The Player

by Michael Tolkin

  Would they find out who sent the postcards?

  What would the Writer do when Griffin was charged with a writer’s murder? He would know everything, as soon as the postcards were introduced in court or mentioned on the news. He might even be the best choice to write the script. No. With the publication of the postcards there would be a hunt for him. He would be famous as the creep who drove the executive to murder. Would anyone have sympathy with his private war against Griffin? Griffin was stirred by a hopeful thought: He could prove that the Writer’s pursuit had passed over from the mail to direct violence. There was the gunplay in the alley. No one knew about that except Griffin and the Beverly Hills Police. They must have known that the shattered glass in the alley was from a Mercedes, and Griffin had the receipt from the auto-glass shop. More trouble for Griffin, of course; why hadn’t he gone directly to the police as soon as he was shot at? Yes, why hadn’t he? How could they have connected the alley with Kahane? Griffin couldn’t remember what his reason had been, unless he was afraid that Walter Stuckel would make the connection, but what was there to see, what was the pattern? Dead writer, and executive shot at in an alley. It would have been easy to get out of, no reason for anyone to hear about it. If they’d asked him why he’d been driving in the alley, he could have told them he was using an old shortcut, he’d thought of going to Santa Monica Boulevard, four long blocks south, but had changed his mind and turned back to Sunset. No. They wouldn’t have liked that answer. There is no good reason on earth not to run to the police when someone shoots at you unless you have something to hide. If he tried to lie, they would ask him about the postcard delivered to his table at the Beverly Hills Hotel. How would they know about that card? They would have gone to the hotel to find out if he’d been in any kind of fight.

  Griffin watched the Mexican policeman, the vendors, the tourists, the sea, a cruise ship, the clouds. He had made too many mistakes. He had lied to too many people. When the first card arrived, no, when the third card arrived, the card with the death threat, he should have gone straight to Walter Stuckel, straight to Levison, and showed it to them. He should have asked for help. He shouldn’t have worried about the cards’ effect on his job. And now it was too late to show the cards to anyone.

  What if the Writer didn’t have an alibi for the night of Kahane’s murder? Could Griffin get him blamed for the killing? Impossible. It was a desperate thought, and Griffin felt shame for it.

  The beach was almost empty now. The vendors were gone. A few drunk couples sat at the thatched bar, waiting for the sunset. The Mexican policeman was gone. When had he left? Griffin stood up, feeling dizzy. He picked up his towel, his sandals, his magazines. In a comedy these details could make an audience laugh, or at least set the character as fussy, someone the audience had no need to take seriously. Griffin walked back to the room, hating himself, feeling sorry for himself, and then hating himself for the self-pity. He worked so hard that he never really had the time or the need to take his emotional temperature; surely that was one reason he’d taken no vacations for so many years, anything to avoid a long look at who he was. The Writer wouldn’t understand that, he wouldn’t believe that Griffin had an unconscious, like anyone’s, the usual cesspool.

  June called to him from the balcony as he walked through the gardens by their wing.

  “There’s a message for you.”

  “Oh, no, we haven’t even been here six hours.”

  “It’s from your lawyer.”

  “I’ll be right up.”

  Before he knocked on the door, he let out as long a breath as he could, and then breathed in slowly. He smiled hard and tapped on the door. June opened it, wearing a white T-shirt and tan shorts. Her knees and shins were pink from the sun, but it didn’t look painful. She gave him the message pad, but he knew the number. He called the hotel operator, and she put him through immediately. It annoyed him that she didn’t have to take the number and call him back when she made the connection; he needed an illusion of distance to stay sane.

  He spoke to his lawyer’s secretary. He was gone for the day.

  “Do you know what this was about?”

  “Sorry, Griffin.”

  The connection was perfect; she might have been downstairs. What is it, fiber optics? he asked himself, and then answered, Don’t think about this now. “Does he want me to come back?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “He didn’t leave a message for me in case I called?”

  He saw June watching him. He had to let the panic go. He breathed out another lump of unhappy air.

  “Griffin, you’re on vacation. Call him tomorrow morning.” Griffin always forgot her name, and she was always so casual with him.

  “Everything’s okay?” He couldn’t stop.

  “Griffin, you’re in Mexico, go get drunk.” It was the style of some secretaries to assume great ease with him, playing the wise sister. He knew she knew what the call was about, but for all the friendliness, she was not a friend, she was a woman careful of her job, and she would never tell him. Besides, he could never remember her name. He said good-bye. She said, “Adios.”

  He put the phone down.

  “What did he want?” asked June.

  “I don’t know. He’s gone for the day.”

  “Do you think it’s important?” She wanted it to be important, she liked the idea that the long arm of the movies reached him at an instant, anywhere. It made her weekend more interesting, he was that much more impressive.

  “I’m not going back until Monday.” He took off his rubber sandals. As he stood up, he could see over the balcony to the garden below. The policeman who had followed June was there, resting against a palm tree, smoking a cigarette. “Let me take a shower,” he said, “and then we’ll see the town.”

