Quite suddenly I was standing in a grocery store at Hughes Avenue buying a can of Kobe energy drink and chatting to the sales assistant, who was from Bhutan. He was unimpressed by my voyage: ‘I run a trekking business in my own country,’ he told me. ‘Also, I am a mountaineer.’
Outside I looked up at the frozen wang of the Santa Monica Freeway and thought better of it — so poured the drink away on to the asphalt. It wouldn’t do to arrive all fired up. I spat my tasteless cud of nicotine gum into my palm and was appalled to see that my jaws had expertly worried it into a perfect little voodoo doll of Orson Welles, complete with cloak and wide-brimmed hat. I shuddered, remembering the micro-manipulation of Hagop Sandaldjian, and, last fall, Sherman flung naked across the high bed — then Willy Town Mouse scuttled into the cheesy wedge of the Culver Hotel.
Which wasn’t so bad — there was a high staff turnover and no one remembered me. I was given a room on the third floor with a dinky four-poster garrotted by swathes of muslin. The shower’s low pressure felt historically accurate, then I sat drying off in a wing armchair looking out through breeze-buffeted net curtains at the balding Baldwin Hills, with their oil pumps rising and falling like failing hair implants. I had come almost full circle, and might reasonably have gone on to LAX and flown home to London. After all, no one else had turned up dead — yet.
Instead I phoned and in the gap between ‘Hello’ and ‘How are you?’ heard the low moan of eight lost hours and the dumb percussion of falling marbles. I wanted to ask about the crime scene tape — was it still there? But she hardly ever left the house — except by Packard; while the children — who would’ve known — were out at casting calls. So we said our goodbyes and hung up, and in the seconds after the marriage of the plastic I felt as if, far from having communicated, we had only defined the vast compass of the incommunicable.
Guffin was waiting for me at a table outside Ford’s Filling Station, a self-styled ‘American gastro-pub’ on Culver Boulevard, whose ‘executive chef’ was none other than Ben Ford, Harrison’s son from his first marriage. I nodded to Mac and for a while we sat silently in an establishing shot, absorbing the drivel on the menu: Ford’s culinary philosophy was much influenced by the French slow-food movement, which favoured authentic locally sourced ingredients, simple preparation, blah-blah-bleurgh! It wasn’t a philosophy that extended to the establishment’s décor, with its gas station logo implying that esturgeon confit was another type of high-octane fuel.
The happy detective was being played by himself — he’d even grown his own trademark brown moustache for the role. It was a relief, of course, because I never knew before I actually saw someone who would be impersonating them, and even then if it was a good method actor it could still take a while to identify which one. As for me, Mac didn’t seem to care who had the part, only remarking, ‘You look well, man,’ before moving straight to business: ‘So, you’ve got a case for me?’
I filled him in on the conflagration at Pinewood and my escape with the quadrumanous cartoon dog. Then there was the episode on Century, and my discovery of the adulteration taking place at the Coca-Cola Bottling Plant. I alluded to the car fight at the La Brea Tar Pits, but didn’t go into too much detail, then went over the horrific riot outside Grauman’s so exhaustively that by the time I’d finished we were both staring down at matching tartes tatin. Of anything to do with Thetans I said nothing — this was a litigious town, and then there were the Scientologists.
I suppose we must have had Ipswich clam rolls and polenta cakes but saving Mr Ford’s finer feelings it was all plaster casts to me — prop food that had me gulping down glass after glass of water, then calling the waiter to get more. The unemployed actor could barely conceal his annoyance, and every time he plonked down the flask he grunted like a woman tennis pro serving an ace.
Mac sucked his moustache and tousled his own hair. ‘You’re racking up enemies with your behaviour, man,’ he said, as weary as a walrus. ‘You got any protection?’
I explained about the Jeffs.
‘You’re screwing up big time, aren’tcha.’
‘I’m sorry?’.
‘Well, if you’re right and the movies were murdered — not just accidentally killed — then you’re a real slow-moving target. Personally, I think your initial strategy was the right one — be filmed or get drilled. Now how’re you gonna keep safe?’
‘Tomorrow morning I’m going right into the heart of the machine.’ I stabbed a finger towards the Sony lot. ‘It’s the last place anyone will think of shooting me.’
‘And then?’
‘That’s where you come in. Listen.’ I dropped my voice conspiratorially and, leaning towards him, took a forkful of his tarte.
‘Hey!’ Mac was outraged, and struck out at my fork with his own. We began fencing with the cutlery, until the waiter broke it up. ‘You were saying?’ Mac asked, picking bits of caramelized apple off the lapels of his corduroy sports jacket.
‘I can’t keep track of all the leads — that’s the trouble with a victim that’s a representational medium —’
‘You say that, but everyone knows who murdered portrait painting — the camera, right?’
‘Right, but portraits in oils were slow fucking food, man, one frame, hanging around on walls — they had it coming. The movies are something else — sixteen, twenty-two frames every second; for over a century they sopped up the world like a celluloid sponge, they saw everything — they depicted everyone. Sometimes they mocked up real events; other times those events were staged for them. As for the actors — they played characters based on real people; real people played themselves — or else made-up characters. That’s too many linkages, Mac, too many suspects. Have you seen the titles at the end of an average Hollywood movie nowadays, there’s thousands of the—’
An old homeless man, who had been standing watching us from the far side of the waist-high canvas partition penning off the patrons from the sidewalk, now approached, his hand outstretched. I looked at its dirty and cracked nails — there was an open sore on the leathery palm. ‘Please,’ the poor fellow croaked. ‘Please, gennlemen, I only need a few cents to get a sammich. I’d be obliged.’
He bore an uncanny resemblance to the Indian-born British novelist Sir Salman Rushdie, what with his straggling grey beard and dishevelled pride, so I dropped a few coins into his hand, then said, ‘But tell me one thing.’
‘Yes?’
‘How come you’re begging — I would’ve thought that with your sales you’d be set up for life.’
‘Oh, yeah, sales.’ He shrugged philosophically. ‘It’s true, the books sell well enough but that’s chickenfeed; the real money is in movies, and they option stuff and option it again — then they drag me out here for meetings with execs and like a sap I come. Then nuthin’ happens — nuthin’ at all.’
He shuffled away disconsolately, and turning back to Guffin I deftly changed the subject: ‘So, Calista Flockhart, her cunt’s still wedding-fresh, right?’
The happy detective spat a chunk of pastry on to the table, while all around us the baboon diners rose to their bandy legs.
‘Ferchrissakes,’ Mac said, recovering himself, ‘d’you wanna get us lynched, or what?’
‘I was only asking — I’m sure it’s a question that’s on everyone’s lips.’