Steven Bochco

by Death by Hollywood

  With the sliding glass bedroom doors open because of the heat, he can practically hear the sound of their bodies slamming into each other. As the telescope frames them in extreme close-up, Bobby can literally see the beads of sweat on their naked bodies, even though the house is a good thousand yards below and across the canyon.

  Juicy.

  The woman’s lying on her back, her right arm partially obscuring her face, muffling her cries of passion, while the man is on his knees, upright between her thighs, his hands gripping her hips like the handles of a wheelbarrow, thrusting into and out of her, harder and harder, till both her arms go up over her head and she grabs the top of the headboard, bowing her pelvis up at him, her mouth wide with pleasure.

  And right then, Jesus Christ, Bobby realizes he knows her. It’s what’s-her-name, she’s married to Marv Paulson, a fat billionaire piece of shit who owns a bunch of television stations, and the young, well-built guy she’s currently throwing a world-class hump into sure as hell ain’t him.

  Now Bobby sees the thing that changes his life. After Mrs. Marv Paulson finishes fucking this guy, their pillow talk begins to get a little less intimate and a little more animated, and before you know it, things are escalating to the point where they’re up on their feet, bare-ass naked, arguing heatedly. Bobby can faintly hear the sound of their angry voices, but the words are lost as they reverberate through the canyon.

  Finally, in a turn for the ugly, she hauls off and smacks him. Without hesitating, he smacks her back, push begets shove, and before you know it, she picks up a trophy sitting on the guy’s mantel and whacks him over the head with it.

  He staggers around for a few seconds like a chicken with a wrung neck before collapsing, half on, half off the bed. Even from a thousand yards away, the guy looks dead.

  As Bobby watches Marv Paulson’s wife rush around hurriedly throwing on her clothes, he suddenly remembers her name: Linda. And behind that, in a rush, he also remembers her backstory, which he knows because Vee was in some acting class with her, and Linda told Vee her whole sordid life history over a few too many margaritas one night after class.

  Linda Paulson’s about forty years old, except for her nose, which is around twenty-two, and her tits, which are twelve. She grew up somewhere in Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, I think, and by the time she was sixteen, she’d fucked the best-looking boys in her high school (plus a couple of the teachers), she knew she wanted to find fame and fortune (not necessarily in that order), and she figured, with her looks, she had a shot at both of them in Hollywood.

  After graduation, she hitchhiked to L.A. with a friend, just for the summer, she told her mom. She never came home. She got a job posing for underwear ads for the May Co., the kind you still see in the L.A. Times, and used the money to finance acting lessons. When she started making the rounds of casting directors, she caught the attention of one in particular, who shall remain nameless, and happily screwed him cross-eyed for a series of small roles in various television series. Off these parts, usually consisting of not much more than appearing in a nurse’s uniform and uttering lines like “This way, Doctor,” she got an agent, who told her he could make her a star if a) she fucked him and b) she got a nose job. She did both. He neglected to mention that her talent (at least for acting) was minimal, though, candidly, if that were a prerequisite for success, three quarters of the actresses working in television today would be unemployed.

  Within eighteen months, Linda had gotten an agent, secured enough work in TV to buy a nice car, rented an apartment in a high-rise on Doheny between Sunset and Santa Monica, and expanded her network of friends and acquaintances to the point that her social life was pretty much a non-stop party. Of course, this was the early eighties, and cocaine was everywhere, which was how she wound up meeting her first husband, part of a group recreating in the guest bedroom of a house in Sunset Plaza doing lines of coke.

  He was a fifty-six-year-old production executive at Warner Bros., and within a week she’d moved into his house in Beverly Hills. Within a year, they were married, and Linda was on her way. She stayed in the marriage for six years, hoping to parlay her husband’s clout into a viable acting career, but it never happened.

  Toward the end of the marriage, increasingly frustrated at her husband’s inability to use his influence to her advantage, she met an incredibly good-looking young guy who was the brother of a girl she knew from acting class. He was visiting from Atlanta, the attraction was instant, and they wasted little time getting horizontal, and every other which way, with each other. Linda had always enjoyed (and been good at) sex, which was how she’d managed to tolerate the fifty-six-year-old tub of guts she married in the first place. But now, with a hard-bodied young man who told her he was a successful cable entrepreneur in Atlanta wanting to marry her, she dumped her husband in a heartbeat.

