Steven Bochco

by Death by Hollywood

  “I thought you said I wouldn’t be needing an attorney,” Linda says.

  “You don’t,” Dennis tells her. “At least not yet. What you need is a friend.”

  “And I’m supposed to believe that’s you.” Which is rhetorical in tone but which Dennis chooses to answer literally.

  “I’ll let you be the judge of that after you hear me out. And if you still want a lawyer after I’m through, I won’t try and talk you out of it.”

  Dennis lets Linda’s perception of her suddenly altered world sink in for a few moments before making his pitch. “I’m a cop. I’ve seen a lot worse than that, believe me,” he says, pointing at the TV. “Plus, I understand a little something about human nature, and I make no judgments about your lifestyle. I tell you this because I want you to believe me when I say that I like you. You’re smart, you’re great-looking, you got a sense of humor, plus I’m guessing that being married to Marv Paulson’s not the easiest ride in the amusement park, I don’t care how much money he’s got. So all in all, I have no interest in seeing you take a fall for a murder that could be argued was self-defense. So the only issue here is, do you exercise your right to an attorney or do you give me a statement first?”

  “And how is that to my benefit?” Linda asks.

  “Okay. Let’s say you get an attorney in here. He’s going to shut you down. Then I’m not going to have any choice but to arrest you, at which point you go into the system. You get arraigned, it’s splashed all over the tabloids and the TV, and until you make bail—assuming the judge sets bail—you’re in county lockup. Jail. And the reason all this happens is—don’t kid yourself—that’s the way your lawyer wants it. He gets to charge you a big number. He gets to go in front of the cameras. He gets to argue the case in a packed courtroom. But in the meantime, he’s not the one doing prison time if the jury convicts. And he’s not the one who has to live with that videotape being seen in open court.”

  Suddenly Linda imagines Bobby sitting in court, watching the videotape of her and Ramon. The thought of him seeing it and walking out of the courtroom and out of her life makes her heartsick.

  Dennis pours her a glass of water. “Now, here’s an alternative scenario. You tell me what you and Ramon were arguing about. You tell me how things got violent. You tell me how you knew enough about Ramon to know that before he reinvented himself as a successful actor, he’d done prison time for assault and rape. You say how you were in fear for your life and were just trying to protect yourself. Then, once I have your statement, I go to the D.A. I tell him I think you’re telling the truth, that you cooperated fully, and that instead of arresting and charging you, we ought to go before a grand jury, where there’s a good chance they’ll find no true bill. And in the meantime, after you give me your statement, you walk out of here and have your dinner at home instead of at Women’s Corrections.”

  “What happens to the tape in your scenario?” Linda asks.

  “Grand jury evidence is sealed. If there’s no true bill, the tape never comes out. If they indict, you’ve got bigger problems to worry about.”

  Linda takes a deep breath. “Ramon was trying to extort a million dollars from me to start a production company, or he was going to tell my husband we were having an affair. I told him it wasn’t going to happen. He actually picked up the phone to call Marv. That’s when I slapped him. He hit me back, and when he came after me, I hit him with his own fucking trophy.”

  “Because you were in fear for your life,” Dennis prompts.

  “Yes.”

  “And when we enhance the audio portion of the tape, is it going to corroborate what you’re telling me about Ramon trying to extort you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, Mrs. Paulson. Let’s get a D.A. in here and write it up.”

  Linda smiles at him for the first time since walking into the room. “Don’t you think after watching that tape together, you can call me Linda?”

  CHAPTER 29

  In the wake of Linda’s confession that she killed Ramon (in self-defense) and the D.A.’s office announcing it would present its case to the grand jury, there commences a media frenzy, which the absence of hard facts does nothing to suppress. If anything, the scarcity of information fuels a cascading mud slide of rumor, gossip, and innuendo, with all the print rags and TV gossip shows dangling serious bucks for any scraps of information.

