Hello Hollywood

by Suzanne Corso

  “And they’re all accounted for?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “Any spares anywhere in the house? Maybe in your car?”

  “No. But anyone could climb over that gate.”

  “Are there security lights at the foot of the driveway, around the gate?”

  “Yes. They’re supposed to come on automatically, but didn’t. I thought it was odd, but we didn’t stop to check the bulbs. Maybe the bulbs burned out.” But even as I said this, I knew that wasn’t the case.

  Gotti snapped his fingers and called to one of the forensics people. “Joe, get someone down to the gate to dust for prints, specifically on the security lights. It’s a long shot, but let’s go for every long shot we’ve got.”

  “On my way,” Joe said, and headed for the front door.

  “It’s going to take several hours for the forensics team to go through everything, ma’am,” Gotti said. “You’re welcome to stay in the house, but my advice is to use the guesthouse till we’re done.”

  “There is one thing you should know,” I said. “You asked if I had enemies. A man, a producer, has been stalking me.”

  Gotti’s eyes lit up. “His name?”

  “Paul Jannis,” John said.

  In my head, I saw my half million dollars sprout wings and fly away, like some stupid scene from a cartoon.

  “Your relationship to Mr. Jannis?” Gotti asked.

  “He optioned my novel and screenplay and is one of the producers on the film that’s being shot by Gallery Studios,” I replied. “We, uh, were dating for six weeks or so, then split up recently.”

  “I see.”

  Yeah, he probably did. He probably saw a lot of this kind of madness. “I’d like to get a few things out of my office and bedroom before you start.”

  “Sure thing, ma’am. Please be sure to change passwords on your bank accounts and any other private financial information. Same with your email addresses.”

  “I don’t have a computer anymore. That’s going to be difficult to do right now.”

  “If you own an iPad, do it from that.”

  “There’s a computer in the guesthouse. I can do it there. You think the person who did this took information off my computer first?”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  I turned away, but Gotti suddenly said, “Ms. DeMarco, we’re going to be dusting for prints. I’ll need a list of names of the individuals who have been in the house in the last month.”

  “Paul Jannis is at the top of the list. I’ll email you the other names before you finish up here.”

  In my bathroom, I gathered up a few toiletries and stuffed them into a backpack. I gathered up some clothes, added them to my pack, then went into my office and cleaned out the hiding place in the closet floor. I put everything—­photos, cash, jewelry—into the pack. One slow glance around the room told me a few of the books might be salvaged, but not much else.

  I felt so overwhelmed by the extent of the destruction that for long moments I just stood there, struggling to understand the sort of rage that would prompt someone to do this.

  Tony had been capable of this kind of rage. Alec, too. But Alec’s rage had been kept under wraps most of the time and had sneaked out only when he’d felt cornered. Then there was Vito. And Paul. I knew—a deep-down sort of knowing—that I had done the right thing when I told Gotti that a producer had been stalking me. John was ready to fire Paul once his deal was cemented. Liza could make her recommendations to Brian, but the bottom line was that she was simply the newest employee and didn’t have any clout about who was hired or fired. In the end, until John became a partner, the decision for firing Paul was left to Brian King and George Prince. In other words, a fifty/fifty chance. But now that I’d given Gotti his name, Paul would be questioned, he would be a suspect. Perhaps that would tilt things in favor of firing. Maybe it would overcome the factor called profit.

  “You ready?” John asked, coming up behind me. “The forensics team wants to get started.”

  I nodded, grabbed my pack, and navigated the field of debris. My phone rang; Marvin’s name came up in the window. I took the call.

  “Sam, thank God you answered. I was thinking the worst. I’m parked at the gate, and the cop out here won’t let me in. What happened?”

  “The house was broken into. I’ll tell the lieutenant to have his guy let you in. I need to stay at the guesthouse while forensics does their thing.”

  “Good enough.”

