The Player

by Michael Tolkin

  The phone rang. It was the Writer.

  “Don’t think I’m going to let you get away with this.” The voice started deep but broke in the middle of the sentence. Where was he from? New York? Baltimore? Maybe. He had the slightly nasal sound of Baltimore, mixed with an edge of undeserved pride.

  “With what?” asked Griffin.

  “With destroying people’s lives.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” A few days ago Griffin might have thrown up in fear if he’d thought that the Writer had seen him kill Kahane; now he didn’t panic at all.

  “Why are you people always so smug? Where do you get off being so self-satisfied?”

  “I guess it’s because we like our work, and because our work is hard.”

  “Don’t tell me you think you work hard.”

  “If I hang up, you’ll call me right back, won’t you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Don’t you think it’s time to end this game?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Look, I know you think this is the most creative thing you’ve ever done, but why not sit down and write a screenplay without asking for money up front?”

  “Yeah, I knew you’d say something like that. That’s not the issue. The issue is, you owed me a phone call, you owed me a word.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. Okay? I am sorry. I’ve said it, I mean it, and now you’ll never call me again. Thank you.” Griffin hung up. He immediately called June Mercator and confirmed what time he’d pick her up. Then he went to bed.

  He gave himself up to the familiar darkness and thought of the Writer. He was terribly unsatisfying, thought Griffin. He was smart that way, he offered no rhythm. He was anywhere he wanted to be, it seemed, and he interrupted Griffin’s life in a random way that always put Griffin on the defensive. He had wanted to cause Griffin trouble and he had, more than he would ever know. He’d had his revenge.

  That night Griffin couldn’t sleep. He lay in bed, willing himself to get up and at least read a script or drink a glass of warm milk, but something strong defeated his will. What was it? He imagined his skin covered with a light blue flame; all the static electricity he’d built up since the killing was now ready to spark. For a moment he thought he’d suffered a stroke; his brain was terribly alive but his body was frozen, he wanted to scream but his mouth wouldn’t open. There wasn’t even any tension, there was just a collapsed line between his brain and his muscles. Was it really only a moment, or did the aphasia last the night? When he could finally move, the sun was up.

  He packed quickly and waited for the limousine.

  Griffin watched June’s face as she opened her front door, her eyes focused over his shoulder, on the long black car. She brought them back to Griffin and kissed him on the lips.

  “You ready?” he asked.

  “I can’t tell you how glad I am that we’re doing this.”

  The limousine driver came up the walk to carry June’s suitcase. Bonnie Sherow traveled with three pieces of luggage. June’s two-suiter was light enough to carry on the plane, it was lighter than Griffin’s. Here was another reason to love her: She didn’t need much.

  She wore white cotton pants and an expensive pink T-shirt, a green sweater over her back with the arms tied loosely around her neck, and when she slipped into the limousine—like an expert, Griffin thought—she put on mirrored sunglasses. On her feet were black high-topped sneakers. The whole blend, read piece by piece, declared a modest but sincere attempt to be independent of the country club. The sunglasses and the sneakers battled the green sweater and the white pants. Griffin found himself with his arm around her before he could think about it, and he gently bit her shoulder.

  At the airport the driver carried the bags to the first-class counter. Griffin looked around the terminal, wondering who the cop was. It was impossible to tell. How would they know he was going to Mexico? If Susan Avery called his office today, he would already be in Mexican airspace.

  As they approached the gate, Griffin began to sweat. Yes, and his heart started to pound. It was the worst he had ever felt without being sick; if this had been the walk to the gas chamber, he couldn’t imagine feeling a deeper sense of hollow, bleak terror, and loss without bottom. And June couldn’t sense it! He was sure the gate attendant knew to call the police when Griffin presented the ticket.

  No. They were walking down the Jetway to the plane.

  He was sure the stewardess was supposed to call the police once he had locked his seat belt.