  She married the sexy cable entrepreneur and moved back to Atlanta with him, figuring she was going to be the second coming of Scarlett O’Hara, only to discover the guy wasn’t exactly what he’d said he was. He was in the cable business, all right, but the entrepreneur part was something of an exaggeration. What he actually did was drive a truck and lay cable for the local TV signal carrier.

  Newly divorced, Linda returned to L.A. six months later and, with her last four thousand bucks, bought herself a spectacular pair of 36C’s and dyed her hair blond. The rest, as they say, is history. Marv Paulson never stood a chance.

  In his early fifties then, already forty pounds too heavy for his five-foot-nine-inch frame, Marv was a fat slob who stuck a napkin under his collar and sweated when he ate. He was also, at the time, closing in on a net worth somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 million bucks.

  Among his other exotic tastes, Marv liked anal intercourse. Linda was more than willing. He also liked to watch Linda make love to other women while he whipped his skippy. She was okay with that, too. Within a year of moving back to L.A., Linda was living large and opening mail addressed to Mrs. Marvin Paulson.

  Believe me when I tell you that Linda’s story is not that uncommon in Hollywood.

  Hell, for that matter, neither is Marv’s.

  Marv is the kind of guy you love to hate. He started out life wealthy, thanks to a father who made millions building downtown office buildings in L.A. Marv cheated his way through high school, partied his way through college, knocked up a couple of girls along the way that his daddy paid to go away, and when the old man keeled over on the par-three fourth hole at Riviera one Sunday afternoon (he was six over par at the time), Marv suddenly had close to 10 million dollars of inherited wealth, which he shrewdly (not to mention shamelessly) leveraged into ownership of a few dozen flea-ridden flophouses. His timing couldn’t have been better. Catching a wave of downtown real estate development, he sold off all the properties for ten times what he paid and put it all into television stations when they were a license to print money.

  Then, when the good-time nineties finally rolled around and everybody and his cousin was getting rich in the stock market, Marv was getting even richer. Of course, this is where you’d hope a guy like Marv would’ve fallen flat on his ass, hanging around the market too long, watching his stakes in Time Warner and Enron go belly up. Instead, like the creature he is, Marv got out of the stock market in March 2000, just before it began to nose-dive. While everyone else was buying more stock as the prices dropped, hoping to make a killing when the market turned north again, Marv was smugly saying things like “Trading down killed more Jews than Hitler.”

  So, while most of his cronies were getting their brains beat out in the market, Marv was buying himself a new Rolls-Royce, a Gulfstream 4SP, four floor seats to the Laker games, and a thirty-five-thousand-square-foot Bel Air mansion. It’s safe to say, if there’s ever a nuclear holocaust, Marv’s the guy you want to be standing next to.

  The problem is, when you’re rich and you’re wired up as nasty as Marv Paulson is, your perverse impulses tend to escalate, and Marv was no exception. I don’t know wh
at money buys you in Muncie, Indiana, but here in L.A., if you can imagine it, you can buy it, even if it’s not exactly on page three of the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog.

  Over time, Marv’s appetites grew to include pleasures as diverse as losing a million dollars at the craps tables in Vegas, then beating up black whores and taking a dump on them. Nice, huh?

  My point being, at a minimum, you can begin to see how being married to a guy like Marv gets pretty old pretty fast if you’re a sexy woman like Linda Paulson, and everywhere you go guys are checking you out, imagining soapy water running down your perfect 36C’s, imagining what it’d be like if you were sucking their cock in the shower instead of fat Marv’s. Jesus Christ, I’m getting a chubby thinking about it myself.

  It’s in that context you can pretty easily understand how come Linda likes to mess around a little on the side herself, just to keep her hand in, as it were.

