Get Shorty: A Novel

Harry had the next question ready.

“You pack a gun?”

Chili hesitated. “Not really.”

“What does that mean?”

“Not ordinarily. Maybe a few times I have.”

“You ever been arrested?”

“I’ve been picked up a few times. They’d try to get me on loan-sharking or a RICO violation—you know what I mean? Being in what they call a racketeering kind of activity, but I was never convicted, I’m clean.”

“Racketeering, that covers a lot of ground, does-n’t it?”

“What do you want to know?”

Harry hesitated. He wasn’t sure.

“Why don’t you get to the point, Harry? You want me to do something for you, right?”

8

Here was a man had made forty-nine movies and named a bunch of them earlier, when he was making coffee. Chili remembered having seen quite a few. The one about the roaches—guy turns on the kitchen light, Christ, there’s a fuckin roach in there as big as he is. He had seen some of the Grotesque movies, about the escaped wacko who’d been in a fire and was pissed off about it. The one about the giant ticks trying to take over the earth. The one about all the people in this town getting scalped by an Indian who’d been dead over a hundred years, Hairraiser . . . Forty-nine movies and he looked more like a guy drove a delivery truck or came to fix your air-conditioning when it quit, a guy with a tool kit. When he’d gone over to the range to get the coffee in his shirt and underwear showing his white legs, skinny for a fat guy, he looked like he should be in detox at a booze treatment center. Chili had seen loan customers in this shape, ones that had given up. Harry’s mind seemed to be working okay, except all of a sudden he wasn’t as talkative as before.

“Tell me what you’re thinking, Harry.”

Maybe he didn’t know how to say it without sounding like a dummy.

“Okay, you want me to help you out in some way,” Chili said. “How do I know—outside of your asking me questions here like it’s a job interview. I happened to mention—we were in the other room— I said when I came out here I talked to some people and you kept saying ‘What people?’having a fit. You remember that? Well, they were a couple lawyers I was put in touch with. I told you I talked to Tommy Carlo . . .”

Harry was listening but making a face, trying to understand everything at once.

“What’s he got to do with it?”

“I go to your apartment, your office on Sunset, ZigZag Productions, you’re not either place and nobody knows where you are. So I call Tommy, now in tight with Jimmy Cap, and ask him, see if he can get me a name out here, somebody that knows somebody in the movie business. Tommy calls back, says, ‘Frank DePhillips, you’re all set.’You ever hear of him?”

Harry shook his head.

“Don’t go to sleep on me, okay?”

“I got a headache, that’s all. Who’s Frank DePhillips?”

“He’s to some part of L.A. what Jimmy Cap is to South Miami. But I don’t meet with him, he’s on a level only talks to certain people. I meet with one of his lawyers down at the courts, criminal division. Young guy, he comes running out of a courtroom loaded down with papers and shit, looks at me, says, ‘What do you want?’ Fuckin lawyers, they’re always rushing around the last minute. I remind him Mr.

DePhillips set this up, also I happen to represent one of the biggest casinos in Vegas. That gets me about two minutes of his time. He says, ‘I’ll see what I can do. Gimme a phone number.’ I tell him I’ll call him, otherwise I’d never hear. Also I don’t want him to know I’m staying at this dump on Ventura. Two days later I meet him and another lawyer in a restaurant in a hotel that’s Japanese. I mean the entire hotel, not just the restaurant, a Japanese hotel right in the middle of downtown L.A.”

Harry said, “Yeah, the Otani.”

“Right by the city hall. These two lawyers eat there all the time. I watch ’em dig into the raw fish, suck up bowls of noodles . . . The noodles weren’t bad. So this other lawyer gives me addresses and phone numbers, yours and anybody you ever been intimate with on a single sheet of paper. He says, ‘You’re not the only one looking for old Harry Zimm,’ and mentions your investors have been trying to find you for two months. I said, ‘Oh, what’s the problem?’ Guy says, ‘It looks like Harry skipped with two hunnerd thousand they put in one of his movies.’ ”

Harry was shaking his head. He looked worn out.

“That doesn’t surprise me. This town loves rumors, everybody knows everything, just ask them. My investors have been trying to find me for two months? I spoke to them, it wasn’t more than two weeks ago.”

Chili said, “You mention the Piston–Lakers game?”

Harry said, “Look, these guys came to me originally, I mean before. They already put money in two of my pictures and did okay, they’re happy. Which you can’t say about most film investors, the ones that want to be in show biz, get to meet movie stars and they find out, Christ, it’s a high-risk business.”

Harry was easing into it, watching his step.

Chili said, “Yeah? . . .”

“These guys already know movie stars, celebrities; they run a limo service. So they come in on another participation deal—this was back a few months ago when I was planning what would be my next picture. About a band of killer circus freaks that travel around the country leaving bodies in their wake. The characters, there’s a seven-hundred-pound fat lady who wouldn’t fit through that door, has a way of seducing guys, gets them in her trailer—”

Chili said, “Harry, look at me,” and waited to see his watery eyes in the kitchen light, fizzed hair standing up. “You’re trying to tell me how you fucked up without sounding stupid, and that’s hard to do. Let’s get to where you’re at, okay? You blew their two hunnerd grand on a basketball game and you haven’t told ’em about it. Why not?”

“Because they’re not the type of guys,” Harry said, “would take it with any degree of understanding or restraint.”

“They scare you.”

“What’d I just say?”

“I’m not sure. You want to say something to me, Harry, say it, don’t beat around the bush.”

“Okay, they scare me. I keep thinking the first thing they’d do is break my legs.”

“You got that on the brain. What’s the second thing?”

“Or they’d have it done—you don’t know these guys. They’re not exactly financial types.”

“Harry, I prob’ly know ’em better than you do. What you’re telling me,” Chili said, “they got more out on the street than limos. They’re dealing, huh? Selling dope to movie stars and using you to launder their dough. Put it in a Harry Zimm production, take it out cleaned and pressed.”

Chili waited.

Harry eased back. The chair creaked and that was the only sound.

“You don’t know or you don’t want to or you’re not saying,” Chili said. “But from what you tell me, that’s what it sounds like.”

He smiled, wanting Harry to relax.

“You have my interest aroused. I wouldn’t mind knowing more about these guys, if they’re real hardons or they’re giving you a buncha shit. Or what their connections are, if they have any. But what I want to know first,” Chili said, “is why you took their two hunnerd grand to Vegas, put yourself in that kind of a spot. I mean if you’re scared of these guys to begin with . . .”

“I had to,” Harry said, sounding pretty definite about it. “I’ve got a chance to put together a deal that’ll change my life, make me an overnight success after thirty years in the business. . . . But I need a half a million to get it started.”

“A movie,” Chili said, wanting to be sure.

“A blockbuster of a movie.”

“You don’t want to ask your limo guys?”

“I don’t want them anywhere near it,” Harry said. “It’s not their kind of deal, it’s too big.” Harry was hunching over the table again. “See, what happened . . . This’s at the time I’m getting Freaks ready