The Player

by Michael Tolkin

  She sat sideways in her chair. Griffin was surprised to see her clapping; he wouldn’t have thought she liked such a sentimental entertainer, but Neil Diamond was a strong performer, and he was only twenty feet away.

  Griffin touched her shoulder as he took his seat. “Having fun?”

  “Don’t tell anyone you saw me singing along with Neil Diamond.”

  He kissed her behind the ear, moving her hair aside to touch her neck. She leaned into the kiss, and he took a little breath, not so much to inhale her perfume as to rest for a moment.

  “Where were you?” she asked.

  “I wasn’t feeling well.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Why didn’t you say something? Is it your stomach?”

  “I was just feeling a little claustrophobic. I needed some air. I took a walk.”

  “You okay now?”

  “Fine.”

  “Poor baby.” She kissed him on the cheek, with a disappointing lack of pressure. Her lips were dry, it was halfway between a mommy kissing the cut and an old girlfriend giving a kiss for consolation after he’d come to her with the story of a disastrous affair. Her familiarity, which he thought at first signaled the understanding that they’d end up in bed, now promised a passionless friendship. She’d confide in him, but he’d never see her naked. He wanted to see her without her clothes. She needed to be convinced. She needed persuasion. He would negotiate with a few gestures. When she looked back at the singer, he kissed her just above the spot where her neck and collarbone met. She drifted a little, toward him. He put his hand between her chair and the small of her back, and he rubbed her waist. He thought she might hate this because he could grab an inch of fat, but if he stopped, then she’d think he was upset by the extra weight, and how much was it, ten pounds? More. He pushed his hand toward her stomach and then touched the bottom of her breast before letting go. He kissed her on the cheek, and then on the ear. She lowered her head a little, tilted it forward, offering her neck once again. It was another gesture from her grief.

  Levison was watching him. Griffin smiled at him, trying to look shy and proud. Levison grinned back, his lips pursed, and he nodded his approval of June, or of Griffin’s luck. Neil Diamond finished his song. Fifteen hundred people stood and cheered.

  Two women, one the wife of the head of an agency, the other the wife of the owner of a studio, came out onstage and presented the singer with an award for his contributions to the Motion Picture Home. Then they asked for the lights to be dimmed once again, and a movie screen descended and they introduced a film about the Home. June turned back in her chair and finished the wine remaining in her glass.

  “Do you want to stay?” asked Griffin.

  “You have to, don’t you?”

  “I don’t think so. Let’s go.” Griffin left his seat and walked around the table to Levison. He told him he was going.

  “I shouldn’t leave yet,” said Levison. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  June shook hands with Levison and his wife and said good-bye to the doctor. Griffin took her arm as they walked through the maze of tables, and after they had separated for a moment, she took his hand.

  The short-haired man was gone from the lobby. Outside, the limousine drivers stood by their cars and smoked. Griffin’s driver left a circle of five men and disappeared into the garage to get the car.

  “That was fun,” said June.

  “Did you want to stay?”

  “You’ve been to hundreds of these things. They must all be the same.”

  If he told her he loved them, what would she think?

  “I love them.”

  “I guess you’d have to; otherwise, how could you stay in the business?”

  “It’s all part of the game.”

  Their limousine was at the curb. The driver came around and opened June’s door. After she got in, he took Griffin around the back of the car.

  “I didn’t have anything better to do, so I found the Dodge Charger. There were some papers on the backseat. It looks like we were followed by someone from the Pasadena Police.”

  “Maybe he was following you,” said Griffin. His heart wanted to stop. What had he said to the man in the elevator? Had he confessed?

  “I haven’t been to Pasadena in four months, since the Rose Bowl.”

  “I don’t know when I was there. Maybe two years ago.”

  “Maybe they’re after your friend.”

  “Should we tell her?” asked Griffin. He thought this was his master-stroke question, it screamed his innocence.

  “That’s up to you.”

