"You're lucky you're alive," she said as we turned up Miller Drive and pulled up in front of the apartment.
"Yeah. I suppose. But you don't think about it at the time. You just act."
"Well, I'm really glad you're okay." She looked at me and smiled. "Glad it wasn't any worse."
We didn't say anything for a moment. I could hear the dusky sexuality of a Wynton Marsalis record drifting up from the Strip.
"Come in?" I asked.
"Moses, it's almost three. Besides, you need some rest."
"That's for me to decide."
"Look, Moses, I'd like to, but . . . it's not smart. The last time I slept with my boss was when I was a photographer's assistant in Boston and I got in a horrible situation with his wife and ended up losing my job."
"I haven't been married for ten years."
"That's not the point. It's just not professional. How'm I going to look at you in the morning when we have to go off and investigate something?"
"I don't know. How are you going to look at me?"
"What're you going to say if you want me to do something and I disagree and we get into an argument?"
"I hadn't thought about that."
"Well, you'd better think about it."
"Why?"
"Because it's really a problem. This stuff doesn't mix. I've been there. I know."
It was just as well. Twenty minutes later I was fast asleep, a video cassette of The Best of Mike Ptak blaring brightly from the television set at the end of my bed.
13
When you begin to suspect your shrink of being involved in a crime, is this genuine suspicion or resistance to therapy? I was speculating on that problem as I sat opposite Nathanson the next afternoon.
I had just finished telling him about Chantal, about how this French-Canadian woman had walked into my life and how I was feeling euphoric and apprehensive at once, when I noticed a book of matches from the Top of the Five Restaurant at the Bonaventure Hotel on his desk.
"How's the food'?" I asked, nodding toward the matches, which were sitting on a volume of licensing requirements from the Board of Medical Examiners.
"What do you mean?"
"The Top of the Five at the Bonaventure. It wasn't bad when I tried it last February. When were you there?"
"Is this part of your therapy, Moses?" "I'm just curious, really. It's always surprising when hotel food is better than—"
"Don't you wonder why, in the middle of discussing what you describe as the most powerful feelings you've had for a woman in some time, you deflect the conversation to neutral territory?"
"Nothing is neutral. Everything has a purpose. Didn't you say that once?"
"Yes. And do you think your purpose here might be to avoid dealing with your emotions?"
"I doubt it. My purpose right now is to get some facts."
"What facts?"
"You weren't, by any chance, on the seventh floor of the Bonaventure Hotel yesterday afternoon?"
Nathanson studied me a moment. "Why do you want to know that?"
"Because Emily Ptak was visiting someone in Room Seven-fifteen."
"I see .... And how do you feel about that?"
"How do I feel about that? Suspicious as all hell. That's how I feel about that. Her husband's barely two weeks in the ground and she's having clandestine meetings with a man in a suite at the Bonaventure Hotel!"
"And I'm supposed to be that man?"
"It's my job to check out all possibilities."
"Could it be that Emily Ptak left some matches from the Bonaventure Hotel in my office? Her appointment is two hours before yours."
"Yes, it's possible. I just want to know."
"Could it also be possible that Emily Ptak's visit to the Bonaventure had nothing whatever to do with what you think it did?"
"I don't know why she went there. But when a woman visits a man in a hotel room in the middle of the day and neither of them acknowledges their presence, it's been my professional experience that they weren't there studying for their Latin test."
Nathanson straightened himself in his chair and regarded me calmly. "Moses, remember when we discussed 'figure' and 'ground' how your own tensions—melancholia, if you will—sometimes prevented you from seeing what was right in front of your eyes?"
"Are you trying to tell me something'?"
"Nothing more than I'm saying. Life can be simpler than you make it."
"I'd like to know how."
"Well, for example, what do you want from me? Right here. Now."
"An answer. No more shrink bullshit!"
"And if I gave you one, would you believe it?"
"I'd want to."
"But would you?"
I didn't have an answer.