  No. She brought him a margarita. He waved his hand, to tell her that he never drank this early in the day, but June slapped his hand down and he heard her say, “This is a vacation, you have to have it.” He tried to smile, but he wanted to cry. As the crew shut the doors, as the plane backed away from the terminal, Griffin looked out the window for a police car, probably an unmarked car, but there were only baggage carts, fuel tankers, and food-service trucks.

  He sipped the margarita, hoping that the tequila would steady him, but it seemed as though the alcohol were going to someone else’s brain, not his. Griffin the murderer was clear, some other Griffin, the man on vacation with a pretty woman was starting to have fun, but he was in a different universe from the Griffin who watched the ocean as the plane banked to the south and made a left turn toward Mexico. In the tourist cabin, a group of college boys let out movie-bandito yells.

  At some point—Griffin wasn’t sure when—maybe ten minutes into the flight, he heard June ask him what was the matter.

  “Actually I’m afraid of flying,” he said. Could he really expect her to believe him? He needed sympathy, and the fear of planes created the kind of unreasonable panic that generated the same kind of horrible feelings he had now, so that he could tell her a history of this phobia, she could talk him through it, and even though she was not addressing the real cause of his misery, still, he could simulate a misery she would be glad to soothe. He would steal her sympathy.

  “What’s it like, what do you feel like right now?”

  “I feel like I just dropped some bad acid.”

  “I never tripped.”

  “Well, it’s the opposite of fun.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I always hated tripping.” He started to tell her about a bad trip when he was in high school, a true story. What a relief that he didn’t have to lie about a fear of flying, and he didn’t have to tell her that he was scared of everyone right now, since he was sure that at any moment someone would arrest both of them for the murder of her lover.

  The flight attendants brought more drinks and food, and hot towels. Griffin was able to tell June exactly how he felt, without telling her why. As they wiped their faces with the hot towels, Griffin said that when he used to trip, he was always grateful for kindnesses, desperate to find them anywhere, and the smallest generosity was proof of God’s grace. So a visit to an ice-cream store yielded a miracle when the girl behind the counter gave him a taste of a flavor.

  “But they always do that,” said June.

  “Yes, but when you’re tripping, the ordinary takes on tremendous weight, everything fits into the divine plan.”

  “So what happens on bad trips? Does everything convince you that the devil is alive?”

  “Yes,” he said as she took his hand and kissed it. Trees were at eye level. They landed in Puerto Vallarta.

  Getting off a plane in the tropics was one of Griffin’s favorite moments. He liked the stairs that rolled out to meet the jet; he liked the passengers, wearing their new sunglasses, running across the tarmac to be the first inside the cool terminal where the baggage was slow to arrive; he liked the brown workers; and he liked that combination of relaxation and police terror. There were men in uniforms, some with machine guns, but Griffin’s fear, dissolved by June’s tender comfort, was nothing more than a thin mist. Was the bad trip over? Or was this still the trip, a false dawn? Would he collapse in the hotel room?

  While they waited f
or their bags, he thought he was being watched by a customs official. The official, at his station near the end of the baggage-claim area, looked at Griffin without pretending to look elsewhere. Griffin was his target. It was almost noon, eleven in Los Angeles; Susan Avery would have had time to speak to Jan, find out where Griffin was, and then call … call who? The FBI? The Treasury Department? Of course there was a liaison office working with local police departments, but could they locate him so quickly? Would he rate such swift pursuit? It seemed unlikely. Unless there was a warrant out for him. If a court had ordered his arrest, then maybe the Mexicans would cooperate within an hour. He was easy to find. Jan knew the flight number, and the airport was small. June lifted her bag from the conveyor belt, and he followed her to the checkout line. They were directed away from the official who was looking at him. He was behind Griffin during baggage inspection and passport control. When their official let them through, Griffin looked back at the one who had been staring at him. He was gone.

