DARK THRILLERS-A Box Set of Suspense Novels (42 page)

Jimmy Watz, Karl's longtime friend said, "Shit, Karl, you need to call the cops."

"It won't do any good."

"I'll come over."

"Okay."

Under the blazing overhead lights that threw the broken furniture into vivid relief, Karl sank down onto the torn sofa in the living room and he waited for help to arrive. This just seemed too big to handle alone. He hadn't the energy to tackle it without backup. He needed one other sane voice to tell him it could all be straightened up, it could be set right again. Without that, Karl might sit all night long on the sofa holding the folded note, depressed to the bone.

Karl had known Jimmy Watz since college days when they roomed together at UCLA. It was Jimmy, a drama major with hopes of breaking into Hollywood, who pointed out to Karl where his greatest talents lay. Once they graduated, Karl had taken on the task of finding Jimmy a venue through the labyrinth that was Hollywood. Getting to the right people was something Karl could do quickly and with ease, mainly because he wasn't doing it for himself—he was on a quest for a friend. He could take the No sir, you can't see him today, and the No way you're getting in to his office, and the lies and subterfuges and delays without letting it bother him. Or deter him. It wasn't his whole life that was on the line. Rejections held no power over him. That made him relentless and it made him successful.

Karl got into studios that Jimmy never could have penetrated. He set up meetings with producers and directors that most would-be actors would have killed to attend. He convinced pretty secretaries to give him appointments with their high-power bosses, showed up looking cool and intelligent in his best clothes, and he talked up Jimmy Watz as if Jimmy were the second coming.

By the time Jimmy had his first bit-part, he was encouraging Karl to take on pumping up actors' careers as a full-time job. "Karl, man, you've got it, you know? You ought to be an agent."

But Karl didn't really want to be an agent. He couldn't see himself working in a mailroom for two years and trying to wangle his first assistant position. He didn't really want to handle the contracts between actors and studios. No, he told Jimmy, that's not for me.

"Then start your own business. Be a . . . be a publicity maven!"

"A what?"

"Start a publicity company. Take young actors like me and get them in, just the way you've done for me. Teach them how to handle themselves. Publicize them. Get them press, get them into meetings, get them agents . . ."

So that's how it had started. With Jimmy playing a street punk part in a low-budget crime flick. Karl never looked back. He found Jimmy a good agent, worked out subtle but effective publicity campaigns, and Jimmy was more than happy to pay him for those services.

It wasn't long before Karl rented a small office, not in a good part of town, but he found a couple more young actors with talent who didn't know how to break in and he helped them get to where they were going. The business boomed. Within five years, Karl took care of fifty clients and had moved to his Burbank office. He'd hired a secretary and later had to take on assistants. His client base swelled to almost two hundred and fifty.

Jimmy was right. Karl was good at it. He had no wish at all to enter the business himself so that freed him to work on behalf of his clients. The more Karl did for the young actors and actresses, the more his business grew.

Not that Karl took on everyone who walked through his door. Some of them he had to turn away, so many came to his office looking for some kind of foothold into show business. Many of them just didn't have the right attitude or they didn't have the God-given graces or looks to make it. Most of all, too many of them had no training and no aptitude for acting. He couldn't push someone who had little chance of making it.

The word spread through Hollywood circles. If you've got what it takes, Karl LaRosa can help you find the right agent, he can get your name noticed, and start you on the road to success. But if you don't have what it takes, Karl's not going to take your money and run. He just won't take you at all.

Thanks to Jimmy, Karl had found a direction for his life.

He had never known in college what he wanted to do. He took a smattering of courses that gave him two majors, neither of which directed him to a point on the compass where he could spend his energies in something he loved doing. But when he got Jimmy started out in the business and saw him move forward, Karl felt genuine satisfaction. He had been the maker of the dream come true. He had been instrumental in helping a friend get what he had always wanted. It thrilled Karl and made him work even harder on Jimmy's behalf, and then for the other clients he took on.