I left there ten minutes later with my head spinning. The thought of Emily Ptak up there in that hotel room with Nathanson was disconcerting for several reasons, not the least of which was that he was my shrink. Also, he was a cripple. Add the fact that Emily was lying to me. And that Emily was my client and by far the most lucrative one I had had in some time. I was loath to lose her and I didn't like myself for that. The whole thing was making me sick to my stomach and that was too bad because I was headed directly for the Rodman mansion in Bel Air for the Comedians and Chefs Benefit for Africa, and according to that morning's Los Angeles Times, the famous Sandor Romulus had been cooking for three days in honor of the occasion.
It was like a German car convention as I handed my keys to the valet and joined the men in overpriced neopunk sport shirts and the women in unisex silk pajamas at the corner of Copa de Oro and Braxton. From there we were transferred into mini-vans and ferried up the private eucalyptus-lined road that led up to Matthew Rodman's. Even in the van I got the sense of the crowd as middle-aged, upscale entertainment industry liberals who might once have been at the barricades, but were a long way from it now, even beyond the easy nostalgia about Columbia and People's Park I used to hear at similar events. Now I heard a lot of talk about deal-making, but it didn't sound much like an old Woody Allen movie. It was more earnest and deadly, as if there were only a certain amount of money left on a precarious globe and only a short time left to get it.
Rodman, a homosexual who had made his fortune in shopping centers, lived in a cool modern castle of seemingly endless baronial rooms with white Carrara marble floors and tiny seashells inlaid in the rough-hewn concrete walls. All this austerity was counteracted only by a large collection of Indian miniatures and, today, by hundreds of salami-shaped salmon and gray helium balloons that were dangling from the ceiling with the words "Cosmic Aid" printed on them in elegant black Deco. Two streets signs of the same colors stood in the living room pointing TO THE COMEDIANS and TO THE CHEFS. I stood between them, wondering which way to go, when Emily, in a sixtiesish paisley damask and Chinese rubber flats, came up and clasped my hand firmly between hers.
"I don't know how to thank you for what you've done for us. It would have been such an embarrassment without Otis, and whatever differences we may have had, I know you've done him a service too. He's such a talented man and he shouldn't be doomed by his own self-destructiveness. And next you're going to find out why Mike died. Have you had something to eat? Sandor made the most astonishing soufflé of chanterelles on radicchio."
"Maybe later. I'm feeling a little queasy."
"Then you must come and meet Eddy. You know, Eddy Sandollar—the guy behind all this. They call him the Rock 'n' Roll Saint." She took me by the arm and led me across the room to where a slightly overweight man in his early thirties was holding forth to a group of admirers. He wore his long blond hair almost shoulder length in late Beatles style, classic Wayfarer Ray-Bans, and an original Hawaiian shirt that would've made Randy Newman jealous.
"So I told them," he was saying, "don't give me your bureaucratic bullshit. We're talking human survival here. We've got an earthquake in Mexico. Little children are buried alive. Now either give me those medicines or get off the phone and stop wasting
my time."
"Excuse me a moment, Eddy," said Emily. "I'd just like you to meet someone—Moses Wine."
"Hey, brother," he turned to me, grabbing my hand in a soul shake. "You're the Fearless Fosdick who brought Otis back to us!" He pulled me in closer to him and whispered, "I know it sounds corny, man, but you saved a soul. Back in the old days we all wanted to 'save the world'—remember the song? But if you help just one man as long as you live, you've saved yourself. That's why I quit the record business. I was getting into such a heavy ego trip I had to get out before it got me."
"Eddy organized the Heavy Metal Hunger Concerto at the Hollywood Bowl last year," said Emily. "They made a fortune."
"I know. I saw the MTV," I said. "That was some all-star lineup you put together, everything from doo-wop to bebop."
