Hello Hollywood

by Suzanne Corso

  “What kind of cigarettes did mother Joan smoke?” Camilla asked.

  “Marlboros,” I replied.

  “I knew it,” Camilla said. “Paul kept insisting she smoked Lucky Strikes.”

  “Paul didn’t do his research,” John remarked.

  “Okay, my question,” Sarandon said. “What’s the most outstanding quality about Grandma Ruth?”

  I didn’t have to think too long about that one. “She allowed her granddaughter to make her own choices and her own mistakes but remained a constant source of encouragement.”

  “Wow,” Sarandon said. “That’s perfect. I also like that she understood how messed up her own daughter was and that she was determined to buffer her granddaughter as well as she could from growing up to become her mother.”

  “Next week we’re shooting the scenes after Samantha gets her first kiss from Tony, the morning afterward, when Sam is dying to have a private conversation with her grandmother about Tony. But her mother is up and wants to know who she was talking to on the phone,” John said.

  Camilla put her hand on her hip and in a perfect mimic of my mother’s voice, said, “I heard ya talkin’ on the phone.” She paused. “What the hell is he doin’ sleepin’ his life away?” She paused again. “Remember that scene, Sam?”

  Vividly. “You’ve got the Brooklyn thing down pat, Camilla.”

  Sarandon winked and drew her fingers through my hair. “Now, bubelah, you find yourself a nice Jewish boy.”

  “Wow,” Nick exclaimed. “And you’ve got the Jewish grandmother schtick perfect.”

  How lucky was I that these two women were playing Grandma Ruth and my mother? “You two are the best,” I said, and got up and hugged each of them.

  I knew that Paul watched the whole scene and that it pissed him off.

  “Well, we’ll leave you guys to coffee and dessert,” Susan said. “See you on Monday, Sam.”

  “Maybe we should skip our midterm exams, Nick,” said Nina. “I’d rather be on the set.”

  What ensued was a sort of argument between Nick and Nina, probably triggered by too much wine, about whether they should stay an extra few days and miss their midterms. Nina said yes, but Nick reminded her it would cost them an additional two hundred bucks if they changed their tickets now. Nick won.

  While this mini argument was going on, John’s toes sought mine again, but I pulled my feet back toward my chair. Not interested, pal. You’re a liar. I’ve had enough lying men in my life.

  He felt my withdrawal—he’d have to be completely oblivious not to—and he gave me an odd look, one of those WTF? looks that men give women when they realize they’ve messed up but aren’t sure what they’ve done. Through coffee and dessert, no one said much of anything. Nina was pissed at Nick, Nick was pissed at Nina, I was pissed at John, and John was just bewildered.

  When we finally left the restaurant and walked out toward the parking lot, all I wanted to do was get home to the silence of my sanctuary and, like the old man in the nursery rhyme, pull the blanket over my head.

  Since Nick and Nina had come in their own car, we said our good-byes in the parking lot, then John and I headed toward his car on the far side of the lot. We walked in utter silence beneath a shockingly clear sky strewn with stars. He finally spoke first.

  “Did I do something to tick you off, Sam?”

  A direct question. That was good. Points in his favor. Since he’d thrown open the door with that question, I walked through it. “It’s not anything you did. It’s what you neglected to tell me.” I spoke with sincerity, trying to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  We stopped next to one of the solar-powered street-

  lamps and stood there in a circle of light like the orphans we were. He thrust his hands in the pockets of his jacket, frowned, and studied the ground at his feet. When he finally raised his head, he said, “Let me guess. Women’s restroom. Nina said something about my having done time. She figured you knew.”

  Maybe he was a tad psychic, like Liza. “How’d you know?”

  He shrugged. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  “John, you coulda said something after I made my little confession about the kind of men I attract. What were you thinking?”

  “It just didn’t seem to be the right time or place. My story is complicated and long-winded.”

  “I’d be happy with a Reader’s Digest version.”

