Hollywood and Levine

by Andrew Bergman

  I was not mistaken.

  We drove all the way back to Beverly Hills, a dull forty-minute trek. I yawned at lights and drummed my fingers on the dash. Traffic got extremely light as we entered Beverly Hills and I had to lay way back. Unless Parker was unconscious he was bound to notice the omnipresence of the black Chrysler.

  Parker turned onto Rodeo Drive and pulled into the circular driveway of a white mansion. I stopped my car on Gregory and watched. Parker got out of the Rolls, holding his keys, and unlocked the ten-foot-high door of what I presumed to be his house. I sat and waited, undisturbed and undistracted. Gregory was a typically quiet Beverly Hills street, bearing no signs of human habitation: no stores, no people, no children scampering wildly on the sidewalks. There weren’t even sidewalks. Just perfectly green and trimmed lawns, fronting gigantic homes that seemed to be lived in by automobiles. Gregory Street was soundless, except for birdsong and distant traffic.

  And except for the white Cadillac convertible that suddenly sped past me, doing a conspicuous sixty miles per hour.

  The Caddy hurtled down the street, turned left, and whipped around Parker’s driveway, screeching to a stop bare inches behind the majestic Rolls. The driver of the Caddy jumped out and ran up to Parker’s door. He leaned on the bell. The chimes could be faintly heard from where I sat. I removed a small but powerful pair of binoculars from my pocket and observed Parker’s frantic visitor, pushing the bell over and over, holding a manila envelope in his hand.

  It was Dale Carpenter, the cowboy actor.

  The door opened and Parker expressed evident surprise and consternation. He recovered and shook the actor’s hand, quickly guiding him into the house. Before closing the door behind them, Parker looked around in the classic, sickly manner of one fearful of observation. He was being watched. And so, in turn, was the watcher being watched.

  I got out of my car and headed for Parker’s house. It was a clumsy, witless play, but I didn’t see any alternative, not if I wanted to remain even in remote touch with this case. I knew far too little to allow Carpenter to visit Parker, and spend that time half a block away snoozing in my car. It was worth the risk to get closer.

  Then again, it wasn’t worth the risk at all. The rest is dream. As I closed the car door, a large and moist hand clapped itself over my mouth and I heard a sharp intake of breath behind me. I turned to look, but as I did an opera house fell on my head. Time stretched wet and warm. Black waves pounded somewhere. I gazed down at my feet, but they were miles beneath me. I floated down, spinning toward my shoes very slowly, like a parachutist caught in a crosswind, descending at a snowflake’s pace. I couldn’t see my feet, then they flashed into view again, turning orange. The thought occurred to a part of me that I hadn’t seen the man who had just smashed my skull, but it took much too long to think it all the way through, and as I neared the end of the thought, my shoes were racing up to meet me, and there was only time to crash.

  8

  A sea wind blew the closed blinds out and back, smacking against the open window. The room was dim and evening was settling into the ocean outside; gulls screeched and swooped to the rhythms of the dinner bell. Skimming the waters, I thought, adjusting their wings ever so slightly, fading orange sunset reflected on their bellies. Very free and beautiful. Very much unlike myself, a bald man bound hand and foot to a lumpy, fetid mattress.

  My waking came in drugged stages. Not only had I been skulled, but a beaker of mind-numbing chemicals had been indiscriminately added to the LeVine bloodstream. Miraculously, I had come to once or twice, leaden and halfwitted with sedation. The air was moist and my clothes soaked; if I’d had any hair, it would have been matted. Instead, water streamed down my face.

  The first two times my eyes opened, I was flailing through a legless panic of back-alley flight. The waking was just another layer of marbled, patchy sleep. I had nothing to grasp onto and spiraled back downward to a series of blurred Technicolor vignettes: a hardware store set on the banks of the Amazon, pursuit by long-dead relatives, and an abrupt, disquieting meeting with my very own self, aged white and wandering pitifully through an empty lot in Corona, Queens. A confused fight with a Bungalow Bar man ensued, Walter Adrian coming to my aid. Night fell instantly, the sky filling with the sad dim stars of a moonlit corner in a comic strip.