  Linda hires a top-gun criminal attorney named Arlen Gillis to spin the information that inevitably leaks out, and for two weeks it’s a media circus, culminating in the main event, the secret grand jury hearing itself, which results, after due deliberation, in a finding of no true bill, just as Dennis had predicted.

  Normally, that would have been the end of it. Grand jury proceedings are held in secret, the transcripts are sealed, and in a finding of no true bill, the evidence is never revealed. The problem is, this isn’t normal. This is the gorgeous wife of a Hollywood billionaire, accused of murdering her Latin playboy lover in his Hollywood Hills boudoir. I mean, come on. There’s no way the press lets up on this one. Would you?

  And through it all Bobby keeps his head down and works on his screenplay, happily lost in the Zone.

  Time, or at least the perception of it, changes profoundly when you’re in the Zone. For a writer, being in the Zone means that some creative force beyond your control is driving you to work obsessively, all day, sometimes all night, with no sense of the passage of time, until exhaustion literally forces you away from the computer. And then, even after you’ve walked away, your brain continues to fire. You don’t hear much of what people are saying to you over the din of voices in your head clamoring to be heard. You fall asleep at night, or sometimes at dawn, listening to them, only to wake up a dozen times in mid-thought, as if sleep hasn’t been any impediment at all to the creative process. You come out of the shower and, soaking wet, scribble notes on the pad you keep handy, just in case. Your brain is like LAX the day before Christmas, with ideas stacked up like incoming planes, circling, waiting to land, so another one can take its place in the rotation. For sheer long-term excitement, nothing beats it.

  But then, as Bobby approaches the finish line of what feels like the best thing he’s ever written, two things happen: the first thing is, he forgets, at least for the time being, the Devil’s pact he made with Dennis. The second thing is, he unexpectedly hits a wall. Suddenly the faucet slows to a trickle. What had been effortless is now painstaking. The process becomes labored, and time—which seemed not to exist in the Zone—now looms large and weighs heavy, and Bobby fears that the magic has deserted him.

  While Bobby suddenly finds himself creatively stalled, Linda, without any ambivalence whatsoever, is letting time work its healing magic on her wounds. But just as things are beginning to settle down, the shit really hits the fan when a bootlegged videotape of Linda Paulson fucking Ramon Montevideo becomes the hottest item to make the Hollywood rounds since the tape of Pamela Anderson blowing her skanky husband, Tommy Lee, on that boat.

  Within days, every player in town has either seen or heard about the tape of her and Ramon, and if you could rent it at Blockbuster, there’d be a line out to the sidewalk. What had practically become a dead campfire with a few barely glowing embers has now erupted once again into a roaring blaze.

  Predictably, Marv Paulson (who could tolerate—hell, to a point even enjoy—the idea of his wife banging Ramon) can’t abide the humiliation of knowing that every one of his cronies, every person he does business with, every woman he meets, or every whore he beats has seen the tape of his wife riding Ramon like a bare-assed bucking bronco.

  So, given the givens, it doesn’t come as any great shock to Bobby when Linda shows up at his house about forty-eight hours after the tape hits the street, as it were, a little shell-shocked but strangely excited.

  “How are you doing?” Bobby asks.

  “Aside from the fact that I’m embarrassed and angry and I don’t understand why Dennis Farentino would do this to me, I’m doing
okay.”

  “How do you know it was Dennis?”

  “No one else had access to the tape.”

  “Ten other cops had access to it,” Bobby tells her. “The D.A.’s office had access to it. The clerks who handle the evidence for the grand jury had access to it. Christ, your own lawyer had access. And any one of them could’ve sold it to the tabloids for a hundred thousand bucks.”

  “Tell me the truth,” Linda says. “Did you see it?”

  “No,” Bobby says.

  “Promise me you never will.”

  “I promise.”

  “I came over to tell you that Marv wants a divorce.”

  “Are you okay with that?” Bobby asks.

