by Peter Israel
I remember sweating up a storm in the taxi. Three days. The pressure on Waller had passed to the Counselor, who’d lateraled it right into my lap. Three days. Maybe I shouldn’t stop when I got to L.A. It only later occurred to me that had the Counselor left me out of that meeting, or had I deep-sixed the beeper, we might have kept somebody else from getting killed.
Might have.
I had time for only one hurried phone call at the airport.
No, Ms. Hugger wasn’t at her desk.
I left a message.
NAME: Hermatius, Norman Leon (born: Hermanski) white Jewish male
Age: 54
Health: fair (heart bypass operation, 1980)
Sign: Taurus
Function: Film producer
Marital status: twice divorced (1968, 1973) Children: two
Employment: contract employee (independent contractor)
Earnings: circa $600,000 annum
Net worth: unclear (Hermatius Assoc., Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings 1976, annual IRS penalty payment: circa $150,000) Tax shelter investigations pending.
Current val. residence: $1,200,000; dbl. mtge.
Born: New York City
Resides: Brentwood, California
Education: Columbia College
Columbia Law School (no degree)
Sexual preference: promiscuous (susp. bisexual)
Get somebody else to tell you about L.A. The few times I’ve been there I’ve done mostly driving. The street signs are good but the streets go on forever, and the houses sometimes get up into the five-digit numbers. Everything looks kind of temporary, even the hillside homes and the skyscrapers, but that may be because the people I’ve run into tend to talk a lot about natural disasters: fires, mudslides, earthquakes. The hilly parts have the best air. I’ve never had a chance to swim in the Pacific.
The best Ms. Shapiro had been able to do for me with Norman Hermatius was a prebreakfast meeting. Even that, I gathered, had been hard to arrange. Hermatius, according to his secretary, had already talked to the police about Bashard. Besides, he was a busy man. Finally, his secretary had said that he had a breakfast at eight-thirty but that if I could be there at eight, he’d give me a half hour.
But a half hour only.
“There” was one of those swank hotels in Beverly Hills where the fast trackers stay in detached bungalows half hidden by flowers and palms, the most expensive of which have their own swimming pools. I met Norman Hermatius in the hotel dining room, promptly at eight. He was sitting alone, at a rear table for four, with a telephone plugged into a wall outlet behind him. Apparently he’d had a preprebreakfast meeting because the place next to him hadn’t been cleared, but all Hermatius was having was black coffee.
He was a ruddy-cheeked, heavy-browed type with curly salt-and-pepper hair, the kind who looks like he started exercising only in middle age. He wore a navy blazer, a blue-striped shirt with a white collar open at the neck (chest hair curling out of it), gold cuff links, a Rolex. He seemed to know half the people in the dining room. A number of them waved at him while I was there, and he waved back, and a few came up to shake his hand. But we almost didn’t get that far.
“Where’s Camelot?” he said when I introduced myself.
“In New York,” I answered.
“In New York?” he exclaimed. “Then how the fuck did you get in here?” I started to say I’d walked in, but he cut me off. “I agreed to talk to Camelot. I’m not wasting my time with a pisher.” He glanced at the Rolex. “You’ve got half an hour, less two minutes. Up to you. Either get Camelot on the phone or stop wasting my time. Want to order something first?”
I hesitated. As little as I liked it, the Counselor would like it less, but I reached for the phone. Instead Hermatius pulled it away and, barking at a waiter and holding the phone up in the air, gestured for another one.
I guess being a two-phone table counts for something in L.A.
While I was getting through Ms. Shapiro to the Counselor, Hermatius talked to somebody else, his broker presumably. It was hard not to overhear him, and maybe that was the point. He seemed especially interested in the film-studio stocks. I heard him ask for MCA, Fox, and Gulf and Western, but if he was buying or selling it didn’t happen then.
In any case I was explaining the situation to the Counselor when Hermatius, glancing again at the Rolex, broke in on us.
