Madeline Carter - 01 - Mad Money

by Linda L. Richards

  As though thinking about her had conjured her up, Jennifer was suddenly at my elbow, a solid-looking dark haired woman about my own age in tow. “Excellent! You came,” Jennifer said to me before beginning introductions. “Madeline, this is Emily.” The woman had a good humored smile and I liked her instantly. We exchanged greetings and Jennifer went on.

  “This is a secret,” Jennifer looked pleased to not be keeping it, “Emily is completely not supposed to be here. She’s not invited,” her voice dropped to a whisper. “She crashed.”

  “OK. Well,” I wasn’t sure how to respond. “That’s nice, I guess. Good to meet you, Emily.”

  “Madeline,” Jennifer explained to Emily, “rents our guest house,” she pointed under the deck. “She’s a day trader and stock market expert.And my dad is hoping I’ll grow up to be her.”

  “Yikes, Jennifer. I wouldn’t have put it that way,” I demurred.

  “Hmmm. Wait until you get to know him better,” she said it with a smile, but I heard the bite.

  “Stock market expert, huh?” Emily asked. “Sounds like a good thing to know about. I’m in this business, myself,” she spread her hands to encompass the show business types ranged around the deck.

  “Why’d you have to crash, then?” Jennifer had asked it, but I wanted to know myself.

  “Not the same league at all,” she said candidly. “Present company — myself excluded, of course — are on the A list. The movies I work on are somewhere below the B list. Lately I’ve been thinking that, if you want to change lists, it would be a good idea to hang with people from the list you aspire to be on.” She snagged a scallop wrapped in bacon from a tray as it went past. “The food’s better up here, too. We do a party at my level, you’re lucky to get pizza.”

  This was something I hadn’t thought about before: the possibility of a Hollywood echelon into the 21st century. I either liked a movie or I didn’t: and, for me, the two things were seldom related to budget. But it made sense. In my world, there were firms that dealt with big money clients and there were smaller, lower profile firms that didn’t. Having always worked with the former, I’d never spent much time thinking about the latter.

  Emily told us she was currently a first A.D. — I had to stop her so she could explain to me that meant first assistant director — but that she aspired to being “the big D, myself.” She hoped, one day, to direct. Though the way things worked, if she managed to get involved with the production of an important film — say the kind that Tyler Beckett directed — she’d slide back down the side of the well a bit. “But to be a second — hell, even a second second — A.D. on one of your dad’s movies would be a big enough deal for my career to make it worth the drop.” The drop, would in effect, be a rise. It all sounded pretty complicated to me, but Jennifer looked fascinated, as though this were an aspect of her father’s life she’d never thought of before.

  “I’m… I’m going to be an actress,” she confided to us. Then with a glance at me, “that’s why I’m moving to New York next year. I’m going to study acting.”

  “Why New York?” Emily asked. “There are a lot of great coaches right here in L.A.”

  I saw Jennifer’s eyes skim to the other side of the deck where her father was happily flipping burgers and other edible meat products. When she spoke, her voice had dropped to a lower level. “Dad hates the idea of my being in the business. And, anyway, I don’t want to just be Tyler Beckett’s daughter. And I don’t think I would be anything but that in LA.”

  “That’s why the crack,” I said. Jennifer looked mystified, so I added, “you know, the other day when you said your dad was hoping you’d grow up to me.”

  Jennifer reddened slightly, but said “I guess. He’s got the idea that I want to be an actor because of him: because that’s all he’s exposed me to and he suddenly wants to round me out or something.”

  “So I’m part of some campaign to add diversity to your life?”

  Jennifer looked even more embarrassed. “Something like that I guess. Are you mad?”

  I laughed. “Far from it. It got me an excellent apartment at a price I could afford and invitations to parties that are apparently difficult to get into,” I looked meaningfully at Emily.