  And when it turns out this scumbag Ramon is trying to extort her by threatening to go public with their affair if she doesn’t give him money, you can also understand why she’d whack him over the head with his proudest possession before she’d let him screw her out of the life she’d worked so hard to screw herself into …

  CHAPTER 9

  While Bobby watches through his telescope, Linda wipes down the bedside table, the desktop, and every other damn surface she thinks she might’ve touched in the last hour, before disappearing into the bathroom, reappearing moments later with her makeup kit in hand. Taking one last look around to satisfy herself that she’s covered her tracks, she grabs her purse and exits the room, no longer in Bobby’s view.

  The writer part of Bobby’s brain is screaming at her, Come back, you dumb bitch. You forgot to wipe off the fucking murder weapon!

  And as if she’s telepathically heard him, she reappears in the bedroom, grabs the trophy, wipes it cleaner than her husband wipes his ass with Tucks, and splits, this time for good.

  A couple of minutes go by, or, for all Bobby knows, maybe half an hour. Through the telescope, he can clearly see the guy isn’t moving, or for that matter breathing, either.

  “Holy shit,” Bobby says out loud. “Holy shit.”

  He finally pulls back from the telescope, his head throbbing and his eyesight momentarily blurred from squinting through the eyepiece. His first thought as he moves back into the living room is to call 911, but halfway into dialing, a different thought occurs to him and he hangs up the phone.

  What a great hook for a screenplay, Bobby thinks. Sort of like a contemporary Rear Window. A guy on his balcony, a down-and-out screenwriter spying on his neighbors through his telescope, happens upon a very sexy couple getting it on, and before you know it, they get in a beef, it gets violent, and she kills the guy with a statuette. And instead of calling the cops, the down-and-out screenwriter decides to insinuate himself into the lives of the principals so he can see how the story really unfolds, from the inside out, and then write the screenplay that’ll resurrect his career.

  With his brain racing and his head throbbing from too much adrenaline and an incipient hangover, Bobby quickly throws on a pair of jeans, a sweatshirt, and a pair of old sneakers.

  In the kitchen now, he opens a cupboard under the sink and pulls out a box of latex gloves the maid uses when she’s washing dishes. Grabbing a pair from the box, Bobby stuffs them in his pocket and goes through the laundry room to the garage, where he fires up the Boxster and drives down La Presa to the bottom of Outpost.

  Parking well up the street, Bobby walks past seven or eight houses, carefully checking each one out, until he recognizes the dead guy’s home. Pulling on the latex gloves, he checks to make sure the street is deserted before entering the property through the front gate. With his heart pounding louder than his sneakered feet, Bobby tiptoes along the narrow brick pathway running along the side of the house, almost jumping out of his shorts when the dog on the other side of the fence paralleling the pathway starts to bark furiously. Bobby freezes, terrified, and several moments go by before he realizes that either no one’s home next door, they’re home but they’re deaf, or they don’t give a shit that their dog is going berserk.

  Bobby continues along the path until he reaches the back of the house and, finding the sliding glass door to the bedroom still open, lets himself in, relieved to hear that the dog has finally stopped barking.

  Inside, wearing the gloves, careful not to disturb anything, Bobby closes the bedroom curtains before turning to face the room. He’s probably written some version of what he’s looking at a dozen times …

  INT. BEDROOM — NIGHT

  Through the open glass door overlooking the swimming pool, we see the victim, now nothing but a naked corpse, lying half on, half off the bed, head tilted at an odd angle, his cold, unblinking eyes staring vacantly into the camera. PAN DOWN to the murder weapon, a four-pound gold-plated trophy, lying in plain sight on the floor next to the bed. Bloodstains splatter the sheets of the unmade bed where the victim’s head rests, etc. etc… .

  The problem is, what Bobby’s looking at now isn’t something he’s written. It’s the real deal, and the real deal has him scared shitless, to the point where he realizes how lazy and one-dimensional his writing has always been.

  For the first time in his life, he’s suddenly conscious of the way in which real violence, with real consequences, can turn the ordinarily orderly mind into a screaming rat’s nest of fear and confusion. He’s never even seen an actual dead body up close (a murder victim, no less), let alone seen the murder itself, and Bobby stands rooted to the floor, staring at the corpse, trying to get his breathing under control, willing himself to calm down, to think clearly.