  Sixteen

  She wore a white cotton dress, some kind of knit. Griffin always wanted to call it jersey, but he wasn’t sure. She wore the silver earrings from the beach. He didn’t know her perfume, but it was flowery, young. Bonnie Sherow wore something heavier; why didn’t he know the names of these things? He supposed Bonnie’s perfumes were more sophisticated than June’s, but the ordinary, the popular, made him happy so often. To be part of everyday life, to be part of the flow. Why else work in the movies?

  They walked along the waterfront avenue in the town. There were droves of college kids everywhere, most of them drunk, sitting at tables in bars that were made to look like Mexican cantinas. Fake Mexico in Mexico, because the owner was a fan of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Everything was a stage set now.

  June told him her life story. She was adopted. This upset him, he had orphaned her a second time. She grew up in Philadelphia, went to private school in Maryland, college in Vermont, the semester in Japan, then to New York, a job with a magazine, a boyfriend had moved to Los Angeles, she followed, they broke up, she ran into Kahane, she got the job at the bank, that was two years ago. She was twenty-nine. She loved her father and spoke of him with respect. He was some kind of moderate tycoon, a powerful athlete, a great host. She fought with her mother. She had a brother at Stanford Law. Her parents’ natural child. Yes, there was some resentment.

  They ate a bad meal at a large restaurant, and then walked some more, up the streets that led to the hill overlooking the town, behind a big church.

  Griffin looked around and was sure the police had stopped following them after they’d left the hotel. As they climbed a steep set of stairs, he turned June to him and pinned her to the locked gate over the door of a liquor store.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, but she knew.

  The kiss scared him. It might have been the best of his life, it might have been the first time he’d ever really kissed someone as an equal. What was it? Was it Kahane or was it June? Was he tasting the man he’d killed, or was she tasting the killer and, through him, her dead lover? He realized that she was larger and taller than most of the women he’d ever kissed, larger than Bonnie Sherow. He’d slept w
ith actresses, but they usually curled into him, looking for protection. There were delicate women with thin bones who received him, but he always felt like a trespasser. Yes, Kahane was between them now; they were both kissing something between them, a ghost, something they shared. They were on the same side of the mirror. He could do anything. He lifted her dress, she kissed him harder. He put his hands in her underpants, she grabbed his shoulders. He stopped. She took his arm and they continued up the stairs. They turned down a new street. He pressed her into a doorway and unbuttoned his fly. He pulled her dress up above her waist and rubbed himself against her wide, soft belly. He wasn’t sure if she could come in this position, and he lowered her dress.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. Was she willing to let him come against her in the alley? Yes.

  “Let’s go back to the hotel.” He knew she thought he was scared of lying down in the street.

  In the room he poured mineral water into champagne glasses and walked to the balcony, looking for the police. The garden was empty. June hugged him from behind and hooked her chin over his shoulder. He brought a hand to her leg and gathered her dress in his fingers, pulling it up until he could slip into her underpants again.

  They lay on the bed and watched the tops of the palms, and the roof beyond the garden. It was hot in the room.

  “Let me turn on the air conditioner,” he said.

  “No. I like it like this. Don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  Bonnie would have turned on the air conditioner. Bonnie would have taken a shower as soon as they came back. Bonnie wouldn’t have let him jack off against her stomach in a Mexican alley in the middle of the night.

  They held their silly, fat bodies together and sweated. He didn’t want to go inside her. He stroked her with his hand, softly, and she came. He let her rest, and then he helped her come again. She pushed him onto his back, and he watched her watching him. It was a look between life-forms, between two bodies of organized cells, and he tried to let her see the murder in his eyes. She kissed him, and he supposed that all she saw was pain.

  He rolled her onto her stomach and stretched himself along her back. Sliding on the sweat between them, he came. Bonnie would have made a joke about the sperm dribbling down her back, she would have wiped it off immediately. June let him stay where he was. He watched the sperm slide over her waist to the bed.

  Well, he thought, maybe my cell mates will ask to hear the story again. They’ll ask me why I didn’t fuck her. What will I say? It was enough. As it was, we stayed equals. I didn’t need to penetrate. He expected the cell mates to offer another explanation, one he’d already considered, that he couldn’t share the same space with David Kahane, he was scared of the ghost. Maybe he couldn’t because he didn’t want to spoil her any more than he already had, that after his arrest he wanted to leave her with something intact, so she could love other men. No, he was not so generous, it was the first reason, and he smiled when he thought of a phrase sure to make a cell mate laugh: He couldn’t park his car in Kahane’s garage.

