by Phoef Sutton
Walking through the dark wings of the theater, Rush headed onto the stage in front of the tattered movie screen. His way was lit by a ghost light—a single bulb in a small wire cage set on a pole in the middle of the stage. Ghost lights were a theatrical tradition, an offering to the twin show-business deities of superstition and safety.
The theater was inky dark and silent, a cathedral to the business of motion-picture exhibition. The vast expanse of seats lay before Rush like an unexplored cavern, and the proscenium rose high above him. Longhorn skulls and Aztec gods stared down from the ornate arch. Rush walked several steps past the ghost light and turned around.
Sportcoat was standing about ten feet away from him. The ghost light stood between them like an umpire at a prizefight. “Are we there yet?” Sportcoat asked.
“Yes,” Rush said. “Do you have the money?”
“Not so fast. Let’s get acquainted first. What do they call you?”
“Busy,” Rush said. “Let’s get this done.”
“Okay, Busy,” Sportcoat said. “Mr. Cleveland just calls me ‘Bub.’”
Mr. Cleveland? He said the name as if Rush should be familiar with it. He didn’t know Rush was just a hired intermediary, and Rush wasn’t about to clue him in.
“All right, Bub.” Unzipping his hoodie, Rush pulled out the package. It was a plain manila envelope, flat and unimpressive. “Do you have the money or not?”
“I have it.” Bub set the briefcase down on the wooden stage. “Shall we count to three and push?”
“Do we really have to?”
“Mr. Cleveland is fond of ceremony.”
“All right,” Rush said, crouching down and placing the envelope on the stage. “One, two, three.”
Rush slid the envelope across to Bub, and Bub slid the briefcase to Rush. Rush opened it and saw that it was filled with bundles of twenty-dollar bills. A lot of bundles. There must have been a hundred thousand dollars in there. Layla was only paying Rush five hundred to make this exchange. His roommate was right—he really had to start being a better businessman.
He looked up to see Bub examining the contents of the envelope Rush had given him. “Doesn’t seem worth it,” he said. “But like Grandma used to say, it takes all kinds of crazy people to make a crazy world.”
“Your grandma was a smart woman,” Rush said.
“You wouldn’t say that if you met my grandpa.”
Rush shut the briefcase and stood up. The transaction was complete. No gunplay had been necessary. Rush considered that a success.
“Now,” Rush said, “I leave first. You follow.”
“Whatever you say.”
It didn’t really make any difference who led and who followed, but Rush knew that it did matter that he stayed in charge. He walked, covering the distance between them in firm, steady strides. A thought occurred to him when he was opposite the ghost light. He stopped, set the briefcase down on the stage, and opened it.
The bundles of cash looked impressive. He picked one up and flipped through it, like a magician rifling through a deck of cards. The top two bills were real American money. The rest of the bundle was made of real Monopoly money.
He glanced up at Bub. And at the gun in his hand.
“You had to look, didn’t you?” Bub asked.
“I really did. Was this your idea or Mr. Cleveland’s?” Rush gestured to the play money.
“Mr. Cleveland thought it would be funny. Bridget called him Mr. Moneybags.”
“Bridget has a way with words.”
“I’m going to walk away,” Bub said. “You’re not going to follow me. Is that understood?”
“Of course. There’s no need anyway.”
Bub turned to walk off. Then he turned back. “What do you mean?”
“You know Bridget,” Rush said. “If Mr. Cleveland cheated her, don’t you think she planned on cheating him?”
Bub eyed Rush. “Go on.”
“Do you really think that’s the genuine article you have in your hand?” Rush had no idea what the genuine article was, of course, but he was pretty sure that whatever Layla was selling was fake. It was just her way.
Bub maneuvered the manila envelope open again and looked at the contents. Rush could see that they looked like old government documents, and they were marked with a rubber stamp in red ink. Bub licked his thumb and rubbed one of the red markings. His thumb left a bloody red smear.
“It’s a fake!” he said, affronted.
“That’s fake. These are fake,” Rush said, pointing to the bundles in the attaché case. “We’re even.”
“I don’t think Mr. Cleveland will see it that way,” Bub said. “You picked the wrong man to fuck with.”
“I didn’t pick anybody. I’m just a delivery man.”
“We both know better than that.” Bub walked closer and kicked the attaché case closed. “Pick it up for me.”
“There’s a couple hundred real dollars in here,” Rush said. “Don’t I get to keep that?”
“Shut up,” he said, gesturing with the gun. “You’re lucky I don’t shoot you right now.”
Rush latched the attaché case and handed it to Bub, who leaned forward to take it. When he bent down, Rush grabbed the ghost light and smashed it on his head. The light bulb burst and the theater went black, but Rush didn’t need to see. He grasped Bub where he knew his wrist was and twisted it back. Bub hissed in pain and slammed the back of his head hard into Rush’s face.