"Hey, that wasn't me. I was only the conduit. It only passed through me, as Satchidananda used to say. Besides, it's easy. You put the word out and the managers are climbing all over each other just to get the exposure. So, a private eye, huh?" He studied me for an instant with a kind of weird intensity that was visible even through the Ray-Bans. Then his gaze shifted away almost as quickly. "You've got to meet my wife," he said, taking the hand of a surprisingly plain Oriental woman of about twenty-five in an airbrushed Cosmic Aid T-shirt. "This is Kim. She rescued me when I was stone broke. You know the trip, driving a Rolls and filing Chapter Eleven. Kim transformed me spiritually. Like most of us, I was born in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, but I had to branch out. Then I could stop negating."
Kim didn't say anything.
"Negating what?" I asked.
"The whole thing. The spurious glamour of the music scene—sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. I was hooked on ambition. Now I'm hooked on giving. And you know what? It works."
"It does, Moses," said Emily. "It's saved me since Mike died."
"It doesn't make you walk on water, but it helps you sleep nights," said Sandollar. "Hey, have you tried the eats? Sandor Romulus is the next thing in California cuisine, man. And everything's low-cal—we made sure of that. No cholesterol, lipids, or any of those carcinogens except the air we breathe." He tossed his head back to get the blond hair out of his eyes. "Look, man, I'd love to rap with you all day, a private dick doing your kind of charity work turns me on, but I gotta shake the pockets of these characters over here." He gestured toward a couple of older gays in crew-neck sweaters. "They run the Au Pair Gallery and we're planning a round of benefits with the art world. Rauschenberg and Johns have already promised posters. Check you later."
He grasped my hand and shook it firmly before moving on to the gallery owners. For the first time I was starting to feel hungry, as if my duty to the world's starving were to go tank up on the latest cuisine. I followed the T0 THE CHEFS sign to a buffet table laden with everything from mesquite-grilled Santa Barbara shrimp to pizza topped with cabernet grapes and goat cheese. And despite what Sandollar had said, there were also enough brioches, croissants, and bagels to distend the stomach of any California bulimic whose binge cycle ran to outré restaurants and whose purge cycle ran to self-flagellating exercise classes.
I was filling my plate and watching Sandor Romulus, a short, trim man in white pants and a black T-shirt, hold court behind the table like Le Roi Soleil himself while a couple of forlorn movie stars languished nearby in uncomfortable anonymity when Chantal came up beside me. She looked terrific in a silver camisole with a cameo just above her right breast.
"My shrink says I can't distinguish between 'figure' and 'ground', " I told her. "Which one are you?"
"Both." She smiled.
"Well, I can see the figure, but how about the ground?"
"All things come to those who wait—even a smartass." She slipped her arm in mine. "Come on. You're missing Otis."
"Have you seen Bannister?" I asked as she led me out the building in the direction of a temporary stage that had been erected on the tennis court in front of a large video screen.
"Not yet."
"Funny. I didn't think he'd be late for an event like this. It's loaded with potential clients."
We arrived at the back of the crowd and edged our way toward the stage. Otis was standing there with a microphone in his hand looking straight out of Interview magazine in a dinner jacket and jeans with a tieless tuxedo shirt. "I had to clean up my act," he was saying to the appreciative audience. "We're talkin' about poverty here, and just because there are fifty studio executives at this party who can fire my ass don't mean I'm not here for one reason only—to feed the bellies of starvin' babies. So no motherfucker or pussy jokes." There was a round of nervous laughter that died off quickly, perhaps too quickly, and Otis realized it.
"But seriously, folks," he continued, "dirty words are not the killers in this world. Dirty acts are. And one of the dirtiest acts around is not feedin' people when there's plenty to go around. And I'm not just talkin' about that orange juice pizza you people been eatin' out there. Don't you think that's weird? The more people die in Africa, the stranger the food is we eat. Pretty soon the whole continent'll be dead over there and you'll be eating ice cream with Worcestershire sauce." Laughter. "Now isn't that just my style? Insultin' the hell out of the white people and makin' 'em laugh. You be a bunch of masochists, huh? And what that make me—the Marquis de Spade? So open up your wallets, masochist babies, and call your accountants, 'cause the man I'm about to introduce to you deserves all your attention and all your money. And I do mean all! I'm talkin' about none other than the man that rocked and rolled, funky-chickened, jerked, and slam-danced right into your pockets-the Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Prince, and Mick Jagger of international aid . . . Fast Eddy Sandollar."