  John and I hurried into the living room, where I told Gotti the situation with Marvin. He took care of it immediately. We traded cell numbers and email addresses, then John and I continued on outside. “Well?” he said. “Paul or Vito?”

  “Paul.”

  “Then he must have done it before he went to La Playa. I’m sorry you had to go through this, Sam.”

  “Me, too. I appreciate that you stuck around. I don’t do well with cops.”

  He chuckled. “Me, neither. But, hey, he’s a Gotti. It almost made me feel like I was back in Brooklyn.”

  We both laughed—for a moment we were united by this inside joke. We were in the car then, headed to the guesthouse. Lights shone at the bottom of the hill, lights from the police vehicles, and I could see Marvin driving through the gate.

  “If you need help cleaning up your place tomorrow, just holler. I’ll get Gallery’s cleaning service out here.”

  “That’d be great, thanks.”

  He pulled up in front of the guesthouse, stopped. “Sam, I . . .”

  “Let’s just take things a day at a time, okay?” I slipped my arms around his neck, hugging him. “I just need some time to process things.” Yes, like process this man that is suddenly back in my life from thirty years ago, but is also my main source of financing for my dream. Yeah, I’d say a lot to process.

  “A day at a time is better than not seeing you again.”

  “Thank you for the lovely dinner, John. And it was wonderful meeting Nick and Nina.”

  “Let me know about the cleaning service.”

  “I will. I’ll text you tomorrow. Thanks.”

  I got out of the car just as Marvin drove up. He hopped out and hurried over, then John honked and waved and drove down toward the gate.

  “The house is a wreck, Marvin.”

  “So what. At least you’re okay. C’mon, I’ll fix you a strong coffee or a drink or whatever you want.”

  “And then I’ve got to spend hours changing passwords on all my accounts.”

  • • •

  The guesthouse was spacious enough for both of us, two bedrooms and a loft where Marvin had set up his office, a small living room and kitchen with a great porch that overlooked the Pacific. That was where we sat, sipping cappuccinos and catching up on everything that had happened. While we talked, I went to work on my iPad, changing passwords, making a new password list.

  I finally told Marvin about Vito, and he didn’t seem the least bit shocked by what I had done.

  “I wouldn’t have been that gracious, Sam. Do you think . . .” He waved a hand vaguely toward the house.

  “No. It was Paul. I’m sure of it.”

  “Some of the stories Flannigan told me about him are appalling.”

  “But appalling in the sense of what he did to the inside of the house?”

  “You mean, is Paul a psycho?”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s what I mean.”

  Marvin ran his palms over his shorts. “When he’s been drinking, he apparently can be.”

  “I gave his name to the investigating officer.”

  “Good.”

  “But a part of me feels as if I’ve kicked a guy when he’s down. And suppose he wasn’t the one who broke into the house? Suppose it wasn’t Paul or Vito? Maybe I’ve got an enemy I don’t know about, someon
e who despises me so much that he felt compelled to invade and violate my home?”

  Marvin mulled this over in that way he had, his eyes fixed on his coffee mug, his forehead thrown into a chaos of wrinkles. “Look, you don’t have a mean bone in your body. You just got dealt a really shitty hand in terms of parents, and it has had repercussions in terms of the kind of men you attract. But that’s a pattern that can be broken, Sam. And maybe you broke it tonight when you told the cop about Paul. Maybe it got broken when you met John.”

  “If Paul goes completely over the edge, am I going to have to buy bulletproof vests for Isabella and me? Will I have to hire personal bodyguards? Will he come after Isabella? Is he that kind of psycho, Marvin?”

  “If he’s responsible for the damage inside the house, then he’s already gone over the edge.”

  My cell rang again. It was Lieutenant Gotti. “Ms. DeMarco, Liza Corrlinks is at the gate. Do you know her?”

  “Yes, you can let her in.”

  “It’s going to be a long night, ma’am. We probably won’t be outta here till four or five a.m.”