  When he can finally hear more than just the pounding of his own heart, Bobby cautiously approaches the dead body and stares down at it, afraid to touch it, knowing it’s dead, yet somehow terrified it’ll suddenly move or groan or—God forbid—grab his pant leg in some horrible death grip, the torn piece of fabric becoming the fatal shred of evidence that sends him, weak-kneed and loose-boweled, to the gas chamber for a murder he didn’t commit.

  “Get a hold of yourself, for Christ’s sake,” Bobby says aloud before finally checking to see if the guy is dead, as if he didn’t already know from the color of his clammy, cold skin and his creepy, unblinking eyes.

  Eyeballing the room, Bobby sees a pair of pants lying nearby on the floor. Grabbing them and feeling around for a wallet, he reaches into the front left pocket and pulls out a small wad of cash, a couple of credit cards, and a California driver’s license, all held together by two pink rubber bands. The driver’s license identifies the deceased as one Ramon Montevideo, and now Bobby recalls why the guy’s face seemed vaguely familiar to him. He was an actor in some Latino family drama that got canceled after thirteen episodes a couple of seasons back, and Bobby remembers this because Vee took a few acting workshops from him at a small theater in West L.A. last year and had nice things to say about him.

  Bobby gingerly picks up the murder weapon, which, it turns out, is an acting award called an Alma, given by this Latino organization La Raza. The thing weighs a good four pounds, and it was probably lights-out for Ramon the second Linda whacked him with it. Think Barry Bonds jacking one into the bay beyond the right-field bleachers of Pac Bell stadium and you get the idea.

  Now, as Bobby starts to relax a little, his story brain kicks in, big time. What had begun as this vague feeling that, in the midst of his own terrible failures, Lady Luck had chanced to present him with this incredible gift now begins to arrange itself into a coherent structure of events, each more dramatic than the last.

  What could be more dramatic than the murder itself, you ask? Well, for openers, how about this?

  Bobby hears a sound from inside the armoire that faces the bed, kind of like the sound a VCR makes when the tape comes to an end and automatically rewinds itself. Opening the armoire’s doors, Bobby finds, among other things, a tiny video camera that tapes, through a small hole drilled into
the cabinet, Ramon having sex with (presumably) his various and sundry partners. And of course, where there’s a camera, there’s a recorder.

  “Please, please, please,” Bobby begs under his breath, hitting the EJECT button.

  “Thank you, God,” Bobby says as the cassette slides out.

  If you’ve ever been to Las Vegas and pumped your last three bucks into a slot machine and watched as all four cherries come up in a row, you have some inkling as to the excitement Bobby is beginning to feel building inside him.

  Pushing the tape back in, Bobby hits PLAY, then REWIND, and watches, thrilled, as the tape reveals, in absurdly comical backward sequence, first his own search of the bedroom, then Linda scurrying around cleaning up after herself, then the murder, then the argument with Ramon leading up to the murder, and finally the sex preceding their fight.

  “Holy shit,” Bobby says, actually grinning now as he pops the tape out of the machine again and sets it aside.

  Under the shelf on which the VCR sits are three drawers, all filled with tapes, all numerically coded and dated—the mother lode. Jesus Christ, Bobby thinks, this guy must’ve fucked every woman in L.A.

  Leaving the armoire for a moment, Bobby goes to Ramon’s desk and rifles the drawers. If I’m this guy, he thinks, and I’m a big enough shitbird to secretly videotape myself having sex with all these women, I’ve also gotta have some sort of written catalog to identify who’s on which tape, right? I mean, when I die and leave my library to the Museum of Television and Radio, I’ve got to give them the accompanying paperwork.

  And sure enough, in the back of the top right-hand desk drawer, under a bunch of loose papers, Bobby finds what he’d hoped for, Ramon’s “little black book” with the names of all the women he’s fucked, the corresponding dates and numbers that identify their various tapes, plus one-word commentaries and grades on their sexual talents: Anal. Oral. Moaner. Screamer. Doggie. Orgasms. Letter grades from F to A-plus. Bobby can’t help wondering, Does this asshole send out report cards?