"Thanks, Otis," said Sandollar, taking the microphone from the comedian, who remained on the stage with him. "I think we'd all rather be insulted by you than praised by a lot of the moral hypocrites who are around these days. Now I know most people out here have gone through a 1ot—we had a dream with Martin, we had a New Frontier with Jack, and a Great Society with Lyndon. And although some of those dreams faded, I've gotta tell you—look around—we don't have it so bad. But I also don't have to tell you that there are a lot of people out there who don't have it so good. Putting it bluntly, there's a second Holocaust going on, and the scene of that Holocaust isn't Buchenwald, Auschwitz, or Bergen-Belsen; it's Ethiopia, the Sudan, and Mali. You say Holocaust is a big word? Well, let me tell you, I didn't realize how bad it was myself a few years back when I was sitting in my penthouse office as president of Licorice Records, listening to demos and smoking dope. So at the risk of boring people who spend their days watching dailies and rough cuts—"
"Bore 'em, Eddy," shouted Otis. "Bore the shit out of 'em. Then we'll give 'em some more of that strawberry pizza with garlic cookies and they'll be all set to go again."
"Sounds good, Otis." Sandollar nodded to an aide, who switched on the video projector. An image of a barren desert appeared on the screen. "This is East Africa. According to the United Nations Economic and Social Council, twelve million people there are on the verge of extinction. It is the greatest human need crisis of our time." The camera turned 180 degrees to reveal about a dozen near naked, sad-eyed waifs who looked as if they were all suffering from infectious diseases or acute malnutrition. "To avert this catastrophe, if it's not already too late, we need to triple our contributions of medical supplies and food." Several of the children, flies buzzing around their heads, stretched their hands out to the camera, imploring the audience directly for aid. It was hard to watch. "We need to do it now. And we need to avoid the greedy, corrupt local politicians, whether they be Marxist, capitalist, fascist, or whatever." As Sandollar continued, I had the odd sensation people were pushing their way through the crowd, causing it to shift about. "So we have come to you, the members of the community that is historically the most generous because your creative gifts make you the most closely attuned to the suffering of others." The shifting continued and I turned to my left, noticing Koon
tz edging his way toward the stage. Behind him were Estrada and another plainclothes detective in a black leather jacket and Carrera glasses. "And it is that suffering I call upon you to alleviate, to commit yourselves to alleviating not just once, but on a continuing basis."
I turned to see three more policemen in uniform stationed in the back. "We don't want to be cultural or even intellectual imperialists. We just want to give them the money and materials directly so they can help themselves." I turned forward again. Koontz had reached the stage and was talking with Otis, who was staring down at him with a puzzled expression. "In these days we have to fight cynicism; we have to fight inertia. There is hope. We can make a better world. In the words of John Lennon: 'Imagine!' "
Koontz said something else and Otis tensed, moving to his right a couple of steps. Suddenly he bolted from the stage, running across the tennis court like a halfback digging for the goal line. As he did so, the three uniformed cops started sprinting to the fence gate ahead of him. Otis jumped backward and spun around only to find Koontz and his cronies right behind him.
"What the hell kind of bullshit is this?" Otis's voice suddenly boomed out over the crowd like a small dynamite explosion. "These cops is crazy! Get the hell out of here!"
"I'm sorry, folks. Sorry to inconvenience you here," said Koontz as he and Estrada each took Otis firmly by an arm. "We wanted to do this more quietly."
"Fuck quiet! This is bullshit! This is racism! You been tryin' to kill me since I was born!"
Otis took a wild swing at the third detective, who reached for a pair of cuffs and started to clap them on him as Koontz and Estrada grabbed his arms and pulled them back again.
"I'm sure you know your rights under the Miranda decision, Mr. King."
The Straight Man - Roger L Simon Page 10
