and, like most of Lindner’s stuff, it was deliberately overripe and repellent. This one featured two stylized grotesques—a man and a woman—talking to each other on phones. The woman had huge purple breasts, and the man wore a trenchcoat and slouched hat. I wouldn’t have been able to live with it, but then I wouldn’t have rushed home to call Mom, either.

  After a time, Mack came upstairs. He stood in the entryway and looked at me in a friendly, slightly curious way.

  “You want a drink, Harry?” he said.

  “Yeah, I’ll take a Scotch. No ice.”

  Mack went down the hallway and came back a few minutes later with two glasses of booze. He handed one of them to me, then walked over to the davenport and sat down.

  “You ever been to L.A. before?” he said, stirring the drink with his fingertip.

  “When I was in the Army,” I said.

  “You were in ‘Nam?”

  I nodded.

  He leaned back against the couch and took a sip of booze. Away from Helen Rose and Jack Moon, Mack seemed like a different man—a much quieter, much more phlegmatic personality. I thought perhaps the phone call home had taken something out of him. Or perhaps he just didn’t know what to do with me.

  “It’s been a long couple of days,” he said, as if he’d been reading my mind. “And I’m worn out. You know, it’s a funny thing. I’ve waited years to get this break. Paid a lot of dues. And now that I’ve got it...” He stared out the window at the surf. “I wonder if it was worth the trouble.”

  “I thought you wanted the job,” I said.

  Mack stirred up a smile. “Sometimes it’s hard to know if you really want something until after you’ve gotten it, if you know what I mean.”

  It sounded like the sort of thing you said when you’d strong-armed your way into someone else’s job, but then I’d heard a lot of things about Walt Mack.

  “You want to talk about Quentin, don’t you?” he said.

&nb
sp; “Yeah. I want to ask you a few questions.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “I’m willing to answer your questions. But I’d like to ask you something first.”

  “What?”

  “As I understand it, Quentin’s death has been ruled an accident by the coroner’s office. Is that true?”

  “The preliminary autopsy indicated death by natural causes, yes.”

  “Then why are you investigating him?”

  “I thought maybe you could help me answer that question,” I said.

  “Me?” He pointed to himself. “Why me?”

  “Frank Glendora hired me because he’d heard rumors about Dover’s private life. It’s my impression that you were the one who’d been spreading those rumors.”

  Mack laughed nervously. “Who told you that—Jack or Helen? I’m sure it wasn’t Glendora. I’ve only met the man a few times.”

  “It’s no secret that you didn’t like Quentin.”

  “There was nothing there to like,” he said coolly. “Dover had a personality like a black hole. He sucked in everything around him and gave nothing back in return. I suppose some people found that fascinating or alluring or sad. I didn’t. I wasn’t taken in by his act, that’s all.”

  “And others were?”

  “Yes,” he said with a bitter smile. “Others were.”

  “Dover came to L.A. on Friday of last week, instead of on Sunday. He made a special trip. Do you know why?”

  “No,” Mack said. “We hardly talked to each other, outside of weekly story conferences and occasional phone calls.”

  “Did he say anything at the last story conference—anything that might explain why he came in on Friday?”

  “No,” Mack said again. “I told you—outside of business, we didn’t travel in the same circles.”

  “And he didn’t get in touch with you this weekend?”

  Mack glared at me. “Did somebody tell you that he did?”

  I said no.

  But he didn’t believe me. “I can just imagine what Jack and Helen have been saying. And they claim I’m the one with the big mouth!” He laughed scornfully. “The last time I saw Quentin Dover was a week ago Monday at the Belle Vista. And he didn’t say anything. He just sat there, popping pills and smiling. He’d take another pill and smile a little more. He was a burned-out house, Harry. There was nobody home—just the rats in the rafters.”