  Emily and I both saw Jennifer’s attention diverted and followed her glance and smile to a young man who was headed towards us. He was tall, lanky and looked to me to be at least five years too old for Jennifer. He looked, I thought uncharitably, more like he should be dating Tasya than Tyler’s teenage daughter. Not that Tasya would have deigned to let him wash her car.

  “Hey,” he greeted Jennifer, not kissing her but putting his hand possessively in the small of her back.

  “Corby, this is Jennifer and Emily.”

  He nodded to us in turn. “Hey,” he said by way of greeting, running one hand through spiky red hair.

  “Corby is a surfing instructor,” Jennifer informed us. I bit back a laugh just in time when I realized she was serious. Was there really such a thing? I looked him over and realized that, if there was, it would look like this.

  “We outta here?” he asked Jennifer. I was relieved to discover he could say more than “Hey.”

  “’K,” she said to him. “I’ll meet you in the van, all right?”

  “Ai’t,” he contracted the words “all right” so far down they were almost unrecognizable, then took his leave.

  “Does he always talk that much?” I asked Jennifer once he was out of earshot.

  I was pleased when she laughed. “Hey! He’s very sweet, OK? Though maybe not the world’s greatest conversationalist,” she admitted with a smile. “Well, obviously, I gotta go.”

  “Obviously,” said Emily. “Your chariot awaits, madam. But listen, this has been altogether too much fun. You guys want to catch a movie or something next week?”

  Jennifer looked delighted to be included and, in my present newly relocated condition, I needed all the friends I could get. “Sounds great you guys,” Jennifer said. “You two work out the details, OK? I can make it work any night next week. Just let me know.” And she was gone.

  Emily and I exchanged phone numbers and said we’d call each other early in the week. “But now Emily,” I said, “you ought to go mingle. You’ve got some serious networking to do. No sense wasting a perfectly good crash”

  “Good point,” she laughed, though she insisted on dragging me deep into the party as cover on her early networking forays.

  From my perspective, the party was a crashing bore. I was in the center of what might have been a headline story on Entertainment Tonight — if they could have gotten access — and, after a while, all I could do was stifle yawns. I’d always assumed that the clichés were just that: the bubbleheaded starlet, the hungry agent, the ambitious young actor. And while, as with most clichés, there are probably exceptions, I didn’t see any on that night.

  Emily didn’t seem to care about any of that. She worked the room, even though it was a deck and not a room, at all. She seemed adept — a creature in her own element — walking the walk and talking incessantly. It was obvious that, if networking was the way to go, Emily would achieve her goals before much time had passed.

  After a while I knew that if one more person flashed me a supernaturally whitened smile, I’d theatrically clutch at my head and scream, “My eyes, oh God, my eyes! I’m blind!” Knowing that was too great a risk, I took myself out of the networking loop and stood again by the railing, enjoying the party more from a distance than I had at its center.

  “I agree with you,” the voice was slightly accented and it surprised me, coming as it did from the shadows.

  “Excuse me?”

  The man that came and stood beside me was the other side of 50, but was nonetheless fine. Up here at a barbecue in ever-casual Malibu, he wore well-pressed chinos and a golf shirt the way other men wear a tux: like they mean it. He looked as though he’d given up lunch appointments for tennis dates a decade ago and like someone who can clearly afford Car
tier but has opted for Tag-Hauer.

  “It becomes intense after a while, I find. These parties. These,” he seemed to search for the right word, “these… competitions. In your business, it is all about competition: who gets the best scripts, who has the best agent, the best manager, hairstylist, it goes on and on and on. No offense is meant, but it can be a bit overwhelming, don’t you think?”

  My business: I struggled for understanding then realized he’d assumed I was one of Tyler’s Hollywood connections. “I’m not in the business,” I told him. “I rent Tyler’s guest house. I’m his tenant.”

  He looked slightly relieved. “I am not alone then. It is good to meet you. My name is Alejandro Montoya, but please call me Alex, almost everyone does.”