“Charles? Is that you, Charles? This is Norman. I thought you were going to be here yourself, babe, there must have been—”
“Never mind,” the Counselor’s voice interrupted. “I understand you’re a busy man, Mr. Hermatius. I am, too. Why—”
“Norman,” Hermatius cut in. “Call me Norman. Anyway, you want to know if I could have killed Raul? Sure I could have. I could’ve killed him a thousand times, if I’d thought of it. It would have saved me a fortune. How?” Hermatius held his coffee cup up to a passing waiter and gestured at me. “He all but wrecked my company, that’s how. He practically put me out of business! If you don’t know about it, I’m not going to waste my time telling you what you ought to know. ‘How Success Wrecked Norman Hermatius Associates.’ It’s all true, too, most of it. Do you guys know what cost overruns are?”
I knew, the Counselor did, too, and we also knew the Hermatius Associates story. But that didn’t seem to matter.
“It’s when you commit to bringing a picture in at a figure”—he went on, while the waiter refilled his cup and filled mine from a silver pot—“and when the accountants are finished, you’re at two, three times the number. Usually you can stick the studio for it; if they want the picture, they ante up. But this was my picture, my money, and the son of a bitch all but ruined me. I cut a stupid deal, a mega-stupid deal. Monumental. I gave the son of a bitch approvals. Crazy. For years everybody out here wanted to make that picture, but Raul insisted on approvals and nobody would put up ten mill to make a picture and give the writer approvals. Nobody except me. I thought I could manage him, can you beat that? Ego. Let me tell you something, boys, if you ever go into the motion-picture business, keep your egos out of it. If you can’t, don’t.”
I watched him talk in staccato, rapid-fire style, his face flushed, and thought about the bypass operation listed in his printout.
“But what am I telling you this for?” Hermatius shouted. “You were his fucking lawyer!”
“So I was,” the Counselor said. I could imagine him enjoying the moment. While he hadn’t negotiated Bashard’s contract with Hermatius directly, he had masterminded the negotiations from long range. “But that’s not why I sent Mr. Revere out to talk to you.”
“I know that, I know that,” Hermatius said. “And it was a hell of a picture, too, six Academy nominations and strong enough at the box office till Star Wars ran everything else out of the theaters. Shit, people still go to see it. So sure, I could have killed him once. Only I didn’t. Poor bastard.”
“But you had a motive, didn’t you?” I heard the Counselor say.
“A motive?” Hermatius’s eyebrows shot up. “For killing him?”
“That’s right,” the Counselor said. “Alive, he all but ruined you. But you stand to make a fortune with him dead.”
The Counselor had set him up nicely, without the producer so much as realizing it. It shut him up for a minute, and when he reached for his coffee cup, I could see the china shiver.
“You own the sequel rights to Bashard’s book,” the Counselor went on. “As long as Raul Bashard was alive no studio out there would touch the property, because of the approval problem you mentioned. But now? With him dead? And a clever filmmaker who could pull two, three, four more pictures out of the material …?”
The Counselor paused. I imagined him creaking his chair.
“Sure,” Hermatius said, staring out across the dining room. “So I’d pick up a poker and beat him to death. Is that it?”
“That’s not for me to decide,” the Counselor replied. “But according to my information, you’re pretty close to
a deal already.”
“Your information …” Hermatius started to retort. Then, deflating: “Your information’s pretty good.”
He looked across at me, as if in search of corroboration.
“Look, Charles,” he said. “For Christ’s sake, I’m not your murderer. I may come on strong, but I’m a peaceful man at heart. Ask anybody. Hell, ask my shrink, I’ll give you his number. When I lived in New York I couldn’t even kill the cockroaches—that’s why I had to move out here.”
He started to laugh but stopped when nobody laughed with him.
“As I said,” the Counselor answered, “that’s not for me to decide. But I wish you’d cooperate with Mr. Revere.”
“Cooperate? Who says I’m not cooperating?”
“Good,” the Counselor said. “I’m sorry, but I have another appointment now. Phil will put the rest of our questions to you.”
So help me, Norman Hermatius started to say he had another appointment, too, but the phone was already dead in our ears.
We hung up. Hermatius sighed, then drained his cup and wiped his mouth with his cloth napkin.
