Hollywood is an All Volunteer Army (11 page)

~ * ~

“Looks to me like she died of an excessively melodramatic nature,” Roee said after I had updated him and he had read the pages.

“Well, she was young, passionate, idealistic and absolutely convinced she had the moral high ground—such afflictions leads to melodrama. Especially since she didn't have the good sense to vaccinate herself with cynicism.”

“Surely, you jest?”

“Might have saved her life if she had truly become a Dorothy Parker.”

“Yeah, but then she would have drank herself to death.”

“It's slower than homicide.”

“Do you think Mike is right? Do you think Sara Hutton had something to do with it?”

“I don't know, but it's an intriguing enough possibility that we should look into it.”

“So what's Mike going to pay with? Day old copies of the trades?”

“You don't think we'll gather information about one, maybe more individuals that will prove useful in the future? Obviously dark deeds have been done here.”

“True—and I'm not opposed to showing Mike some consideration, but, Fixxer, on occasion you get obsessed—”

“I am not obsessed. I'm intrigued.”

“That may be worse.”

“Nonetheless....”

“Nonetheless, I called the Captain. He said he would have information for us in the morning.”

“Good. Well, I think I'll go into the library, crack open the data bank and catch up on the biography of Sara Hutton.

~ * ~

Sara Hutton was the only child of a clown. Hamilton “Ham” Hutton, known professionally as Hammy the Clown, started just after the early days of television at a little station in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It was just an afternoon children's show, but Ham put his all into it, innovating out of joy as much as necessity due to the low budget. He was happy putting on the costume and make-up and wig and prancing and talking in a strange voice caused by constricted vocal cords. He was happy creating weird characters in puppets, drawings, and full-body costumes. He was happy creating a world and writing dialog for these characters, giving them outrageous, funny, energetic life. He became a local sensation, and might well have remained local if it hadn't been for the Williamstown Theater Festival, that summer event that brings the royalty of New York theater out every year to perform for six weeks or so. Often they had children in tow. The children found the show. Talked of nothing but Hammy, wanted to meet him. The parents, being good parents, had it arranged, met Hammy, saw the show, were charmed. Hammy became the talk. Network people taking a summer break to see some plays heard of him. Soon he had a network show. He was placed in the early evening because a savvy programmer saw how all the sophisticated theater folk responded to him. Hammy was a hit. He was successful. He was “In” and before he could become “Out” he was saved forever by the good fortune of having the “In” stretched into “Institution,” and he became part of the fabric of contemporary America. Thus he was rewarded with riches.

Sara Hutton grew up in a fifteenth floor apartment on Central Park West overlooking the park and in a huge house in the Hollywood Hills overlooking the city. She had puppets and other strange creatures for siblings, and she probably wasn't her dad's favorite. After all, as far as he was concerned, she was only a co-creation. She went to private girls schools because her mother did not want her to face the unfair competition of boys. She excelled academically. She was her class president. She had her pick of Ivy League colleges and she picked Yale. She graduated with honors, decided not to pursue a higher degree, returned to Los Angeles and got a job in the mailroom of William Morris, her father's agency. Everything was ascendant from there. She moved from the mailroom to working a desk for that moment's hot agent, to becoming an agent for a few years, to moving over to Paramount as a junior development executive. At Paramount she easily moved up the ladder of larger offices, until she was a Senior Vice President with nowhere to go, as the President and Chairman of Paramount were firmly planted, well regarded, and, worse, good at their jobs. Then the once fabulous Olympic Pictures, now not much more than a shell and owned by a bank, came calling. They needed a new president. They weren't going to get an “A” player, but a young, aggressive, hungry woman with a very show biz name. It was a good, politically correct, fit. She took the job, after protracted negotiations that ended by shocking the town over how much she got the Swedes to pay her. It seemed to have been worth it, though, for she started to bring Olympic back with reasonably budgeted popcorn movies starring hit TV actors doing exactly what they did best on TV. Big screen action films for small screen action actors. Big screen dumb comedies for small screen sitcom actors. It became known as the Hutton Formula.

And the dark side? People didn't really like her, or rather; artists didn't like her because she had a supercilious attitude towards them, contemptuous and chilly—she thought all of them were nothing but clowns. That's why she was most successful working with those who, if they really wanted what they wanted—as opposed to those who had much too much of what they had always wanted—had no option but to grin, bear, and bitch about her in private while they smiled, sought out, and pursued her in public. Then, of course, there was the sex. The rumors were of many, varied, and young—dangerously young on occasion. The talk was of leverage, power, and force, brutally applied on occasion. The blind eye was well-turned, though—out of a sort of strange industry courtesy.

Was she capable of murder? Roee's opinion was that all motion picture executives had the potential for violence, but that was just the playwright in him. Murder is probably the least effective—and certainly the most messy—way a motion picture executive has to put a crimp in the career of a creative person. How could it possibly be satisfying? Death has a tendency to desensitize a person. What joy was there for a motion picture executive in contemplating the cessation of suffering?

The next morning I got onto the line with the Captain, my “employee” at the LAPD. We never mention or use his name for obvious reasons. He is well placed in Internal Affairs, which makes him valuable to me, as the latitude that gives him becomes a far-reaching tool. On the secure line of The Phone, he was able to give me the details.