  He gazed off to his right, where Nick’s car was pulling out of the lot, Nina’s waving hand visible outside the window. Then he looked at me straight on. “Frank’s Pizzeria. You and I were there together at least twice.”

  My mind didn’t race into the past, it leaped there.

  “Bobby Santos,” he said. “Does the name ring any bells, Sam?”

  The Santos family had lived eight houses down from us in Brooklyn. Santos senior ran a money-laundering operation for the mafia; I had pieced together that much over the years. There were three sons—and Bobby had been the youngest. Bobby, whom I had kissed beneath a bit of mistletoe at some New Year’s Eve party where Tony had vanished long before midnight. I vaguely recalled that Tony had returned in the middle of the night, in what was essentially the new year, and was enraged that I had left.

  I got a fist in the face for it the next day.

  But I never forgot that kiss from Bobby Santos. Or, at any rate, my body apparently had never forgotten. That was why John had seemed so familiar to me.

  “My God, Bobby Santos and the kiss under the mistletoe.”

  “I never forgot it.”

  “Oh, my God,” I muttered, and got into the car.

  He scrambled in behind the wheel. “Sam, let me explain.”

  “Leave me alone.” Forget the toe dance, forget that his mouth had inflamed mine hours earlier. Forget all that. Right now, he was a liar no better than Tony, than Vito, than Alec. “I’m done. Please just take me home.”

  I felt something from him, something swift and powerful, a tsunami of emotions that seemed to seize him, shake him, and shred him to the bone. I wasn’t sure how I could actually feel such a thing, but I did. And it changed something deep inside of me—but my change was slow and cautious. This was a man I had known for thirty years. How did I not know him? How is he here? And why is he here? These were my questions that I needed to have answered.

  TEN

  From La Playa, it was a twenty-minute drive to my house. But there had been an accident on the Pacific Coast Highway, a multiple-car pileup with fatalities, and John and I sat there together in his car for a long time before either of us said anything.

  I felt as if I had been cast in a really bad movie, one of those grade-B Japanese films from the 1950s, where a monster of some kind would suddenly appear at my window, its face pressed up to the glass. And then all hell and chaos would be let loose, a kind of Pandora’s box of horror scenes that had all been done somewhere before but could still shock you senseless.

  I was thirsty. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to get away from John. I needed to be alone to absorb this. But he began to talk—about his childhood, about who Bobby Santos had been. And his voice captured me and whisked me away, back to Brooklyn.

  “We laundered everything. Drug money. Prostitution money. Assassination money. Wall Street pyramid scams. It was Wall Street that paid me the most, next to the later—real estate—which legitimized me. The pump-and-dump schemes. We laundered money for local gangs and cartels, and for international outfits. We were your first stop, probably your only stop. I started working for my father when I was fourteen, delivering messages. I’m now in my forties. I got busted when I was twenty-one for selling drugs and was sentenced to eight years. I did six. My time was hard and I went to jail for a charge that I barely had anything to do with. There’s nothing easy about prison. If I’d been busted for the Wall Street stuff, I’d probably still be doing
time. Fortunately, I stashed away a lot of my profits, and I took that money, changed my name, and paid my way through college. Then I went into real estate. You know the rest.”

  I did? And what was that? That he had saved Brian from buying a Manhattan penthouse that would lose money? That on a trip to L.A. he’d invested money in one of Brian’s movies? That was it? End of story?

  “And that’s it? You’re a changed man because of six years in prison?” What happened in those six years behind that cell door? How does one redeem himself ?

  “I’m a changed man because of Nick. I married his mother as soon as I got out; she got pregnant almost immediately, and when Nick was five, she had an affair with her boss. We got divorced. We had joint custody except that he spent most of his time with me because she couldn’t be bothered.”

  Traffic inched ahead. I stared out my window, struggling to understand why some people bothered having children at all. Why had my mother and Vito had a kid? I was undoubtedly a mistake, but how many children were mistakes? How many children where the result of lust triggered by too much booze or too many drugs?

