by K. K. Beck
Maurice came on the line. “Quentin!” he said frantically. “Did you send them the letter yet? You know. The Doom Queen people?”
“I sure did,” said Quentin chirpily. “Letter to the lawyer and a copy to her business manager went out on Thursday. Haven’t heard yet, but it’s the weekend.”
“Shit,” said Maurice. “I want immediate results!”
“I’ll rattle their cage on Monday.” Quentin was more than slightly indignant. Just a few days ago Maurice had wanted to stall until the thing was actually shooting. Now he was bitching because things weren’t happening fast enough.
“Get to another phone,” Maurice said tersely. “A secure line. Get yourself a mess of dimes and find a phone booth somewhere. Don’t use the credit card.”
Jesus, the old man was sounding even more paranoid than usual. And had he been away from the States so long he didn’t know pay phones took more than ten cents these days?
Twenty minutes later, Quentin was standing outside a Taco Time in a graffiti-covered phone booth with malt liquor bottles on the floor, pumping coins into a slot and hitting the country code for the nation that had provided Maurice Fender with a safe haven for so many years.
Maurice answered and told him to fax him the phone number of the booth, and go back and stand there, while he, Maurice, moved to another line on the island.
The old man was clearly nuts, but Quentin said okay, wrote the number down, got back in his rental car and hoped to God that this particular booth took incoming calls. Maurice presumably didn’t know that the war on drugs had changed the way public phones operated. Quentin cruised along Sunset until he found a liquor store with a neon FAX sign in the window. This was no way to live, he thought bitterly.
When Quentin finally got back in communication, the first thing Maurice said was “It’s that bitch Carla.”
“Carla?”
“Carla and the Cleartones,” said Maurice impatiently. “You know. Ever since k.d. lang did that cover of ‘Shebang Dulang Wamma Wamma Baby,’ Carla’s been after us.”
Quentin knew that Carla Lomax, songwriter and lead singer of a one-and-a-half-hit fifties girl group and now a retired high school music teacher in Oakland, California, had been trying to get her rights restored. Carla Lomax, like a lot of young R&B artists in the fifties and sixties, had been fleeced by an unscrupulous manager. “Yeah. So? Her manager sold those rights to that tax lawyer a long time ago, and we got them from him.”
“Sure,” said Maurice impatiently, “but he had a heart attack in his hot tub about ten years ago, and he’s not around for her to sue, and her manager’s in the charity ward at some old folks’ home.”
“That’s right, and we wrote her lawyer a letter explaining that they didn’t have a leg to stand on and they went away,” said Quentin. Was Maurice’s memory going too?
“They came back. Carla’s hungry little shyster working on retainer won’t quit. And he found someone in the FBI who’s an old Carla and the Cleartones fan. Carla and her lawyer are getting this guy to leak some stuff about me right out of my files. If I were still an American citizen, I’d be outraged. The stuff’s not good enough for a criminal prosecution, but good enough for Carla to use in a civil matter. It could open the floodgates. Shut me down.”
For a moment, Quentin hoped Maurice would get shut down. Then he’d be free.
“What really steams me is the lack of integrity here,” continued Maurice. “Her original deal, okay, so maybe it was unethical, exploitive, and unfair, but it was legal. And so was my subsequent acquisition of her rights. The way I run my business is irrelevant. Her coming after me is just a shakedown. There’s no honor left in this sad old world.”
“How much you gonna buy her off for?”
“We’re negotiating,” said Maurice tersely. “Obviously, they expect the rights back and plenty extra for Carla to keep her mouth shut. But the problem is I got those rights in the same package as the Valerian Ricardo thing. If it gets around that Carla’s deal was no good, it’s going to screw up this Kali-Ra thing too, seeing as it was part of the same deal. I was counting on at least a million from Nadia Wentworth. I could sure use it to pay off Carla.”
“What do you want me to do?” said Quentin.
“Try and put together a deal with Nadia Wentworth right away.”
“Like in the next few days?”
“Like yesterday, goddamn it!”