It had been a good life, a successful, fulfilling life. Until now, when trouble dogged his every step and all his years of work were about to go down the drain.

Jimmy came through the garage and into the kitchen. He stopped there and cursed at what he saw. He glanced at Karl sitting with his hands in his lap on the living room sofa. "Karl, what's going on here?"

"I don't know," Karl said, his voice full of defeat. "Here's the latest note." He held up the paper and waved it in the air. His friend had been told about the others.

Jimmy picked his way into the destroyed living room and took the paper from Karl's hand. He read it and cursed again. "You need the police to handle this," he said.

"I told you already. They don't have the time to get involved when it's just property being destroyed. They'll come out and take a report, but they can't put a watch on my place or follow me around every day. There's no point in calling them and wasting their time. That's the impression I got the last time I called them."

"You must have some inkling about who's doing this," Jimmy said.

Karl looked around the room. He reached out and picked up one of the shattered legs from the broken coffee table.

"I've talked to some of the women I dated."

"Yeah?"

"Hell, I don't know who it is!" Karl exploded, rising from the sofa and kicking at the table in front of him. He threw the busted table leg down and turned, stomping through the rooms, Jimmy behind him. "I don't think I'd know if I talked to her."

"But how many women could hate you this much, Karl?"

Karl turned around and his face was pale with anger. "None of them could hate me this much. I've never done anything to anyone to make her hate me like this."

"Don't get pissed off at me. Just listen, okay? We need to figure out something. You can't just keep going in circles, wondering, while this continues."

"Someone fixed my credit rating," Karl said.

"Fixed it?"

"As in they fucked it up. I couldn't buy a loaf of bread on credit now. I'm down for late pay on every loan I owe.”

“That's impossible."

"It may be impossible, but it's reality. I went to the credit agencies to see what was happening when I got turned down for a credit card. Whoever tore up my house monkeyed with my credit rating. I don't know how. You can do anything you want if you have a little computer knowledge, you know that. How does this person disarm my alarm system over and over again? How did she get into my office? She just did it. She won't quit doing it. She's like a force of nature coming at me."

"The credit thing may be a more serious blow than your house getting slummed."

Karl leaned against the wall in the bedroom while Jimmy surveyed the damage. Jimmy whistled. "This is gonna be costly," he said.

"Very."

"I'll help you clean it up. We'll haul out the broken stuff and put it in the garage for now."

"It's not your mess, you don't have to," Karl said.

"Yes I do have to. Now shut up and lend a hand. We better start with the kitchen. You'll have stuff growing in there if we don't get it cleaned up soon."

Karl followed his friend to the kitchen and mechanically helped to take up the food cartons. They found sponges and towels to clean up the floors, cabinets, and appliances. All the time he worked in silence, listening to Jimmy trying to cheer him up, while his heart grew heavier. His world was slap-ass crazy now. There was no making sense of it.

There was no way out.

23

"The truth is really an ambition which is beyond us."

Peter Ustinov, International Herald Tribune

"Something funny's going on."

Cam gave Robyn a look and replied, "Something funny's always going on. Who's into the nose candy this time?"

"That's not what I mean. We may have a minor drug problem with one or two of the cast and don't we always? But this is about something else."

"Well, what's it about?"

They sat together hunched over a table at the House of Blues, just about the hottest nightspot in Hollywood. One of the phrases you heard in this town above all others was, "You like the blues?" It was as if you couldn't really be part of the showbiz scene if you didn't love blues music. Robyn could take it or leave it. Cam cared little about music, except for maybe old Jefferson Airplane tunes, Mick Jagger, and the Beatles.

"Can we get outta here and go some place quieter?" Robyn asked. She liked the club all right, but not enough to try to have a private conversation over the noise of the crowd. She saw famous faces peering through the subdued light and was afraid one of them might overhear what she had to tell Cam.

"Sure, c'mon, I'll take you somewhere. We never should have met here in the first place. You know how I hate being seen. And don't ask me if I like the blues."

