The Player (20 page)

Dessert was over. The house lights dimmed. Joan Rivers was at the podium. Griffin excused himself from the table. June squeezed his hand as he got up. He patted her shoulder. If he asked her to marry him tonight, fly to Las Vegas and do it in an all-night wedding chapel, she'd probably say yes.

He walked around the edge of the ballroom as the crowd laughed. The smell of perfume, makeup, shoe polish, food, a few cigarettes, the waves of laughter, the overwhelming mood of satisfaction and the tincture of panic within that happiness, from those who were worried about their jobs, or about their next project, this flood of sensations was suddenly overwhelmingly poignant to Griffin, sunset over Rome from a hotel window. This is my life, he wanted to tell them all. You are my people, I am one of you. This party is not just a thing I have to do. I am happy here.

An usher held a curtain aside for him, and he went through a door into the lobby, to find a man with short hair and a mustache. The photographers waited outside the hotel's entrance. Griffin walked through the lobby toward the coffee shop, around a corner. In the coffee shop he bought a Milky Way bar and tore off the wrapper while the woman at the cash register made his change. Then he walked outside to Wilshire Boulevard. Here he was, in a tuxedo, eating chocolate in Beverly Hills. He walked west on Wilshire, around the hotel's offices, then back to the front entrance. No one was following him.

Inside the lobby again, he went to the elevators. He saw the short-haired man as he passed the entrance to the ballroom. He was about thirty-five, Griffin thought, and he couldn't remember the face at all. He was well groomed, his hair was cut short, with slightly long
sideburns. His face was weathered. How could a writer get so much sun? He wore dark gray slacks and a blue blazer with a brown tie. Griffin didn't remember him at all. This nonrecognition came with a tide of regret. How often does this happen? thought Griffin, feeling sorry for the Writer. How many people do I meet who don't register? If I was as frustrated as this man, would I have sent those silly postcards? Would I have killed?

He'd been gone from the table for almost ten minutes. It was a long time, but it couldn't be helped. He could go back into the ballroom, but he thought that if this was a movie, then it was time to confront the dragon. He wanted the third act now.

He turned away from the ballroom and headed to the elevators. The short-haired man stayed behind him. Griffin nodded to him, and the man joined him in an elevator going up. A bellboy with a cart stacked with luggage waited until they were inside and then joined them.

The bellboy asked Griffin for his floor.

“Five,” said Griffin. The bellboy touched the button for him. Then the bellboy got off on three. As soon as the doors closed behind him, Griffin turned to face the short-haired man.

“You have to understand, it's a very difficult job. I see people all day long. My phone rings a hundred times a day. Take all the stories that are presented to the studio, either in pitches, as scripts, or as books and magazine articles that get covered, and we are talking about seventy thousand stories in a year.”

The door opened. Griffin got out. The short-haired man stayed with him, watching him. The hallway was quiet.

“I don't know how I can make it up to you. I'm sorry that I hurt people's feelings along the way. I'm trying to be better, I really am. But you're going too far. It's an incredibly difficult business. You can have great ideas, you can have all the talent in the world, but you
have to get lucky. And no one has the formula for luck. The only consolation to this is that once you get lucky, you look different, and then it gets easier.”

Griffin watched for a response. The man stared at him. Griffin pushed for the elevator, pressing both the up and down buttons. He wanted to get away.

“I have to get back to the party. Maybe you should come in again and tell me a story. Tell me everything you've got. Usually we only like to hear one at a time, but obviously you've got an active imagination; maybe we can channel all that anger to something good.” Griffin tried to get the man to smile. He didn't.

“You're not going to kill me, are you?” asked Griffin.

“No. Why should I kill you?”

“Who are you?”

“I'm not who you think I am.”

An elevator going up stopped at the floor. Griffin got in, the man followed. They rode to the top floor and back to the lobby.