Quentin remembered what Margaret had told him about Nadia not trusting lawyers and turning over her business decisions to her personal assistant, Melanie Oakley, and he relayed the information to Maurice. “Maybe there’s a chance I can get to this Oakley woman over the weekend and try to ram something through and we can get it all drawn up and signed early next week.” He realized suddenly that this was ridiculous. No one would be so stupid as to negotiate a million-dollar rights deal directly, even the eccentric Nadia Wentworth and her naive little personal assistant. He began to backtrack. “Of course it would be highly irregular. I mean I can’t imagine that she would—”
“She might,” said Maurice in a menacing tone. “If we can scare her.”
“Scare her? Like how?” Surely Maurice wasn’t going to set Machete Mike on Nadia Wentworth.
“I’ll get Vince Fontana on the job,” said Maurice.
Vince Fontana was a seventy-eight-year-old crooner whose nostalgia albums, Vavavoom! The Best of Vince, Serenades for Swingers and Ave Maria and Other Sacred Hits, sold briskly to the Geritol set through a 1-800 number advertised on television. Lately, twenty-year-olds had discovered him along with Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra and martinis. Fontana had been doing business with Maurice for fifteen years, ever since he’d run into tax problems. He was also rumored to be well connected with what was left of the Mafia.
“Vince can drop a few hints,” said Maurice with a growing confidence Quentin found alarming. “He’ll let this Oakley woman know she should get with the program or some of his associates might stir up trouble with the unions on the Doom Queen set. Cranes will fall over, that kind of thing. He can pitch it like he’s trying to do her a favor.”
“But you told me those Mafia rumors about Vince were baseless,” protested Quentin.
Maurice made an unpleasant, contemptuous hooting sound. “Don’t believe everything I tell you.”
Unleashing a geriatric lounge act who had once partied with Bugsy Malone to deliver hints about cement overshoes seemed like a desperate move. Something snapped, and Quentin heard himself say peevishly, “I don’t know, Maurice, it sounds kind of flaky to me.”
“Flaky!” thundered Maurice. “It’s fucking brilliant. You little twerp, I saved your sorry ass and your law license. I gave you a job just when you were about to get nailed, disbarred, screwed, blued, and tattooed. Who cleaned up the fucking mess you made? I did! If it weren’t for me, you’d be teeing off at the ninth hole in one of those white-collar-crime federal slammers right now. So just do what I tell you and don’t screw up.”
“Okay, Maurice,” said Quentin. His head was pounding.
“Listen to me,” said Maurice in a low, slow way that chilled Quentin’s blood. “If Carla Cleartone tries to sell me to the feds, I’m gonna make it easy on myself. I’m gonna leverage whatever I got. Which includes you. If you don’t pull this off and keep me in business, it’s your problem more than it is mine. They can try to cut off my life’s blood but I still got friends here on the island and assets where no one can find them. All you got is my goodwill, which can be revoked at any time. Got that through your pointy little Ivy League brain?”
“I got it, Maurice,” said Quentin.
“Okay, what about the widow who tried to make trouble for the professor? Is she gonna be a problem?”
Quentin, unwilling to do anything to encourage Maurice to send out his own personal Tonton Macoute assassin, had until now been less than frank about Lila, but felt that refusing to answer a direct question about her could backfire badly. “I was just about to tell you, Maurice,�
�� he said. “Apparently, Mrs. Ricardo is alive and well. In fact, she’s staying with Nadia Wentworth and serving as some kind of consultant on the picture.”
“Fine,” said Maurice. “I’m glad I took the precaution of sending Mike out there. He should arrive tonight. He won’t be in touch directly, though, unless it’s absolutely necessary. It’s better if you aren’t seen together.”
“Good thinking, Maurice,” said Quentin feeling queasy. “I don’t want to know any more than I have to.”
CHAPTER XII
A BEAUTIFUL STRANGER
The following afternoon, Nick Iversen got out of his frigid, air-conditioned rental car and felt the close heat hit him in the face. He stood across the street from a condominium complex that had once been the Scheherazade Apartments, a U-shaped Moorish folly in cream-colored stucco with dark-stained wooden trim and a red tile roof. The three sections of the building surrounded a charming garden full of festive palm trees and geraniums. A low wall was covered with a jumble of jasmine. He double-checked the address in his copy of Lila Lamb Ricardo’s book. Yes, this was definitely the place.