Cam led her through the mass of nightclubbers, but it took them ten minutes to reach the door. Stars and gutsy wannabes, agents, producers, and directors had to say hello to them, had to kiss the air around their faces, had to shake their hands. No opportunity to hobnob with the powerful and famous could be allowed to pass.

Cam drove her a few miles away to one of his favorite hangouts, a bar called the Roost. A movie star wouldn't be caught dead in it. As they entered, he said, "Look, no one to maul us! Isn't this joint a beauty?"

Robyn didn't like Cam's low-class dives. They always made her nervous enough to slip off her jewelry and stuff it into her purse. But at least this place would afford them anonymity and that's just what they needed tonight.

After they had ordered their drinks and were ensconced in a back booth that sported curling gray duct tape over the rips in the plastic, Robyn said, "Something weird's happening, Cam."

"Okay, tell Papa." He took a slug of his beer straight from the bottle. Robyn watched his throat work as he swallowed. She had to admit he fit into this kind of bar much better than he did at the House of Blues.

"You know my ex-husband, Karl?"

"Don't think I've had the pleasure. He must be one crazy son of a bitch to divorce you." Cam grinned widely.

"I divorced him, but that's not the point." She gave him a wolfish smile. "Karl runs a company over in Burbank. He works with new actors, getting them good press, helping them find agents who will take them on, that sort of thing."

"Yeah?"

"Well, he's having a big problem now."

"What's that, too much pussy?"

Robyn frowned. "Sometimes you're too crude to live.”

“I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that. Not about a husband of yours."

"He's not my husband and I don't care how much he gets laid, but this is serious, Cam, I want you to listen to me."

Cam bobbed his head. He drank again from the beer bottle, then said, "Go on, I'm listening."

"Karl started having a problem in his life about the same time we started filming the movie. First someone got into his house and left a mash note. The same night he was almost run off the freeway, someone playing tag with him. Then his office was broken into and . . ." Here she hesitated because until this point Cam wouldn't have made the connection. She paused to give weight to the matter and to have Cam's complete attention . . . "they threw blood all over his front waiting room."

Cam's eyes opened a little wider. "No shit," he said.

"That's not all. Every single scene we've shot so far has happened to Karl."

"What the hell."

"Last night he came home to find his house vandalized. It was torn up good and proper. Everything, just like we shot yesterday. Right down to the note left behind for him."

Now Cam looked shocked. He clutched the beer bottle in one hand, but had forgotten all about drinking from it. "Who's doing it?" he asked. "Someone trying to sabotage my film? What asshole's doing some harebrained fucking thing like this? I'll fire the motherfucker first thing in the morning!"

"Karl doesn't know who it is."

"What do you mean he doesn't know who it is? He must know. It has to be someone on the set who gets a copy of the daily script scene. It could be any one of them . . ."

"Cam, listen. Karl doesn't know about Pure and Uncut. No one knows about it but us, the crew, the actors. Remember?"

Realization hit. "Oh shit. That's right. It's not in the trades. And you haven't told Karl about it?"

She shook her head. "If I do that, he's going to come around. He's going to disrupt shooting. He might even bring the police."

"No fucking way. Not on my set."

"I told you. We have a problem."

"You're not going to tell him, are you? It'll fuck up everything we're doing. You tell him, we'll get shut down. Why would anyone take the goddamn script and use it for a roadmap to stalk your ex? What kind of wacko would do such a stupid-ass thing? It's a fucking script! It's . . . it's tinsel and cheap celluloid. . ." He was spluttering.

"I know. I think someone's lost it. Someone has a grudge against Karl and she's using the script scenes to get at him.”

“It's a woman? Like in the script?"

Robyn shrugged. She pushed aside her screwdriver. The orange juice was making her sick. The bartender hadn't used good vodka. "Karl had a few affairs. Before and after our marriage. Not during, or at least I don't think so. But he's been involved with a few women. Some of them work for us on this picture."

"Who? I'll talk to them."