  I introduced myself and asked what he’d meant about not being alone. He told me he was a clinical psychologist. No longer in private practice, he did research work and taught some grad classes at UCLA. Tyler had met him when he’d brought Alex in to consult on Generation Gone, a movie about a midlevel executive who loses it and ends up wreaking havoc on his company and his family. At the end of the movie, this anti-hero offs himself. That had been the best moment in the film: I’d loathed the movie. Having worked in a big brokerage, I’d seen more than my share of corporate crazies. Fully half of the guys I’d worked with had been, at various times, certifiable. Generation Gone had just seemed like yesterday’s news. The world hadn’t agreed: the film had done well and had been nominated for a couple of Golden Globes, though no Oscars.

  None of this was attributable to Alex, who’d merely acted as a consultant. But he and Tyler had formed a connection and now included each other on their guest lists. “Though, to be honest, he’s had few invitations from me since my wife and I split up. I don’t entertain much by myself. Too much trouble.”

  I realized that he’d included the tidbit about his marital status for my benefit and, truly, I didn’t mind. It had been a while since I’d put myself in a position where a man might recognize me as potential mating material, it was a nice feeling to be looked at that way again.

  Alex secured drinks for us and steered me to a table near the corner of the deck that I hadn’t noticed before. The torchlight didn’t quite touch it, though candles illuminated the immediate vicinity and, with a vine-covered cliff wall behind us and the other guests fanned out over the outer regions of the deck, it was a quiet place to chat.

  We talked initially, the way single adults most often do, about our work. That meant that, truly, my end of that bargain was fairly brief. I was transitional. For the moment I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I grew up. Anyway, I was more interested in what Alex did. His area of specialization — and the reason Tyler had brought him in for Generation Gone — was in something Alex referred to as “corporate psychopaths.” The term alone was intriguing.

  “Do you really think there are a lot of them?”

  “My research in that area remains inconclusive. I just haven’t been able to test a large enough field of subjects.”

  He had, however, been given access to many prison inmates, and there he’d found a large percentage of the population to be, by his definition, psychopathic.

  “As high as 25 percent. That’s no surprise, of course. Our system is set up to flag psychopaths with an everyday sort of criminal bent. A psychopath, you see, has no loyalty to anyone or anything besides themselves. They are all about ego, incredibly self-centered. And some even seem to believe that everything they do is right, because what else is there besides them, do you see?”

  I glanced around theatrically at the people sitting near us, lowered my voice, and, with a smile, said, “By that definition, a lot of these people — film people — would be psychopaths.”

  He laughed, a good, clear sound. “You’re right, if that’s all there was. But there’s so much more. We are not talking about psychotic individuals. These are not people who are dull-witted or give the appearance of such. The most successful psychopaths — those that stay undetected throughout most of their lives — are highly intelligent. They are most often very charming and they have a knack for manipulating others, getting them to do what they want and blaming them for their actions. Perhaps even getting those others to believe that the psychopath is right.”

  “And they eat people,” this was out of my head before I even thought about it. And it earned another bout of healthy laughter.

  Alex nodded, “That is the common misconception. Born, I think, of fiction. Fiction and films. But, no, there is no evidence that psychopaths exhibit any more cannibalistic tendencies than the rest of us. There are many misconceptions around what constitutes psychopathic behavior. Some of my colleagues go so far as so to insist that, in our enlightened day, we can no longer even use the term: that psychopaths are, in some way, learning or behavior deficient and should be treated as such. I don’t agree. In my experience, the psychopath — the true psychopath — is untreatable. There is something deficient in their makeup that can not simply be installed, like a computer program. The true psychopath has no conscience, they are incapable of feeling remorse or regret. They are predators and, as such, they predate.”

