Alexander vastly preferred the scumballs of Hollywood, with their outrageous manners, disgusting perversions, unruly egos and uncontrollable behavior.
Poor Teresa. If she only knew what he was really like.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“TERESA, MAY I introduce Richard and Elektra?”
They were all pleased to meet each other. The meeting was taking place in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Teresa had taken a room. Rick at last saw the woman Boss had been talking about for weeks, and what he saw did not agree with what Hellstrom had described. Not at all. Did not agree with what he had heard about her, either. Italian countess, very highly placed in Eastern society, wealthy, intelligent and beautiful. Oh, beautiful, yes, nothing like Elektra, but a wonderful pouting lip and eyes as big and deceptive as a cat’s. A real high-tone bitch with that uppity Eastern cant to her voice.
Also she gave Rick the eye. There was no question about it. Boss was red-faced and happy, sitting there telling stories about their time at Lake Tahoe, and this bitch was making it clear she’d like to fuck Rick at the first possible opportunity. Elektra didn’t seem to notice anything. She sat laughing at Hellstrom’s jokes and stories and shoveling food into her face. And here came Kerry Dardenelle and Peter Wellman from the bar, Kerry already a little smashed and Wellman’s darshan glowing. More introductions, and they made room for the extra two, Rick conscious that every eye in the room watched their table.
Kerry took over the conversation at once, saying that they could only stay a moment, and then staying right through lunch, having drinks brought and babbling about all the horror of location in West Texas, where the two of them had been making a picture about life and love on a modern cotton farm, Texas-style. Kerry was terribly funny, as he always was, but Rick noticed a tremor in his hand and heavy deep circles under his eyes. Kerry worked as hard as he drank, and after a picture he was likely to disappear for a couple of months, some said into a hospital, others said into the tropics where he had his own island. Rick wanted both of them for his picture, but that was Boss Hellstrom’s job.
Rick watched Teresa out of the corner of his eye. Would she give Peter Wellman the look? Peter was considered one of the handsomest men in the world, although a bit short at five six, almost an inch shorter than Rick. But he did not see anything happen, and when, from time to time, Teresa would look in his direction, there it would be, intact, that catlike invitation to get under the building and screw.
Frankly, it made him sweat with desire. He could almost smell her, he could smell her, he wondered what would happen if he brushed his hand against the inside of her thigh under the table. He looked over at Elektra. She was looking at Peter Wellman with undisguised interest. Wellman sat with half a drink, picking up bits of food here and there with a cocktail toothpick, laughing when the punch lines came and generally behaving like the star he was.
From the other tables it must look as if we’re having just the most wonderful time, as befits our station in life, Rick thought. Kerry was now describing falling off one of the huge forklifts used to haul around these gigantic pallets of cotton, and they all laughed heartily, and everyone at the other tables cringed from being left out of the joke—see, they are rich and famous and funny and having the best time, is there no justice? Why don’t they have ulcers and overweight and bad breath and sore egos and black rotting consciences?
Ha ha, well, too bad for you! They have more fun than anybody, and they don’t mind shoving your nose in it.
“Garçon! A little more white wine and cracked crab!”
There was a television producer Rick had known a bit ago, staring at them from his own table of sycophants, ill-concealed venom in his eyes. Rick waved to him, winked, just to see the venom turn to a sweetly grin, eyes brighten with hope, the body half-rise in its seat, only to drop back down, disappointed by Rick’s failure to wave “come on over and meet the gang!” Somebody’s gopher was going to have his ass ripped off that afternoon, Rick thought without charity.
Elektra caught his eye and nodded in the subtlest way toward Teresa di Veccio. Elektra’s expression said much, with little apparent to an outsider. She had seen what Rick had seen. Not the flirtation, but the bitch quality. Elektra’s sleepy eyes said, “Whew, what a bitch, huh?” and Rick signalled back, “Uh-huh!”