  The third time my lids opened, I swam closer to the surface of consciousness, experiencing sea sounds. I breathed deeply, felt no sensation in my arms or legs, and attempted to construct something in the nature of a thought about that fact, but my brain cells shorted out and I sank to the bottom once again. I was home in Sunnyside, somehow trapped beneath my living room couch. Hip-booted men stalked the house looking for me. They opened the oven door.

  The fourth time I awoke nearly for keeps, struggling into the tangible world with considerable effort, like someone climbing a flight of iced-over stairs. My eyes opened and I could not tell if the room was dark or if my vision had been impaired. I had no more sense of time or place than a goldfish.

  A bare bulb dangled by a cord above my bed. I thought the bulb was switched off, then perceived that it generated a nimbus of light. Slow and dim-witted reflection followed: how does a juiceless bulb give off light? It doesn’t, I concluded. It can’t. That problem resolved and instantly forgotten, a cigarette hole in my mind, I turned my full attention to the window. Behind the banging blinds there appeared to be a beach. It smelled and sounded like a beach, and it was evening, given over to sandpipers and solitary walkers. I wanted to take a walk.

  But my ability to walk was seriously limited by the fact that my arms were spread-eagled and roped clumsily to the bedsprings, and my feet bound with clothesline. When I made the logical move to stretch and yawn upon what I believed to be waking, I almost snapped my backbone in two. This frightened me terribly. Unless you’ve been tied down in such a fashion, you cannot imagine the crawly sensation of vulnerability, the anxiety of being as passive, as available, as an open-faced sandwich or a stiff on a slab. My mind wasn’t yet supple enough to determine why and how I had gotten into such a miserable posture. I tried to float my brain from my skull like a helium balloon, but the attempt was stillborn; it was all I could do to remember my name.

  So I lay there sweating, as stupidly afraid as a child locked in nighttime combat with talking closets and fiendish chests of drawers. I awaited the arrival of white-gowned Dr. Frankenstein, wheeling in a rolling cart glistening with syringes and retorts and test tubes all abubble. Electrodes would be attached to my head; sizzling electrical currents, zigzags of horrific lightning, and the job would be done. I would obey any command. I would walk into the sea.

  Fifth time down, but the submergence seemed shorter, lighter, than my previous dips and tailspins. When I awoke, pale evening light still filtered through the blinds and voices shouted from the beach. I was wetter than ever, but my edge had returned; the chemicals seemed to have been flushed from my pores and I no longer feared, or even considered, the bogeyman. Jack was back, faster than his captors had guessed, if the sloppiness of the rope-work on my hands was any tip-off. If you want to keep a six-foot, two hundred-pound man out for half a day, you have to drug him nearly to death. Someone had not wanted to take that risk. Looking back, I don’t really understand why not.

  It took over an hour of ceaseless rubbing and tugging to free my right hand. I had to perform the task silently, and stopped every time I heard warning noises outside the door. There was a radio emitting soft, dull sounds that might have been music, punctuated by an occasional cough and the regular splashing of liquor into a glass. Cigarette smoke wafted into my room. I completed the picture: a bored and cranky thug playing solitaire and getting plastered, the cards lined up on a metal kitchen table, right next to an oiled gun. The picture encouraged me; if I was to get out of here, it would be a good deal easier to slip past one man than two, and a great deal easier if the one man had dulled his reflexes through boredom and whiskey. That’s how I figured it. I was wrong, of course, b
ut that’s nothing new.

  I finally got the rope sufficiently loosened to withdraw my right hand, then rolled over quietly and undid the left. When I leaned forward ever so slightly, in an effort to reach my feet, my brains slid down to my stomach and I had to lie back down again, or faint from dizziness, sick chills, and intestinal revolution. There I lay, coated with perspiration, listening to the waves, the gulls, and the radio. I noticed that the window, while slightly open, was barred, and wondered if passersby were not struck by the presence of bars on a beach house.

  A chair scraped against linoleum and I heard the solitaire player get up. I twined the rope around my right hand, the hand that faced the door, and shut my eyes. A key was inserted, somewhat clumsily, and the door swung open. I breathed heavily, spread-eagled on the bed and lost to the free world. A man entered the room and chuckled.