  June spoke Spanish to the cabdriver on the way to the hotel. She spoke it as well as David Kahane had spoken Japanese, without hesitation, and she was casual about her slightly flattened accent. When the driver stopped talking to concentrate on the road, Griffin asked her what they’d talked about. It was about politics. She showed Griffin the graffiti for a candidate. Griffin had been jealous of her lover, and now he was jealous of her. It bothered him that he didn’t speak another language, and he hated himself for his ignorance of Mexican politics. Suddenly a knowledge of Mexican politics seemed the most crucial information a man could possibly own; without a detailed understanding of the political history of this country, Griffin knew he was uncivilized, a barbarian.

  “Do you speak any other languages?” Griffin asked.

  “French, and a little Japanese.”

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “I got the French and Spanish in high school, I got the Japanese when I was in college. I spent a semester in Kyoto. That’s how I met David. David spoke beautiful Japanese.”

  He almost said, “I know.” Instead he let her sentence lie there, he didn’t pick it up, didn’t respond, he held his breath for half a minute, following the sweep hand on his watch. The second use of David’s name was full of memory. He let his breath out when they saw the hotel.

  June was happy. She said just enough to show she liked the hotel without saying too many words, without gushing over the architecture. The hotel was white, low, with palms and bouganvillea, two swimming pools, a thatched bar between the pools, and a long thatched bar at the beach. It wasn’t the most expensive hotel in Puerto Vallarta, and Griffin thought that that was better. No one here would know him. If he stayed at the top place, he would be sure to find a producer he knew or an agent. The more money he spent, the harder it was to hide.

  Their room had a balcony, and from the bed the view was of tiled roof, thatching, and palm trees. It was perfect. Griffin compared June to Bonnie Sherow. When Bonnie came into the room in Cabo San Lucas, she talked about how she felt like a grown-up, and this had made Griffin hate her. June went to the refrigerator. One side was a bar. She opened a small bottle of tequila. What he liked about the gesture was the way she did it without having to say that the bottle would cost money, because the hotel stocked the bar and someone counted the bottles every morning. She spent his money and didn’t ask his permission. Yes, it was good to get a little drunk on a weekday afternoon with a woman he had not yet slept with.

  He liked her for changing into her bathing suit in the bathroom. She wasn’t skinny. The waist he felt when holding her was wide and high. And wasn’t he now fifteen pounds too heavy, probably twenty? She saw him looking at her.

  “Come on, fat boy,” she said, gripping his tummy with her fingers, “Let’s get a tan.”

  Griffin hoped he would always remember that afternoon on the beach in Puerto Vallarta. In a few days he would probably be in jail, and he might never again look out over his belly to the sea. Everything was precious. He saw himself at seventy, serving his life term if he didn’t go to the gas chamber, boring his cell mate with the story of his Mexican fling.

  “June bought a straw hat from a beach vendor,” he would say. “And then a man with a tray of silver jewelry rushed to us as soon as June opened her purse. I was ready to tell him to go away, but I liked some earrings, thin spikes in a circle, and bought them. I knew she’d wear them only on this weekend, and that made them even more wonderful. A waiter from the bar came around taking drink orders, and we both asked for margaritas. Before the drinks arrived, she took my hand and dragged me into the warm bay. We floated on our backs and let the waves carry us up to the margin of sea and beach, where it was dry. We had to run back into the water to wash the sand from our bathing suits. Then we drank the margaritas and read magazines.”

  Maybe he wouldn’t tell anyone the story, maybe he would keep it a secret. It was the kind of story he’d repeat, though he hated people who kept a portfolio of stories, people who turned their lives into a routine. He didn’t want to be pathetic.

  There were two Mexican policemen on the beach. Griffin didn’t know how long they’d been there. Both wore khaki shirts and pants, and stiff black leather holsters at their waists. Was this normal, or for him? If he was the government, he would prefer to watch Griffin and hope he’d return to Los Angeles on his own. Was an extradition fight good for tourism? Did it matter at all? The policemen joked with a few vendors. June said she was going back to the room. Griffin told her he’d be along in a few minutes, he wanted to watch the water. She kissed him on the lips, twice.