Was Teresa aiming at Wellman? Didn’t seem so. Rick still had the inside track. There it was again, just a passing glance as her eyes went from Kerry across to Alexander for an intimate smile, pausing only long enough to plant one tiny erotic dart into Rick. I promise, it said, I promise to make you feel as you’ve never felt before!
Everybody at the table laughed, Rick included, although he hadn’t paid attention to the story.
The luncheon party broke up in front of the hotel as they all waited for their cars to be brought around. Kerry and Wellman got away first, but not before Kerry had taken Rick aside, and with his pouched and unhealthy-looking eyes shifty under Rick’s gaze, asked if Rick could get him some cocaine.
“We just need a l’il bit for a party,” he said.
“Gee, I’ll ask around,” Rick lied.
“Are you going to be on the lot this afternoon? I’ll be in my office.” Kerry maintained offices at Fox, Universal, the Burbank Studios and Paramount, as well as at Hellstrom’s studio.
“If I don’t call you, that means nothing’s happening,” Rick said. He did not want to middle coke for Kerry or anybody else in the business. All it led to were midnight phone calls and a damaged reputation. Here came his Mustang, and Rick was amused to see how everyone wanted to hold the door open for Elektra.
“Oh, let me ride with you,” Teresa said. “I’ll sit in back. I want to ask Elektra some questions.”
It was fine with everybody. Alexander said cheerfully, “I’ll see you later in my office,” and kissed her goodbye. Rick held the seat forward and Teresa ducked around him and brushed her body against him and smiled up hot enough to fry his brains.
They drove down the circular drive, and waited at the light. Elektra touched his hand on the gearshift briefly, as if to say, “I understand,” and turned around in her seat to talk to Teresa. They babbled about clothes for the ten minutes it took to get to the lot. At the gate, Teresa leaned forward, her head just behind his, and said hello to Charlie, shook his hand, and you should have seen his face redden as he chuckled and waved and saluted them through. He hadn’t even looked at Rick.
They drove around the Administration Building and Rick put his car under the tree reserved for him, not twenty feet from the back entrance to the building, a real prestige spot.
“What are you girls going to do this afternoon?” he asked politely. He thought they were going to watch some picture called Headhunter! about a man who sneaks through the night in this small town and beheads various people.
But no. Teresa, in her purring voice, took hold of Elektra’s hand, and said to Rick, “Is there anyplace the three of us can go? I’ve had a passion for you both all through lunch.”
She leaned forward and kissed Rick on the mouth, soft and moist, promising, a touch of tongue to his lips. Then she smiled up at him and turned and gave Elektra a kiss on the mouth, a deeper kiss, tongues engaged fully, her tiny hand on Elektra’s neck.
Rick could see Elektra’s one open eye, looking at him. “We could go to Errol Flynn’s apartment,” he said thickly.
“Ooh, that would be simply wonderful,” said the Countess di Veccio.
Elektra responded by kissing Rick softly and saying shyly, “I’m kinda horny, too, I guess.”
Rick’s heart swelled in his chest. He started the engine of the car again and they drove slowly and carefully down the dark street between sound studios, twisting and turning until they came to the apartment. They were quiet in the car until Rick turned off the engine again, and then Teresa said, “I can’t wait,” and in they went.
Rick had been to bed with two girls before—once with three—but he had never gone throu
gh anything like this. Usually the girls competed for his attention, catered to him, spending all their efforts in pleasing him, and so there was a slight air of the track meet about the whole business. But Teresa, my God, she seemed to want to suck up all the sex in the world, to have it all again, to use them both as puppets in her dance of love.
By the time Rick had the lights adjusted and the music on, the girls were both naked on the bed, entwined, Teresa sucking noisily on Elektra’s breasts. He had seen Elektra with women before, at the orgies that used to be held up above Sunset at the home of Margo Liston, the orgies that lasted several years, with only two- or three-day breaks when Margo had a commercial or went out of town. In those days if Margo hadn’t fucked your old lady you felt out of things. It’s only sex, and it makes the guy hotter than blazes to see, a lot more erotic than seeing some big dude crawl on top of her. Rick had been to bed with a man and a woman, but it had been under the politest of circumstances—the other man always kept hands off, and they played it straight heterosexual, letting the girl blow each of them in turn.