  “I’m more than okay,” she tells him as Bobby pours her a glass of wine. “The more important question is, are you okay?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I mean is, one day you’re having this nice, quiet affair with a married woman and the next day you suddenly find out, along with the rest of the world, that she killed her previous lover. And if that’s not enough of a scandal, the hottest ticket in town turns out to be the videotape of the last time they had sex, climaxing, if you’ll pardon the expression, in the killing itself.”

  “Hey.” Bobby shrugs. “Nobody’s perfect.”

  “And just when you’re probably thinking how much better off you are with this woman out of your life, she shows up on your doorstep saying her husband kicked her out and asking if she can spend the night.”

  “Yes,” Bobby says.

  “Yes you’re okay with it or yes I can spend the night?”

  “Yes I’m okay with it, and yes you can spend the night.”

  “Thank you,” Linda says, and for the first time since this whole goddamn mess exploded in her face, she starts to cry. Bobby takes her in his arms and holds her, letting her cry herself out, then takes her hand and leads her to the bedroom, where she lets him undress her.

  “You’re not going to kill me, are you?” he asks, which actually gets a smile out of her.

  “Not unless you get a heart attack while I’m fucking your brains out,” she teases him, and that’s the last either of them has to say for a good long while.

  Bobby survives the lovemaking, and after they’ve shared a glass of wine, he asks her what she’s going to do next. She says first she’s going to get a suite at the Bel Air Hotel. Then she’s going to hire a killer divorce attorney. She pretty much knows what Marv is worth, and for all his faults, he’s not cheap. Besides, given his dirty little secrets, she doesn’t figure Marv’s up for much of a fight. When the dust settles, she tells Bobby, she should wind up with a settlement well north of a hundred million dollars, which, if she’s careful, she figures she can get by on. “At least,” she says, “till I find myself another rich husband.”

  “Would you consider a poor one?” Bobby asks.

  “I thought you’d never ask,” Linda says, starting to cry again, this time from happiness.

  Bobby couldn’t have written it any better.

  CHAPTER 30

  Every Hollywood scandal has a shelf life, and even this one—a classic by anyone’s measure—eventually burns itself out. And as Linda’s life settles back into some semblance of relative anonymity, her newly acquired divorce attorney very quietly negotiates a rapid dissolution of her twelve-year marriage to Marv. In her wildest dreams, Linda could never have imagined that roughly twenty-two years after leaving Ohio to seek her fame and fortune, she’s achieved, if not exactly fame, then at least some measure of notoriety. As for the fortune part of the program, I think anyone would agree that 180 million bucks, give or take, qualifies big-time.

  As far as Bobby’s screenplay is concerned, the faucet has turned back on, his creative juices are flowing freely once again, and, happily back in the Zone, he works on his script around the clock, finally writing FADE OUT one night around nine o’clock.

  Bobby hits the PRINT key on his computer, and as the pages start to spit out of the printer, the doorbell chimes.

  When he opens the door, Dennis is there. “Hey,” he says.

  “Hey,” Bobby says back, a little startled.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Oh yeah, sure, come on in. Let me get you a beer.”

  In the kitchen, Bobby pops the caps off a couple of Coronas and gives one to Dennis. “You’re spooky,” he says.

  “How’s that,” Dennis says, swigging the cold beer.

  “I just literally finished the script five minutes before you showed up. It’s printing as we speak. It’s like you’re a fucking mind reader.”

  “I am a mind reader,” Dennis says.

  “Oh yeah?” Bobby asks. “What am I thinking right now?”

  “You’re thinking I don’t know it was you who leaked that tape of Linda and Ramon to the street.”

  Bobby thinks, Fuck. This guy is Columbo. He tells you he’s smarter than you think and you still forget it.

  “I’m not saying I did put it out there,” Bobby says, “but you gotta admit, just when it seemed like the whole thing was fizzling out—boom—all hell breaks loose, it’s the hottest story in town all over again, and her fat slob husband dumps her. It’s a great story twist.”

  “Yeah. You humiliated her, you busted up her marriage—”

  “She hated that fat fuck.”

  “—and turned her into a whore in the eyes of the whole town, just for a better ending to your screenplay.”