  “Okay, thanks for letting me know, Lieutenant Gotti.”

  “Gotti?” Marvin snickered. “A cop named Gotti? Are you kidding me?”

  “Yeah, pretty weird. He probably never hears the end of it. Liza’s on her way in. Did you call her?”

  “Nope. Maybe John did.”

  I walked outside to greet Liza as she pulled up in her Mercedes. “Holy crap, Sam. I was on my home and decided to swing by your place, and what the hell do I see? Cops everywhere. What’s going on? What happened?” She hooked her arm through mine, and we walked toward the guesthouse. “Are you okay?”

  So for the second time in a few hours, I went through the whole story. By Monday, the break-in would probably be reported on the police blotter of the Malibu News, and everyone in town would know what had happened. King and Prince would know about it.

  But the truth was that I probably wouldn’t get to the set on Monday. It would take time to get everything put away again, to buy furniture to replace what had been damaged, to install new locks in the door, to have the security company wire the house and the property with cameras or whatever it was they did. My home would become a kind of prison, a surveillance nightmare.

  And that pissed me off.

  Maybe it was time for me to speak directly to Paul, to confront him when he was sober, when we were in a crowd, at a café, or even at the studios. Yes, maybe there. If he exploded, it would be witnessed by everyone—the entire cast and crew and by King, Prince, and John. Maybe it was time for me to goad him in full view of the people with whom he worked, so that everyone could see the monster inside Paul, what his son called the big dark shadow.

  My imagination seized on this scenario and ran with it. And suddenly, in my head, I could see Paul pulling out a weapon, the same one he’d used to shoot at my photo, and opening fire on the cast and crew. And then another Aurora or Sandy Hook might play out, a tragedy triggered by a psycho.

  How could I have been so wrong about yet another man? Weren’t there signs right from the beginning that I should have heeded—and hadn’t?

  Paul Jannis should have been named Paul Janus, the two-faced Roman god in mythology who ruled beginnings and transitions and was usually depicted with two faces. One face supposedly faced the future, the other peered into the past.

  But to me, Janus meant two-faced. I’d had this thought about Paul rather frequently, that he was actually two people, with two distinct personalities living inside of him. He was like the character Joanne Woodward had played in The Three Faces of Eve, suffering from multiple-personality disorder.

  And maybe, like the Woodward character, the schism in him was so profound that one personality didn’t have any idea what the other personality did. If Paul were responsible for the destruction in my house, the Paul who—when he couldn’t get his way through charm and money—used brute force, if he himself had actually done it, then the personable Paul—the successful producer and Hollywood power broker—might not even know what his darker self was capable of. The personality split could be that complete; he could be suffering from what used to be referred to as multiple-­personality disorder and was now called dissociative-­identity disorder.

  In people who were afflicted with this disease, the schism between the personalities was so total that one personality could have diabetes while the other didn’t. One could be allergic to penicillin while the other wasn’t. Each mind and consciousness ruled each body and its physiology, chemistry, everything. With that disease, Paul Jannis the charmer wouldn’t remember that Paul Jannis, the Darth Vader side of the equation, had destroyed my house.

  And that thought terrified me more than anything else. Hollywood’s level of dysfunction was so great that many of the people here couldn’t recognize mental illness even when it was shoved in their faces. A guy like George Prince could have that conversation with Paul down by the swimming hole—threatening to fire him if he didn’t shape up—but in practically the next breath, he could remark that firing Paul would compromise the film. He wasn’t connecting the dots.

  Liza and Marvin connected the dots, for sure. They were New Yorkers. And John, also a New Yorker and an ex-mafioso, connected the dots. Was that the fundamental difference here? As Lauren’s mom, Becka, had pointed out, Malibu was basically a twenty-one-mile shoreline inhabited mostly by people at the very high end of the entertainment industry. Their perceptions and values, their worldviews, weren’t like those of us from Brooklyn, whose childhoods had been about food stamps for some, owning stolen jewelry and delivering goods for the mob.