“That’s one tough son of a bitch,” he said, subdued. “How much does he pull down a year?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. At this point I pulled out our list and put it on the tablecloth next to him. He glanced at the names, handled the paper briefly like somebody looking at a menu and deciding there’s nothing he wants.
“Sure I know them,” he said. “None of them well. They’re all nice people. But science-fiction people—they’re a separate world unto themselves. I don’t understand them. Hard to talk to. If you want to know the truth, I can’t read the stuff. Spielberg, Lucas, they’re different; they grew up in the midst of it, they feel it in their bones. Not me. All I ever wanted to put on film was Raul’s story. And I did it. If you ask me, though, most science fiction’s a crock of shit.”
He was looking at the list, though, while he talked. Then he pointed at one of the names with his finger.
“Jesus,” he said, “you’ve just given me an idea. What do you think of Latham?”
“Oliver Latham?” I said.
“Oliver Latham, the last of the greats. Jesus Christ. The fans love him. Did you see them at Raul’s party? If I could get Latham, that would complete the package. He wouldn’t even have to script it, I could get somebody else. Cheaper. But Latham would give it credibility. Credibility? Shit, stature! Screenplay by Oliver Latham, based on a novel by R. R. Bashard. Humungous stature! And I’ll tell you something else: I bet I can get him. Do you know who his agent is? I bet he needs the money. Do you think he needs the money?”
His recovery, I’d have to say, was nothing short of amazing. His face flushed again, and the words came rapid-fire.
“I wouldn’t know,” I started to say, but he wasn’t listening.
“Of course he needs the money!” Hermatius said with a guffaw. “Who doesn’t need the money?”
He was laughing then, his whole torso joining in. But then his eyes caught something, or someone, behind my head.
“I’m sorry, babe,” he said, glancing at the Rolex one last time and standing. “Time’s up, my meeting’s here. I meant what I told your boss, though: I wouldn’t kill a fucking cockroach. If you need anything more, though, call my office.” To my surprise, he not only shook hands but patted me on the cheek with his left hand. “And remember, what we just talked about, that’s a secret. Understood? For your ears only.”
As it turned out, we’d run twenty minutes over.
His two guests, both wearing dark blue suits and carrying briefcases, were easily close enough to see the cheek patting and hear the last part. But who they were I’ve no idea. We weren’t introduced.
Nor was there much of a secret. A few days later the gossip columns ran several items about the Bashard sequels, and one of them even mentioned Oliver Latham.
Come to think of it, I never did get to ask Norman how he’d gotten to Hermatius from Hermanski.
NAME: Frankaman, Sidney white Jewish male
Age: 57
Health: good (poor vision)
Sign: Capricorn
Function: retailer, rare-book dealer
Marital status: Married (Edna Samuelson, 1953) Children: 3
Employment: self (owns eleven Dark Star Stores)
Earnings: salary: $150,000
est int & div: $175,000 (possibly low)
Net worth: circa $1.7 million
Born: Brooklyn, New York Resides: Tarzana, Calif.
Education: Erasmus Hall High School no college
Sexual preference: promiscuous
For some reason, Sidney Frankaman was the only one I hadn’t gotten in touch with from New York. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was the cold-shoulder treatment he’d given me in the hotel bar, that Sunday at the BashCon. Maybe I assumed I’d find him at the Dark Star. Maybe I hoped I wouldn’t.
I was finished with Hermatius, or he with me, at eight-fifty. I drove down to Westwood, getting there in time to join the rush-hour snarl and making a few wrong turns before giving up and parking the car in a garage that took up, weirdly enough, the first few stories of an office building. The Westwood I remembered from years ago was, because of the proximity of the UCLA campus, something of a college town: movie theaters and head shops, little boutiques, book and record stores, cutesy restaurants tending toward vegetarian food. Quaint would have been the descriptive word. It still had some of its quaint, and probably the younger set still took over at night, but office towers had encroached and at that time of day you could have thought you were in the downtown of some middle-sized mid-American city. The Dark Star’s main store was still closed, so I bought a newspaper out of a sidewalk machine and had my own breakfast—ham and eggs and hashed browns—in a local cafeteria. By the time I’d finished, the Dark Star had opened for business.