  He called Dick Mellen at home in the morning. The service answered and said he was out of town for the weekend. They didn’t know where he’d gone, but he usually checked in for messages in the late afternoon. If Mellen’s first call had been about the police, about an arrest, he would have made sure to get through to him by now, Griffin thought, so whatever he wanted was important but could wait until Monday. So it must be about work, and Griffin ran through the possibilities. He was fired. He was being offered a job somewhere else. Maybe Mellen was leaving this firm and was calling to ask if Griffin would go with him to a new one. No, he wouldn’t call Griffin on his vacation with that kind of news, and of course Griffin would stay with him. Levison is leaving the studio. That was possible. Larry Levy is taking over. That was not possible, not yet. His lawyer was calling simply to tell him to have a good time, to recommend a restaurant or a beach. That was possible, too. Griffin wondered how he could survive the weekend, followed by the Mexican police, without knowing what the call was about. There was all of Saturday and Sunday ahead of them. He could pretend that he’d made the call to the lawyer from the hotel’s office, and say that he was needed back in town for some kind of high-level studio meeting on Sunday, she’d believe that. But the police who were watching him were probably waiting for him to go home. They’d only stop him if he took a plane to someplace other than Los Angeles, if he bought a ticket to South America. If he left Puerto Vallarta two days early, then wouldn’t the Pasadena Police, and Susan Avery, assume he was feeling the pressure and close in on him? Better to stay, better to pretend nothing was wrong. Suppose they arrested him in Los Angeles when he got off the plane. Why did you leave Mexico the day after you got there? If he said he had a meeting, Avery would check, and they’d want to know why he’d lied.

  Now I must pretend to be a happy tourist, the happy lover, he thought. The weekend disappeared in this act. After breakfast they took a boat to a pretty little bay a few hours south of Puerto Vallarta. If they had been followed by the police, Griffin couldn’t recognize the tail. There was a band on the boat, and Mexican couples danced while American tourists sat on the upper decks, overdosing on tequila and Corona beer. June tugged Griffin’s hand and dragged him to the dance floor. She bought him two shots of tequila and forced him to move to the music. He loved her for letting him get lost in the crowd. He danced, and he was happy to dance. Chubby Mexican women in thick-soled, high-heeled sandals danced closely with their men. Children were dancing, too. Americans watched and Mexicans danced, and now Griffin danced, badly, he knew, all that the liquor did was coax him to the floor, but it didn’t matter if he had no rhythm, he was moving. He kissed June and he was happy. He would remember this day when he was in jail.

  When they came back to the hotel in the late afternoon, they showered and then lay on the bed, ready to make love. They were both tired. They slept.

  Griffin woke up first. It was dark, almost ten o’clock. June sat up and watched him as he moved from the bed and walked to the balcony. The policeman was in the garden again.

  There was no point in pretending that he didn’t see the man, thought Griffin, since it was impossible to ignore him; it was better to let him know that this gringo does not look rudely through Mexicans as though they’re invisible. The policeman looked up at Griffin. Griffin nodded at him. The Mexican tilted his head, the contact was reassuring, promising easy treatment if there were an arrest.

  “I love you,” said June, leaving the bed. Again she hugged him from behind and rested her chin on his shoulder. She said it again. “I love you.”

  Griffin wondered how much the policeman knew. Had he been told simply to watch this couple and to report quickly if they snuck away to the airport? Or did he look at this couple on the balcony and see two killers?

  And what should he say to June? He held her hand where she hugged his chest. He squeezed her fingers, hoping this would feel to her like a love he wasn’t yet ready to declare. She kissed his ear.

  “So?” she said.

  “I love you, too. I do.” The policeman lit a cigarette. Did June include him in the romance of the place? Did she even see him?

  “You’re one of the best men I’ve ever met in my life.”

  “You’ve got me all wrong.”

  “I don’t know what I would have done without you after David was killed.”

  “All I did was offer a little sympathy.”

  “Sometimes I think about the night David died, the night you called him. What if it had been you who had died that night, if you’d been mugged.”

  “I parked on the street.”

  “But if you hadn’t. If you’d parked behind the theater, the killer could have found you instead of David. It could have happened that way.”

  “I suppose. Or to someone else. David could have come home, I could have come home.”

  “But say you had been killed; you didn’t have to go to David’s funeral, but you did. I know I wo
uldn’t have gone to your funeral, not after one phone call. And I think I would have felt awful, somewhere in my, I don’t know my heart, my soul, I would have thought, whoa, if I hadn’t told him that David was in Pasadena, he wouldn’t have gone there and been killed.”

  “Well, you would have been the instrument of my fate, and that’s out of your control.”

  “But the thing is, you didn’t have to extend yourself and you did. And I respected you for it, I really did.”

  “There’s a long road from respect to love.”

  “Well, you’re cute and you’re rich. That doesn’t hurt.”

  “I thought I was fat.”

  “So am I.” She kissed his ear again. The policeman walked away, toward the hotel’s large bar.

  “Were you in love with David?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then maybe it’s a little soon for you to be in love with me.”

  “I know, but it’s how I feel, and I don’t care what anyone thinks.”

  “I’m not talking about other people, I’m talking about how it’s difficult to know your feelings when you’ve been through something awful. Everything gets confused.”

  “But you haven’t been through anything like I have, and you just said you love me. So what do we do about that?”

  “We just have to be careful.” I am a monster, he thought. I am the worst person who ever lived.

  When they made love this time, he controlled her completely, every flutter, every change in her pulse. He could guide her pleasure with the softest imaginable touch; it was his magnetic field drawing a brush against hers, to catch the smallest impulse at the tip of a finger and return it to her, build the pressure, and then let it out. Her breath was the meter. She wanted to do him, but he wouldn’t let her, and this increased her desire and he still said no.