  I reached out absently, towards the rockwork and plucked a yellow flower from the vine. It was small and tenacious-looking, as well it must be to not only survive but to thrive under such unlikely circumstances. When I crushed it slightly in the palm of my hand I was surprised at the strong fragrance the little flower released. It occurred to me that things are not always what they seem. “How would you spot a psychopath?” I said as I opened my palm and let what was left of the flower drop to the deck.

  If Alex had noticed my wandering attention, he didn’t comment. “Most likely, you wouldn’t. Not in casual acquaintance or conversation, such as you and I are having now. As I’ve said, the psychopath is charming, sometimes even charismatic. The functioning psychopath will often be married or have other types of relationships, though they mostly won’t last. And though they might give the appearance of outward calm, their personal lives are often on the brink of collapse.” My attention was beginning to wander, but I struggled not to let it show. Alex went on.

  “He’s often a pathological liar and, to make matters worse, he’s often easily bored — with his relationships, with his life. It’s not uncommon to see the individual psychopath’s style changing drastically over the years, it’s that boredom factor, I believe. In a psychopath with a criminal bent we’ll see that manifest itself in a sort of career arc: perhaps stealing from the corner store when he’s a child, then stealing from department stores as an adolescent, perhaps moving to cars or other large ticket items when he’s a teenager and then up to various types of grand larceny as an adult.”

  “But you said you specialize in corporate psychopaths. How would they differ?”

  “Well, they’re in corporations, for one,” this was a joke, but I could see it was also the truth. “In general psychopaths appear in society more readily at times of great change and upheaval. This is true in corporate structures as well as political ones. In times of crisis, for instance, or when a company is undergoing great change, that’s when the corporate psychopaths come to the fore, for fairly obvious reasons.”

  We talked a bit longer, but after a while the good food and the wonderful wine did their work and I began to get dangerously tired. I told Alex how pleased I’d been to meet him, he gave me two of his business cards, I wrote my number on the back of one of them and handed it back. We said a warm and polite good night, and then I went off to take my leave of Tyler, Tasya, Emily and the few people with normally colored teeth I’d met and made a connection with.

  In my little house I delighted in the relative quiet — the footsteps overhead were understandable and couldn’t, in any case, be helped. I’d brought a full glass of a lovely red wine downstairs with me, reasoning I could return the glass at any time and the wine had been flowing freely enough that I was sure no one would care.

  I cracked the new box of
candles I’d bought and placed them strategically around the bathroom, ran myself a pleasantly stinky bubble bath and sank into the tub with my red wine and a sigh. I thought about the evening. This bath, sans the red wine, had been my original Saturday night plan, but for the interruption of several interesting hours of party going.

  All things considered I’d had a pretty good time. As odd as they were, Tyler and Tasya were very nice, not to mention model landlords. It had been sweet of them to invite me to one of their shindigs. Jennifer seemed to be rapidly forming herself to some sort of little sister mode and I had a feeling I had made a new friend in Emily with whom, though we didn’t have a lot in common, I seemed to share a biting sense of humor and a respect for the ridiculous. I found myself looking forward to a sort of girl’s night out with Emily and Jennifer and the possibility of an evening with Alex flitted through my mind, as well.

  As I settled back into the tub, I realized something else. The feelings of guilt, apprehension and impending doom that had been following me since the moment that shooter pulled out his gun weren’t gone. Not even close. But, for the first time since that awful day, I felt the faintest glimmer of hope. Like maybe a time could come when dark thoughts didn’t bring in every new day or chase out every night. It was an encouraging thought. Hopeful. I liked the way it felt.

  Chapter Four

  No matter what they tell you, it rains in California. Of course it does. Just not very often. And when it does, it doesn’t come down in the delicate but consistent sprinkle I’d grown up with in the Pacific Northwest, or even the persistent but polite downpour that occasionally overtakes New York. Rain in Southern California can be traffic stopping. It’s like movie rain, as from a hose in the sky. It tends not to last long, this opening up of the heavens, but while it does, it’s intense and if you can avoid going out in it, you do.