But this was different. Elektra’s eye bulged from desire and she waved frantically for Rick to join them, as Teresa’s tongue licked her body and her fingers kneaded Elektra’s breasts.
“Come to me, baby,” she said.
“I will,” he said, but he wanted to watch for a while. It was making him hornier than he had been in a long time, it was evil, the way this bitch went after what she wanted. But at last he crawled between them and found himself deep in a pleasure he had only guessed was possible.
They were still making their endless triangle on the bed, shiny with sweat and the stickiness of their juices, when Alexander walked in.
On Alexander’s face was a prepared expression of rage that changed at once to amazement as he stared unbelieving at Elektra, and stammered out, “Wha—what the hell are you . . .”
They stopped. Rick at once understood he had betrayed Alexander, a thought which simply hadn’t occurred to him up to now, as events flowed and Rick floated along. He looked at Teresa, whose lazy smile up at the baffled man included as much affection as contempt.
“Oh, Alexander,” she said. “I’m so sorry you had to . . .”
“Shut up,” he said without looking at her. He was still staring at Elektra.
The radio took this moment to play “As Time Goes By.”
“Aw,” Elektra said. “Pull down your pants and join us.”
“What?” said Alexander.
“Don’t be such a stuck-up,” she said.
“As long as you’ve caught us,” Teresa said, and went back to caressing Elektra’s shiny breast. The nipple was pink and hard from being bitten, and there were the beginnings of purple bruises.
“I’m sorry, Boss,” Rick said.
“It’s my fault,” Alexander said. “I should have knocked.” With a hopeless smile he said, without looking at Rick, “You’re late for a meeting.”
But that could not have been why Alexander had come down here. Rick’s car was in front, he must have known Rick was inside. That look on his face. What had he expected to find?
Then he was gone.
Teresa said, “Oh, don’t worry about him. He just doesn’t understand about sex.”
“What is there to understand?” Rick said.
“I have to be so careful with him,” she said. “I love the man, but he’s not . . . sexual. The way we are.”
Lazily, and in that Up East voice, Teresa told them about having to duck and dodge around Alexander in order to fuck waiters, elevator boys, gardeners, chauffeurs, store clerks, bus drivers, masseurs, tennis partners, strangers and friends. Elektra listened to this disquisition on nymphomania as if Teresa were talking about her art collection, nodding politely and stroking Teresa’s hair with one hand and Rick’s thigh with the other.
As for Rick, he was disgusted with himself. He was not free enough to see things Elektra’s way, and yet not enough of a hypocrite to pretend to be upset. He knew he had betrayed (that word again!) Alexander, but he didn’t feel bad about it. He knew there was no end to the trouble to come, but at the same time he still couldn’t believe that Alexander could be so naive about Teresa. Whore was written honestly across her face, along with breeding, intelligence and arrogance.
He got up and took a shower and when he came out the two girls were upside-down on each other and did not even sense that he was there. He dressed in the living room and got Joyce on the phone.
“I’ve been off the planet,” he said. “What’s new?”
“You missed a meeting,” she said.
So did you, he thought, but said, “Has the Boss called?”
The Boss had called, once. Rick said he would be in the office in ten minutes.
“Oh, you’re down there?” Joyce said in a hungry voice. Rick had brought her once to the apartment. Joyce had loved it, and was not a little upset that Elektra sometimes spent the night there with Rick. “I see it as our place,” Joyce had said, which was not how Rick saw it at all.
He hung up. There were little murmurs coming from the bedroom. With a heavy sigh, he left the place. He had hardly expected to feel like this, so soon after that.