If this man was the postcard Writer, then either Griffin had a terrible memory or this man was a blank who made no impression on anyone and walked the earth indignant. If this man was not the postcard Writer, then either he was the man the limousine driver had seen following them or he was not that man, he was just a person in the hotel. But if he was just a person in the hotel, then why did he ride the elevator with Griffin? Was he homosexual, had he interpreted Griffin's stroll around the hotel as a cruise? If this man had not followed him all night, then either the limousine driver was mistaken and no one had followed them, or the person in the Dodge Charger was the postcard Writer and he was elsewhere in the hotel. Dressed as a waiter? How else could he have found Griffin's table? There was another possibility. That this man was not the person in the Dodge Charger, and the driver of the Charger, though he was somewhere
else, was also not the postcard Writer. Or this man drove the Dodge Charger but was not the Writer.

Griffin didn't know if he should be scared of this man or embarrassed that he'd just given a speech that sounded insane to someone who didn't care. If the man was homosexual, then by now he knew that following Griffin had been a mistake, and was he scared of him? If this man wasn't the Writer, then where was he? Who was in the Dodge Charger?

When they left the elevator, the man turned toward the lobby as Griffin headed toward the ballroom. Before he went in, he looked back to see if the man was still there. He was at a display of tour brochures next to the bell captain's desk.

Griffin showed his pass and walked into the ballroom, where Neil Diamond was on the stage, and the crowd was clapping in time to the song. Someone—Griffin couldn't see who—put out a hand to greet him as he passed a table in the dark. He touched it lightly and moved ahead to find his own table, and June Mercator.

She sat sideways in her chair. Griffin was surprised to see her clapping; he wouldn't have thought she liked such a sentimental entertainer, but Neil Diamond was a strong performer, and he was only twenty feet away.

Griffin touched her shoulder as he took his seat. “Having fun?”

“Don't tell anyone you saw me singing along with Neil Diamond.”

He kissed her behind the ear, moving her hair aside to touch her neck. She leaned into the kiss, and he took a little breath, not so much to inhale her perfume as to rest for a moment.

“Where were you?” she asked.

“I wasn't feeling well.”

“Oh, I'm sorry. Why didn't you say something? Is it your stomach?”

“I was just feeling a little claustrophobic. I needed some air. I took a walk.”

“You okay now?”

“Fine.”

“Poor baby.” She kissed him on the cheek, with a disappointing lack of pressure. Her lips were dry, it was halfway between a mommy kissing the cut and an old girlfriend giving a kiss for consolation after he'd come to her with the story of a disastrous affair. Her familiarity, which he thought at first signaled the understanding that they'd end up in bed, now promised a passionless friendship. She'd confide in him, but he'd never see her naked. He wanted to see her without her clothes. She needed to be convinced. She needed persuasion. He would negotiate with a few gestures. When she looked back at the singer, he kissed her just above the spot where her neck and collarbone met. She drifted a little, toward him. He put his hand between her chair and the small of her back, and he rubbed her waist. He thought she might hate this because he could grab an inch of fat, but if he stopped, then she'd think he was upset by the extra weight, and how much was it, ten pounds? More. He pushed his hand toward her stomach and then touched the bottom of her breast before letting go. He kissed her on the cheek, and then on the ear. She lowered her head a little, tilted it forward, offering her neck once again. It was another gesture from her grief.

Levison was watching him. Griffin smiled at him, trying to look shy and proud. Levison grinned back, his lips pursed, and he nodded his approval of June, or of Griffin's luck. Neil Diamond finished his song. Fifteen hundred people stood and cheered.

Two women, one the wife of the head of an agency, the other the wife of the owner of a studio, came out onstage and presented the singer with an award for his contributions to the Motion Picture
Home. Then they asked for the lights to be dimmed once again, and a movie screen descended and they introduced a film about the Home. June turned back in her chair and finished the wine remaining in her glass.

“Do you want to stay?” asked Griffin.

“You have to, don't you?”

“I don't think so. Let's go.” Griffin left his seat and walked around the table to Levison. He told him he was going.

“I shouldn't leave yet,” said Levison. “I'll see you tomorrow.”

June shook hands with Levison and his wife and said good-bye to the doctor. Griffin took her arm as they walked through the maze of tables, and after they had separated for a moment, she took his hand.