Rush took the force of the blow, stumbled back, and then gripped Bub’s wrist more tightly and twisted it. He heard a satisfying crunch as the joint snapped. Bub groaned, and his gun discharged in a loud explosion off into the wings. Rush spun Bub around, stepped back, and delivered a kick to his chest.
By now, Rush’s eyes had adjusted to the dark, and he could make out shapes and shadows. He could just see Bub flying back and falling off the stage into the greater blackness beyond. Pulling his iPhone from the back pocket of his jeans, he switched on the flashlight app and located the attaché case where it lay on the stage. Next to it was the envelope Layla had given him. He picked them both up and walked to the edge of the stage.
He shined the light on the floor in front of the stage, where Bub lay clutching his arm and moaning. The gun was next to him, but he didn’t seem to be aware of it. He opened his eyes and looked up at the flashlight. “What the hell is your problem?”
“I was hired to make an exchange,” Rush said, tossing the envelope down at him. “Now I’ve made it. Take care of yourself.” He turned off the flashlight and exited, stage right.
Rush walked around the side of the building on Third Street, let himself into the little lobby, and stepped onto the elevator. It was a small one, having been installed in the seventies when the building was remodeled. In the 1910s it had been the home of the Department of Water & Power. Back then L.A. was just another city in California.
He rode up to the fourteenth floor, walked to an apartment door, and pressed the little black buzzer on the door. Layla opened the door.
“Well?” she said. “Did you get the cash?” Since he’d seen her, she had dyed her hair a bright red and was drying it with a towel.
“Yes and no,” Rush said, walking in. The apartment was small but elaborately furnished. The walls were inlaid with wooden cabinets, and the light fixtures were made of elaborate stained glass. “Nice place,” he said.
“It used to be William Mulholland’s office, back in the day.”
“What day was that?” Rush said, sitting on a horsehair sofa and setting the attaché case on an old coffee table.
“The bad old days,” she said. “Mulholland is the guy who stole water so Los Angeles could grow. In 1918. It’s a city founded by pirates, Crush.” She tossed her towel on a love seat. “You want a beer? Or a hard cider? Everybody’s drinking hard cider now.”
“What did they drink in the bad old days?”
“Bootlegged Scotch, I guess.”
“Got any of that?”
“Only the real kind.”
“I guess that’ll have to do.” Rush opened the case. The bundles of cash looked glorious.
“Hot damn,” Layla said.
“Don’t get too excited,” he said, tossing a bundle to her. She flipped through it. “That bastard.”
“You were cheating him,” Rush said.
“Yes, but I’m the underdog. They always root for the underdog.”
“Who does?”
“The audience.”
Rush rubbed his big bald head with his big hand. “Layla, there’s no audience. This isn’t a play or a movie.”
Layla shrugged. “In my mind, it’s all a movie. I’m the lead. A Manic Pixie Dream Girl who muddles through life by her wits and her charm, conning rich bad guys out of their ill-gotten gains and winning the heart of the Hunky Good-hearted Bodyguard Action Hero.”
“Who’s going to play you?”
Layla looked offended. “Me, of course. They’re holding out for Zooey Deschanel, but I think she’s too old. The Rock will play you, of course.”
“I’d prefer Vin Diesel. Who am I?”
“You’re the bodyguard, stupid.”
“I don’t recall you winning my heart.”
“Well, we have to work a romance into it. Give the audience what it wants.”
“What if you’re not the heroine? What if you’re the villain?”
“An anti-heroine?” She shook her head. “Sounds like a seventies movie. Directed by Sidney Lumet or somebody like that. Not very current.”
“What were you supposed to be selling to him?”
She smiled a bright charming smile. “Letters of transit.”
“I need more.”
“Movie memorabilia is a big collectible item these days. You know, the ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz. The black bird from The Maltese Falcon. Rosebud from Citizen Kane. Have you seen any of these movies, Crush?”
“I go to the Cinematheque occasionally.”
“Have you seen Casablanca?”
“‘We’ll always have Paris.’”
“That’s the one. Do you remember the letters of transit? The secret documents that Peter Lorre gave Humphrey Bogart and Bogart gave Ingrid Bergman so she could leave Casablanca at the end?”
“You forgot to say ‘spoiler alert.’”
“After seventy years you get a pass,” she said. “Anyway, I’m selling the original prop.” She opened a drawer in her coffee table, took out ten envelopes, and laid them on the table. “The original letters of transit.” She took out a Marlboro Light and lit it with a match that she scraped against the tile fireplace.
“Those things will kill you,” Rush said.