  As she walked away, one of the policemen followed her, and the other watched Griffin. Would they let him change before taking him to the police station? Would he be beaten in his bathing suit and his rubber sandals? Could he bribe them? He felt the panic from the airplane again. If June was under arrest now, she would have no idea why; the charge would seem insane. Griffin would deny it, too, of course, and why should she not believe him? The indictment would have to say that the two knew each other before the murder; otherwise, how could a jury believe that they had planned this together? Griffin could save her if her lawyer couldn’t prove that they didn’t know each other. If the lawyer couldn’t see what was obviously June’s best defense, Griffin would send him a note, anonymously, to alert the lawyer to the winning strategy.

  Griffin imagined what would happen if he was arrested in Mexico. The Los Angeles Police, or the Pasadena Police, would get a search warrant for his apartment, and then they would find the postcards, just as they would have found them if the Writer’s aim had been true in the alley in Beverly Hills. What would have happened then? They might have traced the postcards back to Griffin’s killer. Griffin stopped himself from following this track, it was a waste of time. He could always think about this in prison.

  He felt sorry for June. Even if June’s lawyer helped her without one error, the case was too juicy to go unnoticed, they’d be celebrity killers in every paper in America. Who knows if someone on the beach wasn’t taking pictures of them with a hidden camera, to sell to a news service? Their paunches might be famous. June could never recover from the suspicion, even if Griffin declared on the stand that he acted alone, and used some kind of insanity plea, with the postcards as the key to explain the paranoia that had led to a senseless killing. No one—no lawyer, no jury, no press agent—could recover June’s innocence. The arrest would destroy her right to grieve Kahane’s death in her own way; reporters would find the people she worked with, they’d say she bounced back too quickly from his murder, not a month later and she was in Mexico with his killer! Maybe a good prosecutor could prove to a jury that even without tangible evidence, motel receipts, telephone bills, it is still reasonable to assume that Griffin and June had known each other for a long time before the killings, because it was entirely unreasonable to imagine that she would fall so quickly in love with a man who claimed to have seen her for the first time at Kahane’s funeral. The truth
was more sordid than the lie that could send her to jail. A trip to Puerto Vallarta! Margaritas on the beach! Guilty, guilty, guilty.

  Someone would buy the rights to the story, once they were both in jail. It wouldn’t be a movie, it was the sort of morality play that television liked to put on, they’d spread it over two nights, they’d make a big meal of the trial. Monday night, the affair with June and the murder of Kahane. Tuesday night, the brilliant work by Susan Avery. All the cat-and-mouse games with her, they’d be good for a half hour of screen time. What would they start with? Griffin would begin the show with Kahane’s pitch. How would they construct the first meeting with June, what would the jury think had happened? They’d have to show him meeting June before he killed Kahane. He’d have to have slept with June before the murder, too. The phone call from June telling him that Kahane was at the movies. The trip to Pasadena—would they include the Japanese piano bar? That would make a nice scene, thought Griffin, although it was probably too subtle for television. And who would play Griffin? Michael Douglas? Val Kilmer would be terrific, thought Griffin, he could play the office politician, the smarm, the manipulator. Or John Malkovich? He could play the paranoid. And what if they told the story as it happened? How would they figure in the postcards? Would they be lost in the story? If Griffin killed for love, then the postcards didn’t fit. If Griffin killed because he was crazy, then passion didn’t fit. Would the actress play June as if she were innocent or guilty? What an awful moment, when June gets arrested and has no idea what is happening. When she is fingerprinted and photographed. When she is put into a cell until a friend or her father bails her out. And the first conversation with Griffin, is he out on bail, too? No. Having left the country once, they’d be seen as risks, bail would either be too high for anyone to pay, or else bail would be denied. When would they see each other? Of course they wouldn’t share lawyers, they wouldn’t share strategies, so they wouldn’t see each other again until and unless they were tried together. And if they weren’t tried together, maybe he’d never see her again, as long as he lived. If the television movie of his crime told the truth, would they know about the gunshots in the alley? Of course. The police would find out everything.