“The body was found just outside Nome, Alaska, in a snow drift on the Bering Sea. The drift was being moved by a snow plow clearing an area for golf.”

“Golf?”

“Yes, it seems they play golf on the frozen sea up there. Use orange golf balls. You know, because white balls—”

“Yes, the obstacles to normal play are not hard to imagine.”

“Anyway, they try to ricochet the balls into sunken, flagged coffee cans before losing them among built up chucks of ice. Big golf classic every March, brings in players from all over the world. This was just for locals, of course.”

“Who found her?”

“Guy by the name of Don Henderson of Arctic Circle Snow Removal.”

“I assume that's a business that suffers no depression up there.”

“Yeah. Anyway, he was plowing away when he caught sight of some color and stopped for a look-see. Was rather shocked to find the body. Knew immediately that it wasn't a local.”

“Sure. Small town. He must know practically everybody.”

“Well, it wasn't that so much as she was wearing a Donna Karan evening gown and high heels. Not your typical dress for Nome, where even business people prefer the layered look and good, sensible walking shoes.”

“She wasn't killed in Alaska.”

“Yeah, even the local police figured that out. They called in the Alaska State Troopers who flew the body down to Anchorage for the autopsy. No coroner or medical examiner in Nome.”

“What was the autopsy report?”

“Cause of death: electrocution.”

“Electrocution?”

“It gets odder.”

“Okay. Continue.”

“The mechanism of death was instantaneous ventricular fibrillation of the heart cause by the electrical current passing from the point of contact, through the heart, then on down to the ground, and the manner of death—”

“Homicide, obviously.”

“Obviously. The accidentally dead and suicides don't usually take a vacation trip to Alaska postmortem, so to speak.”

“Where was the point of entry of the current?”

“Her lips.”

“Her lips?”

“They were burnt clean off.”

“And the grounding point?” I had a guess. It was, unfortunately, correct.

“Her knees.”

“Her knees? Plural?”

“Correct—both of them. Identical burn marks.”

“To kiss the golden arse,” I half whispered.

“What?”

“Nothing. If it's something fruitful, I'll share it later.”

~ * ~

The Captain also reported that the Anchorage coroner could not give even a close estimated of time of death as the body had been frozen in the snow bank, delaying decomposition. However, given the condition of the body, especially that the fixed lividity—that is, where the blood had been taken by gravity to settle and, eventually, clot—was somewhat unevenly distributed throughout the body, and that there was no discoloration of the skin, the coroner had concluded that she had been dead less than 24 hours at the time she was frozen, and that the body had been moved in a, “sort of bundled state.”

The coroner also noted that the victim had motor oil stains in various spots on her clothes and skin, that grains of sand were found under her fingernails, and that she had had sexual relations within twenty-four hours of her death.

“There was no identification on the body, but when the troopers read through the missing persons notices from other states, it wasn't hard to match up the body with the report on Bea Cherbourg. They called the LAPD and the rest you know.”

“Yes.”

“But my question, Fixxer, is, how do you know it?”

“Bea Cherbourg was a friend of a friend.”

“This Mike guy from the newsstand?”

“Yeah. So how's the investigation going?”

“Not much. We talked to her friends; her last known employer—”

“Olympic Pictures?”

“Yeah.”

“What did they tell you?”

“That she no longer worked there, although they were developing a script of hers, but there had been no meetings on it lately, and that no one had seen her recently.”

“Did anyone talk to Sara Hutton?”

“Yeah—the lead was provided by this Mike. Her answer was the same. That she had been busy traveling, running an industry retreat, and that she hadn't seen Bea since the last meeting on her script, which she admitted did not go well, and Olympic and Bea Cherbourg were having ‘creative differences' on it. We told her that we had a report that Bea Cherbourg attended the retreat. She categorically denied it. It was for executives only, and, as she was no longer an executive....”

“You should get a list of who was at this retreat and question them. Although, it will probably be to no avail.”

“We did. It was.”

“You might want to check out the pilot of the Olympic corporate jet about a recent trip to New York, but I'll bet he'll report what he's been told to report.”

“You know something we don't know, Fixx? Because, at the moment, with the information in hand, the word is Olympic is a dead end and we are to leave it that way.”

“I don't have anything I can give you with confidence.”

“Then we'll have to leave it that way. You, however....”

“I'm not in the business of solving murder cases, Captain.”

“Fixx, even over the phone I can see your nose twitching. By all accounts, she was a lovely girl. Hate to see her become a statistic under the heading: Unsolved.”

“Are you offering unpaid aid and comfort?”

“You know my number.”

The Captain hung up.

~ * ~

It was obvious that Sara Hutton was somehow involved in the murder of Bea Cherbourg. It was also just as obvious that she had just less than competently covered her tracks through effort and influence. The finding of Bea's body on a frozen sea Alaskan golf “green” had to have been a mistake. Not enough of one to give the police the means, maybe the desire, to overcome her influence, though. As far as they were concerned, Bea was a malcontent screenwriter (a far too natural assumption) who had done something silly—probably some stupid, weird Hollywood sex thing—to get herself killed by someone with the ability to move her body north to Alaska, hoping to get rid of it. They would continue to investigate, but it would be frustrating, and cases that seemed easier and quicker to solve, offering lovely Skinnerian positive reinforcement, would dictate their behavior.

Poor Bea Cherbourg. Her screenplay would probably never get made now.