  Paul’s son, Luke, had been conceived during a long weekend in Barbados that he barely remembered, during one of his early jobs as a producer. At a cast party, they’d gotten smashed on champagne and margaritas, he’d told me, and had screwed on the beach. Six weeks later, his wife had learned she was pregnant. When Luke was two, they’d gotten divorced, and Luke had bounced back and forth between mom and dad. Now look at him, I thought. The trajectory of his life was nothing for a parent to brag about.

  And what about Isabella? I had tried my best to be a good parent, but sometimes your best wasn’t good enough because you got caught up in your own shit. I regretted that she’d had nannies when she was really young; I should have been there more. My best parenting probably started after Alec’s death. Pathetic, but there you had it. It all came back to my thought that perhaps people should be tested for parenting in the same way they were tested for any profession or skill. Yeah, it sounded fascist. But I believed it was also true.

  I broke out of thought as John started talking again. “It was my eighteenth birthday. And every year the same thing would happen. We had a cake at my home and all the family—­sometimes forty of us—would pack the little place. They would light my candles and my dad would run over and take them out and place one single black candle in the center of the cake and tell me I wouldn’t live past this year. That year, he told me I wouldn’t see nineteen. ‘You’ll be dead and your mother will wear black for the rest of her life,’ he said. I moved out a month later and had nothing more to do with him. So I know about deadbeat dads firsthand.”

  I realized that I’d made so many misjudgments about men in the past that I didn’t trust my own instincts. “I don’t want to talk about this. I just need to sleep.”

  My head tipped against the passenger’s-side window, I shut my eyes, and after a while, the car moved forward at a normal rate. I found comfort in the noise the tires made as they sped up the highway, in the scent of the Pacific, even in the dampness of the rising fog.

  Ah, bubelah, Grandma Ruth seemed to whisper in my ear. Don’t be so hard on yourself. As you always say, shit happens; just deal with it.

  John roused me when we reached my front gate, and I fumbled in my purse, searching for my keys and the remote. I wondered why the security lights at the gates hadn’t come on. They were supposed to be automatic. The gate slid open noisily, slowly, and I was suddenly alert and aware of the fact that John might want to come in, that he might want to stay the night.

  As we rounded the curve in the driveway and passed the guesthouse, there weren’t any lights on inside and no sign of Marvin’s or Flannigan’s cars. I began to feel deeply uneasy. And it wasn’t just about what John might be expecting. This feeling went deeper, concerned something else. The moment I reached the front door and inserted the key in the lock, I understood my feeling. The door simply swung open, and I knew someone had been inside my house, my sanctuary.

  “Did you leave the door unlocked?” John asked.

  “Are you kidding? I’m from Brooklyn.”

  I pushed the door all the way open, and we walked inside.

  The hallway looked as though a cyclone had torn through it, stuff scattered everywhere; clothes and food and random stuff that had been crammed into drawers and closets now lay scattered across the floor. The kitchen was a disaster, water overflowing in the sink and spilling over onto the floor, so we sloshed through several inches. Dishes, pots and pans, and silverware lay strewn from one wall to another. The cabinet that held glasses looked as if it had been pummeled by a bat, the wood smashed, the glasses reduced to smithereens.

  I ran down the hall to my office. My wonderful library had been destroyed: books everywhere, their covers torn off, their pages ripped apart. The perp had even tried to burn some of them, leaving scorch marks on the tile floor, the stink of smoke riding the air. I didn’t check the smoke detectors, and even if I had, it wouldn’t have mattered because whoever had done this had opened the windows so that the smoke would drift out.

  My computer—an iMac—looked like a refugee from a disaster, its screen smashed, its motherboard exposed. All of my flash drives and external hard drives lay scattered in bits and pieces across my desk. I had a flash drive that I always carried with me, but I couldn’t recall when I had last backed it up. The only positive thing I could think of was that I always emailed my documents to my multiple email accounts, then opened them on my office computer. The laptop in the guesthouse would be intact, unless the perp had broken in there, too.