The Dark Star—at least that main, three-storied affair in Westwood (because there are some ten more up and down the West Coast)—is supposed to be the largest store anywhere devoted to science fiction and fantasy, and I’d never seen anything like it. It sold books, hardcover and soft, and magazines you never heard of. It sold video and games, adult games and kiddie games and those role-playing games some teenagers devote their lives to. It sold toys: transformer robots, laser swords, space helmets, miniature figurines, transformer watches, T-shirts, junk jewelry and a lot of miscellaneous stuff you could only classify as accessories. It had an enormous section devoted to comic books, old and new. It also had, up on the mezzanine floor, a Collector’s Corner, which I gathered was where the serious bucks came and which was where I headed, once I got past the sleepy-eyed staff of T-shirted youths, reminiscent of the Hnngas and Hnnns of the BashCon. At that hour, they far outnumbered the clientele.
A young woman very out of character with the prevailing atmosphere was just coming out of an office when I got to the top of the ladderlike stairs and onto the mezzanine. She was tall, with long reddish hair, horn-rimmed glasses, a white shirt with a bow at the neck, and a mid-calf navy skirt. High heels, too.
“May I help you?” she said.
“I hope so,” I answered. “I’m interested in The Twenty-fifth Century.” I expected the line to draw a laugh, or at least a smile.
It didn’t, though.
“Magazine facsimiles are on the main floor,” she answered matter-of-factly, pointing a red-nailed finger behind me.
“Oh? I didn’t know there was a facsimile edition.”
“I’m not sure there is,” she answered. “But if there is, you’ll find it downstairs.”
“But I’m not interested in a facsimile edition,” I persisted. “It’s the originals I’m after.”
“Oh?” She sounded surprised. I guess I didn’t look like a collector was supposed to, but whether this meant I was overdressed or under, I couldn’t say. “Which numbers?”
“Numbers? You mean issues?”
“Yes.”
“All of them,”
I said. “I’m looking for a complete set.”
She stared at me, as though registering the details for the first time. Apparently what she saw made her suspicious. I decided I didn’t look freaky enough.
“Complete sets are quite rare,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”
“Well? You’d have to see Mr. Frankaman himself about that.”
“Then I’d like to see Mr. Frankaman himself.”
“Mr. Frankaman only sees customers by appointment,” she answered tersely.
“Is he here now?”
“No, he’s not.” Clearly I’d begun to annoy her.
“Then I’ll wait.”
“You’ll have to make …”
Something going on behind me, though, distracted her for an instant. She looked surprised. I glanced around, down over the main floor, and saw that “Mr. Frankaman himself” had just arrived. I recognized him by the bald pate and the goggle glasses, also by his short-bodied strut. He stopped briefly at the cash register on a raised platform near the entrance, exchanged words with the security guard, then marched through the aisles and up the stairs.
Halfway up the stairs he spotted me, and stopped.
“Oh Sidney,” Ms. Petulant called out beside me, suddenly all smiles. “This gentleman’s looking for a complete set of Twenty-fifth Century Tales. He—”
“No he isn’t, Virginia,” Frankaman interrupted. Then, to me: “Good morning, Revere.”
He came up the rest of the stairs.
“I knew you were a phony,” Virginia said, glaring at me. “What are you, an insurance salesman?”
“Wrong again,” I said.
“Never mind, honey,” said Frankaman, “I’ll take care of him.”
She hesitated, then swerved on her heels and stalked back into the offices. The heels made her hips swivel.
Sidney Frankaman watched her go, his eyes on the hips. Cyn Morgan had called him an ass-pincher, but you couldn’t tell from his concentration whether he had already pinched Virginia’s or was just thinking about it.
“Eat your heart out, buddy,” he said, shaking his head as she disappeared. “There goes some piece.”
Sidney Frankaman wore black tasseled shoes, a gray nubby silk suit, a white shirt open at the neck and a pinkie ring shiny enough to hurt your eyes, the more so when he jabbed it at you, which he did often. His office was an interior room with a long picture window overlooking the main floor, and he sat in a high-backed stuffed swivel chair near the window, where he could keep an eye on things. There was a lot of chair left over the top of his head.