  “Hey, this is a first date. Let sleeping dogs lie, you know what I mean?”

  He winked, and as the driver opened Griffin’s door, he winked back. If he was expecting a larger tip, as hush money, Griffin wouldn’t pay it. Better to look unconcerned. After all, the problem was the woman’s, not his.

  He sat down beside June; their legs touched as the car changed lanes.

  “That was fun,” she said. The limousine entered the flow of cars on Wilshire. Other drivers and passengers tried to look through the tinted windows, but it was Griffin and June, invisible to them, who were the voyeurs. There was always a feeling of warm entitlement that came with riding in a limousine. Griffin was used to it; it was impossible to feel a kinship with ordinary people in dented, rusted cars with uncomfortable seats. If he lost the job, perhaps this would be the privilege hardest to give up. Yes, and he envied the really wealthy, who had private limousines, for whom the privilege was not an illusion, who had private jet planes and private helicopters. Is this privilege an illusion? They can take it away. But is it an illusion now? If they can take it away, then it’s not really mine, so yes. And June? If she was going to sleep with him tonight, and there was no reason she wouldn’t, if she was enchanted with him, then wasn’t she under the spell of the illusion? He was making himself sick with dizziness. This kind of thinking was beginning to hurt him. These spiraling questions! Perhaps if the limousine was his, and a helicopter and a jet plane were his, then he would finally be without illusions; he would see clearly into the true nature of things, into the reality of power.

  They came to a red light, and the driver caught Griffin’s attention in the rearview mirror. The Dodge Charger was beside them. The man from the elevator looked into the limousine. If he was tailing them, why had he come so close, or was he so stupid to think that the windows were dark on both sides?

  The light turned green and the limousine started, but then the engine died and they stopped. The Charger, forced ahead by the traffic, continued on through the intersection.

  “Sorry,” said the driver. He started again, made a left turn, and the Charger was lost in the traffic ahead. In the mirror he winked at Griffin. The incident happened too quickly for June to notice.

  “Where to?” asked Griffin. “Do you have to be at work early?”

  Her shrug had a grain of guilt in it. “I can get away with anything for two months, maybe even a year.” He understood the shrug to mean that she was closer to the end of her grief than she might let on at work. She was taking advantage of sympathy.

  The cop in the Charger was making a decision now, Griffin knew. He had to choose either her place or Griffin’s. If he went to Griffin’s, would he call the Los Angeles Police, have them drive past June’s? Maybe he would just go home to Pasadena. Hadn’t he collected the most important piece of information, that the suspect and the lover were riding in a limousine just weeks after the murder? No one would doubt that they were sleeping together. How would it look to a jury? It would look bad.

  And what had Griffin revealed to the man in the elevator? Fear of someone. Persecution. How would that connect with the murder of a writer in Pasadena? A conspiracy. But the police would have to ask themselves why Griffin had said so much to a stranger. How could Griffin be in a conspiracy with someone he didn’t recognize? Was he being blackmailed? They would have to say Yes. And wasn’t that the truth? That was the wrong question to ask of hims
elf. He had said too much. Anything was too much. It was ridiculous for him to have imagined that he could lie to everyone.

  Griffin kissed June on the cheek, with conviction. Then he kissed her on the lips. Then he sat back.

  “I had to do that,” he said, as though apologizing, but he was smiling. “Something came over me. I don’t know what it was.” If he had any lines with women, this was his favorite. It helped to play shy later in the evening, as though his official business personality, once unwound, revealed the charming little boy he once must have been.

  “It was about time.”

  “So?”

  “Would you mind coming back to my house?” she asked.

  “No problem.” They kissed again. Griffin didn’t like making love in limousines—he’d done that enough when he was new to power and doing cocaine. Now he was embarrassed even to kiss with a driver watching. He resented June’s eager kisses, he wanted her to be cooler, more discrete. He slipped away from the kiss without letting her know he was unhappy, patted her thigh, and let himself sit back in the seat so he could look at her. They held hands and didn’t talk as the limousine drove along Sunset and back up to the hills. This was another of the pleasures of a limousine: contemplation.

