“Morning, Dad,” Rick said.
“How you doing, Son?” Jack said, offering his hand.
“How’s she coming?”
“Couple more weeks, I guess. The interior is mostly done, and I’ll have the overhauled engines back next week. We’re repolishing the aluminum, starting today, and we’ll put the Centurion name back on her when we’re done.”
“I’ll tell Eddie Harris,” Rick said. “He’s tired of driving to Palm Springs on the weekend, and he’ll be glad to fly again.”
“How’s work?”
“Just great. We wrapped on a new picture yesterday, the one that I directed, and we’ll start the editing and other postproduction work today.” Jack had heard enough conversations about Rick’s work that he knew the jargon by now.
“You’re moving up in the world, boy. You know, when you quit the Beverly Hills police force and took that job as the studio cop, I thought you were headed downhill. In fact, I was kinda hoping it wouldn’t work out, so I could have you back out here as my partner, doing the flying.”
“Sorry to disappoint you,” Rick said, laughing.
“How are my granddaughters?”
“Thriving. Louise is talking a blue streak, and Glenn is a sweetheart, so far.”
“Wait till she’s two; you were a hellion at two.”
“You’re coming to lunch on Sunday, right?”
“Wouldn’t miss it.”
“I’ll let you get back to work, then.” Rick left him, went back to his car and drove to the studio. The guard at the gate gave him a smart salute, and he drove to the administration building and parked in his reserved spot. He went upstairs to his office, which had belonged to Eddie before studio founder Sol Weinman had died. Eddie now worked in Sol’s palatial office next door. Rick passed through the outer reception room and the inner secretaries’ office, where two women kept things running.
One of them handed him an envelope. “This just came. It’s the final budget for the war movie.”
“Thanks,” Rick said, “but it looks like we’re going to be postponing that.”
“You want to send out a memo?”
“Later this morning; I’ll let you know.” Rick went into his mahogany-paneled office and sat down at his desk. Immediately, his phone buzzed.
“Hyman Greenbaum for you,” the secretary said. Sidney Brooks’s agent wasn’t wasting any time.
Rick picked up the phone. “Morning, Hyman, here’s the deaclass="underline" I’ll pay fifty percent more for Bitter Creek than I did for Times Square Dance, all the money on signing, the usual revisions and polishing, all other stipulations as per the last contract.”
There was a brief silence before Greenbaum could speak. “This is a negotiation?” he asked, finally. “With negotiations like this, what will I do for a living from now on?”
“Don’t worry; you can tell Sid you fought like a tiger for the deal, and I’ll back you up. Get me a contract over here this morning; we want to start preproduction immediately.”
“Anything you say, Rick,” Greenbaum said.
Rick hung up, and his phone buzzed again. “Just a reminder,” the secretary said. “You have an appointment with your architect in ten minutes.”
“Oh, right,” Rick said. “And take a memo to the preproduction staff: Eddie Harris and I are postponing production of Pacific Invasion in order to begin preproduction immediately on a new Sidney Brooks script, Bitter Creek, a western. Meeting in my office at nine A.M. tomorrow morning. Hold that until the contract arrives from Hyman Greenbaum, then send it out. Also, come in and get the script, get it retyped and run off a hundred copies as soon as possible, and send each member of the preproduction team a copy with the memo.”
“Will do,” she said. She came in and got the script. “What’s going with this? No revisions? How come I never heard of this?”
“Because I read it only last night.”
“It must really be something,” she said.
“It really is, but don’t take time to read it until the copies come in.”
“Peter James, the architect, is outside.”
“Send him in.” Rick walked over to the conference table and met the young man there. “Good morning, Peter.”
“Good morning, Rick.” He spread out the plans on the table. “Your revisions are done; you want to go over them?”
“Tell you what, take them to the house and go over them with Glenna, then let’s meet out at the site at twelve-thirty. I’ll call her and tell her you’re coming.”
“That’s great. The pilings are going in this morning.”
“Make them deep; I don’t want the place swept out to sea.”
“Don’t worry.”
The architect left, and Rick called home and woke up Glenna. “You’d better roll your ass out of bed; Peter James is on his way over there with the revisions on the beach house.”
“How long have I got?”
“Fifteen minutes, tops. We’re going to meet at the site at twelve-thirty; I’ll bring sandwiches.”
“I don’t know how you can do all this at the crack of dawn,” she said.
“It’s ten-fifteen.”
“Okay, okay.” She hung up.
Rick went through some papers on his desk and found the Los Angeles Times staring up at him:
He read the lead paragraph, then set the paper aside for later. Among the papers on his desk was a manila envelope, the kind for interoffice communications, with two rows of lines for names of addressees. It was a new, previously unused envelope, and his was the only name written on it, so he couldn’t tell who the sender was. Also, it was sealed with red sealing wax, which was very unusual. Ordinarily, such an envelope was secured only with a piece of string wound around a paper disk. He broke the seal, unwound the string and shook the contents of the envelope out on his desk.
There was only one sheet of paper. He picked it up and looked at it. It was a photostatic copy of a membership card of the Communist Party, made out in the name of Sidney Mark Brooks, dated 1935 and showing a New York City address.
Rick was startled. He had never seen one of these before, nor had he, to the best of his knowledge, known anyone who was a Communist. There were rumors around town, of course, but he had never paid much attention to them. He had trouble imagining Sid Brooks as a bomb thrower, or even a subversive.
He put the photostat back in the envelope, walked over to the coffee table in front of the sofa, picked up the Ronson table lighter, took it to the fireplace and set fire to the envelope and its contents, watching until it had completely burned, then stirred the ashes.
He didn’t know who had sent it, and he didn’t care. He didn’t care about Sid Brooks’s politics, either. He went back to his desk and tried to put it out of his mind.
4
At noon Rick left his office with a picnic lunch prepared by the studio commissary and drove down to Santa Monica, then out the Pacific Highway to Malibu.
At the insistence of Eddie Harris, Rick had started investing in real estate not long after getting his medical discharge from the navy in early ’44, at first borrowing money to do it. As his income rose, he bought more, among the properties three beach lots in the village of Malibu. After the war he began thinking about building on the beach, and, as materials became more available in the postwar environment, he and Glenna had hired Peter James to design a house for them.
The lots were half a mile south of the Malibu colony, an enclave of movie stars and the very rich, which together fronted four hundred feet on a gorgeous stretch of beach and stretched for more than three hundred feet from the highway to the beach.