The short-haired man was gone from the lobby. Outside, the limousine drivers stood by their cars and smoked. Griffin's driver left a circle of five men and disappeared into the garage to get the car.

“That was fun,” said June.

“Did you want to stay?”

“You've been to hundreds of these things. They must all be the same.”

If he told her he loved them, what would she think?

“I love them.”

“I guess you'd have to; otherwise, how could you stay in the business?”

“It's all part of the game.”

Their limousine was at the curb. The driver came around and opened June's door. After she got in, he took Griffin around the back of the car.

“I didn't have anything better to do, so I found the Dodge Charger. There were some papers on the backseat. It looks like we were followed by someone from the Pasadena Police.”

“Maybe he was following you,” said Griffin. His heart wanted to stop. What had he said to the man in the elevator? Had he confessed?

“I haven't been to Pasadena in four months, since the Rose Bowl.”

“I don't know when I was there. Maybe two years ago.”

“Maybe they're after your friend.”

“Should we tell her?” asked Griffin. He thought this was his master-stroke question, it screamed his innocence.

“That's up to you.”

“Hey, this is a first date. Let sleeping dogs lie, you know what I mean?”

He winked, and as the driver opened Griffin's door, he winked back. If he was expecting a larger tip, as hush money, Griffin wouldn't pay it. Better to look unconcerned. After all, the problem was the woman's, not his.

He sat down beside June; their legs touched as the car changed lanes.

“That was fun,” she said. The limousine entered the flow of cars on Wilshire. Other drivers and passengers tried to look through the tinted windows, but it was Griffin and June, invisible to them, who were the voyeurs. There was always a feeling of warm entitlement that came with riding in a limousine. Griffin was used to it; it was impossible to feel a kinship with ordinary people in dented, rusted cars with uncomfortable seats. If he lost the job, perhaps this would be the privilege hardest to give up. Yes, and he envied the really wealthy, who had private limousines, for whom the privilege was not an illusion, who had private jet planes and private helicopters. Is this privilege an illusion? They can take it away. But is it an illusion now? If they can take it away, then it's not really mine, so yes. And June? If she was going to sleep with him tonight, and there was no reason she wouldn't, if she was enchanted with
him, then wasn't she under the spell of the illusion? He was making himself sick with dizziness. This kind of thinking was beginning to hurt him. These spiraling questions! Perhaps if the limousine was his, and a helicopter and a jet plane were his, then he would finally be without illusions; he would see clearly into the true nature of things, into the reality of power.

They came to a red light, and the driver caught Griffin's attention in the rearview mirror. The Dodge Charger was beside them. The man from the elevator looked into the limousine. If he was tailing them, why had he come so close, or was he so stupid to think that the windows were dark on both sides?

The light turned green and the limousine started, but then the engine died and they stopped. The Charger, forced ahead by the traffic, continued on through the intersection.

“Sorry,” said the driver. He started again, made a left turn, and the Charger was lost in the traffic ahead. In the mirror he winked at Griffin. The incident happened too quickly for June to notice.

“Where to?” asked Griffin. “Do you have to be at work early?”

Her shrug had a grain of guilt in it. “I can get away with anything for two months, maybe even a year.” He understood the shrug to mean that she was closer to the end of her grief than she might let on at work. She was taking advantage of sympathy.

The cop in the Charger was making a decision now, Griffin knew. He had to choose either her place or Griffin's. If he went to Griffin's, would he call the Los Angeles Police, have them drive past June's? Maybe he would just go home to Pasadena. Hadn't he collected the most important piece of information, that the suspect and the lover were riding in a limousine just weeks after the murder? No one would doubt that they were sleeping together. How would it look to a jury? It would look bad.

And what had Griffin revealed to the man in the elevator? Fear of someone. Persecution. How would that connect with the murder of a writer in Pasadena? A conspiracy. But the police would have to ask themselves why Griffin had said so much to a stranger. How could Griffin be in a conspiracy with someone he didn't recognize? Was he being blackmailed? They would have to say Yes. And wasn't that the truth? That was the wrong question to ask of himself. He had said too much. Anything was too much. It was ridiculous for him to have imagined that he could lie to everyone.