  “How’s the weather down there?” he asked in a husky voice.

  He laughed again. I felt his attention for a few more seconds, then he left the room and relocked the door.

  “Out like a dead bulb,” he said outside. The grunt he received in reply came as a shock. Two men. They had been as silent as one. The lack of chatter meant that they were either complete strangers or old friends, long past words. Which meant, in turn, that I had no clue as to whether the two men could be played off against each other.

  I leaned forward again, into a shimmering swell of nausea, and undid my feet, leaving the cord wrapped loosely about the ankles.

  “When’s he coming back, he say definite?” a voice asked.

  “Late. Two or three.”

  “Then we take the dick right out?”

  “About ten, twelve miles out.”

  “And a mile deep.”

  They shared a good laugh over that one. I failed to see the humor in it. The prospect of being left as a kosher snack for a slew of sharks was unimaginably grim, but my mind was still too deadened to appreciate the full horror of it. The threat of getting tossed to fish with big teeth was so outside my experience, so wildly melodramatic, that I couldn’t work up a man-sized scream. Instead, I concentrated on finer, detective-school details, like getting the hell out of this house on the beach. It was early evening and “he” wasn’t returning until the early A.M., leaving me a great deal of leeway.

  I reached over and felt through my jacket, which was draped hunchbacked over a chair. The gun, of course, had vanished, but my binoculars remained. I took them out and gripped them tightly in my right hand, then resumed my snoring posture on the mattress. I closed my eyes and awaited the next bed check.

  An hour or so passed. It was now very nearly dark outside. The ocean surf was beating harder, more ominously on the shore. I might have dozed a bit, I can’t remember anymore. But I heard the chair scrape against the floor again, then a key bumped around the lock before getting accurately inserted. I guessed that the waiting had gotten to my night nurse; he had been drinkng way too much.

  The door opened and closed, and a cloud of alcoholic breath blew my way. I commenced mumbling.

  “How’s the weather down there?” he asked as before.

  “Cunt … tits,” I murmured, twisting my shoulders and hips as best I could.

  There was no reply, just a further density in the air as bourbon fumes proceeded the lowering of his head. Attentive silence hung suspended above my face.

  “Big tits,” I gargled thickly, then turned my head slightly. I began to snore.

  “Goddamn,” he said softly. He shook my head, trying to coax out some more wet dreaming.

  “C’mon,” I growled, suddenly brutal and bear-like. “Abbaba. Put it in your mmmn.”

  “What?” he said. “Your what?”

  I heard a high thin voice from the next room.

  “You talking to me, Mex?”

  My avid listener raised his head and stepped to the door, stumbling as he went. “The dick’s talking dirty to himself,” he called through the door. “Wanna hear?”

  “No,” the man shouted back. “Fight’s coming on. If you’re staying in there, shut the fuckin door.”

  The door closed. I smelled Mex’s fiery breath, felt increased body heat, as his face neared mine.

  “Sabbalar … fuh. Come on, baby,” I pleaded. “My cah … cah.”

  “What?” Mex whispered urgently. I had him.

  “Take it in your hand,” I said softly, smiling in my sleep. “Now squeeze it. Squeeeeze it.”

  I groaned and Mex groaned with me.

  “Christ,” he said with difficulty. “I could use some of that.”

  “Now, open your mouth,” I said, cutting my volume. “No, wider. That’s it. That’s it.” I lowered my voice to an indecipherable mumble. The last audible word I issued forth was “tongue.”

  Mex put his ear to my mouth like an anxious doctor checking for signs of life. At which point I successfully whipped my right hand around and sapped him with the binoculars. He fell in a heap on top of me, as much victimized by drink as by the blow.

  I rolled Mex over and off me, arranging him neatly on the bed, tying his hands to the bedsprings and binding his ankles with the rope I had kicked from mine. Then I arose, slowly and with head pounding, and crept behind the door, binoculars in hand. The radio in the next room was tuned to a prizefight; introductions from the ring were in progress.