  I had taken action against Paul tonight. And I didn’t intend to stay away from the set. Why should I?

  I felt liberated by the plan. In the past, with Tony, with Alec, even with Paul, I had tried to ignore what was going on, hide my head in the sand, look away in the hopes that the problem—whatever it was—would disappear. And of course the problem had never disappeared. It had only grown larger, more pervasive, until it had blown up in my face.

  No more.

  ELEVEN

  By Sunday evening, my property was wired with hidden cameras. Tomorrow morning, security personnel would begin a twenty-four/seven patrol outside and around my property. It was the direct result of my poor judgment about men and wasn’t what I’d imagined for Isabella and myself. But, as the saying goes, better safe than sorry.

  John had dispatched the cleaning company that Gallery used, and the crew had done a masterly job restoring order to my sanctuary. At the moment, Isabella and I were making lists of furniture, dishes, and other items that we needed to replace.

  “I don’t need a new bed frame, Mom. I like having my bed on the floor. It’s kind of Zen, you know?”

  “We can go totally Zen and buy some bamboo furniture and redo the wallpaper, change the flooring, whatever you want.”

  “I’ll go online and see what I can find. Oh, I almost forgot to remind you. There’s a teacher’s in-service day tomorrow. No school. Can I come to the set with you?”

  How had I forgotten that? I usually circled holidays and teacher in-service days on my calendar so that I could spend time with Isabella. “That’d be fantastic!”

  “Will I get to meet your new guy? Will he be there?”

  “He’s not my new guy.” Yet. “We’ve had only one date. But, yeah, he’ll be there.” And Paul probably would be there, too. Even though Isabella had never come out and said she disliked Paul, I knew that she did.

  “I’ll check him out and give you my assessment, Mom.” She grinned as she said it, then turned back to her iPad and began checking Web sites for furniture ideas.

  I watched her for a moment, her lustrous hair flowing like a dark river down her back, her long, nimble fingers tapping away on her iPad. Isabella, my greatest joy, always and forever.

  I went i
nto my office, now sparse and sparkling clean. The crew had hauled away the debris of broken furniture and shattered glass, and my floor was now so clean I could eat off it if I felt like it.

  I spent the next hour fiddling around with the security system, synching the video feed to my iPad. The feed was private. But if the house security system was breached, the company would know about it and would alert the police, who would be here within minutes unless they received a call from us saying that the alarm had been tripped accidentally.

  Even though my iMac had been destroyed, I decided that my MacBook Air—which was at the office—could fill in and get the job done. I would just bring it home with me every night.

  Marvin and Flannigan dropped by, and I showed them both how to use the system and engage the alarms, which had also been installed in the guesthouse. “Are these security guards going to be armed?” asked Flannigan.

  “No.” I didn’t want guns around my house and property.

  “Then if someone tries to get in, what do they do?” Marvin asked.

  “They call the cops.”

  “If Paul was behind this break-in,” Flannigan said, “or did it himself, then being at the restaurant will be his alibi. He may have sent Donaldson or Olmoso to do the dirty work.”

  Maybe. But in my bones, I knew Paul had done it.

  “You were his moral compass, Jim.”

  “Ha. He rarely listened to me. I was just the dude who cleaned up after him when he was six sheets to the wind.”

  “Are you going to feel weird about being on the set with him there tomorrow?” Marvin asked.

  “Weird?” Jim ran his fingers through his thick copper-colored hair. “No. I’ll feel relieved that he’s not my problem anymore. And I’m deeply grateful to you two and to Liza for giving me options.”

  • • •

  Monday morning, we were on the road by eight, just Isabella and me in my car, and Flannigan and Marvin following us in his car. Since Liza’s car was in the garage, we swung by her place to pick her up.

  For her first day on the job as King’s new PR person, she was dressed casually chic, a look that she had perfected and that would fit right in with the way everyone else dressed at Gallery.