The building had the air of having been recently restored to its thirties splendor. Nick tried to imagine what it must have looked like in 1972, when Uncle Sid had died there. In My Life with Valerian Ricardo, the place had sounded like a real dump. Uncle Sid’s widow had been pretty clear about that in the final chapter, in which she lamented that a great artist had sunk so low. According to her, Uncle Sid had managed, through inner spiritual strength, to have survived the humiliations of stoking the boiler, fixing stuck windows and leaking faucets, setting rat traps and trying in vain to kill the armies of cockroaches that called the place home. Lila had been especially bitter that all his efforts had been unappreciated by the lowlife tenants, none of whom gave him so much as a fruitcake at Christmas.
At LAX, Nick had bought a cheap throwaway camera. Awkwardly juggling the book, he took a few shots of the building now. As he did, he became uncomfortably aware that someone had sidled up next to him. He felt instantly on his guard. He’d seen a lot of scruffy homeless people around, and although homeless people didn’t scare him in Minneapolis, he was worried that the California variety were more likely to be hearing voices and might stab him or engage him in irrational conversation. He stepped sideways and turned warily, only to be confronted by the sight of a stunning young woman who was staring at him.
She was tall and aerobicized in the way he expected California girls to be, but instead of being a tanned Barbie blond, her skin was a very pale gold and she had thick dark hair to her shoulders. She was wearing a black swimsuit top that showed off impressive cleavage, some kind of ankle-length flowered sarong arrangement wrapped around her hips, revealing a flat stomach and a navel pierced with a jeweled ring, and a small woven pouch on a leather thong that crossed her bare torso diagonally.
Against his will and his better judgment, Nick checked out her entire body, including one long leg partly exposed by the slit in the sarong, and ending with feet in gold lamé high-heeled sandals, the toenails painted bright blue.
“Are you interested in this building?” she asked. He was reassured by her voice, with its immature Valley Girl tinge, at odds with her spectacular appearance. Nick told himself that she was real.
“Yeah, it’s great,” he said, putting the cheap camera in his pocket, suddenly wishing it were some expensive matte black model with a brace of lenses.
“I know. I’m writing a paper on this building for a history class. This used to be the Scheherazade Apartments. Some famous people lived there. Not like the Garden of Allah or anything, but still, it’s part of the cultural heritage of Southern California.”
Nick caught a whiff of some exotic perfume. He wasn’t sure if it came from her golden skin or the nearby jasmine. “Well, my uncle Sid lived there and he was kind of famous in his day,” he said with a modest downward glance. “He wrote books under the name Valerian Ricardo.”
He heard her take in her breath rapidly and her eyes widened. They were green, fringed with dark lashes and flecked with little bits of gold. “Wow, really?”
“You mean you’ve heard of him?”
“Well, yes. I came across him in my research. He wrote those Kali-Ra books that Nadia Wentworth is making a movie of. He died in weird circumstances in the boiler room in there.”
“He did?” Lila had poignantly described Uncle Sid’s death in a large, carved bed with Egyptian motifs. Whispering “Au revoir,” he slipped gently beyond the veil, my arms still around him.
“Valerian Ricardo. Wow. How are you related to him?”
“He was my grandfather’s uncle.”
She appeared to make some rapid calculations. “Then he’s your great-great-uncle.”
“Yeah. I guess so.”
“I’d really like to interview you for the paper I’m writing,” she said. “Get some family history and all.”
“No problem,” said Nick dizzily. “Shall we go get a coffee or something?” But then he remembered he had an appointment with Nadia Wentworth. Here was the most incredible girl he had ever seen in his life, and she wanted to talk to him, and he had a schedule conflict because he was due at the Beverly Hills home of the woman with the best breasts in America. He felt he had to lean against something while he composed himself, and backed up against his rental car.