  “Hey, Mex,” the man called. “Fight’s about to start.”

  I tensed and gripped the binoculars tightly in my fist.

  “Mex!” he repeated, more loudly. “The fight!”

  Mex wasn’t receiving messages, and a quizzical silence filled the next room. The other man turned the volume down on the radio, then pushed his chair back and stepped to the door. I held myself rigid against the wall, my knees knocking from fatigue, weakness, and the aftermath of a chemical riot in my system.

  “Mex?” he said softly through the door. He was right outside now, standing quietly and trying to assess the situation, aware with a thug’s logic that something had gone a little screwy. I didn’t know whether he’d tiptoe in or launch a full siege, gun drawn. Either way, I had the lie on him.

  The door opened. Saying “I told you to quit juicing,” the man entered the room cautiously, a revolver in his paw. I brought the binoculars down on his head the second it appeared through the door. It was a fine shot and the man, thick-necked and attired in corduroy pants and a fisherman’s sweater, fell down heavily. So did I. My knees gave way and I went to the floor, breathing rapidly and with effort, coughing up and swallowing some bile.

  It took a few minutes for me to gather enough strength to stand up again. I walked over to the bed and undid one of Mex’s hands, giving me enough rope to tie his friend’s arms together above the elbow. If you do it tightly enough, the circulation gets cut to zero and the victim awakes with arms of stone. I did the same for Mex and then bid them both adieu.

  I left the bedroom. Outside was a small kitchen, containing a stove, a refrigerator, and a tattered, ruined linoleum floor. An Emerson was perched on the white metal kitchen table. I turned up the volume just as a fighter named Morales was getting knocked on his ass in San Diego. I didn’t much care. I found my gun resting on a rose-decaled breadbox and made very sure that it was still loaded. Then I dropped it into my jacket pocket and exited from the house through a screen door. I had no idea of where I was but a good idea of where I wanted to be. Back home with Helen Adrian.

  I closed the screen door softly behind me and emerged into the cool, damp evening air. Crickets were conversing steadily, and two hundred feet to my immediate right, the Pacific surf rumbled and broke upon the shore. I breathed deeply, a lost and unhappy man, my mind still clouded over with drug-induced mysteries. When you awake from a nightmare, the discomfort nags at you for hours afterward, undigested. If the nightmare has come from the tip of a needle, the spooks hang around for days and weeks; they roll out from under the carpet at peculiar, disorienting intervals. They shake tambourines and roll their eyes. You try to recall making t
heir acquaintance.

  I stood outside the door for a very long moment, acclimating myself to the surroundings. I was on a concrete path next to the side entrance of a back apartment located in a three-story, brown-shingled Cape Cod saltbox home, the last house on a residential street that ended in sand and scrub brush. There was a fire-scorched lot next door, and a half-dozen low-slung beach houses quite a distance beyond that. Lights were on in those houses, and music was playing. I didn’t know where the hell I was but I did know that I should be getting away from the saltbox house, so I started down the road, passing a sea-rusted street sign that informed me I was hurrying down Pacific Way.

  Pacific Way followed the coastline for a few hundred yards, then dropped down and to the east. I stopped and gaped at one of the lit beach houses, a wooden structure of recent design, with the look of a gull alighting on the sand. Through a window I observed two young couples seated around a dinner table, drinking red wine from goblets and laughing uproariously. I stared at the scene with the bewildered awe of a child come downstairs to his parents’ noisy party. After rejecting a notion to knock on their door and ask exactly where I was, I left Pacific Way as quickly as possible to hunt down a public phone.

  Two hundred yards down the road and the ocean disappeared from view. I was sorry to see it go. The road was dark and untrafficked, bordered by dense, wild foliage. After a quarter-mile, I came to a small garage and filling station. The boy on duty was spread out beneath a Pontiac that dated from the Ming Dynasty. A light rain began to fall. I coughed to announce myself and he came squirming out from under, a husky kid in his late teens.

  He gazed at me from the ground, still on his back, his blond hair caked with oil and dust.

  “Sir?” he asked.

  “I need a phone. You got one?”

  “We got one, but it’s on the fritz. Car break down?”