  There was no sign of the Charger near her house. Griffin signed for the limousine and then gave the driver thirty dollars. The tip was included, but Griffin decided to act the part of the happy big spender.

  The driver asked if he wanted a receipt. Griffin said no. The driver thanked him.

  As they walked up the path to the house, his arm around her waist, he sensed a new mood in her; she was walking slowly, trying to say something. She opened the door while he kissed the back of her neck and leaned into her body.

  Inside the house, she asked him if he wanted something to drink. She went to the kitchen for mineral water. When she came back, she looked like she’d found the words for the thought she’d had on the path.

  “I can’t sleep with you tonight,” she said. “Not here. I hope you understand.”

  “Actually I was wondering about that myself.”

  “Really?”

  “I was feeling a little weird.”

  “Why?”

  “I’d be the first person to make love to you since David died, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s a powerful—I don’t want to say ‘responsibility,’ I don’t know—that’s a charged event. I was wondering how you’d be.”

  “We should have gone to your house.”

  If he said to her, “We still can,” he’d lose her. He knew that. He might be losing her already; the door to her grief had been opened again. If she hadn’t hesitated, maybe if he hadn’t broken the kiss in the limousine, and they’d undressed as soon as they’d closed the front door behind them, and they were in the bed, in Kahane’s bed, they might have been able to bring the significance of the moment into the lovemaking and electrified it by not denying the truth. The first time in a dead man’s bed. Of course, he had more truth than she. He didn’t say, “We still can.” He said, “Look, let’s stay up and talk, tell me about your childhood or something, and then I’ll go home, and we’ll go somewhere this weekend.”

  “Where?”

  “Mexico.” He said this to get through to her, to let her know that he wanted her time and that he would give her his time, his precious time. But Mexico … why had he volunteered Mexico?

  She left her chair and came to him and gave him a long hug and cried. Griffin saw her grief. Was she crying for herself or Kahane? Would she have cried like this if a truck had run over him, or if he’d died of pneumonia? Griffin couldn’t tell, but he thought not. There was something of her own confusion in the tears. Her warm forehead was like a baby’s against his cheek. He stroked her hair. All he could think of saying was, “I’m sorry, baby, I’m so sorry.” She broke from the hug, took a breath, and smiled at him. Her face was inches from his. He walked her to the bedroom, his arm around her waist, the friend who would soon be a lover, but not tonight. He knew that if he said, “I love you,” to her, she would have said the same thing to him. She was thinking the same thoughts as he; there was no question. Almost the same thoughts. He watched her lie down on the bed, and he pulled the comforter over her.

  “Thank you, Griffin,” she said. “I don’t know you very well, but I think you’re one of the best men I’ve ever met. Did you mean it about Mexico?”

  “Of course.”

  “I really need that. You don’t know how much I need a change.”

  “We’ll have a good time.” He gave her a light kiss on the forehead, just long enough for her to feel the warmth of his skin.

  He called a cab and waited in front of the house. A few cars passed, none slowed down, the police had gone home for the night to puzzle over his strange declamation. This seemed an interesting detail to him, that murderers didn’t need to be watched as closely as thieves. Well, he said to himself, how much do you know about thieves? He wondered if he should steal something. The cab came, and he was in his own bed an hour later.

  At four in the morning he woke up from his first awful dream since the murder. The dream was a terrible feeling woven through an epic of beaches, airplanes, and horses. He knew the source of this panic; here he had gone and promised June Mercator a trip to Mexico, and they were certain to be followed by the police and stopped at the airport, maybe even arrested on the plane, before it took off.