“Are you all right?” she said with a look of concern. It suddenly occurred to him that she was as good-hearted as she was beautiful. She had to be. Anyone who looked this good had to have an equally lovely soul.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s the heat. I just got here from Minneapolis.”
“You are a little overdressed,” she said, fingering the lapel of his tweed jacket and shifting her weight thoughtfully from one foot to the other. The result was a spectacular curvature of her left hip.
“Listen, I really want to talk about Uncle Sid,” he said urgently, “but I just remembered, I’m supposed to go see Nadia Wentworth.” He consulted his watch. “And I’m not sure how long it takes to get there. I’m not used to the freeways and all that.”
“The Nadia Wentworth?”
“Yeah. I have some material for her about Uncle Sid. But I’d really like to talk to you. About Uncle Sid. I’m kind of fascinated by the old guy, to tell you the truth.”
“I know, so am I,” she said. “Take me with you to Nadia Wentworth’s. I’ll drive, so you won’t get lost. And we can talk in the car.”
“Oh,” he said, worried. Would Nadia Wentworth mind if he brought someone else?
His new acquaintance seemed to be telepathic. “Just tell her I’m your girlfriend or something. Is this your car?” She opened the door and slid into the driver’s seat.
“I’m Nick,” he said, stumbling around to the passenger’s side. “Nick Iversen.”
“Callie,” she said, flashing a smile and holding out her hand for the keys. “Callie Cunningham.”
He handed them over. “Kali? Like Kali-Ra?” Maybe she was making some kind of a joke.
She laughed. “God, no. It’s short for Caroline.”
“Um, this is a rental car,” he said. “I’m not sure the thing I signed said anyone else could drive it.”
“Chill, Nick. I’ve got my driver’s license and everything.” She revved the engine and barreled out into traffic. “Wow. I think it’s a fabulous coincidence that we met. A real kismet thing, you know? So where is this place?”
She drove very fast, but quite expertly, and soon they were winding up a curved road past an architectural hodgepodge of French châteaus, Spanish missions and Gothic castles. Nick was startled to see little metal signs stuck in bright green lawns that read PREMISES PATROLLED. ARMED RESPONSE.
“Back at the Scheherazade you said Uncle Sid died in weird circumstances. What do you mean?” asked Nick.
“Didn’t you know?” she said, raising an eyebrow but keeping her eyes on the road.
“No. The family never had much time for the
guy. There’s no one left who remembers him.”
“He was over eighty and doing some heavy partying with a bunch of hippie chicks. He was found tied up to some bizarre bondage device in the boiler room of the Scheherazade surrounded by drug paraphernalia.”
“Oh really?” said Nick. He held up Lila’s book. “His wife says he died peacefully in bed in his striped silk pajamas, full of tender thoughts for her.”
Now Callie did turn around. “That book looks interesting,” she said. “I noticed it under your arm at the Scheherazade. I’ve heard about it but I’ve never seen a copy.”
“Apparently, it’s very rare, and Nadia Wentworth wants it,” said Nick. “I arranged to sell it to her, but I Xeroxed it first.” Nick had had a hard time doing this. Kinko’s had refused to help him, saying it was copyrighted material, so he’d sneaked into the office at the theater every night for a few weeks and done it bit by bit.
“Wow! Could you make me a copy too?”
“Sure,” said Nick, absolutely thrilled. He now had a reasonable excuse for staying in touch with this fascinating creature. “It’s amazing I ran into you,” he said. “I can’t believe you’ve heard of Valerian Ricardo. I never had until Nadia Wentworth got interested in him. All I knew was that there had been some no-account Uncle Sid that no one liked to talk about.”
She nodded. “Like I said. Kismet.”
“To tell you the truth,” said Nick, “when I found out about Uncle Sid, I had this little fantasy that I owned the movie rights and Nadia Wentworth would have to buy me off. But then I did some research and realized the copyright had expired. Anyway, I consoled myself with the thought that it would be interesting to meet a movie star.” He looked over at her solemnly. “And I got to meet you too,” he added.