  I threw open the closet door, dropped to my knees, swept office supplies out of the way, and slid off the panel of flooring that hid my stash.

  My stash of photos, my stash of money, the stash that would get me through anything short of a nuclear blast. All here, thank God.

  But my altar, humble as it had been, had been destroyed, the statues smashed, the candles forever extinguished, my offerings reduced to memory, nothing more. A photo of Grandma Ruth had been torn apart, the frame on the floor, now cracked and broken, beyond repair.

  In nearly every room, there was damage and evidence of rage and derangement. Even in Isabella’s room. I knew Paul was behind this, knew it with every fiber of my being, and pressed my fists against my eyes to hold back a torrent of tears. When had he done this? Before he’d gone to La Playa? It had to have been then—he had arrived later than we had, much later. You fucker, you sick fucker.

  My hands dropped away from my face, and I took a long, slow look around my daughter’s room. Remember this, Sam. Next time you’re about to make an excuse for Paul, remember this. Her bed frame had been destroyed, her chest of drawers had been ravaged, her closet had been turned into a nightmare of empty hangers with clothes puddled everywhere. My bed, my comfortable king, had a knife sticking up out of the middle, impaling a printed note that read: Do not pass GO. Do NOT collect two hundred buckaroos.

  Monopoly. Paul and I had played Monopoly a couple of times with friends. But how could I prove he had done this?

  At some point, John apparently had called 911, and now sirens shrieked through the neighborhood. I assumed that John opened the gate and the front door for them because when I finally went out into the living room, he was speaking to a short, muscular man in a Malibu police uniform.

  “Lieutenant Gotti, this is Samantha DeMarco.”

  Gotti? Really? His name was Gotti? Who said the universe didn’t have a sense of humor?

  “Evening, ma’am. Mr. Steeling filled me in on the basics.” His blue eyes wandered around the living room, pausing here, there. “Do you know yet if anything was stolen?”

  “I . . . I haven’t had a chance to check. The level of destruction . . . is . . .” I shook my head.

  “Do you have any enemies, ma’am?”

  I nearly choked. Well, hey, guy
, where the hell would you like me to start? “Probably.”

  “Have you received any threats recently?”

  “Threats?”

  “Through email, hang-up calls . . .”

  “There’s a note impaled in my bed with a knife.”

  “What’s the note say?”

  I told him. Gotti held an iPad as he asked questions, and kept tapping it, entering information. “Christ,” he muttered. “Sickos come in every variety. Does anyone live in the guesthouse above the garage?”

  “My assistant, Marvin Castelli. He isn’t home right now.”

  “Was the guesthouse broken into?”

  “No,” John replied. “I checked as I was calling nine one one.”

  “So the guesthouse was unlocked?” Gotti asked.

  John shook his head. “I peered through the windows and didn’t see anything out of place.”

  The forensic team—four men and two women—came into the living room, and Gotti directed them to start at the other end of the house. One of the men whistled as he took in all the destruction. “Wow, someone’s got an ax to grind.”

  “A psycho,” John said.

  “And is it just the two of you who live here?” Gotti asked us.

  “John doesn’t live here. It’s just my daughter and me. She’s spending the night at a friend’s.”

  “Do you have security cameras on the property, Ms. DeMarco?”

  “No.” But by tomorrow night I would. I should have done that sooner, but a part of me had felt that if I’d had security cameras installed right after Isabella and I moved here, then I might attract circumstances that would require them. Ha. Looked as if I’d attracted the circumstances regardless. In fact, right about now, armed guards sounded even better than security cameras or a ferocious Doberman. Hell, maybe I’d have bars put on all the windows and metal grates installed over the doors.

  Tap, tap, went Gotti’s fingers. “How many remotes are there for the front gate?”

  “Three. Marvin, my daughter, and I each have one.”