L.A. Success (34 page)

15

Gertie honked from my driveway at
half past two. With act three tucked under my arm, I went outside and got in
the Eldorado. She was dressed in a new outfit that made her look like a Spanish
dancer—black, frilly skirt with a red belt, white-lace blouse, and a black
choker with a faux diamond in the middle. She had clearly just come from the
hairdresser. Her hair was pulled back in a bun, and her make-up looked professionally
done as well. The amount of leg I could see was covered by barely noticeable
panty hose, the kind that, when you see professional ice skaters wearing them,
you get mistakenly excited at first thinking of how many times you're going to
get flashed during the performance. On Gertie, the whole getup made her look no
older than, say, 56.

“Wow baby! All dolled up for your
ex-boyfriend,” I said and shut the car door.

“I want him to see that I look
nothing like what he predicted.”

“Where does he want to meet us?”

“On the Malibu pier,” she said and
pulled out.

We headed north up the Pacific Coast
Highway. The ocean was spread out below the cliffs on our left; the hills on
our right were covered with houses built on stilts. Every available space on
those slopes had a house somewhere, and they all looked like a good rain would
send them sliding down onto the highway.

What I didn’t realize was that
Dennis had been parked on my street, waiting for me to come out of my house,
and was now following us.

Gertie began her juggling act with
the lighter, cigarette and steering wheel. She clearly had depth-perception
issues. She had to focus really hard on the end of her cigarette in order to
bring the lighter up to the right place to light it. I had to reach up and grab
the steering wheel to steer us back on course, and as a barrage of honking
exploded around us, Gertie looked up, saw my hand on the wheel and glared.

“Are you trying to get us killed?”
she asked. “Leave the driving to me.”

We weaved up the coast and passed
the sign that welcomed us to Malibu and its “27 miles of scenic beauty.” Ten
minutes later, Gertie hung a dangerous U-turn at the pier and parked on the
side of the highway.

“So, you still have that gun in
here?” I asked, pointing at the glove box.

“Yep. Every once in a while if
someone does something really stupid on the road, I like to pull it out and
wave it around. The traffic opens up around me immediately.”

“Can I see it?”

“Sure,” she said.

I opened up the glove compartment, dug
around underneath the condoms and pulled out the Walther PPK. Now that I knew
it wasn't real, I didn't feel as tough as I had the first time I had held it,
but it was still cool.

Gertie was giving her make-up a
final once-over in the rearview mirror. I was twirling the gun on my finger,
trying to catch it and aim all in one smooth motion. The first few times, I
dropped it on the floorboard and had to bend over and stretch to pick it up.
Then I flipped it a little faster, and it went around and came to rest in my
palm perfectly.

All of a sudden, two hands grabbed
the gun and began smashing my hand down on the car door. I let go of the gun
and turned to see Dennis. He put the gun up against the side of my head.

“The worm turns!” he yelled.

“What the hell does that mean?” I
said, holding my hand in pain.

“It means that you think the worm is
going in one direction, and then—pow!—he goes in the other direction, and his
head becomes his ass!”

I was a little confused as to why he
would make such a declaration. Apparently Gertie was equally mystified.

“Who is the worm in this situation?”
she asked.

“I'm the worm, damn it! I'm the
fucking worm!”

“Are you the ass now, or were you
the ass before?” she asked.

“Enough talk!” he yelled. “You're
going to give me those pictures now, or this is going to get ugly.”

“We don't have them. We came here to
get them from the guy who does,” I said.

“How did he get them?”

“I gave them to him on accident, but
he realized what they were worth,” I said.

“He's about to learn that they’re
worth a headache. Where are you supposed to meet this guy?”

“At the end of the pier,” said
Gertie. “He'll be standing near the fishermen. He's an old guy with a beard.
You'll recognize him easily. He looks exactly like Steven Spielberg.”

Dennis slowly took the gun off me
and moved back from the car.

“Don't even think about following
me,” he said and ran toward the entrance to the pier.

“Why did you tell him where
Spielberg was?” I asked, but Gertie just held up a finger to tell me to be
quiet and dialed a number on her phone.

“Steven? We're here, but we've got a
problem. There's a nutbag coming your way right now. It's a long story, but
basically he has a non-working replica of James Bond's gun that he thinks is
real, and he's coming to steal the pictures,” she said and then listened.
“That'd be great.” She hung up and then turned to me. “Everything will work out
fine.”

“Really?”

“Actually, it couldn't have worked
out better. Let's go watch,” she said and got out of the car.

We walked down the highway to a spot
from where the end of the pier came into view. I could see Dennis looking
around the crowd, trying to find Spielberg. Then he walked straight over to a
man who was fishing and grabbed him by the shirt.

“He's got the wrong guy there,” said
Gertie.

Dennis seemed to be yelling at the
guy and shaking him a little. After the fisherman yelled something back, Dennis
let go of him and moved away, continuing his search. Then he noticed Spielberg.
He walked over to him with his hand in his pocket, and when he got right next
to him, he pulled out the gun and stuck it against his side.

“He's going to regret that. Steven
has a lot of built up rage. People have been stalking him ever since he became
famous,” said Gertie.

Spielberg put his hands up slowly,
and then with one vicious backhand chop, he hit Dennis in the throat. Dennis
went sprawling down onto the pier. Spielberg made a gesture to a couple of the
fisherman, his disguised bodyguards, who rushed over and grabbed Dennis.

Gertie and I walked to the end of the
pier. We couldn’t get near Spielberg because the crowd around him had become
enormous. After the police made their way over, they took down several
eye-witness accounts, handcuffed Dennis and then led him off to their cruiser.