  Sleep was now impossible. He went to the kitchen and made himself a hot milk and added a half inch of rum. He didn’t like to drink in a crisis, but he didn’t know what else to do. Cancel the trip, of course, use work as an excuse. But if he canceled, would it be as easy to sleep with June Mercator, and isn’t that what he wanted? Why did he want to destroy this woman? Had he killed her lover because of the attraction he’d felt when he spoke to her on the phone the night of the murder? Would he have killed David Kahane if June Mercator had been dull on the phone?

  He didn’t want to cancel the trip. He could suggest San Francisco, but who cared about perfect restaurants and kissing in the fog? What would they do, drink merlot and shop for cashmere sweaters? It was heat they needed, heat he wanted, the reduction to the elements of heat, sand, salt water, suntan lotion, tequila, white cotton pants and pink shirts, high sidewalks and cobblestone streets, beggars, and the fires near the airport. There are always fires near the airport in Mexico, trash fires in the shadows of unfinished buildings.

  Against the backdrop of someone else’s misery he could make love to June Mercator, make love to the woman whose lover he had murdered for obscure reasons. No, obscure to a jury, clear to him still. He could make great love. There was no other place to go; fucking her in a desert resort like Palm Springs would degrade them both, it would be ugly. Kahane’s ghost, if he was watching them, could justify to God the need to return in his body and haunt them if he saw them screwing where the sin was so inelegant, so predictable. Mexico and June are both unhappy, and he saw that her unhappiness would be comforted by that sad country. In Mexico he could buy her something nice, a silver ring or an old mask. It had to be Mexico.

  Fourteen

  Still tasting the rum, he tried to burn it away with a second glass of orange juice in the Polo Lounge. Levison was telling him that he liked June.

  “You looked good together,” he said.

  “She’s nice,” said Griffin.

  “How’d you come to meet a nice girl who’s not in the business?”

  “Friend of a friend.”

  “You devil, you took her from her boyfriend, didn’t you?”

  “Why do you say that? No.”

  “You’re blushing.”

  “What am I supposed to say? I like her. We’re going to Puerto Vallarta for the weekend.”

  “Did I give you permission to take a vacation?”

  “No.”

  “Good, it’s about time you took a trip.”

  Griffin brought the discussion around to work habits,
and then to Larry Levy, and then to scripts and stories, and he hoped that Levison wouldn’t think about June anymore.

  At the office Jan gave him his messages. June had called, also Susan Avery, also Walter Stuckel, and Larry Levy, a few agents, a producer. It was strange to see, among the usual names, signifying usual things, the signs of the killing. June, Avery, and Stuckel stood out in relief, an esoteric design, and he was the only initiate in the cult.

  He called June first, she was at work. Maybe she was backing out of the trip. He didn’t want that. He was risking her arrest, and he knew he didn’t care; he needed to sleep with her in a Mexican hotel room. She answered the phone.

  “How does Puerto Vallarta sound?” he asked her.

  “I don’t know. What’s it like?”

  “Let’s find out. Can you leave on Friday morning? Back on Monday, maybe Tuesday?”

  “Can you get reservations on such short notice?”

  “Yes.” He could have made a light joke about the power of his office, but the seduction was beginning now; and it needed austerity and confidence. Unless he could crack her up with a joke, better to avoid an unsure attempt. He told her that Jan would call with the details.

  “I had fun last night,” she said.

  “So did I.”

  Then he told Jan to book a room in Puerto Vallarta, not a high rise, and to get two round-trip first-class tickets. She asked if this was company business and he told her no.

  Susan Avery was not in. Griffin left his name and then regretted it. He couldn’t call back and say, “Cancel that message.” No cop taking phone calls would throw away a message. Then he decided it was good he had called, if Avery was on his trail, if she had evidence, if there was a witness, he should appear calm and reasonable. Or should he be outraged? He didn’t know.

  Walter Stuckel was in, and he asked if he could see Griffin privately, he didn’t want to talk on the phone. Griffin told him to come up. Stuckel was there in three minutes.