  “Grow up, Dennis. She’s not a whore. She’s a divorcée with a hundred and eighty million dollars who a thousand guys would commit murder to get next to.”

  Dennis wipes the sweat off his beer bottle with a paper towel before chucking it into the trash. “Are you two getting serious?” he asks.

  “What, have you been spying on us?”

  “You haven’t exactly been sneaking around.”

  “Are you fucking my wife?” Bobby asks.

  “We’ve been spending some time together,” Dennis admits.

  “I figured,” Bobby says, and it’s an index of how serious he and Linda are getting that he’s not particularly angry about it.

  “How’s the script?” Dennis asks.

  “Walk this way,” Bobby says, and does a passable Groucho stride all the way to his office, where the last couple of pages are sliding out of the printer.

  There’s a special thrill writers feel when they print out that first copy of a finished script. Years ago, before word processors, you’d send your stuff to an outfit called Barbara’s Place, where professional typists would format your script and print as many copies as you needed. It would take days, though, before you got the pleasure of hefting your newly finished script in your hand. But these days, with computers, script programs, spell checks, and a high-speed printer, you can do it yourself in a fraction of the time. And when it comes out of the printer, it’s like bread coming out of the oven.

  Bobby takes the 118-page script and raps it on the desk a few times to even up the edges, then hands it to Dennis as if he were a new parent letting him hold the baby for a minute. “Feel that,” Bobby says proudly.

  “It’s warm,” Dennis says.

  “No, baby, it’s hot. That’s what a million bucks feels like. I’m calling it Hollywood. It’s a morality tale. It’s got it all—themes, melodrama, humor, sex, offbeat characters, plot twists—it’s the best thing I’ve ever written.”

  “I know the story,” Dennis says. “Tell me how it ends.”

  “Every piece of the plot fits,” Bobby says, “and since this is Hollywood, everybody lives happily ever after. The writer’s ex-wife gets tried for murder and acquitted, and the publicity makes her career. The writer falls in love with the Linda Paulson character, and she divorces her fat, rich husband. The writer writes his screenplay and sells it for seven figures against five percent of adjusted gross, and his ex-wife stars in it. The movie’s a huge fucking hit, the writer marries Linda Paulson, and everybody lives happily ever after.”
>
  “What about the cop?”

  “You’re in it big,” Bobby says. “You break the case, and even though the writer’s ex-wife gets off, you’re okay with it, partly because you have a chubby for her, but mostly because you’ve been there too many times. You only catch ’em, you don’t cook ’em. So whichever way it goes, you shrug your shoulders and move on to the next one. And after the wife gets off and she tells you she understands you were only doing your job, and since she senses there’s chemistry between you, maybe now that she’s free and single, you could spend some time together. And you know what you say?”

  “Something like ‘I’d like that, except I’d always be thinking you killed your last lover. How do I know you won’t kill me?’ “

  Bobby grins and shakes his head in genuine admiration. “I keep trying to be mad at you, Detective, but I can’t. You’re too fucking smart. Plus I like you too much.”

  “So that’s the ending?” Dennis asks.

  “That’s it. The writer marries Marv’s rich ex-wife, his ex-wife becomes a movie star, the cop is the classic stoic hero who soldiers on alone, and the kicker is, no one ever knows that it was really the Linda Paulson character who murdered her Latin lover.”

  “See,” Dennis says, “that’s why you’re a hack writer. You go for the bullshit ending.”

  Stung, Bobby says, “Oh yeah? You’re such an experienced creative genius, you tell me what’s a better ending.”

  Dennis weighs the script in his hand like the counter guy at Art’s Deli in Studio City holding aloft a freshly sliced half-pound of lox on a thin piece of wax paper. “Everyone knows Linda Paulson murdered her Latin lover,” he says. “That’s no surprise. A better ending is, the cop kills the writer, takes the script, puts his own name on it, sells it for seven figures, then fucks the dead writer’s wife in the nice cushy bed in the bedroom of the Hollywood house she inherits when her husband gets killed.”