As Spielberg was being escorted down
the pier by the police, he took out his phone and dialed. Gertie's cell rang.

“Did you have to hit the guy in the
throat?” Gertie asked and then listened. “Well, I guess that was fair. He
didn't realize it was a fake. So where do we meet up now? Okay. We’ll be there
in twenty minutes.”

16

We drove south on the PCH to a fish
restaurant named Gladstone's, which overlooked the ocean. Gertie pulled into
the parking lot and got in line for the valet parking. Like most of the valet
parking in L.A., the lines you had to wait in usually took you longer than it
would have taken just to pull in and find your own spot. In fact, the spots
that the valets were driving to were only about a hundred feet beyond the front
of the line of cars. Gertie handed the keys over to a really shady-looking guy.
We stood there watching him from the sidewalk to see how long he lingered
inside the car after pulling into the space. He got out within an acceptable
amount of time, so we headed into the restaurant.

Gertie told the hostess who we were
there to see. We were directed to a part of the restaurant that had been
blocked off by partitions. We walked behind them and saw a table for four with
a great view of the ocean, but instead of Spielberg waiting for us, there was
only Grant, texting away on his phone. When he saw us he gave a nod and
continued to text, but now he grimaced and held the phone up higher to let us
know that he was making every human effort possible to finish quickly. He
firmly pressed the send button, sighed and then looked at us.

“Glad you could make it,” he said.

“Where's Steven?” asked Gertie,
checking her hair in the reflection of the window.

“He couldn't make it. He's got a
fleet of paparazzi behind him now. But don't worry—I have what you want. Sit
down. The studio is picking up our lunch.”

Gertie and I sat down. She slid the
photo album over to Grant. I took out the third act and slid it his way as
well.

“Great. And here are your photos,”
he said and handed me the envelope.

“Thanks. I'm kind of curious to know
why you wanted this thing. I only wrote it when I thought...well, when I
thought Spielberg wanted to know what Gertie here was up to.”

“I probably shouldn't tell you
this,” Grant said, “but it's too late for you to do anything about it anyway.
When we thought you were trying to blackmail us with this script, we decided to
take action. We saw that you didn't have it copyrighted, so I typed it up and
added some more scenes explaining how the Dweller came to Earth, and then we
gave it to a USC student. We told him if he managed to make a good film with a
non-existent budget and handheld cameras, we'd give him a job on Steven's next
project. He's almost finished filming act two now. Steven will be able to parry
any future accusations involving the name 'Gertie Elliot' by saying you saw the
independent film he produced and are trying to capitalize on a coincidence. We
thought it would be a giant piece of garbage, but the kid managed to get
Nicolas Cage to star in it. Nick is apparently trying to jump start his career
by doing quirky, independent stuff for free.”

“This is terrible. I can't believe I
wrote a Nicolas Cage movie,” I said.

“I even wrote in a sweet tag line
for him once he signed on. He looks at the Dweller and says 'I'm giving' this
world an antenna enema'. Great stuff...Are you hungry? You guys should try the
shrimp here. We'll get some appetizers.”

We stuffed ourselves royally while
listening to Grant talk about himself and what it was like to work with Steven.
At the end of the meal, the waiter took away our leftovers and then came back a
few minutes later with huge doggy bags made out of aluminum foil, folded to
look like enormous crabs. I felt pretty stupid walking out of the place holding
a big fucking aluminum-foil crab, especially since everybody stared at it. They
didn't stare out of surprise—it was nothing new to them—but rather because they
were comparing my crab to the animals that their waiters had done for them. And
what was worse was that by the time I made it out the door, I had managed to
get pissed off because some other waiter toward the entrance had done these
swans that looked amazing. The people there gave my crab snobby looks and
muttered to each other how much better theirs were, the dickheads.

Gertie handed the valet our number,
and then we stood on the curb for about twenty minutes waiting for them to get
to us. We weren't the only ones doing this. There were about fifteen people,
all standing there looking at their cars, which were at the most one hundred
feet away. No one dared just ask for the keys and walk over there themselves.
That would have upset a vital part of the L.A. economy—the part that allows
people with shit jobs to make just enough money to share a one-bedroom
apartment with three people and look for acting jobs during the week. The
valets did their best to look sweaty and tired in order to seem to deserve the
tips. I pretended to appreciate it and handed ours a finsky, and we set off
again.

17

Gertie drove directly to the Malibu
police station.

“What are we doing here?” I asked.

“Making sure we don't have any
problems in the future.”

We went inside and asked to file a
report. A policeman brought us over to his desk and asked what the nature of
our complaint was. Gertie explained that we had been about to take a walk on
the Malibu pier when a lunatic reached in our car, hit me, and stole the fake
PPK. The policeman looked at us in astonishment.

“You'll never believe what happened
afterward,” he said. “That lunatic ran down the pier and used your fake gun to
force Steven Spielberg to take a picture with him! Mr. Spielberg beat him up
pretty good. He's got a low tolerance for this sort of thing. Would you be
willing to testify against the thief?”

“Of course,” said Gertie. “But then
we'd also like a restraining order in case he goes nuts on us once he realizes
we helped put him away.”

“No problem,” he said and whipped
out a couple of forms to fill out. The whole thing took less than an hour.

18

Ignacio told us to meet him outside his
office building in Century City. When we pulled up to the address he had given
me, I dialed his number, and he came out five minutes later. He was holding a
bamboo-fiber grocery bag that didn't look anywhere near as bulky as I thought a
sack containing one hundred grand would. He bent over and leaned against the
car door.