But he did.
RICK MADE a lot of phone calls that afternoon. He spoke to his agent, his business manager and the attorney who ran Endless Unicorn Company for him. The information he got was disturbing. It was going to be difficult, very difficult, to pull away from Alexander Hellstrom if it should become necessary. There had been “financial interbreeding,” and the investors, under the guidance of their management team, were not as easily swayed by Rick’s intuitions, now that they had a handful of a major studio.
“What if I cashed out?” Rick asked his business manager, Sherman Frieberg.
“You mean you personally cash out?”
“That’s right.”
“After the tax consequences?”
“Cash money.”
Something under a million dollars. Probably more like half a million.
The trouble was, everybody liked the program, and this was no time to rock the boat.
As David Novotny put it, “What’s the matter, Richard?”
Boy, Man and Girl was heating up and Peter Wellman’s people were enthusiastic about the project and working with Rick’s team. The Lady in the Lake was virtually bought, for a healthy whack of change, and everyone was pleased and proud to be associated with the Chicano project, now called The Pickers, even though no one expected it to be the financial blockbuster the other two projects were shaping into. But nonetheless it was a project you could take pride in.
So why the panic calls?
“Suppose, between you and me, that Boss Hellstrom took a sudden dislike to me?” Rick asked David.
“What the hell have you done?” David wanted to know.
“Nothing. But you know how it is.”
“Richard, never bullshit your agent.”
Rick sighed and told David a scrubbed-up version of the afternoon’s events. It made him sweat, even though he left Elektra out of it, and only hinted that Teresa had been the aggressor.
“Can’t you keep that thing in your pants?” David said with some irritation. “You could literally fuck yourself out of a pretty good deal.”
“What’s done is done,” Rick said.
“Well, let me put it to you this way, young man. If the Boss decides to dump on you, you’re going to have to fight. Everything’s wired together. Your investors are not going to be happy that all the money we’ve spent up to now can be flushed down the toilet through your indiscretion. Their faith in you is all that keeps you in the driver’s seat, as you well know, and their money is all that keeps you on this lot, at the front table, as it were.”
“What can he do?”
“Stand in your way,” David said coldly.
After hanging up, Rick sat quietly for a few minutes. He could walk out this afternoon, and land on his feet with over half a million tax-free American d
ollars. He saw himself on a lonely windswept road, the bag of money at his feet.
It ground his guts to think of quitting. What would he do with the half million? Open a chain of laundromats? Go back to square one and make another low-budget picture?
Half a million wouldn’t even buy the house he was living in.
It made his skin crawl to think about being poor again.
So his skin crawled and his guts ground. He hiccupped sourly.
The buzzer buzzed and he almost jumped out of his chair. “Yes, Joyce?”
“Alexander Hellstrom on one.”
Rick almost, almost but not quite, said, “I’m in a meeting.”
“Hello, Boss,” he said.
He heard Hellstrom’s deep rich voice, almost in a chuckle: “If we put that little scene in a movie, they’d laugh us out of the business. Sorry about playing the heavy. I’ve got my wheels under me now.”
But that was not why he had called. He had just been on the telephone to New York and everyone there liked the way Boy, Man and Girl was shaping up.
“I think we should strike while the iron’s hot,” he said, “and tie up Kerry and Peter and your friend Dael Tennyson. With them and your screenplay we can really go to the bank. The timing’s just right. Kerry’ll be through cutting his Texas pastoral, Peter will be available—by the way, what’s the availability of Dael Tennyson?”
“We’re safe on that,” Rick lied. He would go see Dael as soon as possible and hogtie him.
The rest of the conversation had to do with the production department and Rick’s presentation of a budget to the studio. Budgets often broke the backs of promising projects, but Hellstrom didn’t seem worried. “Hell, that’s my specialty,” he told Rick. He truly did not seem bothered about the afternoon’s doings. Rick decided to test him:
The Hollywood Trilogy Page 55