“A lot of things will kill me. Anyway, I sold them to three collectors yesterday. I’ve got six more on the hook.”
Rush looked at the envelopes. “Are any of them real?”
Layla looked at Rush as if he’d just said he believed in Santa Claus.
“Honey, there are no real letters of transit. It was just a plot device the screenwriters made up. It’s all pretend.”
“But are any of them the original prop from the movie?”
She considered for a moment then opened another drawer. “These two. One was for long shots. The other one is the gold mine. What they call the hero prop. The one for close-ups.” She took a long, thin envelope, weathered and stained and marked CONFIDENTIAL SECRET. Undoing the flap on top, she slid out two pieces of paper covered in typewritten French and marked with various official-looking stamps. “It’s glorious. A real piece of the dream. Worth maybe a hundred thousand.”
“Where did you get it?”
“I borrowed it.”
“You stole it.”
“Stealing involves keeping. I borrowed it from a collector. A very nice old man who lives in the Hollywood hills.”
“Did this borrowing involve breaking and entering?”
“Maybe,” she admitted. “But I’ll ‘break and enter’ it back. I needed it to make these copies.” She opened one of the other envelopes and pulled out a nearly identical copy. “Pretty good, huh? I arranged to sell it nine times over.”
“You should have used higher-quality ink. It smeared.”
Layla started. “Shit. Does he know?”
“Bub? Yes. I imagine Mr. Cleveland knows by now.”
“Well, shoot,” she said. She got up and started collecting her things. “I wanted to sell those other six before anybody found out.”
“So now what are you going to do?”
“Disappear. Move to another city. Change my name.”
“You think that will be enough? Mr. Cleveland sounds like a dangerous man.”
“He’s rich and he’s crazy and his name’s not Cleveland.”
“What is his name?”
She looked at Rush like she was thinking something over. Then she picked up the real letters of transit and handed them to him. “Take these.”
“I thought you were going to return them.”
“Change of plan,” she said. “Just keep them safe. You’ll hear from me in two years.”
“Why two years?”
“Because that’s what it always says: ‘Two years later.’ Right after the dissolve. That’s when you find out what happens to the heroine.”
“The Manic Pixie Dream Girl?”
“That’s right. When she goes off to find herself. Without the letters of transit or any evidence to tie her down.” She pulled her car keys out of her pocket. “Do you want a Mini Cooper?”
“You don’t need a car?”
“Not where I’m heading. It makes a better story. ‘She arrived in New York with nothing but the clothes on her back and twenty dollars in her purse.’”
“And how much in the lining of her jacket?”
“A couple hundred thou. But that’ll be our little secret.” She grabbed her jacket. “Take care of yourself, Crush. When you see me again, I’ll be on top of the world.”
Layla kissed him on the head and was gone, leaving the door of the apartment wide open. She didn’t care. She wasn’t coming back.
Rush thought of her occasionally over the next few months. When he heard of an unidentified dead body being discovered in the Angeles National Forest, he wondered if it might be her. He told K. C. Zerbe, his roommate and half-brother, to search for her occasionally on the internet.
“But you don’t know her real name,” Zerbe said. “That makes it difficult. Or impossible.”
So Rush just kept the letter of transit hidden in a wall in his loft and didn’t think about Layla much. Two Christmases rolled by, and two New Years. The crowd at the Nocturne drank and danced and aged two years under Rush’s watchful eye. It was January, and the Oscar nominations were the hot topic, everyone calling up the list on their mobile devices and discussing which of the movies they’d seen and which they’d only heard about. Rush, standing against the wall and being invisible like a good bouncer, hadn’t seen or heard of any of them. He didn’t keep in touch with pop culture.
One of the nightclubbers shoved her oversize cell phone in front of his nose and asked him what he thought. He was about to shrug and say he didn’t think about it much at all when he saw the Best Supporting Actress nomination for an up-and-coming star named Amanda Fairchild. Take away her black hair and her blue eyes and she was a dead ringer for Layla.
Once a con artist, always a con artist, thought Rush.
TO BE CONTINUED
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Phoef Sutton is a novelist, television writer, and playwright whose work has won two Emmys, a Peabody, a Writers Guild Award, a GLAAD Award, and a Television Academy Honors Award. He was an executive producer of Cheers, a writer/producer for such shows as Boston Legal and NewsRadio, a writer for Terriers, and the creator of several TV shows, including the cult hit Thanks.
On the book front, Sutton co-authored the new mystery Wicked Charms with Janet Evanovich, and he’s collaborating on a new series with Evanovich that will
launch in 2016. His other novels include the romantic thriller 15 Minutes to Live, and he is the co-author of a new serialized novel, The Dead Man. Sutton lives with his family in South Pasadena, California.
